A landmark public-private initiative convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance will soon begin testing a tokenized payment platform for cross-border settlements across multiple currencies and jurisdictions. 

Project Agorá, named for the Greek word for marketplace, is intended to modernize digital global payments with an new correspondent banking model that makes use of blockchain technology, lowers the cost and time needed to make cross-border payments, and retains anti-money-laundering and sanctions compliance controls. Seven central banks and 40 multinational financial institutions have contributed to the project over the last two years, BIS said. 

In a report published on Wednesday, BIS identified the platform’s compliance architecture as one of its defining features. Under the current correspondent banking model, AML/CFT checks, sanctions screening, and fraud controls are conducted sequentially across a chain of intermediaries, generating high rates of false positives, duplicative work, and payment delays. 

Project Agorá, by contrast, would enable each institution to conduct its own compliance checks independently and confidentially, while the platform ensured all required validations are completed before settlement occurs, replacing sequential processing with parallel execution.

The report describes the current false-positive burden in sanctions screening as a significant pain point that compounds other operational frictions and delays the clearing of legitimate transactions. The prototype’s design brings compliance checks forward in the payment workflow, before liquidity is committed, meaning a transaction cannot proceed to settlement unless all AML/CFT, fraud, and sanctions validations across the payment chain have been satisfied, BIS said. 

The prototype uses a two-layer blockchain architecture. A unifying ledger records tokenized commercial bank deposits and is accessible to all participants. Beneath it, separate jurisdictional ledgers record tokenized central bank reserves, allowing each central bank to retain full autonomous control over its currency and domestic operations while participating in the shared settlement infrastructure. 

Participating central banks include the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, and now the Bank of Canada. Private sector participants include JPMorgan Chase, Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, UBS, Mastercard, Visa, Swift, and more than 30 other regulated financial institutions.