Mastercard

The large private companies will work with seven central banks on improving structural inefficiencies in international transfers.

The Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS’) Project Agora has progressed to the design stage with the onboarding of 41 private financial firms. The project, launched in April by the BIS and seven central banks, is looking at how tokenized commercial bank deposits can be integrated with tokenized wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on a single platform.

The regulated private-sector participants include Visa and Mastercard, SWIFT, the Swiss SIX Digital Exchange, Japan’s Monex Group financial services firm, clearing companies and a host of large banks. The Institute of International Finance, a financial services trade group, was chosen to convene the private participants, which responded to a call for participation issued in May.

Project Agora is now the largest BIS project in terms of participants. The private-sector members join the Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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