Singapore’s central bank brings Ripple, Coinbase and JPMorgan into cross-border payments initiative

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is working with Bank Negara Malaysia, the Bank of Thailand, the World Bank Group and commercial partners to develop shared approaches for cross-border settlement using digital money through its BLOOM initiative, according to a Friday statement.

BLOOM, short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online and Multi-currency, is designed to advance settlement infrastructure for domestic and international payments and financial transactions.

The project follows Project Orchid, which explored applications for a digital Singapore dollar and the infrastructure needed to support it.

BLOOM will examine the use of tokenized commercial bank money and stablecoins that satisfy regulatory expectations, with applications spanning G10 and Asian currencies, corporate treasury management, trade finance and agentic payments.

The initiative’s industry members include Circle, Coinbase, DBS, JPMorgan, Maybank, Mastercard, Ripple, Standard Chartered, Stripe, Visa, Airwallex, Anchorage Digital and other financial institutions and payment providers.

Its participating policymakers are MAS, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand, with the World Bank Group also involved.

The participants will work on how digital money can be accepted and settled across jurisdictions, how separate networks and systems can interoperate, and how programmable controls can incorporate identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction safeguards.

BLOOM will also explore AI agents making payments under predefined rules, potentially reducing manual payment management and allowing transfers to be timed to favorable conditions.

MAS said common implementation frameworks and operating arrangements could help financial institutions avoid creating separate arrangements for every market and counterparty.