Payward, the financial infrastructure company behind Kraken, and Singapore Gulf Bank have launched around-the-clock fiat settlement for institutional digital asset clients in parts of Asia and the Gulf region. The partnership connects Payward to SGB Net, the bank’s real-time clearing network, letting clients deposit dollars and put them to work instantly, including on non-banking days.
The service starts with US dollar transactions for a small group of eligible clients, the companies said in a Sunday announcement carried over Business Wire. Plans call for expanding to more clients and additional currencies over time. Settlement between banks and trading venues has historically taken days and stopped at fixed cut-off times, even though crypto markets trade continuously. That gap is a running operational pain for exchanges, payment providers, over-the-counter desks and fintechs, which is where the partnership aims to bite.
SGB Net and a bank that already clears big volume
SGB launched its clearing network in 2025 for digital asset businesses and now processes more than $20 billion in fiat transactions per month, according to the two companies. The bank is backed by Mumtalakat, Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, and by Singapore’s Whampoa Group, and it is fully licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain. That pedigree matters, because a regulated bank wiring client money directly into crypto infrastructure is still not the default in most jurisdictions, whatever the marketing decks claim.
“Access to liquidity is only useful if clients can move funds when they need to,” said Shawn Chan, chief executive officer of SGB, in the announcement. “By connecting SGB Net with Payward and partnering with Kraken Prime, we are bringing settlement and liquidity closer together.”
| Partner | Role | Key detail |
|---|---|---|
| Payward | Infrastructure operator | Powers Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, CF Benchmarks |
| Singapore Gulf Bank | Clearing and settlement | SGB Net handles $20 billion-plus in monthly fiat volume |
| Kraken Prime | Prime brokerage | Onboards SGB as a liquidity source |
Kraken Prime joins the picture
SGB is also partnering with Kraken Prime, Payward’s full-service prime brokerage, to access liquidity for its own digital asset offerings. Over the coming months the bank will draw on Payward’s markets to price trades for its own customers. For Payward, the deal is part of a broader product called Payward Banking, the money layer it is building across deposits, payments, cards, custody and lending. Chief commercial officer Mark Greenberg framed the partnership squarely around the constraint it removes. “Exchanges, payment providers, OTC desks and fintechs all run into the same banking constraint,” he said. “Settlement stops when the business day does, while their markets do not.”
The timing is not accidental. Regulators and banks have warmed to crypto-adjacent settlement rails this year even as retail demand for some products has cooled. Tokenized stocks, stablecoin cards and institutional crypto financing have all moved from whitepapers into production. Real-time multi-currency clearing is another piece of that architecture, one that rests on ordinary banking licenses rather than new crypto-specific charters, which makes it a model other institutions can copy without waiting on national legislation.
Asia and the Gulf as proving grounds
The rollout targets a select group of institutional clients in eligible Asian and Gulf jurisdictions, which is where Payward has concentrated recent expansion. Tokenized equity platform xStocks reaches more than 110 countries, and the exchange has pushed onchain perpetual futures for US clients via Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets. Onchain yield on tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds went live earlier this year for Kraken customers through vault products on SPYx, QQQx and NVDAx. Payward reported 6.6 million funded accounts as of June 30, 2026, so the distribution reach behind the settlement product is not theoretical.
Settlement speed looks like a small detail until the market moves. A desk waiting two days for a fiat wire when Bitcoin drops 5% is holding wrapped risk on an ordinary bank transfer. An instant deposit means margin calls get met in hours rather than half a week. For a segment that trades on leverage, the plumbing between the exchange and the bank matters as much as the exchange itself. This is the same logic that pushed traditional prime brokers to shorten their own settlement cycles after past market breaks.
A regulated bank, a crypto market, a real precedent
Critical scrutiny is fair. The service is geographically limited to specific jurisdictions for now. Clients cannot deposit every currency into it. Corporate onboarding onto a Bahrain-regulated digital bank will not be frictionless for every institution, and compliance expectations on cross-border flows are tightening, not loosening. Brazil’s central bank, to take one example of the direction of travel, has been building a framework that treats cross-border crypto transfers under its foreign exchange rules. The world Payward and SGB are building into is one of more regulation, not less.
But the structure itself, a regulated bank plugging its clearing network into a major crypto exchange’s money layer, is a real precedent for how digital asset and traditional banking are converging. It is the model the sector keeps pushing toward as regulatory clarity improves in the US, the EU and Singapore. Whether it becomes a widespread feature or stays a boutique service for a handful of institutional customers who can already afford private banking-grade integration is the open question.
“Every regulated bank we connect with this way brings us closer to a world where settlement and cross-border payments happen in real time, wherever our clients are.” – Mark Greenberg, CCO, Payward
The next test is a simple one: whether SGB Net volume carries more clients, more currencies, and eventually more exchanges. A second bank joining the network would tell the market this was a trend. A year of quiet expansion confined to the Gulf and a handful of Asian markets would tell it something else.