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The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is expanding its BIS Innovation Hub with the establishment of new Hub centres across Europe and in North America in cooperation with member central banks. In the next two years, the BIS will open centres in collaboration with the Bank of Canada (Toronto), the Bank of England (London), the European Central Bank/Eurosystem (Frankfurt and Paris) and four Nordic central banks (Danmarks Nationalbank, the Central Bank of Iceland, the Central Bank of Norway and Sveriges Riksbank) in Stockholm. The BIS will also form a strategic partnership with the Federal Reserve System (New York).

The BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) has unveiled its 2023 work program. This includes previously unannounced projects on stablecoins, DeFi and CBDC, including Project Pyxtrial at the London Centre that will monitor stablecoins to ensure that the backing assets at least match the stablecoin issuance. And "going into its fourth year of life, the BIS Innovation Hub is reaching a cruising altitude, with 21 ongoing and five concluded projects. The Hub will increase the integration of its global network with additional cross-centre projects such as Mariana, which connects the Singapore, Swiss and upcoming Eurosystem centres, and others." https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/about.htm?m=1%7C441%7C713

"The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) today announced that Raphael Auer will join the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) team as the head of the upcoming Eurosystem Centre, expected to open in the first half of 2022. Mr Auer is currently a principal economist in the BIS' Monetary and Economic Department, working with the unit dedicated to Innovation and the Digital Economy."

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has handed the mBridge central bank digital currency (CBDC) based cross-border payments platform over to the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens, this was not because of "political considerations" but because after the project's four years it is "at a level where the partners can carry it on by themselves". This has happened already with other projects such as the Swiss National Bank's Project Helvetia. By "political considerations", Mr. Carstens was referring to stories that during discussions among central bankers and finance chiefs at the October 2024 International Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings, concerns were expressed about the fact that China is supplying the platform's key technological backbone, and that China and the UAE are BRICS members. (In that regard it is notable that the U.S. Federal Reserve has not joined the project.) https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp241031.htm

BIS mBridge cross border CBDC project has 23 central banks, IMF and World Bank as observers The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub published an update on its mBridge multiple central bank digital currency (multi-CBDC) common platform for wholesale cross-border payments. Project mBridge supports real-time, peer-to-peer, cross-border payments and foreign exchange transactions using wholesale CBDCs, focusing on the use case of international trade. In 2022, a pilot involving real corporate transactions was conducted on the platform among participating central banks, selected commercial banks and their corporate customers in four jurisdictions. A minimum viable project (MVP) will be launched in the middle of next year. The project is a collaborative effort of the BIS Innovation Hub, four founding central banks and over 25 observing members

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published two Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) reports that offer key insights and recommendations on the interlinking and interoperability of payment systems to enhance cross-border payments. The first report discusses design choices and the risk implications of interlinked fast payment systems (FPSs) and the role of application programming interfaces (APIs), setting out the key decisions for governance and outlines recommendations for their oversight. The second report presents ten recommendations to promote the harmonization of APIs to enhance cross-border payments. https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d223.htm https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d224.htm

The BIS and the HKMA have today signed an Operational Agreement on the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Hong Kong. The Hub will identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends in technology affecting central banking... Hub Centres will be set up in Hong Kong, Singapore and Basel, Switzerland, in the initial phase.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Danmarks Nationalbank, Central Bank of Iceland, Norges Bank and Sveriges Riksbank today launched the BIS Innovation Hub Nordic Centre in Stockholm. The BIS Innovation Hub's work programme is currently focused on six areas: suptech and regtech; next generation financial market infrastructures; central bank digital currencies; open finance; cyber security; and green finance. Work related to these themes is spread among the various Hub Centres, although specific projects have not yet been finalised for the Nordic Centre.

The crypto press has discovered that Ripple is part of a task force convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure (CPMI) cross-border payments interoperability and extension (PIE) task force. That does seem to be a big deal, because Ripple has been persona non grata in any international forums in which the US government plays a key role, on account of the firm's ongoing legal dispute between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It's why you haven't seen much, if any engagement between Ripple and any G20 central banks since the legal dispute started in 2020. https://www.bis.org/cpmi/cross_border/events.htm

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub announced the development of a prototype developed as part of Project Dynamo that explored how institutional investors can be encouraged to finance small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the programmability and transferability of digital trade tokens on a public blockchain. The prototype makes use of non-fungible tokens and smart contracts for SME finance. https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/open_finance/dynamo.htm

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) proposed a new type of financial infrastructure that would combine central bank digital currency (CBDC) with tokenized bank deposits and other tokenized claims, on a programmable platform on a unified ledger. The BIS claims that "eventual benefits would go beyond faster speeds and lower costs, to enable entirely new types of transaction, limited only by the ingenuity of public and private innovators... Examples include new methods for securities settlements that combine all the individual steps into one seamless transaction, tokenized deposits with built-in regulatory checks that simultaneously settle in wholesale CBDC, smart contract-enabled credit that reduces the cost of trade finance for smaller companies, improving global supply chains, enhanced sharing of data on potential borrowers, and using privacy-protecting technology, to expand access to credit for disadvantaged segments of the population."

