24/7 Institutional Digital Asset Settlement: Payward Taps SGB Net
Payward, the financial infrastructure company behind the Kraken exchange, has connected its platform to Singapore Gulf Bank's real-time clearing network to bring round-the-clock institutional digital asset settlement to clients across Asia and the Gulf. The integration, announced on 4 October 2026, lets eligible institutional clients of both firms settle transactions instantly at any hour, seven days a week, starting with US dollar flows for a limited set of clients before additional currencies and counterparties are added.
The practical change is timing. Settlement between banks and trading venues has historically run on multi-day cycles and fixed daily cut-offs, even though digital asset markets never close. By plugging into SGB Net, a client of Singapore Gulf Bank can now deposit funds with Payward and put them to work immediately, regardless of the hour or the calendar.
What exactly have Payward and Singapore Gulf Bank agreed?
Payward has integrated SGB Net, the bank's real-time, multi-currency clearing network, into its own rails. The settlement service opens with US dollar transactions for a select number of clients, with both firms signalling expansion to more clients and more currencies over time.
The arrangement runs in both directions. Singapore Gulf Bank is also onboarding Kraken Prime, Payward's institutional prime brokerage, as an additional source of digital asset liquidity, and over the coming months it plans to draw on Payward's markets to price trades for its own customers. In short, Payward gains a regulated banking rail that moves cash on demand, while the bank gains access to institutional-grade liquidity for its digital asset desk.
Why does always-on settlement matter for institutions?
For trading operations, settlement timing is a funding problem. Exchanges, payment providers, over-the-counter desks and fintechs all hit the same wall: the banking day ends, but the market does not. Capital that cannot move overnight or at weekends sits idle as collateral, and unsettled positions carry counterparty and funding risk until the next cut-off clears. An instant, any-hour settlement rail compresses that gap and frees intraday liquidity that would otherwise be stranded.
Traditional finance is moving in the same direction, though more slowly. The Bank of England is consulting on extending CHAPS and RTGS operating hours toward near 24/7 settlement later this decade, and US equities completed the shift to T+1 settlement in 2024. Digital asset infrastructure is skipping the incremental path and going straight to continuous settlement, which is one reason banks with crypto-native clearing networks have become attractive partners for exchanges.
How does this connect to Kraken Prime?
Payward launched Kraken Prime in June 2025 as a full-service prime brokerage offering institutions trading, custody and financing through a single interface. At launch the company said the service reached liquidity covering more than 90 per cent of the digital asset market across over 20 venues, with T+1 credit facilities and round-the-clock support. It competes with established players such as Coinbase Prime and FalconX. Routing Singapore Gulf Bank's digital asset liquidity through Kraken Prime deepens that book while giving the bank's clients a wider execution pool.
Who is Singapore Gulf Bank, and how big is SGB Net?
Singapore Gulf Bank is a wholesale bank licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain and headquartered at the Bahrain World Trade Center in Manama. It was founded by Singapore investment group Whampoa Group and is backed by Mumtalakat, Bahrain's sovereign wealth fund, which manages a portfolio valued at roughly $18 billion. The bank rolled out corporate banking services in late 2024, launched SGB Net in May 2025 and formalised a custody partnership with Fireblocks in November 2025.
The one figure to treat with care is scale. SGB says SGB Net now processes more than $20 billion in fiat transactions a month. That is a company-stated number and has not been independently verified. For context, independent reporting in February 2026 described the network as processing more than $2 billion in monthly fiat volume and growing at an average of roughly 93 per cent month on month, so by the bank's own account throughput has climbed steeply over the following months. The trajectory is plausible on those growth rates, but the current total rests on SGB's disclosure rather than audited data.
Where does this fit in Payward's strategy?
The integration sits inside Payward Banking, the money layer the company uses to move client cash across deposits, payments, cards, custody and lending. Payward runs a single shared architecture beneath Kraken, the NinjaTrader futures platform and a growing set of products, and it has spent the past two years bolting regulated capabilities onto that base.
Adding banking partners that can settle in real time is the logical next layer: as digital asset markets and conventional banking converge, clients increasingly expect their cash to move as fast as the assets they trade. Payward has said it intends to keep adding regulated banking partners across new markets, which makes Singapore Gulf Bank a template rather than a one-off.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
The competitive frontier in digital assets is shifting from trading screens to the plumbing underneath them: settlement, custody and banking rails. For treasury teams, OTC desks and asset managers active in Asia and the Gulf, a regulated 24/7 settlement line changes how funding and collateral are managed, and it hands Payward a repeatable model for entering new markets through local banks.
Two caveats temper the story: the service starts US-dollar-only for a short list of clients, and SGB Net's headline throughput is self-reported. Watch whether the currency set widens and whether the volume figure holds up under independent scrutiny.
