Bank of England, MAS and Bank of Thailand Complete Project Meridian FX APAC Trial

By Tom Whitfield

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Bank of Thailand have completed Project Meridian FX APAC, a cross-border foreign exchange settlement trial connecting traditional payment rails with distributed ledger technology. The three central banks published their findings in a joint statement on Friday, roughly ten months after announcing the project last November.

The experiments used a prototype built by Partior, a Singapore-based settlement network operator. The system coordinated payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement and multilateral net FX transactions across the three banks' test environments, according to the statement.

Project Meridian FX APAC spanned multiple currencies, technologies, settlement infrastructures, and time zones. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas joined as observers, extending the project's reach across five jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe.

What did the Partior prototype actually do?

The prototype carried out four core functions during the tests, the joint statement said:

• matched settlement instructions between counterparties;
• coordinated the reservation of funds across systems;
• monitored payment readiness before execution;
• initiated settlement across both legs of each FX transaction.

The central aim was settling both legs of FX payments across real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems and distributed ledger (DLT) systems simultaneously. That synchronization targets a long-standing structural weakness in cross-border FX: the window between legs settling, during which one party carries settlement risk.

The experiment also tested multilateral netting, a mechanism that lets banks offset payments against one another before settlement. Netting reduces the gross liquidity banks must hold to complete their obligations, which lowers the working-capital cost of cross-border FX activity.

What problems did the policy report flag?

The accompanying policy report stopped short of declaring the model ready for production. It identified open questions in five areas: operational resilience, settlement finality, governance, liability, and cross-border data sharing.

The report also raised a regulatory boundary issue. If an operator takes on additional functions — holding funds or calculating net positions — its regulatory responsibilities could change, the report warned. That distinction matters for firms like Partior, because custody and netting functions typically trigger licensing and prudential obligations that pure coordination services do not.

Tom Mutton, the BOE's executive director for payments, innovation and fintech, said the project delivered "practical evidence of how synchronized settlement could help reduce risk and improve efficiency in cross-border FX transactions."

What happens next?

The Bank of England plans to launch a live synchronisation interface in 2028, the statement said. Findings from Project Meridian FX APAC will feed into that further work on synchronized settlement.

The timeline gives the three central banks and their observer peers more than three years to resolve the governance and liability questions the policy report raised before live infrastructure comes online. For banks and settlement operators in the region, the 2028 launch date now marks the earliest window in which synchronized PvP settlement between RTGS and DLT systems could move from test environments into production.