BIS: Tokenization Can Upgrade Wholesale Cross-Border…

The Bank for International Settlements has outlined how tokenization technology could meaningfully improve wholesale cross-border payments — one of the most friction-heavy, cost-intensive layers of the global financial system. The BIS argument centres on programmable settlement: tokenized assets and liabilities settling on shared ledgers can collapse the multi-day correspondent-banking chain into near-instant finality.

The BIS has been a consistent voice in this space, running experiments under its Innovation Hub — including Project mBridge, which tested multi-CBDC settlement rails across four central banks. The latest framing reinforces that institutional interest in tokenized infrastructure is moving from research to policy recommendation.