BIS announced Thursday (May 27) that the project had delivered a prototype that demonstrated tokenized commercial bank deposits could be combined with “the trust and safety” of tokenized central bank reserves using a shared platform.
The prototype allows for atomic, multi-currency settlement of wholesale cross-border payments, which could happen on an around-the-clock basis if put into practice, BIS added.
“By leveraging smart contracts, the platform allows financial institutions to embed workflow logic, compliance requirements and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions,” the announcement said.
“This promises to reduce reconciliation burdens, manual intervention and other operational frictions — key sources of delay, cost and payment failure in today’s cross-border system. A Project Agorá – type solution could also unlock new capabilities, including conditional and always-on wholesale cross-border payments.”
Announced in 2024, Project Agorá — Greek for “marketplace” — is an effort convened by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), along with seven central banks and more than 40 other regulated financial institutions.
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Participants include the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and Bank of England, as well as private companies such as HSBC, Citi, Visa, Mastercard and JPMorgan Chase.
The goal is to explore how tokenization and programmability might improve wholesale cross-border payments.
“Tokenization is shaping the future of global finance,” BIS Deputy General Manager Andréa Maechler said earlier this year. “Atomic settlement could be a game changer for cross border payments in a digital era,” she added, in reference to the ability of digital technology to approve payments both instantly and simultaneously.
“It will benefit the entire financial system,” Tim Adams, head of the IIF, told reporters Thursday (May 27), per a Bloomberg News report, adding that the organizations have no set timeline for the project, because “it’s important to get this right.”
As PYMNTS wrote last month, there is room for improvement when it comes to cross-border payments, a process that still means “navigating a patchwork of correspondent banks, local clearing systems and compliance checks that slow transactions, inflate costs and introduce uncertainty to every step.”
Demand for improvement is already there, with PYMNTS Intelligence data showing that 14% of U.S. consumers made cross-border payments in the previous year and 63% of those people employed digital wallets to do so.
“Yet small businesses remain stuck. One in 3 cite the lack of an industry standard as a reason for avoiding those tools, pointing directly to a lack of interoperability as the core barrier,” the report added.
