Group items tagged

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) published their final "same risk, same regulation" guidance on regulating stablecoin arrangements (SAs). The guidance highlights that the transfer function of an SA is comparable to the transfer function performed by other types of financial market infrastructure (FMI). As a result, an SA that performs this transfer function is considered an FMI for the purpose of applying the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI) and, if determined by relevant authorities to be systemically important, the SA as a whole would be expected to observe all relevant principles in the PFMI.

Along with the aforementioned Project Ensemble collaborations, the HKMA provided updates on its other initiatives to spearhead the journey of fintech development in Hong Kong. The HKMA will collaborate with other members of the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust on interoperability aspects of DLT-based FMIs in the Ensemble Sandbox. Also, the HKMA has completed the initial phase of six tokenization use cases across four main themes under Project Ensemble and will publish a report detailing the results of the experimentation in 2025. The HKMA is working closely with the People's Bank of China to establish a cross-boundary linkage between Hong Kong's Faster Payment System (FPS) and the Mainland's Internet Banking Payment System (IBPS). This linkage will support 24/7, instant, small-value, cross-boundary remittances using account proxies like mobile numbers. A pilot launch is expected to be around mid-2025 tentatively.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has established new cross-border partnerships with Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) to explore cross-border payment-versus-payment (PvP) and delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement use cases in areas such as trade finance payments and carbon credits. In the HKMA-BCB case the HKMA will link its Project Ensemble central bank digital currency (CBDC) sandbox to the BCB Drex CBDC pilot platform. In the HKMA-BOT case, the HKMA will link the Ensemble sandbox to the BOT's Project San experimental tokenization platform, and test linking the two platforms with distributed ledger technology (DLT) based financial market infrastructures (FMIs). https://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/news-and-media/press-releases/2024/10/20241028-4/

The most important facets of dFMI are the removal of systemic risk, a 24/7 market, confining risk to just the counterparties, resilient infrastructure, ambient legal and regulatory compliance, faster but liquidity preserving settlement, the preservation of anonymity and privacy and the removal of asset silos. Most projects focus on a subset of these facets. The choice is to do incremental transformation or a more radical change. It is evident that the dominant FMIs and market players are resistant to change as their very existence and fat margins are threatened by the new world and they will be compelled by a combination of forces to transform or be replaced.

The U.K. government is consulting on Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS) in which the financial industry will be able to set up and test financial market infrastructures that utilize digital asset technology. The DSS will enable firms to set up and operate FMIs using innovative digital asset technology, performing the activities of a central securities depository (specifically notary, settlement and maintenance), and operating a trading venue under a temporarily modified legislative and regulatory framework. The consultation invites feedback from industry on the approach to the DSS, and seeks feedback on some further policy and legal issues.

The New York Fed's Innovation Center (NYIC) is participating in a proof-of-concept project along with members of the private sector to explore the feasibility of an interoperable network of digital central bank liabilities and commercial bank digital money using distributed ledger technology. In a 12-week proof-of-concept project-the Regulated Liability Network U.S. Pilot-the NYIC will experiment with the concept of a regulated liability network (RLN). RLN is a concept for a financial market infrastructure (FMI) facilitating digital asset transactions that connect deposits held at regulated financial institutions using distributed ledger technology. The proof-of-concept will build a prototype for a distributed ledger-based network and test the feasibility of payments between financial institutions using tokenized regulated liabilities on the RLN. The project will be conducted in a test environment and only use simulated data. Participants include BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. Swift, the global financial messaging service provider, is supporting interoperability across the international financial ecosystem.

Nomura is investing in Fnality, the interbank payment and settlement platform that uses "synthetic" wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) to settle transactions on distributed ledger technology (DLT) based financial market infrastructures (FMIs). (A "synthetic CBDC" is essentially a stablecoin backed by central bank deposits.) Fnality is expected to launch its first such synthetic CBDC in October 2022, pegged to the British Pound and backed by deposits at the Bank of England.

The World Bank issued the first digital securities on the new Euroclear R3 Corda-based Financial Market Infrastructure (D-FMI) distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. The three-year Digitally Native Notes raised EUR 100 million to support the financing of World Bank's sustainable development activities.

London-based Fnality, launched its distributed ledger technology (DLT) based Sterling Fnality Payment System (£FnPS). This digital financial market infrastructure (FMI) and regulated payment system leverage an Omnibus Account held by £FnPS in the Bank of England real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service. The intent is to scale it up to create a seamless global liquidity management ecosystem for payment, payment versus payment (PvP), and delivery versus payment (DvP) transactions in both wholesale financial markets and emerging tokenized asset markets. This is arguably a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) based platform, or at least a synthetic CBDC one, although I'm waiting for more architectural detail to make that determination.

The Bank of England published its supervision of financial market infrastructures 2022 Annual Report. It reports that the Financial Services & Markets Bill, published in July 2022 and scheduled to complete in 2023 seeks to bring systemic stablecoins into the Bank's regulatory remit, and bring the UK regime in line with standards discussed. The Bank is now working on a regulatory framework for systemic stablecoins and plans to consult on this in due course. Alongside regulation, another key component of a stablecoin regime is the potential application of the FMI Special Administrative Regime to systemic stablecoin firms. The Bank, working with His Majesty's Treasury, will continue to develop this regime to ensure it reflects international CPMI-IOSCO guidance.

