41 Financial Firms Join Project Agorá to Explore Tokenized Cross-Border Payments
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has initiated Project Agorá, a groundbreaking collaboration between central banks and private financial institutions aimed at revolutionizing wholesale cross-border payments through tokenization. More than 40 private sector firms, convened by the Institute of International Finance (IIF), have been selected to participate in this ambitious initiative.
Project Agorá brings together seven central banks, including the Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. These monetary authorities will work alongside a diverse group of financial institutions, ranging from major global banks to payment service providers and financial market infrastructure companies.
The project, named after the Greek word for “marketplace,” aims to address structural inefficiencies in cross-border payments by leveraging the BIS’s unified ledger concept. It will explore the integration of tokenized commercial bank deposits with tokenized wholesale central bank money on a public-private programmable core financial platform.
Key objectives of Project Agorá include:
- Overcoming challenges related to differing legal, regulatory, and technical requirements across jurisdictions.
- Addressing issues arising from varied operating hours and time zones.
- Streamlining financial integrity controls, such as customer verification and anti-money laundering procedures, which are often redundantly performed by multiple intermediaries.
The initiative will utilize smart contracts and programmability to enable new settlement methods and unlock transaction types that are currently impractical or unfeasible. This approach is expected to maintain the two-tier structure of the monetary system while enhancing its functionality.
Notable participants in the project include major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank, as well as payment giants Visa and Mastercard. Financial market infrastructures like Swift, Eurex Clearing, Euroclear, and SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) are also involved.
As Project Agorá enters its design phase, the BIS emphasizes that while the initiative aims to deliver a prototype that could form the foundation for future financial market infrastructure, it remains experimental in nature. The project is scheduled to run through the end of 2025, with a final report to be released upon completion.
