The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank of Thailand said on Friday that synchronised FX settlement worked across three central bank systems, ahead of a planned 2028 live service.
The findings come from Project Meridian FX APAC, which tested payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement and multilateral net settlement across the three banks’ test environments.
These spanned both Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and distributed ledger technology systems, the central banks said.
Tom Mutton, executive director of payments, innovation and fintech at the Bank of England, said the project “provides practical evidence of how synchronised settlement could help reduce risk and improve efficiency in cross-border FX transactions”.
PvP settlement means the transfer of one currency happens if, and only if, the transfer of the other currency also happens.
The Bank for International Settlements’ 2025 Triennial Survey found more than $1.4trn, or 10%, of average daily FX settlement in April 2025 remained fully exposed to settlement risk.
Synchronisation is a service that coordinates movements of central bank money. A prototype Synchronisation Operator, a coordination layer that makes linked transfers occur together or not at all, was built and tested by Partior, the project’s delivery partner.
The trial showed synchronised settlement can be achieved across systems with different technologies and capabilities, while identifying the requirements and trade-offs involved. Multilateral net settlement, which nets payments against each other, can help banks use liquidity more efficiently.
The Bank of England’s executive summary said multilateral net PvP was technically achievable across the three environments. It added that the key challenge went beyond calculating net positions to coordinating a common set of transactions across all systems while the necessary liquidity stayed reserved.
Kenneth Gay, chief FinTech officer at MAS, said the project “has shown how synchronisation could help enable PvP settlement across these diverse environments, reducing settlement risk while supporting greater interoperability”.
The experiment focused on coordination between the operator and the settlement systems. It did not reproduce the full FX trade lifecycle, live participants or production operating conditions, the summary said.
The technical report described it as a proof-of-concept in a non-live test environment that deliberately simplified several aspects of real-world operation. The Singapore dollar testnet was used only in a non-live configuration.
On policy, the summary said the appropriate treatment would depend on the functions the synchronisation operator performs and their materiality. Participation does not imply an implementation commitment or a particular policy direction by MAS or the Bank of Thailand.
Only the Bank of England has committed to a live service.
Pucktada Treeratpituk, director of the payment systems and financial technology policy department at the Bank of Thailand, said the project “successfully demonstrated that synchronisation can work across diverse wholesale settlement systems”.
The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas took part as observer central banks, informing the analysis of legal, regulatory and oversight considerations. Results are published in three reports: an introduction and executive summary, a technical report and a policy report.
The project was announced in November 2025 and builds on Project Meridian FX, led by the BIS Innovation Hub London with the Bank of England and four European central banks.
The Bank of England’s experiments programme says it is running a Synchronisation Lab in 2026 and targeting a live capability for 2028. In May, it committed to launching a live synchronisation service alongside the Financial Conduct Authority’s tokenisation discussion paper.
Future work could extend the approach to more jurisdictions and industry participants, a wider range of currencies and transaction scenarios, and consider the legal arrangements needed in practice.
