Malaysian and Thai central banks join Singapore’s BLOOM digital-money forum
Their membership gives banks and payment networks a three-market policy forum for cross-border settlement design.
Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined Singapore’s BLOOM initiative as policymaker members, the Monetary Authority of Singapore announced on 23 October. Banks and payment networks serving all three markets now have the relevant regulators in one forum to shape cross-border digital-money arrangements.
The official MAS release says the three regulators will work with industry participants on common approaches to accepting, exchanging and settling different forms of digital money across institutions, networks and jurisdictions.
Three practical questions for banks
The regulators and industry participants have identified three areas of work. The first concerns how an institution accepts digital money from a cross-border counterparty and how the resulting obligation is settled. The second concerns how separate digital-money arrangements can operate across networks and infrastructures. The third concerns programmable controls, including identity checks, sanctions screening and transaction rules.
These are operating questions for payment providers, treasury teams and trade-finance banks that may need to move value between markets using tokenised deposits or regulated stablecoins. A common approach could reduce the number of separate arrangements a firm has to negotiate for each counterparty or jurisdiction. These are design tasks, not an operating cross-border rail. MAS presents lower implementation costs and faster time to market as expected outcomes of future frameworks, rather than measured benefits today.
Industry joins the policy discussion
BLOOM also includes financial institutions, payment networks and technology providers. MAS named Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group among the expanded participants. Their presence gives the three central banks a way to test proposed approaches against payments, treasury and trade-finance use cases.
For a bank serving customers across the three countries, BLOOM now offers one place to raise the same design problem with all three regulators. The framework choice that would change implementation planning is how a payment received in one form of digital money can be accepted and settled by a counterparty in another market under compatible controls.
Source: Monetary Authority of Singapore media release, 23 October 2026.
