The Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub published the findings of Project Meridian FX, an experiment run with the Bank of England, Bank of France, Deutsche Bundesbank, Bank of Italy and the European Central Bank, on how wholesale payment infrastructures can interoperate with new technologies for foreign exchange transactions. The project’s core outcome is a demonstration that a technology-neutral “synchronisation operator” can coordinate atomic payment-versus-payment (PvP) FX settlement across different payment systems, including between an RTGS system and a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. In the experiments, an emulated UK RTGS system (GBP leg) was connected to three Eurosystem interoperability solutions for the EUR leg: DL3S (Bank of France), TIPS Hash-Link (Bank of Italy) and the Trigger Solution (Deutsche Bundesbank). Across these set-ups, the synchronisation operator successfully orchestrated PvP settlement, including in scenarios where only one infrastructure could earmark funds, and without the operator needing an account in the relevant RTGS systems or taking on credit or liquidity risk. The work also tested liquidity-saving mechanisms, user-defined transaction controls such as approval limits, and a chained “(PvP)+(PvP)” workflow using a bridge currency, while noting that the project did not assess the commercial proposition for synchronisation operators or the regulatory and legal frameworks for deploying them. Insights from Project Meridian FX are intended to feed into the Bank of England’s work to develop a synchronisation interface under its RTGS roadmap and into the Eurosystem’s follow-up programme to settle DLT-recorded transactions in central bank money, which is organised on a two-track approach with timing to be set in the coming months.

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