UK, Singapore and Thai central banks test linked currency settlement

Here's the problem it tackles. When two banks swap currencies, one often pays before the other. More than $1.4tn a day, about 10% of currency settlement, was still exposed to that risk in April 2025, the Bank of England said, citing a BIS survey.

In Project Meridian FX APAC, the Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand tested a "synchronisation operator". Think of it as a referee that lines up both payments and releases them together, or not at all. Partior built the prototype. Australia's and the Philippines' central banks took part as observers.

The test worked across very different set-ups: a simulated version of the UK's main payment system, a Thai prototype for tokenised payments and a Singapore test network built on a shared ledger. It covered simple two-way swaps, netted deals across three systems, and failures such as missing funds or outages.

Put it in context. These were test environments, not live systems, and questions about legal finality, oversight and liability remain open, according to the policy report. But the Bank of England repeated its commitment to launch synchronisation in 2028.