Project Agorá: A Blueprint for Programmable Cross-Border Payments

Convened by the BIS and IIF, Project Agorá tests how tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits could operate on a shared programmable platform. Its prototype targets the delays, opacity and settlement risks embedded in today’s wholesale cross-border payments—using coordinated workflows, privacy-preserving data exchange and atomic settlement to make transactions safer, faster and more transparent, while preserving correspondent banking and jurisdictional control.