The Bank of Korea has unveiled a concept for a unified-ledger-based platform that would settle tokenized financial assets within a single ledger, intensifying a race among major central banks to overhaul payment infrastructure. The Bank of England, meanwhile, is accelerating experiments in “synchronized settlement” that connect its existing payment network with external blockchain platforms.
The Bank of Korea on Nov. 11 held its 2026 Payment Systems Conference under the theme “Payment Infrastructure Innovation and Policy Challenges in the Digital Finance Era,” sharing innovation cases from the Bank of England, Nexus Global Payments and the Central Bank of Brazil. As financial assets such as stocks and bonds digitize rapidly, how to safely link asset transfers with payment has emerged as a key agenda item — and this year’s event highlighted how each central bank is taking a different technological path.
The sharpest contrast is between the South Korean and British approaches. The Bank of Korea envisions a unified-ledger platform on which assets and money are traded and settled within one ledger. The Bank of England, by contrast, has chosen to connect its existing central bank payment system to external distributed-ledger (DLT) asset platforms.
Andrei Pustelnikov, the Bank of England team leader heading its wholesale settlement innovation experiments, presented the “synchronization” approach that links the central bank payment system with external tokenized asset platforms. The structure ensures that digital asset transfers and payments are completed simultaneously, eliminating the risk of delivering an asset without receiving payment, or paying without securing the asset. “Even as technology changes, central bank money must continue to serve as the foundation of settlement,” he stressed.
The Bank of England is testing tokenized securities settlement with 18 institutions, including the London Stock Exchange, targeting live use in 2028. It plans to issue related operational and regulatory guidelines in 2027. It also intends to actively participate in Project Agora, an international settlement experiment involving the Bank of Korea and other major central banks. Project Agora is a project to issue and operate tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits from various countries on a shared platform.
In cross-border remittances and small-value payments, the model of central banks directly operating infrastructure came to the fore. Andrew McCormack, CEO of Nexus Global Payments (NGP), presented the “Nexus Project,” which links the real-time payment systems of six Asian countries — India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand — into a single platform. The project is designed to enable cross-border remittances without each country building a separate remittance network, with a target launch in the fourth quarter of 2027.
Jose Vicente Matos Santana, a team leader at the Central Bank of Brazil, shared operating experience with Pix, the instant payment system introduced in 2020. Pix, run directly by the central bank, supports 24/7 remittances and online and offline payments, and as of 2025 accounted for 56% of all small-value payments in Brazil, overtaking credit cards and other methods to become the country’s leading payment means. Transaction volume that year reached 79.8 billion, up 25% from the previous year. The Central Bank of Brazil cited as success factors its encouragement of participation by banks, fintechs and other diverse providers and its operation of the service free of charge to consumers. It is also recently pushing to strengthen transaction-limit settings and a system for returning fraud losses in response to financial fraud and cyber threats.
The payment infrastructure overhauls by major central banks are intertwined with the growth pace of the tokenized asset market. As the market for issuing and trading stocks and bonds as digital tokens grows, the reliability of settlement infrastructure that handles asset transfers and payments simultaneously will determine the expansion of the entire market. That is why how central banks connect with private blockchain platforms while maintaining the credibility of money as the final settlement instrument has emerged as a policy challenge for each country.
A Bank of Korea official said, “Through this conference, we plan to examine payment innovation cases from overseas central banks and the private sector and discuss the development direction of South Korea’s payment and settlement system and future policy challenges.” The Bank of Korea said it is broadly reviewing various ways for the central bank to support final settlement services in the tokenization era.
CategoryBank of KoreaBank of EnglandCentral Bank of BrazilApproachUnified-ledger-based payment platformLinking existing payment network with external DLT platformsCentral bank-operated small-value payment networkKey projectConcept for trading assets and money on a single ledgerSynchronized settlement, Project AgoraPixTarget timingPolicy review stageLive use in 2028, guidelines in 2027Introduced 2020, in operation
Note: Compiled based on what each central bank disclosed at the conference.
The market sees central banks’ technology choices for payment networks as influencing the standard-setting competition in tokenized asset distribution and cross-border remittance businesses going forward. The fact that the Bank of England has chosen to link external platforms while retaining its existing payment network, whereas the Bank of Korea is reviewing a single-ledger concept, is expected to be a variable determining how South Korean financial institutions and fintech companies will participate in tokenized asset settlement in the future.