Central banks complete FX trial; Bank of England targets 2028

The Bank of England plans to launch a live cross-border foreign-exchange synchronization interface in 2028, after the Bank of England, Monetary Authority of Singapore and Bank of Thailand completed a joint trial under Project Meridian FX APAC, according to the central banks’ Friday statement.

Project Meridian FX APAC tested synchronized foreign-exchange settlement across different currencies and financial systems. The work brought together conventional real-time gross settlement infrastructure and distributed ledger technology-based systems, with the aim of linking currency transfers even where the underlying platforms had different technologies and operating capabilities.

What the trial established

The central banks evaluated two settlement approaches:

• Payment-versus-payment: The model coordinates the two sides of an FX transaction so that settlement occurs in step across participating systems.
• Multilateral net settlement: The trial assessed whether obligations among multiple participants could be netted, with results indicating potential to improve liquidity efficiency.

According to the Friday statement, synchronized settlement could connect central bank systems with different technologies and operating models while reducing the risk that one side of an FX transaction settles without the other. Partior, a distributed-ledger-based clearing and settlement provider, developed the prototype coordination layer that enabled the trial.

The project also examined the legal, regulatory and oversight requirements for applying the model in live markets. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas served as observers, followed the testing and contributed insights. The participants published the findings in three reports covering technical and policy considerations.

What does this change for financial institutions?

For financial institutions, the operating proposition is a settlement process designed to coordinate completion on both sides of an FX transaction across different infrastructure. The trial indicates that this can reduce one-sided settlement risk and, under multilateral net settlement, improve liquidity efficiency.

That matters because institutions can coordinate settlement and liquidity across different systems without every participant adopting the same technology.

Synchronized settlement does not require a central bank digital currency. The central banks said synchronization gives tokenized forms of central bank money a practical route to settle against traditional forms, while the Bank of England described its planned interface as accommodating tokenized assets as they evolve alongside different forms of wholesale money.

The route to a live market

Project Meridian FX APAC builds on earlier work by the Bank for International Settlements under Project Meridian FX. Almost exactly a year after the November 2025 announcement, the three central banks reported the trial complete. The findings could inform further work extending synchronized settlement to more jurisdictions, currencies and financial institutions.

The project assessed the legal, regulatory and oversight requirements for applying the model in live markets; the Friday statement did not say those requirements had been resolved. It described 2028 as the Bank of England’s launch target for the live synchronization interface, but did not characterize the prototype as a production service or provide an earlier deployment timetable.

The next hard deadline is the Bank of England’s planned 2028 launch; beyond it, the market-structure question is whether synchronized settlement can extend to more jurisdictions, currencies and financial institutions.