The Monetary Authority of Singapore, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand are joining industry participants through the BLOOM initiative to develop common approaches for using digital money across borders. The policymakers will work with financial institutions, payment networks and technology providers on how tokenised deposits, regulated stablecoins and other forms of digital money can be accepted, exchanged and settled between institutions and jurisdictions.
BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online and Multi-currency. The initiative is a public-private effort focused on practical infrastructure and operating arrangements. The expanded participation brings two additional central banks into the work and adds companies including Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay and Visa, as well as the World Bank Group.
Three Workstreams
Participants will examine acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability between digital money arrangements, and programmable controls. The acceptance work includes how institutions contract with counterparties and settle transactions across markets. Interoperability covers the technical and operational methods that allow separate networks and infrastructures to communicate. Programmable controls include safeguards such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction-level restrictions.
The topics reflect a central issue for digital finance. Different institutions may issue or use digital money on separate systems, each with its own technical standards, governance and supervisory expectations. A transaction that crosses a border may require the sending and receiving institutions to agree on the asset, the network, the time and legal finality of settlement, as well as compliance controls. If every pair of counterparties negotiates a distinct arrangement, the number of connections can become costly to establish and maintain.
MAS said BLOOM will work on implementation frameworks and the alignment of commercial and operating arrangements. The authority expects common approaches to reduce the need for financial institutions to make separate arrangements for each counterparty or market, lowering implementation costs and improving time to market. The initiative is intended to accommodate local requirements rather than impose a single rule set on all participating jurisdictions.
Industry and Public-Sector Participation
The participant group combines banks, payment companies, fintech firms and infrastructure providers. Existing participants include Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, JPMorgan, Kasikornbank, OCBC, Partior, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB and Xweave. The new participation of the World Bank Group is intended to bring experience in payment system modernisation and financial inclusion, including perspectives from developing economies.
The mix of organisations may help identify use cases across payments, treasury and trade finance. These activities have different requirements. A corporate treasury transfer may involve liquidity management between branches, while trade finance can require conditional payment, document verification and coordination among several parties. Consumer remittances raise other questions, including cost, speed, access and protections against fraud.
Digital money also covers a range of instruments. Tokenised deposits are digital representations of commercial bank liabilities, while stablecoins are privately issued tokens designed to maintain a stable value, often by reference to a fiat currency. Their legal status, redemption mechanisms, reserve arrangements and risk profiles can differ. BLOOM’s stated approach is to consider multiple forms rather than assume a single type of digital currency will serve every use case.
Policy Coordination Without Uniform Rules
The central banks’ participation gives the initiative a policy dimension. MAS said the work will consider international standards and jurisdiction-specific supervisory expectations while allowing differences in local requirements. BNM Deputy Governor Aznan bin Abdul Aziz said the initiative would explore the prospect of cross-border payments using multiple forms of digital money. Bank of Thailand Deputy Governor Daranee Saeju said the work could inform regulatory approaches to tokenised money in cross-border payments and wholesale settlement.
Participation in BLOOM does not itself amount to a regulatory approval of a specific stablecoin, tokenised deposit, settlement system or commercial product. The announcement sets out a collaborative programme, not a launch of a live cross-border payment service. Firms using any future arrangements would remain subject to the laws and supervisory rules of the jurisdictions in which they operate.
Questions of settlement finality, insolvency treatment and redemption will be important as the work moves from design to implementation. A payment may appear technically complete on a blockchain, yet participants must know which legal obligations are discharged, how disputes are handled and what happens if an intermediary becomes unavailable. Sanctions screening and identity controls must also work across institutions without creating gaps or unnecessary duplication.
What BLOOM Could Mean for Market Infrastructure
If common frameworks are developed and adopted, institutions could connect to more counterparties through shared technical and commercial arrangements. That could make it easier to scale cross-border transactions and reduce the cost of bespoke integrations. The benefits would depend on participation, governance and whether the systems can interoperate with existing payment infrastructure rather than requiring a wholesale replacement.
The initiative also faces coordination challenges. Public and private participants may differ on data access, liability, privacy, technical standards and how operating costs are shared. Stablecoin issuers, banks and payment networks have different business models and regulatory obligations. Reaching agreement will require more than designing a technical bridge between networks.
No timetable, pilot volume or initial corridor was disclosed. The next meaningful indicators will be the publication of implementation frameworks, the selection of concrete use cases and the participation of institutions willing to test settlement across jurisdictions. BLOOM’s expansion signals regional policymaker interest in shaping interoperable digital money arrangements, while the commercial and regulatory details remain under development.