Payward's Second 24/7 Settlement Deal Signals a Race to End Banking Hours

Signal Spotlight · Asia-Pacific crypto and fintech, settlement infrastructure

What happened

Payward, the financial infrastructure company behind the Kraken exchange, announced on October 5 that it has integrated SGB Net, the real-time clearing network of Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB), as reported by CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, and others. Eligible institutional clients can settle qualifying digital asset transactions and fund trading around the clock, including weekends and other non-banking days. SGB Net launched in May 2025 as a real-time, multi-currency clearing network. In return, SGB will connect to Kraken Prime, Payward's institutional trading platform, for digital asset liquidity, and plans to use Payward's markets when pricing trades for its own customers over the coming months.

The launch is limited. It covers select institutional clients in eligible jurisdictions across Asia and the Gulf, which coverage does not name. US dollars are the only settlement currency publicly confirmed. The companies said more currencies and customers are planned, with no dates. It is Payward's second arrangement of this kind in about a month: a September agreement with SoFi gave eligible Kraken institutional clients 24/7 USD settlement through the SoFi Exchange Network in the United States.

Why it matters

The first correction concerns the bank. SGB is described in coverage as licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain, and as backed by Bahrain's Mumtalakat and Singapore's Whampoa Group. We found no source describing a Singapore banking licence. The name suggests Singapore regulation, and that assumption should not carry into a due diligence file. This is the same lesson we keep returning to: check which regulator actually stands behind a label.

The second correction concerns what the product solves. It addresses the banking-hours gap, the fact that settlement stops when the business day ends while crypto markets do not. Clients deposit funds with Payward and can use them immediately. It does not by itself address exchange custody risk, which is the concern the Bitget breach raised. Money settled faster is still funding an account on an exchange.

There is a plausible indirect benefit, and it is our reasoning, not a claim from Kraken or SGB. If a desk can fund instantly at any hour, it needs less pre-funded cash sitting on an exchange to cover off-hours trading. That could reduce balances at risk, but only if the desk then changes how it holds assets, and nothing in the announcement says it would.

For Philippine operators the relevance is unproven. Nobody has said Philippine-domiciled entities qualify, and the service targets institutional clients, not operators in general. The signal that matters more is the pattern. Payward is building a network of 24/7 banking links, and incumbents are moving too: Traders Union reports that a consortium including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Barclays plans a tokenized deposit network run by The Clearing House in the first half of 2027, aimed at 24/7 settlement. The banking-hours gap is being closed from both the crypto and the banking side.