BoE, MAS, Bank of Thailand publish Meridian FX APAC policy report

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand published the policy report from Project Meridian FX APAC on November 13, a synchronised FX settlement experiment linking their test real-time gross settlement systems across jurisdictions, time zones and infrastructure types. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas participated as observers.

What happened

The three central banks tested a synchronisation operator (SO) prototype that coordinated payment-versus-payment settlement across their wholesale test RTGS systems and ledger-technology environments. According to The Block, Partior supplied the prototype; the central banks' own page names the SO but not the vendor. The experiment built on BIS-led Project Meridian, which concluded in 2023, and extended it to multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction FX.

The prototype matched settlement instructions, reserved funds, monitored payment readiness and triggered settlement. The experimental design also exercised multilateral netting — offsetting payments to reduce the liquidity required for atomic settlement.

What the report found

The policy report flags five live questions before this type of architecture can be deployed in production:

1. Operational resilience. Linking disparate RTGS systems concentrates recovery and continuity risk at the synchronisation layer.
2. Settlement finality. Technical atomicity does not establish a legally recognised point of finality across systems. Each domestic RTGS can define its own final settlement event, and the arrangement must stitch those into one outcome for the linked FX trade. The report cites PFMI Principle 8 and CLS as reference points.
3. Governance and liability. The report notes that if the SO holds funds or calculates net positions, its role may edge closer to a clearing function — and the regulatory responsibilities that implies.
4. Cross-border data sharing. Routing payment instructions through a shared operator raises jurisdictional questions on data residency and oversight.
5. Role definition. Whether netting runs inside each central bank system or at the SO depends on individual RTGS capabilities, with regulatory consequences either way.

Why this matters

PvP is the standard defence against Herstatt risk in FX — the exposure a bank takes when it pays out one leg of a trade before its counterparty confirms the other. CLS handles ~$7 trillion a day for the 18 currencies it covers; most emerging-market and APAC currencies sit outside CLS and settle bilaterally. Meridian FX APAC is the first public policy-report output from a central-bank consortium pursuing PvP for currencies that CLS does not cover, with a design that is explicitly RTGS-plus-ledger rather than a monolithic DLT platform.

What to watch

1. Whether the three central banks commit to a follow-on technical phase with named commercial banks and a dated pilot.
2. The BIS Innovation Hub's parallel work on cross-border CBDC settlement — mBridge participants include the PBoC, HKMA, BoT and UAE Central Bank — and whether Meridian FX APAC's governance findings are picked up there.
3. Partior's commercial pipeline. The company runs a live JPM/DBS/StanChart USD/SGD/EUR settlement rail and is positioning for central-bank work.

Context

This is the fourth Meridian-branded experiment the BoE has published since 2023. The APAC extension was announced in November 2025, when the three central banks said they would use simulated RTGS systems and DLT-based environments to test PvP across different infrastructures. The policy report closes that one-year arc with the institutional and legal objections laid out explicitly — a more candid read than the usual central-bank sandbox write-up.