The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank of Thailand have completed a trial of a system designed to coordinate foreign exchange (FX) settlements across different central bank infrastructures.
The Project Meridian FX APAC trial showed that the two sides of an FX trade could settle at the same time even when the systems involved used different technologies.
The project focused on payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement. Under this model, both sides of a currency exchange are completed together, or neither goes through. This prevents one party from sending money without receiving the agreed currency in return.
Partior developed the Synchronisation Operator prototype used in the trial. It connected three simulated wholesale settlement environments, covering both traditional real-time gross settlement (RTGS) infrastructure and systems based on distributed ledger technology (DLT).
The operator coordinated the payment instructions and checked that funds were available before initiating settlement. The tests also covered multilateral net FX transactions involving all three systems.
This allows participating banks to offset payments against one another instead of settling each transaction separately, which can reduce the amount of liquidity needed.
The team also tested what would happen if something went wrong, including insufficient funds, incorrect account details and temporary system outages. In these cases, the operator either completed the linked payments or reversed the entire transaction, rather than allowing one side to settle on its own.
However, the experiment did not cover all the conditions that could arise in a live environment. Non-overlapping operating hours, prolonged outages and differences in time zones remain among the issues requiring further testing. The trial also did not involve live market participants or reproduce the full FX trading process.
The policy workstream identified further questions around regulation, oversight, accountability, data sharing and the legal status of settlements across jurisdictions. Existing regulatory frameworks offer some guidance but do not provide a ready-made model for synchronization services.
The report also makes a distinction between technical and legal finality: making two payments settle together does not automatically establish that the transaction has the same legal status in every country.
The findings will feed into the Bank of England’s plans to launch a live synchronization interface in 2028. MAS and the Bank of Thailand have not made similar implementation commitments.
The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas took part as observers, contributing to the project’s policy work.
Project Meridian FX APAC was announced in November 2025 and builds on earlier research into synchronized settlement led by the BIS Innovation Hub in London. The new trial expanded that work to cover more currencies, settlement technologies, and operating environments.
The need to reduce settlement risk remains significant. According to the BIS 2025 Triennial Central Bank Survey, more than $1.4 trillion, or around 10% of average daily FX settlement in April 2025, remained fully exposed to settlement risk.
