Project Agorá
04 Feb 2026
Led by the BIS, Project Agorá is exploring whether tokenised money and a unified ledger model can address the long-standing inefficiencies of wholesale cross-border payments
Image: miha_creative/stock.adobe.com
Cross-border payments sit at the heart of global finance, yet the infrastructure underpinning them remains one of the most fragmented and inefficient parts of the financial system.
Despite decades of incremental improvements, wholesale payments between banks still rely heavily on correspondent banking chains that can span multiple institutions, jurisdictions and time zones, creating delays, opacity, and operational risk.
It is against this backdrop that Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), is exploring whether tokenised money and a unified ledger model could provide a more efficient foundation for wholesale cross-border settlement.
The initiative brings together seven central banks and more than 40 private-sector financial institutions in what has become the BIS Innovation Hub’s largest and most complex project to date.
While still firmly in the experimental phase, Project Agorá offers an insight into how the settlement layer of global payments could evolve — not by displacing banks or existing structures, but by modernising the infrastructure that connects them.
Why cross-border payments remain a structural problem
For banks and their corporate clients, cross-border payments remain slow, costly, and difficult to track. Transactions often pass through several correspondent banks, each introducing its own checks, cut-off times, and fees, while settlement across currencies typically occurs asynchronously.
Claire Gates, global head of payments at Crown Agents Bank, points to the cumulative impact of this fragmentation. “Cross-border payments across multiple markets are inherently complex — often taking three to five days depending on the region, lacking transparency, and incurring significant costs as multiple intermediaries take their margins,” she says.
“This initiative can help unify and enhance the overall process, as tokenisation improves efficiency both financially and structurally.”
Beyond delays and cost, the structure of correspondent banking ties up liquidity as banks pre-fund accounts across jurisdictions to manage settlement risk. Time zone differences exacerbate these pressures, while resolving exceptions or failed payments often requires manual intervention.
According to Julia Demidova, senior director for digital assets product and strategy at FIS, today’s model resembles a relay race rather than a coordinated process. “Each step adds checks, cut-off times, fees, delays and uncertainty. If something goes wrong, it’s hard to see where it got stuck and fixing it often means manual investigations and interventions,” she says.
What Project Agorá is — and what it is not
Project Agorá is focused squarely on wholesale, not retail, payments. It does not involve consumer-facing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), public crypto networks or securities trading platforms. Instead, it is testing whether a multi-currency unified ledger could improve the way banks settle cross-border payments with one another.
At the core of the project is the tokenisation of two forms of money: commercial bank deposits, represented digitally as tokenised bank money and wholesale central bank money, providing a safe settlement asset anchored to reserves
These tokenised instruments are brought together on a programmable platform designed to support atomic settlement — meaning that payment and settlement occur simultaneously, or not at all.
Demidova emphasises that this design choice is deliberate. “What makes it different from a lot of other tokenisation or digital asset projects is that it’s not trying to replace banks or build an alternative payment rail,” she says.
“It’s experiment-led, through the BIS, designed to work with the existing two-tier system. Commercial banks still provide services, but the settlement layer is modernised.”
In other words, Project Agorá is not about reinventing money, but about improving how money moves between institutions.
Why tokenisation matters in wholesale payments
In the context of Project Agorá, tokenisation is not treated as a buzzword, but as a mechanism for collapsing multiple steps in the payment process into a single operation. By embedding rules for ownership, transfer, and compliance directly into tokenised money, the project aims to reduce reconciliation, duplication, and operational risk.
“The promise of Agorá is to test whether you can move value between countries more like a single and coordinated process instead of a relay race,” says Demidova. “In practical terms this means fewer hand-offs, less reconciliation, faster settlement, and clearer status updates end to end.”
This approach also enables more sophisticated payment functionality, such as conditional payments or synchronised foreign exchange settlement, while preserving the relationship between banks and their depositors.
