The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF) have selected CaixaBank to work on a project exploring digital payments. CaixaBank will collaborate with the Bank of England, the Bank of France, and others on the initiative.
CaixaBank highlights that it is the bank with the largest digital customer base in Spain and was the only European bank chosen by the ECB in 2022 to participate in the prototyping for a possible digital euro.
This specific project is known as Project Agorá (Greek for “marketplace”) and involves seven central banks: Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Project Agorá is said to build on the unified ledger concept proposed by the BIS and will also investigate how tokenized commercial bank deposits can be integrated with tokenized wholesale central bank money in a public-private programmable core financial platform.
The public-private partnership will seek to overcome inefficiencies in how payments happen today, especially across borders, inclujding different legal, regulatory, and technical requirements, operating hours, and time zones. It will also involve compliance like AML/KYC/CFT protocols to maintain the integrity of the process.
