Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) has become the first bank from the Middle East, and the first from outside Europe, to join the Commercial Bank Money Token network, known as CBMT. The initiative is led by Die Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft (German banking association) and counts Commerzbank, DZ Bank, Helaba, UniCredit, ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas and DNB among its participants. CBD will onboard to the CBMT Sandbox, which launched in Frankfurt in November 2025, and is run with GFT and UDPN as technical service providers. The sandbox currently covers the euro, US dollar, Japanese yen and Norwegian krone.
A Network is Only as Interesting as Its Edges
Most tokenised money projects begin inside one banking system, among institutions that share a regulator, a currency area and a legal tradition. That makes them easier to build and harder to judge. A design that works among European banks proves only that it works among European banks. A Gulf lender joining changes the question, because it asks whether the model can stretch across borders without being rebuilt each time.
GFT’s Florian Becker framed it in those terms, saying CBMT was designed as a multi-issuer, multi-currency network from day one and that CBD shows the design working beyond Europe. That claim deserves testing rather than assuming. Adding a member is a membership event. Making tokenised bank money move between two legal systems and two supervisors is an engineering and legal problem, and it will be the real measure of whether the network travels.
CBD’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Bernd van Linder, described the step as a natural one for the bank.
“Joining CBMT is a natural next step in CBD’s digital transformation strategy and our long-standing role in connecting UAE businesses with international markets. As the first bank from outside Europe to participate, we bring the perspective of the Gulf’s banking and trade sector to a broader effort to modernise commercial bank money on a secure, regulated basis,” said Dr. Bernd van Linde.
Why Bank Money, and Why Now?
The pitch behind CBMT is that corporate payments can move on digital rails while remaining claims on regulated bank deposits. That is a quiet but pointed answer to the debate over whether tokenised settlement belongs to stablecoin issuers or to banks. For a corporate treasurer, speed matters, but so does knowing exactly what kind of money has landed. Barbara Riccardi, Co-Head of Wholesale Banking at CBD, described the demand she sees from clients.
“Corporate and institutional clients across the Gulf and Europe want cross-border payments that are near real-time, transparent, and anchored in the security of commercial bank money. By joining CBMT, we are not only connecting the Gulf’s vibrant trade ecosystem to a leading European tokenised money initiative, we are actively shaping the future of tokenised commercial finance from a regional perspective,” said Barbara Riccardi, Co-Head of Wholesale Banking, CBD.
If clients on both sides of a trade corridor are asking for that combination, networks built by banks start from a strong position. No client volumes have been shared yet, so how large that demand is remains an open question.
What Could Change Along the Europe-Gulf Corridor
The use cases planned for the sandbox resemble a treasurer’s wish list, covering cross-border corporate payments, trade settlement, cross-jurisdiction treasury operations and working capital optimisation. Each hints at a second-order effect. If settlement between a European and a Gulf bank becomes near real time, the days of float that companies quietly plan around begin to shrink, and so does the idle cash held to cover them. Money once tied up in transit could be released, which changes how treasurers think about liquidity, credit lines and short-term funding.
There is also the question of who sits in the middle. Cross-border payments today lean on chains of correspondent relationships. A network where participating banks settle directly in tokenised form could shorten those chains, rewarding banks inside the network and pressuring those outside it. That is speculation at this stage, but it is where the logic points.
The Harder Questions
Tokenised money across jurisdictions raises questions technology cannot answer alone. Regulators in different regions may define deposits, settlement finality and operational resilience differently. Banks will have to decide which chains they are willing to run on, and whether a token issued by one bank is treated as equivalent by another.
Claus George of DZ BANK, speaking for the CBMT Working Group, described the aim as a multi-issuer, multi-currency and multi-chain ecosystem. Each of those features adds both capability and complexity, and getting different systems to work together may prove harder than building the tokens themselves. UDPN’s role as a messaging layer linking digital currency rails with existing core banking systems suggests the builders know it.
For banks and corporations, the broader takeaway is that tokenised money is being pushed from a regional experiment toward something that must work across regions. Corporations may eventually see faster and more transparent settlement on routes they already use, while banks will weigh joining shared networks against building their own. None of this is settled. All sandbox activity remains subject to regulatory requirements and does not commit anyone to a commercial launch, so the results will matter more than the membership list.
Digital Trade Outlook: What stands out is that the first Middle East bank has joined a sandbox rather than a live network. That makes CBD’s presence more of a design test than a commercial milestone, and the participants have said as much. If the model holds up across two regulatory systems, the Europe-Gulf corridor could become an early proving ground for tokenised bank money in trade settlement, and other banks outside Europe would have a template to follow