July 2025
By Pascal Himmelberger, Advisor, BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre
Cross-border payments represent a complex, risky and costly area in the global financial system. Despite technological advancements, challenges such as repeated compliance checks, settlement delays, and fragmented ledgers and data continue to introduce friction into the system. Project Agorá, launched by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in collaboration with seven central banks and over 40 private sector financial institutions, seeks to address these issues through a next-generation unified, programmable financial infrastructure.
Agorá is a collaborative effort involving both public and private sector participants designed to explore the integration of tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised wholesale central bank money. The project builds on the concept of a unified ledger that combines both forms of money, aiming to enable atomic settlement, support 24/7 operations, and streamline compliance. It also explores how programmability and smart contracts can improve cross-border payments and, in the future, potentially unlock new transaction types and improve liquidity management.
The path forward is not without challenges. Liquidity fragmentation and governance models for a global financial infrastructure are among the complex issues to be addressed. Moreover, integrating new platforms with legacy systems and ensuring compliance in a programmable environment requires careful system design and standardisation.
This report outlines the key themes, challenges, and opportunities surrounding Project Agorá emerging from a roundtable discussion titled Architecting the future of cross-border payments – an Agorá roundtable held at the Point Zero Forum in Zurich, Switzerland.
1. Liquidity demand vs. near real-time settlement
Instant atomic settlement ensures transaction finality and reduces counterparty risk but requires full pre-funding of each transaction. This can strain participants' liquidity pools, especially in fragmented wholesale markets where liquidity is spread across legacy financial rails and emerging platforms like Agorá. To alleviate this burden, Liquidity-Saving Mechanisms (LSMs), such as netting arrangements, can be used to reduce the amount of liquidity needed. However, these methods introduce settlement delays, meaning that near real-time settlement is no longer viable, depending on the netting frequency and structure.
2. Efficient compliance as a differentiator
Agorá is positioning efficiency in compliance as a strategic advantage in cross-border payments. By enabling secure information sharing, the project aims to reduce redundant compliance checks and streamline operations across intermediaries. Current processes are often inefficient and become costly and complex, especially when issues arise, requiring time-consuming reconciliation and potential rollbacks between parties.
Agorá aims to record and maintain verifiable attestations of compliance processes conducted by involved parties, such as KYC, AML, and sanctions screening. This integration supports broader G20 goals by enhancing safety, transparency, and efficiency. In wholesale financial transactions, where risk mitigation is critical, Agorá envisions a platform that improves operational resilience and aligns with the evolving expectations placed on financial institutions. However, current legal and regulatory frameworks will likely limit the Agorá platform's ability to enhance existing compliance checks.
2. Unified Ledger for cross-border efficiency
A unified ledger architecture offers a powerful solution to long-standing inefficiencies in cross-border payments. Combining messaging and value transfer on a single platform eliminates the need for reconciliation between disparate ledger systems. Enabling composability on the platform facilitates the atomic settlement of transactions involving different types of tokenised money (e.g., tokenised central and commercial bank money), thereby reducing—if not eliminating—settlement risks.
Agorá exemplifies this approach by designing a platform that allows for the integration with legacy infrastructure while supporting composability and programmability. This streamlines transaction flows, particularly in complex or “unhappy path” scenarios, and enhances transparency, compliance, and operational resilience across jurisdictions.
3. Integration with legacy systems
Replacing legacy financial infrastructure in the short term is neither practical nor realistic. As a result, any new platform must be designed to coexist with existing systems for the foreseeable future. This makes interoperability and orchestration critical components of any modern financial architecture.
Agorá addresses this challenge by focusing on gradual integration rather than full replacement. Its design supports seamless interaction with legacy systems, enabling institutions to adopt new capabilities, such as tokenisation and atomic settlement, without disrupting current operations. This approach ensures continuity, reduces transition risks, and supports broader adoption across diverse financial environments.
Roundtable participants agreed that Project Agorá represents a bold step toward reimagining the global financial infrastructure. Addressing long-standing inefficiencies in cross-border payments and fostering collaborative innovation between public and private sector participants lays the groundwork for a more integrated, programmable, and resilient global financial system. However, building a global financial platform such as Agorá is much more than simply building the technology stack. It involves significant governance, regulatory, legal, and operational considerations that form the overall solution as much as the underlying technology.