Malaysia, Thailand Join MAS BLOOM Digital Money

Two more Southeast Asian central banks are throwing in with Singapore’s push to settle cross-border payments using tokenised money. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said on 23 October that Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) have joined its BLOOM initiative — short for “Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency” — as policymaker members, according to the regulator’s media release.

BLOOM is a public-private effort to work out how different forms of digital money can move cleanly across borders. “As financial institutions and jurisdictions develop different digital money use cases, including for tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins, greater coordination will be important to support its effective use across borders,” MAS said. Bringing in two neighbouring central banks is a bid to make that coordination real rather than theoretical.

In brief

Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s BLOOM initiative, as “policymaker members”, to work on settling cross-border payments in digital money.
The work covers tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins, and explicitly builds in controls for identity checks, sanctions screening and transaction limits.
No pilot, currency corridor or go-live date has been announced, and the central banks are joining a design effort, not launching a payment service.

What BLOOM is trying to fix

The release sets out three focus areas. The first is “acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions” — making sure digital money issued in one country can actually be used and settled in another. The second is “interoperability across digital money arrangements”, so that tokenised deposits, stablecoins and other instruments can talk to one another instead of forming walled gardens.

The third is the one that will interest regulators most: “programmable controls”. MAS says the initiative is looking at building in “safeguards such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls in digital money transactions”. In other words, the compliance checks that today sit in banks’ back offices would be encoded into the payment rails themselves.

For the two newcomers, the framing is about keeping regulation in step with the technology. BOT’s deputy governor, Dr Daranee Saeju, said the collaboration would “help inform forward-looking regulatory approaches for tokenised money, particularly in cross-border payments and wholesale settlement”. BNM’s deputy governor, Aznan bin Abdul Aziz, was more lyrical: “A future where frictionless cross-border payments can be made using multiple digital monies is now closer to a tangible reality than a far-fetched fantasy.”

Who else is in the room

Alongside the two central banks, MAS named a fresh batch of industry participants: Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group. They join an existing roster that already includes Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Kasikornbank, OCBC, Partior, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB and Xweave. The mix of card networks, banks, stablecoin issuers and a multilateral development bank is the point: cross-border digital money only works if all those layers plug together.

The move fits a wider pattern across the region. TSN has reported Bank Negara opening a platform for tokenised bonds and sukuk, as well as OCBC and Ant International testing tokenised deposits between Singapore and Malaysia and J.P. Morgan moving tokenised money-market funds onto public chains.

Malaysia’s own groundwork gives the announcement some weight. In February, BNM said its Digital Asset Innovation Hub had onboarded initiatives to test ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits for wholesale payment uses, including cross-border settlement, and that it “intends to provide greater clarity on the use of ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits by end-2026”. A country working out the rules for its own tokenised currency is a more credible BLOOM partner than one starting from scratch.

Compliance baked into the rails, not bolted on

For anyone who works in anti-money-laundering or RegTech, the most consequential line in the release is not about speed but about those “programmable controls”. Encoding identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction limits directly into a settlement network is a genuinely different model from today’s, where each bank runs its own checks and reconciles after the fact. Done well, it could make sanctions enforcement faster and harder to evade across borders. Done badly, it hard-codes one jurisdiction’s rulebook into money that is meant to be interoperable, and raises awkward questions about who sets the screening lists, how false positives are handled, and whether privacy survives when every transfer is checked at the protocol layer. That these are central banks, not just fintechs, sitting at the table is what makes the governance questions worth taking seriously now rather than after launch.

There is also a reason to keep expectations modest. BLOOM remains a design-and-experimentation forum. The release names no pilot, no currency pair, no corridor and no date on which money will actually move between Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore under this banner. Joining as a “policymaker member” is a commitment to help shape the rules, not a promise to switch on a live service. For UK-based firms the interest is indirect but real: London-headquartered names such as Standard Chartered and Schroders are among the industry participants.

The thing to watch is whether 2026’s run of announcements turns into a working cross-border transaction — and whether BNM’s promised end-of-year clarity on ringgit stablecoins lands on time to support it.