Sept 16 (Reuters) - Three Swiss banks, including UBS

, have carried out a binding payment using bank deposits

and a public blockchain for the first time, the Swiss Bankers

Association said on Tuesday.

The payment was carried out as part of a feasibility study

on use of deposit tokens by PostFinance, Sygnum Bank and UBS.

"This is something really new," said Thomas Frei, head of

product innovation at Sygnum Bank.

Deposit tokens refer to bank deposits that have been made

usable on the blockchain by "tokenizing" them. During the study

clients sent tokens on the blockchain that represented bank

deposits, settling their respective transactions.

"Our tokenized deposits can be used across different banks,

which is something that was not there yet," Frei said.

He said the study showed the banks could cover their

counterparty risk. Frei added that while JPMorgan ( JPM ) had tokenized

deposits too, they could only be used within JPMorgan ( JPM ).

"Basically, what we did is we launched a kind of new form of

payments on the blockchain, which is an alternative to

stablecoins," Frei said. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose

value is pegged to that of another currency, commodity, or

financial instrument.

In future, payments could not only be processed immediately

and definitively on shared infrastructure but also be integrated

directly into automated business processes, the SBA said.

More work still needs to be done before the banks would be

ready to roll the product out, Frei said.