On 27 May 2026 the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance published the findings report for Project Agora, and the headline was concrete. A prototype had settled wholesale cross-border payments across several currencies using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits, and the project’s legal analysis found that settlement…
On 27 August 2026 the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Payments System Board met and reported developments across four areas: it endorsed the annual assessment of ASX’s clearing and settlement facilities against the Financial Stability Standards, discussed progress on the account-to-account (A2A) payments roadmap, endorsed the proposed approach to consulting on the future role of the…
On 28 October 2025 the Hong Kong Monetary Authority published the e-HKD Pilot Programme Phase 2 Report and, with it, drew a line under three years of retail testing. The report sets out the HKMA’s latest policy stance on Hong Kong’s central bank digital currency: the immediate priority for the e-HKD sits in wholesale settlement…
On 13 November 2025, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) launched Ensemble TX, the pilot phase of Project Ensemble, and with it moved tokenised-deposit settlement out of the laboratory and into real-value transactions. HKMA Project Ensemble had spent more than a year as a sandbox; Ensemble TX now lets participating banks settle interbank tokenised deposit…
The first mistake teams make with ECB Appia is filing it under the wrong roadmap. The name surfaces in payments newsletters next to SEPA instant credit transfers and the Verification of Payee deadline, so it gets read as the next step in the retail instant payments programme. It is not. Appia, and its short-term twin…