At a glance
- Three central banks completed Project Meridian FX APAC, a trial in which one operator linked their test settlement systems so that both sides of a foreign-exchange trade settle together or not at all, they said in a joint release on 13 Nov.
- It ran in simulation. The banks say it left out the full trade lifecycle, live participants and production conditions.
The Bank of England (BoE), Singapore’s central bank (the Monetary Authority of Singapore, MAS) and the Bank of Thailand (BoT) tested what they call synchronisation: one coordinating service that makes payments in separate systems either all go through or all stop. The trial connected a prototype “Synchronisation Operator”, built by the project’s delivery partner Partior, to three simulated wholesale settlement environments. The Reserve Bank of Australia and the Philippines’ central bank took part as observers.
In plain terms, when a bank sells pounds for baht, it pays in one system and is paid in another. Today one side can deliver while the other has not yet arrived. Payment-versus-payment settlement, or PvP, removes that gap by making the two legs settle as a pair.
“Cross-border settlement increasingly takes place across systems built on different technologies and operating models,” Kenneth Gay, MAS’s chief fintech officer, said in the release.
The test environments spanned account-based real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems and ledger-based, or distributed ledger, settlement systems.
What was tested
| Test | What the banks report | What was not tested |
|---|---|---|
| Atomic PvP of one FX trade | Settled across the three environments | Full trade lifecycle, live participants |
| Multilateral net FX PvP | Technically achievable; could cut the liquidity banks need | Keeping one agreed set of trades settled everywhere was the hard part |
| Errors and outages (insufficient funds, invalid accounts, temporary outages) | Operator either completed settlement or fully unwound it | Differing operating hours, time zones, expiry of reserved funds, long outages |
Source: BoE executive summary, 13 Nov 2026; wording condensed by CryptoWatchDesk.
The banks add a caveat of their own. Making the legs settle together technically is not the same as legal finality: the policy report says atomic settlement does not by itself create a common, legally recognised outcome across separate domestic systems.
Differences between the systems mattered. Where a system could not let a third party reserve funds, the operator had to work around it; in MAS’s test environment it managed a dedicated escrow account to do so, which the banks say is not a proposed design for a future operator.
What it changes
For banks, nothing yet: there is no live service, no volume and no live money in the trial. If synchronisation becomes real, the change would sit in wholesale settlement between banks, not in what customers see, and would let different central bank designs interoperate rather than converge on one.
The BoE says it intends to open a live synchronisation interface in 2028, and that the findings give “valuable insight” into turning the approach into a service. “Project Meridian FX APAC provides practical evidence of how synchronised settlement could help reduce risk and improve efficiency in cross-border FX transactions,” Tom Mutton, the BoE’s executive director for payments, innovation and fintech, said.
For related central bank work, see the Bank of England’s tokenised-collateral consultation and the ECB and Commission call for tokenisation standards nominations. On the retail side of Thailand’s payments rules, there is its securities regulator’s proposal to cap stablecoin transfers.
Next, watch for the banks’ decision on further work: they say it could extend to more jurisdictions and industry participants, more currencies, and the legal arrangements needed in practice.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.