Richard Baker, founder and CEO of Tokenovate, notes that projects like Agorá quickly shift the conversation away from tokenised assets themselves and towards the infrastructure that supports them. “Tokenisation isn’t really about the asset or the payment itself, but about how systems connect, how settlement is coordinated, and where legal finality and risk sit,” he says.
Settlement finality, liquidity and trust
A defining feature of Project Agorá is its reliance on settlement in central bank money — widely regarded as a low-risk settlement asset for wholesale payments when held as central bank reserves. This choice addresses one of the core risks in cross-border payments: uncertainty over when settlement is final.
By anchoring settlement to central bank money, Agorá seeks to reduce counterparty risk and improve confidence in payment finality across jurisdictions. Teresa Cameron, CEO of Clear Junction, describes the project as “a useful signal that banks and central banks are testing tokenised deposits and settlement in central bank money to reduce cross-border settlement friction,” while cautioning that “the hard work is governance, interoperability, operational resilience, and demonstrable controls”.
Liquidity management is another area where Agorá could have long-term implications. Today, banks often pre-position liquidity in multiple markets to manage settlement timing mismatches. A unified ledger capable of near-real-time, atomic settlement could reduce the need for idle liquidity, although participants stress that this remains an area for experimentation rather than assumption.
Governance, regulation and operational reality
Unlike many privately led tokenisation initiatives, Project Agorá places governance and regulatory alignment at the centre of its design. With seven central banks involved, the project is examining how tokenised money can comply with existing legal frameworks around settlement finality, anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) across multiple jurisdictions.
Gates highlights the importance of this institutional backing. “The key strength lies in the backing of seven central banks and 40 private-sector financial institutions,” she says. “The aim is to establish common standards, supported by state-level rigour and auditing, to ensure that this financial innovation complements broader monetary policy.”
Operational questions remain central to the project’s work. These include how to manage payment-versus-payment (PvP) across currencies, how liquidity and FX risk are handled, and how the platform would operate across time zones on a near-continuous basis.
From a compliance perspective, Agorá is also testing whether shared validation processes could reduce duplication without weakening controls. “Cross-border payments often repeat similar sanctions and AML checks at multiple points in the chain,” Demidova explains. “Agorá is effectively testing whether more of that can be done up front, without breaking privacy rules or national regulatory requirements.”
Infrastructure before innovation
Several contributors stress that tokenisation alone will not resolve longstanding inefficiencies if it is layered onto outdated infrastructure. Steve Cook, co-founder and strategic adviser at Form3, argues that legacy architecture remains a key constraint. “It’s impossible to leverage the benefits of tokenisation for cross-border payments while relying on legacy architecture that simply can’t handle them,” he says. “Tokenisation is not a workaround for legacy systems. Without fixing the foundations, the industry risks running into the same old bottlenecks.”
This theme — that coordinated infrastructure change matters more than isolated innovation — runs throughout Project Agorá. As Baker puts it, “progress in capital markets will depend less on isolated tokenisation projects and more on coordinated changes to core market infrastructure”.
What happens next
Project Agorá moved from design into the prototype-building phase in 2025, with work continuing through 2026. A report capturing lessons learned, technical design choices and identified legal and regulatory gaps is expected in the first half of the year.
Importantly, the BIS Innovation Hub has been clear that Agorá is not a finished platform or a product roadmap. It is an experiment designed to test whether a new form of regulated financial market infrastructure for cross-border payments is feasible.
As Pratiksha Pathak, partner and head of payments at RedCompass, notes, momentum is building, but delivery remains uneven. “Despite strong G20 and CPMI commitments, cross-border payments are still too slow, too costly and too opaque,” she says. “Unified ledgers, tokenisation and settlement in central bank money have the potential to materially improve speed, transparency and liquidity efficiency — but 2026 is pivotal.”
For now, Project Agorá represents a careful, institution-led attempt to modernise one of the most critical — and complex — layers of global finance.
Whether its concepts move beyond experimentation will depend not only on technology, but on governance, coordination and the willingness of institutions to modernise the foundations beneath global payments.
