Cross-border tokenised settlement has, in the eighteen months since the Bank for International Settlements launched Project Agorá in April 2024, moved from a small set of central bank discussion papers to a recognisable institutional landscape of three live initiatives. Each addresses a different combination of currencies, participants and policy constraints. Each will shape what payment-versus-payment looks like when it is conducted natively on a unified ledger. The institutional question in May 2026 is no longer whether such settlement is feasible. The question is which of the available architectures becomes the operational default for which currency corridors, and how institutions should position for that outcome.
Project Agorá, hosted by the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub and bringing together seven major central banks and a wider group of private financial institutions, is the broadest of the three initiatives. The participating central banks are the United States Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank. The participating private sector includes more than forty of the world's largest commercial banks and a number of operating financial market infrastructures. The objective is to explore how wholesale central bank money and tokenised commercial bank deposits can interoperate on a single programmable platform, with payment-versus-payment for foreign exchange and delivery-versus-payment for securities as the primary use cases.
The May 2026 status of Project Agorá is that the technical experimentation phase is substantially complete. The published interim findings, released in late 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, identify three principal architectural choices, each with material implications for institutional participants. The choices concern the placement of foreign exchange conversion, the treatment of credit and liquidity provision, and the governance of access. The decisions are being framed for resolution in a series of policy workshops scheduled through 2026.
Project mBridge, jointly led by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates with the Bank for International Settlements as a contributor, has had a different trajectory. The initiative achieved the minimum viable product stage in mid-2024 and has subsequently transitioned to a phase in which the participating central banks have taken majority control of the platform. The Bank for International Settlements completed its formal contribution in 2024 and has continued in an observer capacity. The platform is now in live operation for a limited but growing set of cross-border transactions between the four founding currencies, with additional central banks reported to be in advanced discussions to join. The institutional reading is that mBridge has become a policy-driven infrastructure for the participating jurisdictions, separate from but conceptually adjacent to the Agorá initiative.
Partior, the third initiative, is a commercial venture launched by JPMorgan, DBS Bank and Temasek and subsequently joined by Standard Chartered and others. The platform provides interbank settlement on a permissioned distributed ledger, principally for United States dollar, Singapore dollar, euro and certain other major currencies. The institutional reading is that Partior occupies a different position from Agorá or mBridge, in that it is a commercially operated network with central bank visibility but not central bank operational control, and that it is designed to scale through commercial network effects rather than policy mandate.
The combined effect of the three initiatives is a cross-border tokenised settlement landscape in which the major reserve currencies have at least one operational or near-operational tokenised settlement option, with overlap, gap and choice. The overlap is concentrated in the United States dollar, where Agorá, Partior and a number of bilateral arrangements all operate or aspire to operate. The gap is concentrated in the smaller currencies of emerging market economies, where none of the three principal initiatives has yet established operational coverage. The choice, for an institution with cross-border tokenised settlement requirements, depends on the corridor, the counterparty network and the supervisory expectations of the relevant jurisdictions.
The institutional implications begin with the foreign exchange conversion question. In a traditional cross-border payment, foreign exchange conversion is performed by one or more correspondent banks at points along the payment chain, with each conversion attracting a spread and each contributing to operational risk. In a tokenised settlement, the conversion can in principle be performed atomically on the platform, with payment-versus-payment finality preserved throughout. The technical capability is now established. The remaining question is whether the conversion is performed by the platform itself, by the participating central banks acting as foreign exchange counterparty of last resort, or by participating commercial banks acting as conventional counterparties. The decision has direct implications for foreign exchange business lines at the major banks.
The second institutional implication concerns the treatment of credit and liquidity provision. Traditional correspondent banking is, at its core, a credit and liquidity service. The correspondent bank advances funds before the corresponding receipt, on the basis of a documented credit relationship with the originating bank. In a tokenised settlement system with payment-versus-payment finality, the explicit credit advance is no longer technically required, but the underlying liquidity need remains. The question is how the platform supports overnight or intraday liquidity provision to participants that have payment obligations exceeding their available balances. The published architectural options include central bank provision, commercial bank provision and platform-internal liquidity pools, each with different supervisory and pricing implications.
The third institutional implication concerns access. The participating central banks must decide which institutions can hold balances on the platform, on what conditions and with what oversight. The current default in each of the three initiatives is restricted to authorised commercial banks and certain qualifying non-bank financial institutions. The question of whether and on what terms the access perimeter should be widened, for example to include non-bank payment service providers or large corporates, is among the most consequential outstanding policy decisions. The institutional reading is that the perimeter will widen over time but that the conditions for widening will include demonstrable governance, supervision and operational maturity equivalent to that of existing participants.
The fourth institutional implication concerns interoperability between the three initiatives. The Agorá, mBridge and Partior platforms are not, in their current form, natively interoperable with one another. An institution participating in two of them must operate two separate sets of operational interfaces, two separate sets of liquidity positions and two separate supervisory dialogues. Each of the three platforms has published an interest in eventual interoperability with the others, and a number of technical working groups under the auspices of the BIS Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures are pursuing the question. The institutional reading is that interoperability will be achieved over time but that the initial period of multi-platform operation will impose real operational costs on the participating institutions.
