BIS’ mBridge shows CBDCs enhance cross-border payment efficiency: HKMA

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the city’s de facto central bank, has published a report of the mBridge central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot project with three other central banks and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which examined cross-border payment transactions via CBDCs.

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Fast facts

The pilot successfully executed real-value cross-border transactions involving four currencies and 20 commercial bank participants across four jurisdictions, the HKMA said in a statement shared with Forkast on Wednesday.
The mBridge, or mCBDC, is a collaborative CBDC project between the HKMA and the central banks of Thailand, China, the United Arab Emirates and the BIS to enhance multi-currency cross-border payments.
Over the course of six weeks in August and September, the participating commercial banks conducted payment and foreign exchange transactions worth over US$22 million on behalf of their corporate clients using the CBDCs issued on the mBridge platform, according to the report.
Tayo Tunyathon Koonprasert, a senior specialist of Bank of Thailand, wrote in a Wednesday social media post that the project’s findings demonstrated that it can bring down cross-border transfer times from three to five days to just several seconds.
The HKMA and the Bank of Thailand said the team will keep working to improve existing functionalities and add new features to the platform.
In September, the HKMA said it would likely take at least two or three years to build the system for the city’s wholesale CBDC.