BIS’ Project Agorá to commence design phase with private sector participants confirmed
More than 40 private sector financial firms have confirmed their participation in Project Agorá, an initiative by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) seeking to explore how tokenisation can enhance wholesale cross-border payments.
Private sector participants join BIS’ Project Agorá for design phase
Convened by the Institute of International Finance (IIF), the participants set to take part in the project include industry heavyweights such as Standard Chartered, Lloyds Banking Group, Mastercard, Euroclear, BNP Paribas and JP Morgan Chase.
They will sit alongside the seven central banks who have supported the project since its launch in April, including the Bank of England, Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
BIS confirms that with all participants in place, Project Agorá is now ready to roll into its scheduled “design phase”.
This stage will focus on integrating tokenised commercial bank deposits with tokenised central bank money on a public-private programmable ledger, a concept first proposed by BIS last year.
Participants will work to overcome “several structural inefficiencies” present in existing payment methods through their testing.
These, according to BIS, include legal disparities between varying jurisdictions, differing technical requirements and operating timelines, and “the increased complexity of carrying out financial integrity controls”, which it says are often repeated several times for the same transaction, depending on the number of intermediaries involved.
The results of the project will build upon the findings of BIS’ Project Mariana, which explored the cross-border settlement capabilities of wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
