Audrey Metzger

This roundtable gathers experts from key organizations involved in shaping the future of wholesale cross-border payments. In this early phase—focused on collecting diverse requirements, shaping the technological fundamentals and establishing a multi-stakeholder project organisation—participants will share initial lessons learned and discuss anticipated challenges for future phases of Project Agorá. The discussion is designed to foster robust debate and exchange innovative ideas from various perspectives.

It aims to discuss the driving forces and motivation behind project Agorá and synthesise early insights around key coordination, technical, and operational challenges in building a resilient next-generation tokenised cross-border payment platform. Further the roundtable aims to share and ideate on possible strategies to resolve identified challenges and consider emerging technology trends in future phases of the project.

The discussion will produce a report of synthesised insights, current challenges and proposed solutions and strategies, to effectively and efficiently enable the future of cross-border payments with future phases of Project Agorá.

Institutional players are increasingly adopting digital assets, including private sector stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized real-world assets, and tokenized deposits, as part of their financial infrastructure. With 2025 poised to be the breakout year for digital money, this session brings together financial institutions, regulators, and leaders in the digital assets space to discuss:

·      The emerging use-cases and commercial opportunities for on-chain assets, such as improved cross-border transactions and programmable money applications
·      The risks institutions will have to navigate when managing their digital money assets, including financial volatility, cyber risks, and compliance concerns
·      Integrated approaches to managing assets across the traditional finance and decentralised finance landscape

Legislators and regulators are currently considering how to support and oversee financial market infrastructure that leverages DLT technology. This requires changes to the trading and post-trading infrastructure as well as targeted regulatory changes.

One of the key questions is what form of digital money will be used to settle transactions, i.e., what tokenized instruments will be allowed and fit for purpose? EU regulators seem to prefer wholesale CBDC over stablecoins. This coincides with the additional momentum for wholesale CBDC in the EU and synthetic CBDCs in the UK. However, CBDCs are not the only option – stablecoins and even tokenized money market funds (MMFs) may have a role to play. The emerging US approach will also shape market preferences and is likely to spill over into European policy discussion.

In this regard, this roundtable will bring together policymakers, technologists and financial sector experts to tackle the following main questions:

• What are the lessons learned from recent tokenization trials when it comes to the digital money used for settlement? What are the next steps in Europe and in the UK on developing the payment and settlement layer for tokenization?
• Can stablecoins play a role? What about other versions, like synthetic stablecoins, or tokenized MMFs?
• Are there fragmentation or liquidity risks if the UK or EU are out of step with other jurisdictions?
• How should regulators approach this?