The Bank of England (BoE), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the Bank of Thailand have shared findings from Project Meridian FX APAC, a joint experiment looking at how to make international currency exchanges faster and safer across different banking systems.
Announced on November 13, 2026, the findings show how synchronization could help central banks coordinate payments across their settlement systems, even when those systems run on different technology.
The test focused on payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement, a system that makes sure one currency only moves when the matching payment in the other currency goes through at the exact same time. This prevents the risk of one side sending money and never getting the currency they were promised in return.
The project also tested multilateral net FX (foreign exchange) settlement, which cancels out overlapping payments among multiple banks so they don’t need to keep as much liquidity tied up to complete trades.
A major goal of the project was testing synchronization across three different wholesale settlement setups: the Bank of England’s traditional RTGS test environment, Thailand’s Project SAN (a prototype tokenized payment system with an interoperability layer), and Singapore’s SGD Testnet, which runs on distributed ledger tech and supports wholesale central bank digital currency.
Technology partner Partior built and connected the prototype Synchronization Operator that coordinated these payments across all three platforms.
Results showed that linked payments could settle together (or be fully reversed) even when the experiment threw in problems like insufficient funds, bad account details, or brief system outages.
Still, the tests ran in simulated environments and not live production systems. The central banks also flagged technical differences that could complicate integration and change what the operator is responsible for handling.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});The trial carries considerable weight because a massive amount of currency trading remains vulnerable to settlement failure.
In a 2026 review of its 2025 Triennial Survey, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) revealed that more than $1.4 trillion (about 10% of daily FX trades in April 2025) went through gross bilateral arrangements that are fully exposed to settlement risk.
The Bank of England noted that the test results will help shape its plans to roll out a live synchronization system in 2028, while Singapore and Thailand have not yet committed to matching launch schedules.
Project Meridian FX APAC builds on earlier Project Meridian FX work and fits into a larger push to improve international payments.
