Bank of England, MAS and Thai Central Bank Link FX Settlement in Trial

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand said Friday they settled currency trades across three different central bank systems at once in a joint trial, including one that runs on tokens. The Bank of England plans a live version of the linking service in 2028.

The trial, called Project Meridian FX APAC, goes after settlement risk: one side of a currency trade pays and the other doesn't. More than $1.4 trillion a day, or 10% of FX settlement, was still fully exposed to that risk in April 2025, according to the BIS survey cited in the Bank of England's release.

Both legs move, or neither does

In payment-versus-payment settlement, the pounds and the Singapore dollars change hands together or not at all. The trial put a coordination layer, which the banks call a synchronisation operator, on top of each central bank's own system. It tells every system to release funds only when all legs are ready. Partior, the project's delivery partner, built the prototype.

The systems were deliberately mismatched. Some were conventional real-time gross settlement systems, which move central bank money one payment at a time. MAS's test network held Singapore dollars as tokens in digital wallets, its technical report shows.

The banks also tested multilateral netting, where many trades are offset and only the net amounts move. The executive summary says that could cut how much cash banks must tie up.

Lab results, with caveats

No live market money moved; the three were test environments. In MAS's network, the operator had to run an escrow account to fill a missing feature, which the report says added complexity. Tests of failed payments and outages gave "encouraging evidence," it says, though "important real-world conditions remain for further testing." The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas took part as observer central banks, MAS said.

In our opinion: the date that counts is 2028. That's when the Bank of England wants tokenized money and old-style bank ledgers settling side by side in central bank money, the plumbing tokenized deposits and funds would need. For now, it's three test systems and not a single live baht.