"Inefficiencies in International Payments Confirmed Improved"... Bank of Korea to Join 'Project Agora' Real-World Transaction Testing

Completion of Joint Prototype Development with BIS
Bank of Canada to Newly Join the Project

The Bank of Korea announced on May 27 that, following its participation in the construction of the 'Project Agora' platform led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), it will also take part in the upcoming live transaction tests.

Project Agora is an initiative designed to enable efficient cross-border remittance, payment, and settlement by utilizing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), deposit tokens, and similar instruments. The purpose is to address the high costs and low efficiency of current cross-border payment systems, which require transactions to pass through multiple intermediary banks for overseas remittance and payments.

The prototype phase of the project involved not only BIS and IIF, but also the central banks of reserve currency countries such as the United States, France (representing the Eurozone), the United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, as well as Korea and Mexico, along with over 40 global financial institutions.

A Bank of Korea official stated, "Based on a platform utilizing tokenized central bank reserves and bank deposit tokens, we have confirmed that it is possible to significantly improve inefficiencies such as the slow speed, high costs, and low transparency of global inter-institutional payment transactions," adding, "The Bank of Korea will also participate in the forthcoming live transaction tests."

The BIS explained in a press release, "Project Agora has demonstrated that atomic settlement—real-time simultaneous exchange of assets and payments—can be achieved in global inter-institutional transactions by using tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits," and added, "It has also been confirmed that atomic settlement can be carried out safely and with finality across all participating jurisdictions and currencies."

Furthermore, the BIS emphasized, "The platform is designed in a modular manner, making it easy to expand to various functions such as conditional payments and always-on 24-hour payments. As regulatory and data-sharing frameworks advance, functions in areas such as anti-money laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT), compliance with financial sanctions, and fraud detection can also be further enhanced."

The Bank of Canada also plans to newly join Project Agora. Regarding this, a Bank of Korea official stated, "We expect that the global acceptance of the Agora platform will increase and that the momentum for advancing the project will be further strengthened."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.