David Newns

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.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is frequently highlighted as a game-changer for financial market infrastructure (FMI). Yet, despite numerous pilots, proofs of concept, and even some production deployments, it has (yet) neither replaced nor fundamentally transformed today’s financial markets. Rather, DLT has remained limited to niche applications.

Which key elements are still missing, or are insufficiently mature, to enable DLT to truly reshape FMI? Is the main hurdle the current regulatory framework, or do challenges around standardization, interoperability with legacy systems, scalability, governance, and proven use cases with sufficient value bear the greatest responsibility?