Design options for interoperability and funds locking across digital pounds and central bank money (arXiv) arXiv published a paper by Barclays staff that analyzes the design options for supporting "functional consistency" across digital pounds and commercial bank money. It focuses on three key capabilities: communication between digital pound ecosystem participants, funds locking, and interoperability across digital pounds and commercial bank money. It explores them via three payments use cases: person-to-person push payment, merchant-initiated request to pay, and lock funds and pay on physical delivery. It then presents and evaluates the suitability of design options to provide the specific capabilities for each use case and draw initial insights. The paper concludes that a financial market infrastructure (FMI) providing specific capabilities could simplify the experience of ecosystem participants, simplify the operating platforms for both the Bank of England and digital pound payment interface providers (PIPs), and facilitate the creation of innovative services.

Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC) issued a €100 million digital bond settled using the Banque de France's DL3S DLT platform using its pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). The transaction formed part of the European Central Bank's wholesale distributed ledger technology (DLT) settlement trials. The Banque de France avoids using the term wholesale CBDC, instead referring to it as a tokenized representation of central bank money. For the CDC issuance, it required synchronizing the issuance of the digitally native note (DNN) on Euroclear's D-FMI platform with the settlement on the central bank's DL3S.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) published the results of Regulated Settlement Network (RSN) proof-of-concept that explored the possibilities for shared ledger-based digital settlement using U.S. Treasury securities and tokenized cash. It found that multi-asset and cross-network settlement could be enhanced through a shared-ledger financial market infrastructure (FMI) that contains tokenized securities, central bank deposits, and commercial bank deposits where each institution operates its own partition. The network enabled a common settlement infrastructure that is 24/7, programmable, and offered precise settlement capabilities to allow financial institutions to optimize their collateral and liquidity positions. At the same time, the network alleviated challenges such as market fragmentation and uncertainty throughout the settlement process.

The Federal Reserve is still weighing up the possibility of launching a round-the-clock real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system, but will reach a decision "soon", chair Jerome Powell said.

"Over the past decade, advances in public key cryptography, hash functions, virtualisation, distributed consensus, multiparty computation, and peer-to-peer networking have led to experimentation around record sharing between erstwhile competitive firms. Over the past five years, a series of independent efforts has chaperoned regulatory requirements into a digital, automated state that enables secure information sharing in full compliance with the law, while simultaneously enabling market participants to mutualise infrastructure that would otherwise be run by a single trusted party. With these developments, many of the services that centralised intermediaries currently provide could potentially be replaced by decentralised infrastructures or decentralised financial market infrastructure (dFMI). dFMI also enables a change in business structure, where a re-alignment of incentives can take place such that those firms taking risks can fully bear the consequences of these risks."

This Asian Development Bank (ADB) report ascertains the current status of technology adoption, including wholesale CBDC applications, by its Cross-Border Settlement Infrastructure Forum member organizations. They include central securities depositories and central banks in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus the People's Republic of China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (collectively known as ASEAN+3) region.

The BIS Innovation Hub Nordic Centre Project Aurora will investigate the use of advanced technologies, such as privacy-enhancing technologies, machine learning methods, network analysis, and the use of additional data sources and machine-readable typologies (to represent money laundering patterns in a machine-readable format) in a proof of concept that aims to show how information could be shared in a private, secure and compliant way to detect suspicious transactions across financial institutions and borders.

The BIS Innovation Hub, Swiss National Bank and World Bank launched Project Promissa to build a proof of concept (PoC) of a distributed ledger technology (DLT) based platform for digital "tokenized" promissory notes. Many international financial institutions (IFIs) are partly funded promissory notes, most of which are still paper-based. Project Promissa intends to simplify the management of the notes and provide a single source of truth for all counterparties throughout the notes' lifecycles. While the project aims to simplify the management of promissory notes between member nations and IFI, in the future it could be extended to include payments (or encashments) associated with such notes by integrating tokenized payment systems based on private or public money.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) together with seven central banks will explore how tokenization of wholesale central bank money and commercial bank deposits on programmable platforms can improve the monetary system. Project Agorá's primary area of exploration will be to increase the speed and integrity of international payments, while lowering costs by building on the BIS's proposed unified ledger concept. The BIS will issue a call for expressions of interest to private financial institutions, with the Institute of International Finance (IIF) acting as the intermediary and convener, to join the project.

The five Project Nexus central bank partners (India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) established the Singapore-based Nexus Scheme Organization (NSO) managing entity, which will manage the project in its live implementation stages. Nexus was launched in 2021 by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub to enhance cross-border payments by connecting multiple domestic instant payment systems (IPS) globally. The European Central Bank (ECB) also joined Nexus as a special observer as part of exploratory work on linking its TARGET Instant Payment Settlement with other fast payment systems. While the BIS will not own or operate the NSO, it will continue its support by playing a technical advisory role.