Project Meridian FX APAC Completes a Simulated FX Settlement Trial

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand on 13 November 2026 published the findings of Project Meridian FX APAC, a joint trial of synchronised foreign-exchange settlement. It was an experiment. The work ran in the three central banks’ test environments, on simulated settlement systems, and did not put live payment instructions through a production network.

That distinction matters because the problem the trial is aimed at is real. Payment-versus-payment, or PvP, is the arrangement in which one currency moves if, and only if, the other currency moves too. In a footnote to the joint news release, the central banks cite the 2025 BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey for the claim that “more than US$1.4 trillion, or 10%, of average daily FX settlement in April 2025 remained fully exposed to settlement risk.” The trial asked whether a co-ordination layer, sitting over different national systems, could reduce that residual risk without forcing every central bank onto the same technology.

For the United Kingdom there is a second, dated hook. The Bank of England has already said it plans to launch a live synchronisation interface in 2028, a commitment first announced with the FCA in their Call for Input on the future of tokenisation. The Meridian findings, the Bank says, will inform work towards that interface. The same report is careful to add that participation by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand does not imply an equivalent implementation commitment or a particular policy direction by those authorities.

What Project Meridian FX APAC actually ran

The trial tested two use cases across a wider set of currencies, technologies, infrastructures and time zones than the earlier Project Meridian FX work led by the BIS Innovation Hub London. One was real-time gross PvP, the all-or-nothing settlement of the two central-bank-money legs of a single FX trade. The other was multilateral net FX settlement, in which groups of payments are offset against each other to save liquidity, still under a PvP constraint.

The three environments were deliberately unlike one another, as the technical report sets out. The Bank of England contributed its Synchronisation Lab, a test environment in which a Synchronisation Operator can interact with a simulated Real-Time Gross Settlement system, including a prototype ability to reserve, or earmark, cash and then settle in a co-ordinated way. The Bank of Thailand contributed Project SAN, a prototype tokenised payment system with a centralised interoperability layer. The Monetary Authority of Singapore contributed a non-production configuration of its SGD Testnet, a shared-ledger environment that can issue, transfer and redeem Singapore-dollar wholesale central bank digital currency. The technical report notes that SGD Testnet is an operational environment, but that its use in this project was limited to a non-live configuration.

Partior was the delivery partner. The news release says it developed, integrated and tested the Synchronisation Operator prototype. The executive summary describes the firm as the project’s technical partner and states, plainly, that the experiment “did not reproduce the full FX trade lifecycle, live participants or production operating conditions.”

A Synchronisation Operator, in the project’s definition, is a co-ordination layer that aims to make linked transfers happen together, or not at all. It does not have to run the underlying settlement systems, keep the settlement accounts or hold participants’ funds. In the trial it received and matched instructions, co-ordinated the earmarking of funds, watched for readiness on each leg, and then instructed settlement or unwound the transaction if something failed. Tom Mutton, the Bank of England’s executive director of payments, innovation and fintech, said Project Meridian FX APAC “provides practical evidence of how synchronised settlement could help reduce risk and improve efficiency in cross-border FX transactions.”

The policy report leaves the hard questions open

A companion policy report, informed by the Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas as observer central banks, is where the caveats sit. The trial found encouraging evidence that, in the exception scenarios tested, the operator could either complete settlement or fully unwind a transaction without leaving one payment leg to proceed alone. It also records what was not fully tested, including non-overlapping operating hours, time-zone differences, earmark expiry and prolonged outages.

The report is explicit that technical atomicity is not the same as legal settlement finality. The executive summary says the policy analysis “distinguishes technical atomicity from legal settlement finality: co-ordinating payment legs so that they settle atomically does not by itself establish a common, legally recognised settlement outcome across separate domestic systems and jurisdictions.” Each domestic system may define its own final settlement event. A live service would still have to explain how those events combine into a definitive outcome for the linked FX trade, including during outages.

Operational resilience is treated as an end-to-end problem, not only a property of the national RTGS or ledger. Matching, earmarking, readiness monitoring and settlement co-ordination create a dependency on the operator and its connections. A failure there, the report says, could delay or prevent linked settlement even where the underlying central bank systems remain available. Cyber security, capacity, change management, recovery and contingency arrangements therefore form part of that resilience.

