Cryptoupdated 1h ago3 min read
Bank Negara Malaysia and Bank of Thailand Join Singapore’s BLOOM Cross-Border Stablecoin Payments Initiative
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BNM and BOT joined MAS's BLOOM as policymaker members to develop cross-border stablecoin settlement. BLOOM aims to cut costs and enable stablecoins and tokenized deposits for cross-border payments.
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BLOOM expands across borders
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand joined Singapore's BLOOM cross-border digital money initiative as policymaker members on Friday. BLOOM, short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, was launched in October last year and the three central banks will work with industry players on common approaches for accepting, exchanging and settling digital money across institutions, networks and borders. BLOOM covers tokenised deposits, regulated stablecoins and settlement across payment networks, with a focus on interoperability and programmable controls.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said shared frameworks would lower implementation costs and shorten time to market, while the authority said the three central banks would look at how international standards and jurisdiction-specific supervisory expectations can be applied to such transactions. The industry membership has expanded to include Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group, alongside founding members such as DBS, OCBC and UOB.
What the central banks will do
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said the three central banks will center their work on three areas: acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability between digital money arrangements, and programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said the initiative will examine how international standards and jurisdiction-specific supervisory expectations can be applied to transactions while leaving room for differences in local requirements. Bank Negara Malaysia separately outlined three pilot schemes, announced in February, to test a ringgit stablecoin and tokenised deposits for domestic and cross-border wholesale payments in 2026.
The Bank of Thailand's move aligns with a broader push among Southeast Asian monetary authorities to adopt distributed ledger technology, and the authority has not set a timeline for the common frameworks or said when the first cross-border transactions under the expanded membership would be processed. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said central bank involvement is meant to ensure public policy and regulatory considerations are built in as those approaches take shape.
Participants and potential impact
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said BLOOM's industry roster has grown beyond its founding group of Singapore lenders DBS, OCBC and UOB, along with Standard Chartered, JPMorgan Chase, Coinbase, StraitsX, Circle and Temasek. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said the initiative brings together policymakers, banks, payment networks and technology providers to push digital money into cross-border financial activity, and it said the World Bank Group's presence is expected to bring global experience in payment-system modernization, cross-border payments and financial inclusion. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said BLOOM builds on Project Orchid, a 2021 MAS effort to explore uses for a digital Singapore dollar, and the current phase focuses on the technical and policy plumbing needed for next-generation payments infrastructure.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said the arrangement could eventually mean fewer bilateral integrations and a more uniform set of compliance expectations when moving tokenised value between markets. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said shared implementation frameworks and aligned commercial and operating arrangements would cut the need for financial institutions to strike separate deals with every counterparty or market, lowering implementation costs and shortening time to market.