Australia’s Account-to-Account Payments Roundtable has published a draft payments vision that explicitly treats stablecoins and tokenized fiat as design priorities for future A2A rails. The document signals a policy shift toward interoperable settlement between bank accounts and tokenized money.
The draft was coordinated by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Treasury, and arrives alongside Tranche 1 exposure draft legislation and recent amendments to the Corporations Act. Together, the measures set a clearer regulatory and technical agenda for payment service providers, crypto exchanges, custodians, bank treasuries and market infrastructure operators.
Tokenized Fiat Moves From Experiment to Design Requirement
The payments vision argues that A2A infrastructure should support secure interoperability between conventional accounts and tokenized fiat. The goal is to preserve reliable fund flows while enabling new settlement models, continuous availability and automated execution.
Policy work is advancing across several tracks. The Treasury’s Tranche 1 exposure draft, issued in March 2026, proposes a technology-neutral and function-based regulatory perimeter for payment service providers. The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025 received Royal Assent on April 1, 2026, adding further structure to Australia’s digital-asset rulebook.
Project Acacia, led by the RBA and the Digital Finance CRC, has also moved from experimentation toward implementation analysis. The RBA’s industry advisory group met on March 31, 2026, with participation from major banks and clearing providers. The emphasis is now less on whether wholesale tokenized money has a role, and more on how it can be operationalized safely.
Licensing and Reserve Disclosure Become Central Controls
The draft and Tranche 1 material point to tighter obligations for market participants. Payment service providers would face new Australian Financial Services Licence requirements, while cryptocurrency exchanges and custody platforms would need an AFSL within six months under the Digital Assets Framework amendments.
Large stored value facility providers would also come under enhanced prudential oversight, including tokenized SVFs and payment stablecoins. The framework clarifies that the regulated object is the facility or provider, not the token itself, while proposing monthly disclosure of reserve assets and outstanding liabilities for tokenized SVF providers.
Regulators framed these measures as a way to close accountability gaps, reduce data-misuse risks and strengthen operational resilience as ledger-based execution expands the cyber-attack surface. ASIC’s class exemptions for certain intermediary stablecoin distributions show the same balancing act: allowing controlled innovation while preserving supervisory guardrails.
Firms will need to map licensing exposure, prepare reserve and custody disclosures, revise settlement contracts and strengthen third-party resilience controls.
Consultation remains open into mid-2026, with the government planning to consolidate and introduce the Tranche 1 package to Parliament later in the year. Project Acacia’s forthcoming white paper is expected to add practical detail on wholesale tokenized settlement. For now, Australia’s direction is clear: tokenized fiat is becoming part of the payments infrastructure conversation, not an adjacent crypto experiment.