The BIS Innovation Hub published a handbook on offline central bank digital currency (CBDC). It covers the complex matrix of issues including security, privacy, likely risks, the types of solution, their maturity and applicability, and operational factors, as well as objectives for resilience, inclusion, cash resemblance, accessibility and other desired attributes. The degree to which CBDCs will be provided or used offline will vary significantly by country, region, demographics and specific contexts, which will also influence the solutions chosen. https://www.bis.org/publ/othp64.htm

The BIS, IMF, World Bank, and Swiss National Bank have launched a project aimed at applying tokenization to the paper-based processes used when richer countries donate into some of the World Bank's funds to support poorer parts of the world. The idea is to tokenize the original paper-based "promissory notes" to make it easier to transfer when required. https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp231128.htm

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Singapore Centre and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have developed a new prototype platform that integrates regulatory data and analytics. Known as Project Ellipse, the platform successfully demonstrates how regulatory and other data, such as articles and news, can be integrated into a single platform to help regulatory authorities identify potential risks to individual banks and the banking system. The new prototype is the first to be published on BIS Open Tech, a new platform for sharing software as public goods for further testing, customizing and scaling.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Eurosystem Centre, a joint effort by the BIS and all Eurosystem central banks, opened on March 28, 2023. The Centre will have offices in Frankfurt and in Paris, hosted and supported by the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Banque de France. The European Central Bank will coordinate the interactions of the Eurosystem with the Centre. The Centre's project focus areas will be decentralized finance (DeFi), wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), cyber security and green finance. Projects include Atlas, which will create an open-source data platform to provide information on DeFi and crypto-asset market capitalization, economic activity and international flows of crypto-assets, and Mariana, which will explore automated market-makers (AMM) for the cross-border exchange of Swiss franc, euro and Singapore dollar wholesale CBDCs.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper on the potential impact of introducing retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). It argues for a fairly aggressive issuance policy with an optimal outstanding level equal to about 40% of annual gross domestic product (GDP). In the paper's theoretical model, GDP increases by more than 6%, with only a 6% drop in commercial bank deposits, albeit based on restrictive assumptions, like limited on-demand convertibility of bank deposits into CBDC, and issuance only permitted against government securities (and not reserves). Many of the macroeconomic benefits come from the fiscal budgetary space created by replacing higher-interest government debt by CBDC remunerated at an interest rate below that on central bank reserves. https://www.bis.org/publ/work1086.htm

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced the first batch of six new projects in its 2024 Innovation Hub work program including experimentations on digital payments cyber security and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Project Leap starts its phase II, aiming to "quantum-proof" payment systems, after successfully establishing a quantum-safe communication channel between the central banks of France and Germany in its first phase. Project Aurum enters a new phase in which it will study the privacy of payments in retail CBDCs. The recently started Project Promissa tests the feasibility of tokenizing promissory notes, financial instruments that help fund multilateral development banks and other international financial institutions. All these new initiatives will be added to existing projects that various Innovation Hub Centres will continue to develop this year:  FuSSE, Gaia, Mandala, mBridge phase III, Nexus phase III, Pyxtrial, Rio and Viridis. https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/about.htm

The BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) posted its 2025-26 work programme. The BISIH started 16 new projects in 2024, and the project portfolio consisted of 26 active projects at the start of 2025. The work programme for 2025 includes further developing ongoing projects such as Project Agora in which partners from seven central banks and over 40 private sector financial institutions are exploring how tokenization can enhance wholesale cross-border payments. The first two new projects in 2025 will explore AI-based tools supporting supervision and green finance. https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/about.htm

The Governor of the Bank Indonesia (BI) reportedly said that the central bank is planning to launch a digital rupiah and is assessing which platform it will use. BI is also examining how a central bank digital currency (CBDC) will help it meet its monetary policy and payment systems objectives, including by assessing the readiness of the financial infrastructure. The Governor said the rupiah will remain the only legally accepted currency for payment, and BI will regulate the digital rupiah the same way it regulates banknotes and card-based transactions.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) today launched the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Singapore. This is the BIS's first expansion of its global footprint in 17 years.