Payments

Final part of our three-part series on Project Agorá, which is testing tokenisation to improve cross-border payments. We close with the lessons for treasurers.

A public-private project led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Agorá aims to make wholesale cross-border payments faster and safer through a shared, programmable platform on which tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits circulate. Tested with real money in July, the prototype still has no launch date.

At the latest EuroFinance conference in Barcelona, Morten Bech, head of the BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre and co-chair of the project, described corporate treasurers as future users of Agorá, who will access it through their banks. There is nothing to buy or connect, but the project raises liquidity and organisational questions that are worth examining now.

What Bech told treasurers

Most of the session was given over to questions from the floor, most of them very practical.

  • Access is through your bank. Treasurers will use their banks’ tokenised deposit services rather than connect to Agorá directly; a dedicated digital wallet is possible but not essential. For them, it should be a payment like any other, in principle safer, faster and cheaper, with near-instant confirmation that funds have arrived.
  • No 24/7 treasury desk. The project’s co-chair expects the monitoring of round-the-clock flows to be largely automated, including by AI agents, with teams called on only when something goes wrong.
  • Atomic does not mean instant. “Atomic settlement doesn’t mean instant settlement,” Bech said: settlement is conditional, and near real time beats the several days some payments still take. Once all conditions are met, every leg settles in one go.
  • Interest and liquidity conventions will change. Money available round the clock would require interest to be calculated continuously as well, blurring the line between intraday and overnight liquidity. Bech said the project is working to reduce liquidity needs. The session moderator added that faster settlement allows everyone to hold smaller buffers.
  • Compliance works as it does today, for now. Each bank in the chain confirms it has no objection before settlement. A shared platform could later reduce duplicated checks.
  • LEIs matter. The legal entity identifier was taken into account in designing Agorá’s messaging, and the project’s co-chair expects to see it in any live version.
  • Agorá is the cash leg. The prototype already handles payment-versus-payment (PvP). For securities, the asset would sit on another platform and settle against commercial bank or central bank money on Agorá via APIs.
  • Large corporate payments first. Bech’s typical case is a Swiss company paying a Korean supplier, end to end. The moderator added time-critical flows such as margin calls, triggered automatically once contractual conditions are met.
  • Broad reach in the long term. Markets abandoned by correspondent banking are part of the vision, according to the project’s co-chair, once the model has been proven with current participants.

What it means for treasurers

For now, Agorá changes nothing in day-to-day operations. It does, however, change the questions to put to banks and the assumptions to test in treasury policies.

What a live service would bring:

  • All-or-nothing settlement eliminates payments stuck mid-chain, and checking the payee up front reduces repairs and returns.
  • Every party can track the payment’s status from initiation to credit, a direct answer to today’s tracking problem.
  • Execution no longer depends on the operating hours of real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, which opens up liquidity moves at weekends and overnight.
  • Payments can be made conditional, for example released when a delivery or a margin call is confirmed.

Open questions:

  • FX costs. Spreads remain a matter of commercial negotiation. PvP removes settlement risk, not the margin.
  • Compliance holds. A payment that requires an investigation still waits.
  • 24/7 availability. Round-the-clock payments require central bank money to be available at all times, or banks to park liquidity on the platform, which has a cost.

Five steps for treasurers to take now:

  1. Ask your banks whether they take part in Agorá, Swift’s ledger or Pontes, and which currencies and corridors they plan to offer.
  2. Ask how tokenised deposits will be documented, priced and protected compared with conventional deposits.
  3. Ask how value dates, cut-off times and interest calculation will work for weekend and overnight transfers, including in cash pooling structures.
  4. Clean up your data: LEIs and fully structured ISO 20022 payment data, on which Agorá-type platforms rely.
  5. Identify candidate flows: intragroup funding, urgent supplier payments, margin calls and FX settlement.

 

Bank-led solutions are likely to arrive first. Swift’s ledger and single-bank tokenised deposits already serve some companies: the choice between these infrastructures will arise before Agorá arrives.

Sources

Redbridge / Market Intelligence / Payments / Project Agorá (3/3): lessons for treasurers
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