Project Agorá Goes Live: Lloyds, CaixaBank and 26 Other Banks Settle Real Cross-Border Payments in BIS Pilot
Project Agorá Goes Live: Lloyds, CaixaBank and 26 Other Banks Settle Real Cross-Border Payments in BIS Pilot #
Lloyds Banking Group has disclosed it completed three live tokenised deposit transactions under Project Agorá’s Real-Value Testing phase, including a euro-denominated payment with Spanish lender CaixaBank, in the broadest live test yet of wholesale cross-border payment tokenisation.
Project Agorá, convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), brings together five central banks and 28 commercial lenders to explore whether tokenising central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits on a shared programmable platform can improve cross-border money transfers. The July 2026 real-value testing phase was the initiative’s first use of actual funds, moving beyond earlier simulation work.
Lloyds’ three transactions spanned sterling, Swiss francs, and euros. In a cross-currency scenario, Lloyds’ Corporate Markets business converted Swiss francs into sterling, with Lloyds Bank providing the sterling leg of settlement. The bank also participated as a customer bank in separate Swiss franc and euro transactions. For the euro payment, Deutsche Bank confirmed it served as the intermediary agent in a transaction between Lloyds and CaixaBank, an example of how the shared-ledger architecture can route payments across institutions in multiple jurisdictions at once.
The tests demonstrated atomic settlement, in which foreign exchange conversion, the payment, and final settlement are linked into a single simultaneous transaction flow rather than the sequential steps typical of today’s correspondent banking model. Peter Left, Head of Digital and Markets Innovation at Lloyds, said the tests delivered “valuable practical insight into how tokenisation could help reduce friction and settlement risk in wholesale payments.”
Across all participants in the broader real-value phase, 28 commercial lenders and five central banks (the Bank of England, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, and the Swiss National Bank) collectively settled approximately CHF 800,000 (around $1 million) in 30 transactions spanning six currencies: US dollar, euro, sterling, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, and South Korean won. Average settlement time was around 80 seconds, according to BIS figures, even though the prototype was not yet integrated with participants’ core banking systems or the central banks’ live settlement infrastructure.
Other named participants in the wider pilot include JPMorgan, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered. The BIS said the exercise remains experimental, with no commitment to move toward production. Next steps will involve analysing trial results and working through legal, operational, and liquidity questions before any decision on progressing to a live settlement service.
Copy link