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Union Bank of the Philippines recently became the first Philippine bank to successfully pilot blockchain-based remittance from Singapore to the Philippines. This was done in partnership with OCBC Bank, Singapore, using the Adhara liquidity management and international payments platform.

Singapore has been named the world's top nation in terms of digital adoption and which showcases the most favorable environment for digitalization, according to Cisco's annual Digital Readiness Index. The index, which measures digital readiness of countries based on seven components: ease of doing business, human capital, startup environment, technology adoption and technology infrastructure, ranked Singapore as the world's most well prepared country for digitalization.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) launched the linkage of Singapore's PayNow and Thailand's PromptPay real-time retail payment systems. Customers of participating banks in Singapore and Thailand will be able to seamlessly and securely transfer funds of up to S$1,000 or THB25,000 daily across the two countries, using just a mobile number. The fees will be affordably priced and transparently displayed to senders prior to confirming their transfers.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has proposed new stricter rules for crypto businesses, in line with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards. The regulator wants to have enhanced powers to prohibit any unsuitable entity from conducting business in Singapore and wants to regulate and license crypto businesses that provide services outside of Singapore. The MAS will adopt a risk-proportionate approach, taking into account the nature, severity and impact of the misconduct. The MAS has also proposed raising the maximum penalty for contravening technology risk requirements to SG$1 million.

Singapore and Australia have formally signed off on a digital economy agreement following months of negotiation. It marks the second such pact, following a first with New Zealand and Chile, that the Singapore government has inked covering several areas of cooperation, including cross-border data flow, digital payments, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Monetary Authority of Singapore has awarded full virtual banking licences to a Grab-Singtel consortium and tech giant Sea, and digital wholesale bank licences to Ant Group and a coalition comprising Greenland Financial Holdings Group, Linklogis Hong Kong, and Beijing Co-operative Equity Investment Fund Management. The central bank announced the digital bank framework in June 2019 with the aim of enabling non-bank players with innovative business models to offer digital banking services. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2020/mas-announces-successful-applicants-of-licences-to-operate-new-digital-banks-in-Singapore

The Australian Border Force, Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore and Singapore Customs, along with other industry representations, have concluded a blockchain trial project analyzing the status of the countries' digital verification systems in issuing and verifying trade documents. QR-codes embedded with unique proofs are inserted into digital certificates of origin, enabling immediate verification for authenticity and integrity of the document when scanned or machine-read. It was concluded that "digital verification and verifiable documents show promise as a 'circuit-breaker' to disrupt persistent paper-based evidence required by authorities."

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas the Monetary Authority of Singapore signed an enhanced FinTech Cooperation Agreement facilitate interoperable payments between the Philippines and Singapore. It will facilitate the linkage of both countries' real-time and QR payment systems, to facilitate instant, seamless, and low-cost cross-border payments. This is a significant initiative given the sizeable remittance flows between the Philippines and Singapore, which totaled 2.15 billion in 2020.

The Singapore Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) announced that it will start a proof-of-concept of its Project Nexus cross-border payments platform with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Bank of Italy and the Central Bank of Malaysia, as well as with BCS in Singapore and PayNet in Malaysia. Project Nexus aims to enable and speed up the process of linking fast payment systems by standardizing the way that these systems connect to each other. Rather than a payment system operator building custom connections for every new country that it connects to, the operator can make one connection to the Nexus platform. This single connection allows a fast payments system to reach all other countries in the network. This provides a more scalable way to build up instant cross-border payment networks.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore is starting two pilot projects to explore trade finance and wealth management product tokenization. The trade finance project will be led by Standard Chartered, and the wealth management product one involves HSBC, UOB, and Marketnode, a digital asset platform built by the Singapore Exchange and Temasek. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2022/first-industry-pilot-for-digital-asset-and-decentralised-finance-goes-live

Bank Indonesia (BI) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have commenced work on a cross-border QR payment linkage between Indonesia and Singapore as part of the ASEAN-wide payments connectivity effort. This linkage, which is targeted to be launched in the second half of 2023, will allow users to make instant, secure, and efficient retail payments by scanning the QRIS (Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard) or NETS QR codes displayed by merchants.

