Maha El Dimachki

As financial services expand, consumers enjoy a myriad of choices for instant payments from an evolving ecosystem of providers. However, many of these solutions are designed for domestic use and lack true interoperability, limiting their cross-border utility. We will explore how leveraging technologies like blockchain, tokenised assets, and CBDCs, alongside globally aligned standards such as ISO 20022, can mitigate fragmentation risks and connect ‘digital islands’. Discover how these innovations can herald a new era of seamless interoperability for cross-border payments, enhancing efficiency, security, and global financial connectivity.

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This roundtable considers the work that the BIS Innovation Hub Eurosystem Centre, Singapore Centre, together with the central banks of France, Italy, Malaysia, and Singapore are pursuing to determine how FX will look like in a world of digital money.

The discussion will support this work, with the objective to:

- Promote understanding and share insights on the integration of digital currencies in the FX market.
- Identify challenges and explore opportunities presented by the intersection of FX, DeFi, and wholesale CBDCs.
- Encourage collaboration among stakeholders to shape a forward-looking FX framework that accommodates digital innovations.

This roundtable is closely tied to the work on Project Rialto, which aims to improving instant cross-border payments using wholesale CBDC settlement, details of which are available in the agenda brief. Operating under the theme of Decoding Digital Assets and Payments, this roundtable will explore the inefficiencies in today's foreign exchange markets, and the various initiatives that are being pursued to address these.

Attendees who wish to familiarise themselves with the history of the topic may refer to the reference materials here.

In this session, policymakers convene to envision the future state of financial market infrastructure, where multilateral cross-border fast payment linkages become the cornerstone of the global financial architecture. Leveraging on practical insights from exploratory projects such as Project Nexus, the session seeks to uncover the risks and opportunities and chart the way forward on how interlinking of fast payment systems could reshape cross-border payments, market dynamics and global connectivity.