Governance and liability are left as open questions. Rulebooks and contracts would need to allocate decision rights and responsibilities across the operator, participants and infrastructure operators: who may approve, pause, cancel or retry a transaction; how exceptions and persistent failures are handled; and how losses or liabilities are allocated. Those questions, the report says, become more significant where the operator holds funds, calculates net positions, or otherwise exercises greater control over settlement outcomes.

That last point is not theoretical. In the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s test environment, the prototype used a dedicated escrow account to replicate funds reservation. In the multilateral net workflow, it calculated net settlement positions across the participating systems. The policy report says those arrangements reflected the design of the test systems and are not inherent features of synchronisation or of a future operator model, but that additional functions “may change the SO’s legal characterisation and risk profile.” An operator that temporarily holds or controls funds could raise custodial, credit, liquidity, safeguarding and insolvency questions that are not raised in the same way when funds remain in participants’ accounts and are merely earmarked. Calculating net instructions, it adds, may bring the role closer to functions associated with clearing.

The analysis also flags legal, data and cross-border dependencies: applicable law, enforceability, confidentiality and cross-border information sharing, alongside the data the operator needs in order to match, monitor and settle. Existing international frameworks, the authors say, provide useful building blocks, but not a ready-made model for synchronisation.

A successful trial is not a live PvP service

The cleanest reading of Project Meridian FX APAC is also the narrowest. Three central banks showed that a co-ordination layer can produce an all-or-nothing settlement result across a simulated RTGS system, a tokenised platform and a wholesale CBDC testnet. That is evidence about interoperability, not a claim that residual FX settlement risk has been closed, or that a production operator is ready to be authorised.

For UK readers, the 2028 interface is the practical next date, not a result of this trial. It is a Bank of England plan, already on the public record from the joint work with the FCA, and the Meridian reports are being used to inform it. The policy questions the Bank will have to answer for a live service — finality across legal systems, the operator’s regulatory perimeter, and who carries the loss when something fails mid-cycle — are the same questions the policy report lists as still open. They sit in the same family of wholesale-market issues TSN has already followed in the Bank’s consultation on tokenised collateral at clearing houses, which remains open until 12 February 2027, and in the earlier UK tokenisation Call for Input.

Nor should a central-bank experiment be confused with the commercial interbank work already under way in tokenised deposits. Those projects, which TSN has described as banks trying to move deposit claims between one another on a ledger, are a different instrument and a different legal claim, even when the settlement asset is described as central bank money. The Canadian, US clearing-house and Swift interbank efforts are useful context for why interoperability keeps coming up; they are not a substitute for a PvP operator sitting over national settlement systems.

The reports themselves point to further work: more jurisdictions and participants, a wider range of currencies and transaction types, including possibly delivery-versus-payment, and the legal arrangements that would be needed in practice. Until those are tested under production conditions, Meridian FX APAC should be read as what the authors say it is — a trial that demonstrated a mechanism, and a policy paper that listed the questions a live service would still have to settle.

The next marker to watch is not a second press release calling the trial a launch. It is whether the Bank of England’s 2028 synchronisation interface is specified in enough detail — including the operator model, the finality analysis and the liability allocation — to turn this experiment into a service that banks could actually use.

Sources

1. Bank of England, “The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Bank of Thailand: Project Meridian FX APAC”, 13 November 2026.
2. Monetary Authority of Singapore, “The Bank of England, Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Bank of Thailand Complete Trial of Synchronised FX Settlement across Different Currencies and Systems”, 13 November 2026.
3. Bank of England, “Project Meridian FX APAC: Executive summary and introduction”, 13 November 2026.
4. Bank of England, “Project Meridian FX APAC: Technical Report”, 13 November 2026.
5. Bank of England, “Project Meridian FX APAC: Policy Report”, 13 November 2026.

Related stories

The closest live TSN article is the Bank of England’s consultation on tokenised CCP collateral, which sits on the same UK wholesale-tokenisation track as the planned 2028 synchronisation interface.

• Bank of England Consults to 12 February on Tokenised CCP Collateral
• UK, US and EU Tokenisation Rules Shifted in One Month
• Tokenised Deposits Go Interbank: Canada, The Clearing House and Swift