Barclays, Wells Fargo and Five Canadian Banks Join BIS Project Agorá

Key points

Barclays, BMO, CIBC, Rabobank, RBC, Scotiabank, and Wells Fargo joined Project Agorá on 29 September 2026, bringing the private-sector group to nearly fifty institutions across eight central banks.
Five of Canada's six largest banks are now in Project Agorá; TD Bank was already participating through its US subsidiary, and only National Bank of Canada is absent.
OSFI confirmed that tokenised deposits receive equivalent regulatory treatment to conventional deposits, which preceded Canada's big six banks announcing a joint Canadian dollar tokenised deposit initiative for domestic interbank payments.
BMO has partnered with CME Group and Google Cloud on a tokenised cash solution for margin and collateral workflows, making it one of the more operationally active participants in the project.
Project Agorá, led by the BIS with the Bank of Canada joining in May 2026, is exploring whether a unified platform for tokenised deposits and central bank reserves can improve wholesale cross-border payment settlement.

Seven financial institutions have entered Project Agorá, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) initiative testing whether a shared platform combining tokenised deposits and central bank reserves could transform wholesale cross-border payments. The new entrants are Barclays, BMO, CIBC, Rabobank, RBC, Scotiabank, and Wells Fargo, spanning four jurisdictions. The project now encompasses eight central banks and a private-sector cohort approaching fifty institutions.

The Canadian dimension is the most notable development. Five of Canada’s six largest banks are now participating, with BMO, CIBC, RBC, and Scotiabank all joining in this round and TD Bank already present through its US subsidiary. Only National Bank of Canada remains outside the project.

The timing connects directly to domestic policy movement. The previous week, Canada’s six largest banks announced a joint Canadian dollar tokenised deposit initiative for domestic interbank payments, following confirmation from the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) that tokenised deposits receive equivalent regulatory treatment to conventional deposits. Project Agorá extends that domestic architecture into the international dimension, offering a route from domestic tokenised deposits to settlement in tokenised central bank reserves across borders. BMO has been among the more active participants in tokenised deposit development, having previously partnered with CME Group and Google Cloud on a tokenised cash solution designed for margin and collateral workflows.

The concentration of Canadian banks signals that domestic regulatory clarity from OSFI is functioning as an accelerant, pulling institutions toward cross-border infrastructure experiments once the home-market question is settled. The project’s expansion toward fifty private-sector participants alongside eight central banks suggests the pilot is broadening its evidentiary base ahead of any eventual policy conclusions.

What this means

treasury & allocator: OSFI's equivalence ruling on tokenised deposits removes a key regulatory ambiguity that may have kept Canadian dollar liquidity management at arm's length from tokenised rails; the question now is whether cross-border settlement through Agorá's architecture materially changes intraday liquidity costs and counterparty timing assumptions worth modelling under a pilot scenario.
collateral & funding desk: BMO's existing tokenised cash work with CME Group and Google Cloud for margin and collateral workflows, now layered into an international central bank reserve settlement project, is worth examining as a signal of where collateral mobility standards may land; desks with significant cross-border margin exposure should consider what a tokenised reserve settlement leg would do to their current settlement timing and haircut assumptions.
regulatory & policy affairs: OSFI's equivalence determination appears to have functioned as a direct catalyst for both the domestic Canadian tokenised deposit initiative and accelerated Agorá participation, suggesting that a clear home-jurisdiction treatment statement can pull institutions into cross-border pilots faster than the pilots themselves generate momentum; other jurisdictions watching Canada's sequencing may find that regulatory clarity precedes, rather than follows, broad industry engagement.
founder & strategy: A private-sector group approaching fifty institutions across eight central banks is reaching a scale at which network effects begin to self-reinforce, narrowing the window for infrastructure providers or protocol designers to establish foundational positions; the Canadian cluster's coherence around a shared domestic standard before joining the international project suggests that regional alignment strategies may be a more durable path into Agorá than bilateral institution-by-institution approaches.

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Ledger Insights

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Barclays, Wells Fargo and Five Canadian Banks Join BIS Project Agorá

Key points

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