Spain-based financial institution CaixaBank has been selected to be part of a global project that explores additional forms of international payments. By participating in the initiative, known as the Agorá Project, CaixaBank intends to utilise the Bank of International Settlements (IBS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF) resources and expertise to support the mitigation of increased complexities happening when conducting financial integrity controls and the advancement of the monetary system, while creating a simplified and secure payment landscape.

The selection can be attributed to CaixaBank’s extensive digital features that allowed it to solidify its position in the financial industry. In addition, the financial institution has previously developed international innovation projects supported by regulatory bodies and with public-private collaboration. Moreover, back in 2022, the bank was chosen by the European Central Bank (ECB) to participate in an international call for payment service providers, financial institutions, and other relevant companies to design payment service prototypes as part of the research phase of an upcoming launch of the digital euro. At that time, the bank co-developed a prototype of a P2P payment wallet for the digital euro with the ECB.

Agorá Project Developed by the BIS and the IIF, the initiative includes private sector firms globally to assess how the application of tokens can solidify wholesale cross-border payments. Structures as a public-private partnership, the Agorá Project gathers seven central banks, including the Bank of France, which represents the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The financial institutions are set to work in collaboration with selected financial firms, while the IIF acts as the private sector convener. Furthermore, the project develops on the unified ledger concept recommended by the BIS and is set to investigate how tokenised commercial bank deposits can be integrated with tokenised wholesale central bank money in a public-private programmable core financial platform.

Through this, the monetary system could be augmented, and new solutions could be offered by leveraging smart contracts and programmability while keeping the two-tier structure. Also, the public-private partnership focuses on removing several structural complexities, notably in cross-border payments, including different legal, regulatory, and technical requirements, operating hours, and time zones. .