Kraken’s parent company plugs into a Singapore bank for round-the-clock dollar settlement

Payward, the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, has integrated with Singapore Gulf Bank’s SGB Net platform to enable round-the-clock U.S. dollar settlement for institutional clients. The integration targets a structural mismatch that has long frustrated institutional crypto traders: digital-asset markets trade continuously, seven days a week, while the traditional banking rails used to move the dollars backing those trades have typically operated only during standard business hours in whichever jurisdiction the settlement bank sits.

SGB Net is Singapore Gulf Bank’s settlement infrastructure, and by connecting to it directly, Payward is positioning itself to offer institutional clients dollar settlement that does not pause overnight or over weekends — a capability that matters most to trading desks and market makers that need to move collateral or close out positions outside conventional banking windows. The company has not disclosed transaction volumes or pricing tied to the new capability.

The integration comes amid a broader pattern of crypto exchanges and their parent companies building more direct relationships with banks and settlement networks, rather than relying exclusively on traditional correspondent banking arrangements that can introduce delays and additional counterparty layers. Kraken itself has been active on multiple fronts recently, including enabling margin trading on additional token pairs and working through separate operational issues involving Ether and ERC-20 withdrawal delays, underscoring that infrastructure build-outs like the SGB Net integration are happening alongside the day-to-day operational demands of running a major exchange.

For now, the practical effect of the integration is narrower than it might sound: it addresses settlement timing for institutional dollar flows, not the broader question of how retail crypto trading interacts with banking hours. Its significance lies in what it signals about where crypto infrastructure companies are investing — building purpose-built rails for always-on markets rather than working around the limitations of banking systems designed for a five-day trading week.