BIS Innovation Hub Sets Out Work Priorities for 2023
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub announced its work priorities for 2023. The focus is expected to be on the aspects of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), suptech and regtech, next-generation financial market infrastructure, open finance, green finance, and cybersecurity. The work program has increased its focus on improving payments systems and experimenting with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), shaping the future of financial regulation and supervision, and on greening and securing the financial sector. The BIS Innovation Hub expects to work with all euro area central banks and is also consolidating its expansion, with the Eurosystem Center expected to open soon and to be hosted by the European Central Bank, the Bundesbank, and the Bank of France.
The BIS Innovation Hub has set out the following key priorities for 2023:
- Building on the knowledge gained from wholesale CBDC projects (Project Helvetia), BIS Innovation Hub plans to experiment more with retail CBDCs this year. The ongoing projects include experimenting on the technology architecture of a two-tiered distribution model (Project Aurum), the distribution of retail CBDC through an open Application Programming Interface (API) ecosystem (Project Rosalind), examining cyber resilience of retail CBDCs (Project Polaris, Project Sela), and cyber resiliency, scalability, and privacy in a prototype CBDC (Project Tourbillon). BIS experiments also show how wholesale and retail CBDCs (Project Icebreaker) as well as the interconnection of domestic payments systems (Project Nexus) can deliver faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border payments. Three multi-CBDC experiments (Project Jura, Dunbar, mBridge) have demonstrated that common platforms with various digital currencies are technically feasible and offer benefits such as lower cost, faster settlement, and operational transparency. Moreover, BIS is exploring automated market-makers for foreign exchange using CBDCs (Project Mariana).
- With regard to the improvements in payment systems, BIS Innovation Hub aims to focus on payment synchronization (Project Meridian), a data-driven approach to combating money laundering across firms and across borders (Project Aurora), and novel liquidity savings mechanisms (Project Titus).
- Focus will also be on projects that aim to shape the future of regulation, supervision, and finance. For example, the development of tools for monitoring financial markets in real time (Project Rio and Samba), cryptocurrencies, and decentralized finance (Project Atlas) and other regulatory reporting and data analytics purposes (Project Ellipse). Project Ellipse explores how technology solutions could enable supervision to be more forward-looking, insights-based, and data-driven, using an integrated regulatory data and analytics platform.
- With regard to open finance, BIS Innovation Hub plans to explore specific use cases of decentralized finance (DeFi) tools, such as blockchain and smart contracts for the supervision of financing for small and medium-sized enterprises (Project Dynamo). The research will extend into related topics such as decentralized identifiers and the interoperability of digital payment methods such as stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.
- The Hub will continue its work on developing a climate risk platform for financial authorities (Project Viridis). Project Viridis explores how regulatory data could be integrated with external climate data sources to provide insights into climate-related financial risks. In addition, projects on greening and securing the financial system seek to improve climate-related data availability (Project Gaia) and develop concrete digital solutions to the trading of green bonds (Project Genesis 1.0 and 2.0).
- Finally, the Hub will explore the new experiment called Project Pyxtrial (launched by the Hub’s London Center), which aims to develop a platform to monitor balance sheets of stablecoins. Most central banks lack tools to systemically monitor stablecoins and avoid asset-liability mismatches. The project will investigate various technological tools that may help supervisors and regulators to build policy frameworks based on integrated data.
Related Link: Press Release
Keywords: International, Banking, Regtech, Suptech, ESG, CBDC, Fintech, Cybersecurity, Work Program, Reporting, Cyber Risk, Sustainable Finance, ML TF Risk, Decentralized Finance, Open Finance, Blockchain, Stablecoins, Smart Contracts, Climate Change Risk, Green Bonds, BIS Innovation Hub, BIS
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