The fifth institutional implication concerns the impact on traditional correspondent banking. The published research from the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board suggests that the addressable market for cross-border tokenised settlement is, in the medium term, a meaningful but not overwhelming share of total cross-border payment volume. The most plausible scenarios indicate that a substantial portion of high-value, wholesale cross-border payments will migrate to tokenised settlement over the next five to ten years, while retail and small-value payments will continue to rely on the traditional correspondent banking model and its modernisation through initiatives such as the SWIFT Global Payments Innovation programme. The institutional reading is that the major banks should expect to operate both models in parallel for an extended period.
The sixth institutional implication concerns the regulatory and supervisory architecture. The participating central banks have, through a series of joint publications under the auspices of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, articulated a framework for the supervision of cross-border tokenised settlement platforms. The framework emphasises the application of the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures to the platforms themselves, the application of existing prudential and conduct standards to the participating institutions, and the coordination of cross-border supervisory cooperation through colleges of supervisors. The institutional reading is that the supervisory architecture is mature in concept and remains to be tested in practice as the platforms move from experimentation to live operation at scale.
The seventh institutional implication concerns the implications for emerging market and developing economy currencies. The current concentration of the three initiatives on major reserve currencies leaves the cross-border tokenised settlement question for emerging market currencies largely unanswered. A number of regional initiatives, including the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, the Latin American work on interoperability and several bilateral arrangements in South Asia and the Middle East, are addressing the question at sub-regional level. The institutional reading is that the eventual architecture for emerging market currencies is likely to be a combination of regional networks with bridges to the major reserve currency platforms, rather than direct participation in those platforms.
The eighth institutional implication concerns the impact on the foreign exchange market microstructure. The major foreign exchange dealers have, over the past decade, built their business models on a combination of risk warehousing, internalisation of client flow and provision of liquidity at very tight spreads. The transition to tokenised settlement with atomic payment-versus-payment finality changes the time horizon of the risk warehousing, the operational economics of internalisation and the pricing dynamics of liquidity provision. The institutional reading is that the foreign exchange market microstructure will evolve significantly as tokenised settlement becomes more prevalent, with consequences for the competitive landscape that are difficult to predict in detail but that institutions should expect to be material.
The ninth institutional implication concerns governance of the platforms themselves. Each of the three initiatives has its own governance structure, with different combinations of central bank, commercial bank and other private sector participation. The arrangements have implications for the speed of decision-making, the openness to new participants, the protection of intellectual property and the management of intellectual capital. The institutional reading is that the governance arrangements will themselves be a competitive variable, with platforms that achieve effective decision-making and broad participation likely to outperform those that do not.
The tenth institutional implication is strategic. Institutions should now have, at board level, a documented position on cross-border tokenised settlement that addresses participation in each of the three principal initiatives, the operational interfaces with the institution's existing payment infrastructure, the supervisory dialogue with the relevant authorities, and the contingency arrangements for adverse developments at any of the platforms. Where the documented position is absent, the institution is exposed to surprise developments at any of the platforms and to the loss of relative positioning compared with peers that have begun to engage. The cost of engagement is real but contained. The cost of disengagement, on current trajectory, is rising.
The Cabier Consulting institutional brief Governance Above the Rail identifies cross-border tokenised settlement as the area of tokenisation infrastructure most directly relevant to a globally active institution's commercial position over the next five years. The brief recommends formal board-level engagement with the question, supported by a structured assessment of the institution's participation strategy, by the end of 2026.
Readers responsible for institutional implementation are directed to the FinanceTrackerIQ cross-border payments dashboard, the CALCULATORiQ foreign exchange settlement risk workbench and the institutional reading list maintained by Cabier Consulting.
Board questions to ask now.
Has the management body received a documented assessment of the institution's participation strategy across the three principal cross-border tokenised settlement initiatives? Has the institution mapped the operational, supervisory and commercial implications of the architectural choices currently being decided within each of the initiatives? Has the third line of defence performed an independent review of the platforms in which the institution participates or intends to participate?
Operating model implications.
Cross-border tokenised settlement should be owned at the institution by a named accountable executive with consolidated visibility across payments, foreign exchange, post-trade operations and the digital-asset function. Splitting the responsibility across these functions, as a number of institutions have attempted in 2025, has produced gaps in the institution's strategic position and in its supervisory dialogue.
Twelve-month implementation plan.
In the first quarter, complete the strategic assessment of the institution's participation strategy across Agorá, mBridge and Partior. In the second quarter, formalise the decisions on participation, integration and supervisory dialogue, and document the contingency arrangements. In the third quarter, execute the integration work at pilot scale, capture operational metrics and engage the relevant supervisors. In the fourth quarter, present the experience to the board, decide the scale-up cadence and align the resource plan accordingly.
Cabier Consulting's 2026 institutional brief, Governance Above the Rail, sets the architectural context within which these initiatives are best understood. Reciprocal reading at https://cabierconsulting.com/insights/governance-above-the-rail-2026 is recommended for institutions formalising their cross-border tokenised settlement strategy.