The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today announced that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined BLOOM, its initiative for cross border settlement using tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins. Nine industry participants also joined, including Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Maybank and the World Bank Group.
BLOOM launched a year ago, and its 24 industry members include DBS, OCBC and UOB, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered, stablecoin issuers Circle, Anchorage Digital and StraitsX, payment firms such as Nium, Airwallex and Stripe, and the interbank settlement network Partior.
The project’s work is organized into three strands, acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability between digital money arrangements, and programmable controls such as identity verification and sanctions screening. MAS says the aim is to reduce the need for financial institutions to set up separate arrangements with each counterparty or market.
For the foreseeable future there will be several tokenized deposit networks, several regulated stablecoins and several card and fintech rails, and a single cross border payment may cross more than one of them. Every handoff between two forms of money today rests on a bilateral deal covering legal terms, technical integration and compliance. Bilateral arrangements do not scale easily, and the membership and workstreams show how BLOOM intends to address that.
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