Deutsche Bank completes live Project Agorá real-value test transaction

In one of Project Agorá’s first real-value test transactions, Deutsche Bank acted as intermediary agent for a €10,000 treasury payment between Lloyds Banking Group and CaixaBank, while the Eurosystem acted as clearing agent. The Project Agorá platform facilitated the exchange of messages used to initiate the movement of funds within participants’ core banking systems.

Although the transactions took place within a highly controlled, staged environment, the exercise enabled participating banks and central banks to validate the platform’s technical capabilities and assess the operational processes required to coordinate real-value transactions between commercial bank and central bank money.

The payment was one of 17 scenarios in the real-value testing phase, which involved 23 financial institutions across Asia, Europe and North America as well as five central banks. Together, participants completed transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000 across six currencies. In total, around 250 public- and private-sector staff took part in the testing.

According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the prototype supported a wide range of wholesale cross-border payment use cases, including corporate and interbank single- and dual-currency payments, payment-versus-payment transactions and intragroup bank transfers.

The average time from payment initiation to settlement was about 1 minute and 20 seconds. Participants also noted the platform’s end-to-end visibility of payment status and routing, as well as its support for direct corporate payment processing.

Project Agorá – Greek for “marketplace” – is a public-private collaboration convened by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance to explore how tokenisation and programmability can enhance wholesale cross-border payments.

“In a landscape with fragmented infrastructure, the role of correspondent banks will be significantly rewired”Sabih Behzad, Head of Digital Assets and Currencies Transformation, Deutsche Bank

“Project Agorá is significant because it brings central banks and private-sector institutions together to explore how tokenised central bank money and commercial bank deposits can operate on shared infrastructure,” said Sabih Behzad, Head of Digital Assets and Currencies Transformation at Deutsche Bank. “Real-value testing represents an important next stage in this journey, and we look forward to building on the insights generated alongside the other participating institutions.”

The test transactions follow the completion of the prototype phase, which demonstrated the feasibility of a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments.¹ As testing relied on synthetic rather than production transactions, the real-value testing phase enabled participants to assess the prototype using real funds, with insights from participating banks and central banks expected to inform any future project phases.

“Real-value testing marked an important milestone in moving from conceptual design towards practical implementation,” said Marvin Ulbrich, Product Manager, Emerging Payment Rails at Deutsche Bank. “Through close collaboration across central banks, commercial banks, and internal operations, risk and treasury functions, we gained valuable insights into the operational processes, control frameworks and technical capabilities required to support a future shared financial infrastructure.”

Sources

¹ See Project Agorá: A shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments at bis.org