Global Banks Test Digital Money to Speed Up International Payments

Imagine sending money to another country as quickly as sending a text message. That's what the world's biggest banks are working toward with a new technology test.

Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS - the "central bank for central banks"), just completed a major experiment involving seven central banks and over 40 financial institutions. They tested whether turning regular money into digital tokens (like digital certificates representing real money) could fix the biggest problems with international payments.

Currently, sending money abroad is slow and risky: • Payments can take several days to arrive • Money passes through multiple banks, each taking fees • Sometimes payments fail halfway through • Banks struggle to track where money is in the process

The test found that tokenization (converting regular money into blockchain-based digital tokens) could solve these issues. With this technology, international payments would work on an "all-or-nothing" basis - meaning the entire transaction either completes instantly or doesn't happen at all. This eliminates the risk of money getting stuck between banks.

Major participants included: • Federal Reserve Bank of New York • Bank of England • Bank of Japan • Swiss National Bank

The success has banks excited to move from testing to real transactions. Meanwhile, Wall Street giants like NYSE and Nasdaq are building similar systems for stocks and bonds.

This technology could revolutionize how money moves around the world, making international payments as simple and reliable as domestic ones.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/05/27/bis-project-finds-tokenization-could-make-cross-border-payments-faster-safer