Tag Archives: Cross-border payment

Three BIS innovation hubs plan to test DeFi inspired liquidity pools to exchange wCBDCs. BIS press release: Project Mariana will use DeFi protocols to automate foreign exchange markets and settlement. Automated market makers can become the basis for new generation of financial infrastructure. Exploration on cross-border exchange of wholesale CBDCs is the first to involve three Hub centres. The BIS Innovation Hub is launching a new project around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)...

The Economist reports on “The race to redefine cross-border finance:” SWIFT recently launched SWIFT Go for retail payments. FinTech firms often partly bypass SWIFT by aggregating payments first. Ripple evades SWIFT, using a cryptocurrency for international transactions. Credit card companies build infrastructure independent of SWIFT for retail (push) payments initiated by the sender. JPMorgan Chase and a Singaporean bank and Temasek launched Partior for wholesale payments. This...

On bankunderground, Michael Kumhof, Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul, and Andrej Sokol question that foreign savings is an important driver of US current account deficits: Consider how US imports can be paid for in the real world: first, by transferring existing domestic or foreign bank balances to foreigners, which involves no new financing. Second, by borrowing from domestic banks and transferring the resulting bank balances to foreign households, which involves domestic but not foreign...

A new report by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures lists 7 types of frictions and 19 focus areas to address these frictions.

In its Quarterly Review, the BIS offers nice perspectives on the future of payments. Morten Bech and Jenny Hancock survey innovations in payments, and where the problems lie. Tara Rice, Goetz von Peter and Codruta Boar examine the fall in the number of correspondent banks. Morten Bech, Umar Faruqui and Takeshi Shirakami discuss cross border payments. Morten Bech, Jenny Hancock, Tara Rice and Amber Wadsworth discuss securities settlement. And Raphael Auer and Rainer Böhme explore design...

The BIS has published a report on stablecoins. On Alphaville Izabella Kaminska approves but argues that the report does not contain novel points. One aspect discussed in the report concerns the benefit of stablecoins for cross-border payments; it may be limited unless technology is able to address the key friction: A major obstacle to the interlinking of domestic payment systems and/or the development of shared global payment platforms is differing legal frameworks across jurisdictions...

In the FT, Martin Arnold reports about a new cross-border payment method tested by the Bank of England. The “interledger” program transfers money “near-instantaneously and without settlement risk.” The Bank of England set up two simulated RTGS systems on a cloud computing platform, using the Ripple interledger to simultaneously process “a successful cross-border payment”. This is not necessarily good news for the blockchain community. The Bank of England’s proof of concept is “about...