Australia’s future payment systems may need to accommodate stablecoins and other tokenized forms of money, according to a draft vision released by a group of leading payments stakeholders. The document, co-developed by the Account-to-Account Payments Roundtable—which includes AusPayNet, Australian Payments Plus, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and the Commonwealth Treasury—identifies digital assets as a key external force that could shape the country’s domestic account-to-account (A2A) payment rails.
The draft notes that tokenized forms of money are moving from experimentation into real-world adoption. It says this shift reflects a broader move toward programmable, ledger-based value that could enable new settlement models, continuous availability, and more automated execution. The consultation suggests Australian payments planners are starting to treat tokenized money as a serious design consideration for mainstream payment infrastructure.
According to the document, A2A systems may need to support secure interoperability between account-based money and tokenized representations of fiat currency. This would allow reliable movement of funds between those environments while maintaining trust. The draft also treats digital assets as a potential parallel value layer alongside other emerging forces reshaping payments.
It warns that these technologies could reshape how payments are initiated, authorized, and managed, but they also introduce new risks around accountability, liability, data use, and resilience. The draft is part of a broader push by Australia to explore tokenized money, stablecoins, and digital asset regulation.
Australia advances tokenization work
The A2A consultation comes as Australia continues broader work on tokenized money. In July 2025, the RBA and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre announced the selected use cases for Project Acacia, a wholesale digital money project exploring settlement in tokenized asset markets. The RBA said proposed settlement assets for those use cases included stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), and new ways of using banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA.
In March 2025, RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones said the next phase of financial system innovation would require moving beyond short-term pilots toward longer-term, staged environments where industry and regulators can test new technologies and adjust policy. He noted that the interaction of wholesale CBDC with bank deposit tokens and stablecoins, as well as the synchronization of tokenized asset ledgers with Australia’s settlement infrastructure, would be areas of interest.
Regulatory movement
Australia has also moved to bring parts of the digital asset sector into its financial services framework. In November 2024, the Treasury said proposed digital asset laws would introduce two new financial products: digital asset platforms and tokenized custody platforms. Those platforms would be required to hold an Australian Financial Services Licence. The developments suggest Australia is taking a measured but deliberate approach to integrating digital assets into its financial infrastructure, though many details remain to be worked out.
