In its commitment to developing a cutting-edge cross-border payments infrastructure in collaboration with various international financial institutions and central banks, the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) has become a participant in the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) mBridge project, specifically on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) platform.
The MVP platform represents a multi-central bank digital currency (Wholesale CBDC) system designed to enhance cross-border payments between commercial banks across different jurisdictions. This initiative marks the first multi-wCBDC platform to reach the MVP development phase.
SAMA has been exploring the potential of wholesale CBDCs by analyzing policy-related issues to assess the feasibility of using these digital currencies to improve the efficiency of cross-border payment and settlement processes between commercial banks.
In October 2020, under Saudi Arabia’s G20 presidency, a roadmap was agreed upon to enhance global cross-border payments, with the objective of making transactions cheaper, faster, more inclusive, and more transparent. This roadmap called for evaluating the proposed digital currency designs of several central banks and experimenting with their use in settling cross-border payments.
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