Despite decades of incremental improvements, wholesale payments between banks still rely heavily on correspondent banking chains that can span multiple institutions, jurisdictions and time zones, creating delays, opacity, and operational risk.
It is against this backdrop that Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), is exploring whether tokenised money and a unified ledger model could provide a more efficient foundation for wholesale cross-border settlement.
The initiative brings together seven central banks and more than 40 private-sector financial institutions in what has become the BIS Innovation Hub’s largest and most complex project to date.
While still firmly in the experimental phase, Project Agorá offers an insight into how the settlement layer of global payments could evolve — not by displacing banks or existing structures, but by modernising the infrastructure that connects them.
Why cross-border payments remain a structural problem
For banks and their corporate clients, cross-border payments remain slow, costly, and difficult to track. Transactions often pass through several correspondent banks, each introducing its own checks, cut-off times, and fees, while settlement across currencies typically occurs asynchronously.
Claire Gates, global head of payments at Crown Agents Bank, points to the cumulative impact of this fragmentation. “Cross-border payments across multiple markets are inherently complex — often taking three to five days depending on the region, lacking transparency, and incurring significant costs as multiple intermediaries take their margins,” she says.
“This initiative can help unify and enhance the overall process, as tokenisation improves efficiency both financially and structurally.”
Beyond delays and cost, the structure of correspondent banking ties up liquidity as banks pre-fund accounts across jurisdictions to manage settlement risk. Time zone differences exacerbate these pressures, while resolving exceptions or failed payments often requires manual intervention.
According to Julia Demidova, senior director for digital assets product and strategy at FIS, today’s model resembles a relay race rather than a coordinated process. “Each step adds checks, cut-off times, fees, delays and uncertainty. If something goes wrong, it’s hard to see where it got stuck and fixing it often means manual investigations and interventions,” she says.
What Project Agorá is — and what it is not
Project Agorá is focused squarely on wholesale, not retail, payments. It does not involve consumer-facing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), public crypto networks or securities trading platforms. Instead, it is testing whether a multi-currency unified ledger could improve the way banks settle cross-border payments with one another.
At the core of the project is the tokenisation of two forms of money: commercial bank deposits, represented digitally as tokenised bank money and wholesale central bank money, providing a safe settlement asset anchored to reserves
These tokenised instruments are brought together on a programmable platform designed to support atomic settlement — meaning that payment and settlement occur simultaneously, or not at all.
Demidova emphasises that this design choice is deliberate. “What makes it different from a lot of other tokenisation or digital asset projects is that it’s not trying to replace banks or build an alternative payment rail,” she says.
“It’s experiment-led, through the BIS, designed to work with the existing two-tier system. Commercial banks still provide services, but the settlement layer is modernised.”
In other words, Project Agorá is not about reinventing money, but about improving how money moves between institutions.
Why tokenisation matters in wholesale payments
In the context of Project Agorá, tokenisation is not treated as a buzzword, but as a mechanism for collapsing multiple steps in the payment process into a single operation. By embedding rules for ownership, transfer, and compliance directly into tokenised money, the project aims to reduce reconciliation, duplication, and operational risk.
“The promise of Agorá is to test whether you can move value between countries more like a single and coordinated process instead of a relay race,” says Demidova. “In practical terms this means fewer hand-offs, less reconciliation, faster settlement, and clearer status updates end to end.”
This approach also enables more sophisticated payment functionality, such as conditional payments or synchronised foreign exchange settlement, while preserving the relationship between banks and their depositors.
Richard Baker, founder and CEO of Tokenovate, notes that projects like Agorá quickly shift the conversation away from tokenised assets themselves and towards the infrastructure that supports them. “Tokenisation isn’t really about the asset or the payment itself, but about how systems connect, how settlement is coordinated, and where legal finality and risk sit,” he says.
