Bank of England, Singapore and Thailand Complete Meridian FX APAC Settlement Trials

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand have completed cross-border FX settlement trials under Project Meridian FX APAC, demonstrating that payment-versus-payment settlement can run across both conventional real-time gross settlement systems and distributed ledger technology. The Bank of England reiterated its plan to launch a live synchronization service in 2028, according to the central banks' joint release.

The stakes are large. The Global Foreign Exchange Committee's latest survey, published in September and covering 49 financial institutions, put average daily FX settlement obligations at $14.4 trillion, up 8% from October 2025. Payment-versus-payment arrangements covered $4.8 trillion of that. Another $1.2 trillion — 8% of the total — settled without any protection against FX settlement risk. Of those unprotected trades, 84% could not qualify for PvP settlement at all.

How the trials actually worked

The tests focused on PvP settlement, the mechanism that settles both legs of a currency exchange simultaneously and removes the risk that one side pays while the other defaults. Partitor, a technology firm, built the prototype of the Synchronization Operator that coordinated transfers between the three national settlement systems. The setup spanned real-time gross settlement networks and DLT-based infrastructure.

The central banks also tested multilateral net settlement, a design that lets banks defer payment commitments while payments move through the system. The results showed this approach could cut liquidity requirements while preserving coordinated settlement. That matters operationally: less capital parked as collateral means cheaper cross-border payments.

The technical report went further and stress-tested failure. The researchers simulated failure to pay, insufficient funds and temporary system outages in controlled conditions. Coordinated settlement survived every failure scenario tested. The limits are equally clear. The trials did not examine prolonged outages, differing operating hours across jurisdictions, or live commercial transactions.

What does this change for cross-border settlement?

In the near term, not much — nothing here is live. What the project establishes is a working proof that heterogeneous payment systems, some classical, some blockchain-based, can be synchronized through a single operator. Tom Mutton, an executive at the Bank of England, said synchronization in cross-border FX transactions could help reduce risks and improve efficiency.

The harder problem is legal, not technical. The project's policy report analyzed settlement finality, operator oversight and cross-border accountability, and reached a blunt conclusion: a technically coordinated process is not, by itself, sufficient to create legally binding settlements between different national payment systems. Each jurisdiction's law has to recognize the finality of a synchronized transfer. That gap is where the 2028 timeline will be won or lost.

Singapore and Thailand have not announced deployment commitments matching the UK's 2028 pledge. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas attended the discussions as observers, a signal that the model may extend beyond the three lead central banks.

A crowded field of experiments

Project Meridian FX APAC lands in a busy period for settlement infrastructure in Asia. Hong Kong's Monetary Authority recently launched 24-hour tokenized deposit settlement under Project Ensemble, with 12 banks and 20 industry participants. In Singapore, Standard Chartered separately outlined digital asset custody plans covering cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized assets, structured to comply with Singapore's regulatory framework.

The common thread is institutional. Central banks and commercial banks are treating settlement risk as an engineering and legal problem to solve before scaling, not an afterthought.

For the $1.2 trillion that still changes hands daily without settlement-risk protection, the Meridian FX APAC work offers a template rather than a remedy. The Bank of England's synchronization service, targeted for 2028, is the first concrete deadline to watch.