CNB Research Seminar "Coordinated Settlement in a Tokenised Financial System: Implications for Cross-Border Payments"

Prague, 10 June 2026

Priscilla Koo Wilkens (Bank for International Settlements)

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Priscilla Koo Wilkens works as an Adviser at the BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre. Her work focuses on digital payments, tokenisation, central banking innovation, and financial market infrastructures, including topics such as fast payment systems, CBDCs, DeFi, tokenised assets, and public payment infrastructure.

Coordinated Settlement in a Tokenised Financial System: Implications for Cross-Border Payments (abstract)

This seminar investigated the hypothesis that tokenisation, combined with programmability, can improve the efficiency of wholesale cross-border payments by reconfiguring underlying settlement processes. Existing arrangements are characterised by sequential processing, fragmented information flows and reliance on prefunded liquidity, which collectively generate delays, opacity and settlement risk.

The analysis considers whether representing central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits as claims on a DLT enables a shift from sequential to coordinated payment execution. In such an architecture, validation, path finding and liquidity commitments are aligned ex ante, allowing transactions to settle atomically. This design has the potential to eliminate settlement and credit risk, increase processing speed and enhance transparency through shared, synchronised state.

The findings suggest that tokenisation may support a qualitatively different organisational model for cross-border payments, one based on coordinated workflows rather than bilateral message exchanges, while preserving the institutional structure of the two-tier monetary system. At the same time, the results highlight open questions relating to governance, interoperability and legal implementation, which remain central to the feasibility of large-scale adoption.