The BIS Innovation Hub Singapore Centre and partners successfully connected the test versions of three established instant payment systems (IPS) using the Nexus model. The next phase of the project will work on the real-world potential of a multilateral network that could be scaled up across more countries. The year-long collaboration included the Bank of Italy, Central Bank of Malaysia (BNM) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Test payments were initiated using only the mobile phone numbers or the recipients' company registration numbers via the Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS), Malaysia's Real-time Retail Payments Platform (RPP) and Singapore's Fast and Secure Transfers (FAST) payment system. For the next phase of the project Bank Indonesia, BNM, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, MAS and the Bank of Thailand will leverage experiences from Phase I and Phase II of the project towards connecting their countries' IPS and facilitate cross-border transactions across a combined population of about 500 million people. Looking ahead, the BIS and the five central banks envisage that Nexus could eventually be implemented globally. To achieve this, they will aim to establish a Global Advisory Panel of central banks and payment system operators to advise on the project's development beyond the Southeast Asian region. The Bank of Italy and the European Central Bank will be invited to join this panel.

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.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Bank Negara Malaysia announced plans to commence a phased linkage of Singapore's PayNow and Malaysia's DuitNow instant payment systems. Customers will also be able to make retail payments by scanning QR codes displayed at merchants' storefronts. The first phase, to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2022, will allow customers of participating financial institutions to make real-time fund transfers between Singapore and Malaysia using just a mobile number. In June, the MAS and the Reserve Bank of India announced plans to link PayNow and India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) real-time payment systems by July 2022.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published a paper that sets out its initial assessment of the economic case for a retail CBDC in Singapore and its potential implications for financial stability and monetary policy.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore's Project Guardian DeFi-based wholesale funding platform completed its first live trades, with DBS Bank, JP Morgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings conducting live foreign exchange and government bond transactions against liquidity pools comprising of tokenized Singapore Government Securities Bonds, Japanese Government Bonds, Japanese Yen (JPY) and Singapore Dollar (SGD). More industry pilots have been launched to test the application of asset tokenization and DeFi across a broader range of use cases in the financial sector. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2022/first-industry-pilot-for-digital-asset-and-decentralised-finance-goes-live

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published two consultation papers proposing strict regulatory measures to reduce the risk to consumers from cryptocurrency trading while supporting the development of stablecoins as a credible medium of exchange. One of the papers is focused on reducing the risk to consumers from speculative trading in cryptocurrencies, requiring that digital payment token (DPT) service providers ensure proper business conduct and adequate risk disclosure. The other paper is focused on ensuring that stablecoins have a high degree of value stability, including imposing capital requirements on nonbank issuers.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) have jointly launched a real-time payment systems linkage between Singapore's PayNow and Malaysia's DuitNow. The initiative follows the QR payment linkage announced in March 2023 which enabled cross-border QR payments to merchants. The PayNow-DuitNow linkage enables instant, secure and cost-effective P2P fund transfers and remittances between the two countries using the recipient's mobile phone number or virtual payments address. This real-time payment systems linkage is also the first to include the participation of non-bank financial institutions from both countries.

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 of Ghana (BOG) has reportedly completed the second phase of Project Digital Economy Semi-Fungible Token (DESFT), a joint project with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The first phase saw the development of the blockchain-based Universal Trusted Credentials (UTC) system that enables micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to efficiently verify authenticity of key information, such as basic credentials, licenses, certificates, and trade records across borders. In the second phase, a cross-border payment was made using UTCs, the eCedi CBDC and a Singapore dollar stablecoin, using the Purpose-Bound Money (PBM) protocol.