BoE, MAS and BoT close Meridian FX APAC trial; UK targets 2028 live synchronisation

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand jointly published results from Project Meridian FX APAC on November 14, validating synchronised cross-border FX settlement between RTGS systems and distributed-ledger infrastructure. The Bank of England said it plans to introduce a live synchronisation interface in 2028; the timeline is not binding on MAS or BoT.

What happened

The three central banks tested payment-versus-payment settlement and multilateral netting across simulated RTGS systems and DLT environments. The prototype was built on Partior, a DLT settlement network whose founders include JPMorgan, DBS, Standard Chartered and Temasek. In each test case, one currency moved only when the corresponding leg in the other currency also moved; where either leg failed — insufficient funds, invalid account identifiers, temporary outages — the operator either completed the settlement or cancelled the entire transaction.

The trial found multilateral netting technically feasible without quantifying a liquidity saving. The principal engineering difficulty was keeping transaction batches aligned when liquidity was blocked on one side; computing the net positions themselves proved less demanding. At MAS, the team used a dedicated escrow account, because funds could not be reserved for a third party in the test environment.

Tom Mutton, BoE's executive director of payments, innovation and fintech, is quoted in the Bank of England summary. The policy report notes that legal finality of settlement, governance, operator supervision and data-sharing remain open questions ahead of commercial deployment.

Mechanism

Synchronised FX settlement reduces Herstatt risk — the risk that one leg of a cross-currency settlement completes while the other fails — by making both legs atomic. Project Meridian FX APAC extends the original BIS Innovation Hub Meridian FX experiment, published in April 2025, by testing in three live RTGS jurisdictions rather than a simulation. The interoperability model does not require the central banks to adopt identical infrastructure: each retains its own RTGS, and the DLT layer coordinates the atomicity.

Numbers

• Project phase: APAC pilot, simulated RTGS + Partior DLT
• Daily FX settlement at risk (BIS triennial, April 2025): >$1.4 trillion, ~10% of total
• BoE live-service target: 2028
• Participating central banks: 3 (BoE, MAS, BoT)
• Prototype operator: Partior

What to watch

1. The Bank of England's path to a 2028 live synchronisation interface — the executive summary lists legal finality, operator governance and oversight as unresolved before commercial deployment.
2. Whether MAS and BoT publish their own go-live timelines, or wait for a BIS-coordinated framework.
3. Whether Partior's prototype role translates to operator mandate, or the central banks select another provider by tender.
4. The next geography of Meridian FX extensions — the 2025 euro-area results established interoperability among BoE, Banque de France, Bundesbank and ECB; the APAC results extend the reach to two major Asian trading currencies.

Context

The Meridian FX programme is the most developed central-bank experiment in synchronised wholesale FX settlement using DLT. It fits a 2024–2026 pattern in which G20 central banks have moved from conceptual CBDC research toward concrete wholesale-settlement pilots: the BIS's Agora, the ECB's Eurosystem exploratory work, and MAS's Project Guardian all run in parallel. Project Meridian FX APAC's contribution is the first cross-jurisdictional interoperability test among three live RTGS systems using a commercial DLT platform rather than a central-bank-built one.

Sources

• Bank of England executive summary: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/payments/payments-innovation/wholesale-experiments-programme/project-meridian-fx-apac-executive-summary-and-introduction
• CoinDesk coverage of the Nov 14 joint publication.