Bank of England, MAS and Bank of Thailand Complete PvP Synchronisation Trial

Project Meridian FX APAC, a joint trial involving the Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the Bank of Thailand, has concluded after testing whether a synchronisation operator could coordinate atomic payment-versus-payment (PvP) foreign exchange settlements across three structurally different central bank wholesale systems. The experiment confirmed that synchronisation as a mechanism works. However, it also exposed a consequential asymmetry: the degree to which the operator could remain lightweight and non-custodial depended almost entirely on what each underlying system was built to support.

The Bank of England’s RT2 environment was the cleanest case. Built with interoperability in mind, it allowed the operator to earmark funds directly, requiring no architectural workarounds. Thailand’s Project SAN used an internal escrow arrangement to reserve funds, but custody did not pass to the operator, so it remained within the spirit of the non-custodial model. MAS’s SGD Testnet for wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) presented the starkest challenge: because it did not support operator-side earmarking on behalf of participants, Partior was required to run a dedicated escrow account and temporarily hold custody of funds, inverting the non-custodial premise entirely.

That inversion is the operative finding for anyone building toward multi-jurisdiction PvP infrastructure. Where a system lacks native earmarking capability, the synchronisation operator is pulled into a custodial role that introduces credit exposure and insolvency risk, concerns that central banks have been explicit about wanting to design away. The trial’s honest accounting of these gaps, rather than smoothing them over, makes the results more useful as an engineering and policy reference than a cleaner headline would have been.