Project Agorá Test Cuts Wholesale Cross-Border Settlement to 80 Seconds

On July 30, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reported that in July’s real-value test (RVT) of the public-private partnership Project Agorá, wholesale cross-border payments took an average of about 80 seconds from initiation to settlement. The test was conducted in a controlled environment, with 28 private financial institutions and central banks from Asia, Europe, and North America participating. Transactions were completed in multiple currencies totaling approximately CHF 800,000 (about $990,000), covering 17 scenarios, with individual amounts ranging from CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000.

BIS said the test verified the feasibility of settling real-value transactions on a programmable shared platform of tokenized reserves and deposits; atomic settlement brings faster settlement speeds and greater transparency, with participants also valuing end-to-end visibility into payment status and routing. The test also covered use cases such as intercompany and interbank single- and dual-currency payments, payment-versus-payment (PvP) transactions, and intragroup transfers, and demonstrated interoperability with external systems in various jurisdictions.

The project provides evidence for moving tokenized wholesale payments from concept to practice, while noting that cross-border clearing and settlement infrastructure still needs to strengthen compliance screening and funds attribution capabilities.