Settlement finality, liquidity and trust
A defining feature of Project Agorá is its reliance on settlement in central bank money — widely regarded as a low-risk settlement asset for wholesale payments when held as central bank reserves. This choice addresses one of the core risks in cross-border payments: uncertainty over when settlement is final.
By anchoring settlement to central bank money, Agorá seeks to reduce counterparty risk and improve confidence in payment finality across jurisdictions. Teresa Cameron, CEO of Clear Junction, describes the project as “a useful signal that banks and central banks are testing tokenised deposits and settlement in central bank money to reduce cross-border settlement friction,” while cautioning that “the hard work is governance, interoperability, operational resilience, and demonstrable controls”.
Liquidity management is another area where Agorá could have long-term implications. Today, banks often pre-position liquidity in multiple markets to manage settlement timing mismatches. A unified ledger capable of near-real-time, atomic settlement could reduce the need for idle liquidity, although participants stress that this remains an area for experimentation rather than assumption.
Governance, regulation and operational reality
Unlike many privately led tokenisation initiatives, Project Agorá places governance and regulatory alignment at the centre of its design. With seven central banks involved, the project is examining how tokenised money can comply with existing legal frameworks around settlement finality, anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) across multiple jurisdictions.
Gates highlights the importance of this institutional backing. “The key strength lies in the backing of seven central banks and 40 private-sector financial institutions,” she says. “The aim is to establish common standards, supported by state-level rigour and auditing, to ensure that this financial innovation complements broader monetary policy.”
Operational questions remain central to the project’s work. These include how to manage payment-versus-payment (PvP) across currencies, how liquidity and FX risk are handled, and how the platform would operate across time zones on a near-continuous basis.
From a compliance perspective, Agorá is also testing whether shared validation processes could reduce duplication without weakening controls. “Cross-border payments often repeat similar sanctions and AML checks at multiple points in the chain,” Demidova explains. “Agorá is effectively testing whether more of that can be done up front, without breaking privacy rules or national regulatory requirements.”
Infrastructure before innovation
Several contributors stress that tokenisation alone will not resolve longstanding inefficiencies if it is layered onto outdated infrastructure. Steve Cook, co-founder and strategic adviser at Form3, argues that legacy architecture remains a key constraint. “It’s impossible to leverage the benefits of tokenisation for cross-border payments while relying on legacy architecture that simply can’t handle them,” he says. “Tokenisation is not a workaround for legacy systems. Without fixing the foundations, the industry risks running into the same old bottlenecks.”
This theme — that coordinated infrastructure change matters more than isolated innovation — runs throughout Project Agorá. As Baker puts it, “progress in capital markets will depend less on isolated tokenisation projects and more on coordinated changes to core market infrastructure”.
What happens next
Project Agorá moved from design into the prototype-building phase in 2025, with work continuing through 2026. A report capturing lessons learned, technical design choices and identified legal and regulatory gaps is expected in the first half of the year.
Importantly, the BIS Innovation Hub has been clear that Agorá is not a finished platform or a product roadmap. It is an experiment designed to test whether a new form of regulated financial market infrastructure for cross-border payments is feasible.
As Pratiksha Pathak, partner and head of payments at RedCompass, notes, momentum is building, but delivery remains uneven. “Despite strong G20 and CPMI commitments, cross-border payments are still too slow, too costly and too opaque,” she says. “Unified ledgers, tokenisation and settlement in central bank money have the potential to materially improve speed, transparency and liquidity efficiency — but 2026 is pivotal.”
For now, Project Agorá represents a careful, institution-led attempt to modernise one of the most critical — and complex — layers of global finance.
Whether its concepts move beyond experimentation will depend not only on technology, but on governance, coordination and the willingness of institutions to modernise the foundations beneath global payments.
NO FEE, NO RISK
100% ON RETURNS If you invest in only one asset servicing news source this year, make sure it is your free subscription to Asset Servicing Times
100% ON RETURNS If you invest in only one asset servicing news source this year, make sure it is your free subscription to Asset Servicing Times
