The Monetary Authority of Singapore on 23 October announced that Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) have joined BLOOM, its public-private initiative on settlement in tokenised bank deposits and regulated stablecoins, as policymaker members. Eight more firms joined at the same time, among them Visa, Mastercard and Ripple, along with the World Bank Group. The arrival of two central banks changes the purpose of BLOOM. When MAS launched it a year ago, the project was about extending settlement options inside Singapore’s financial centre. With BNM and BOT inside, it becomes a forum where three Southeast Asian central banks and their industry work out how digital money moves between jurisdictions, and the rules question moves to the front.
The project now has three regulators at the table
MAS launched BLOOM on 16 October 2025 with 16 industry members, including DBS, OCBC, UOB, Circle, Coinbase, Stripe and Ant International, and no other public authority. Its first work streams covered the distribution and clearing of settlement assets, programmable compliance controls and agentic payments. The launch release framed the effort around Singapore’s own infrastructure and the earlier Project Orchid trials of a digital Singapore dollar.
The 23 October release restates the focus areas around cross-border use. Participants will now work on acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, including how counterparties contract with each other and where a transaction is finally settled. They will also work on interoperability between different digital money arrangements, and on programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction limits. MAS says the work will cover “how relevant international standards and jurisdiction-specific supervisory expectations can be applied” to cross-border digital money transactions, “while allowing for differences in local requirements.”
The aim is to describe how a payment that touches Singaporean, Malaysian and Thai rules can be completed while each regulator keeps its own requirements, and the release says nothing about a common stablecoin rulebook. For a bank or payment firm, that is the practical question: whose rules apply at the point a stablecoin or tokenised deposit is accepted, exchanged and redeemed, and what evidence each regulator expects to see.
The new members tilt the project toward payment acceptance
The eight new industry members are Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay and Visa. That takes the industry list to 24, according to the list of participants MAS published with the release. The World Bank Group joined in a separate category for multilateral development banks, and MAS says it will bring “the perspectives and needs of developing economies” to the work.
The two global card networks, two cross-border payment firms in Airwallex and Nium, and the ShopeePay e-wallet now sit alongside the stablecoin issuers and banks that were there at launch. Maybank is the first Malaysian bank on the list. Kasikornbank was already the Thai bank member.
MAS says participants are working across payments, treasury and trade finance. Its release states that common implementation frameworks would reduce the need for financial institutions “to establish separate arrangements with each counterparty or market.” A firm that today negotiates settlement and compliance terms corridor by corridor has a direct commercial reason to join.
The three central banks already link their fast payment systems
BLOOM builds on retail payment links between the three countries that are already live. Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s PromptPay were linked on 29 April 2021, in what MAS described as the world’s first linkage of real-time payment systems. PayNow and Malaysia’s DuitNow followed on 17 November 2023 for person-to-person transfers, after a QR payment link announced on 31 March 2023.
Those links move commercial bank money between domestic systems within retail limits. BLOOM addresses a different problem: settlement in tokenised forms of money that may sit on shared ledgers and that each jurisdiction regulates in its own way. The Bank of Thailand frames its interest narrowly. Deputy Governor Daranee Saeju said the work will “help inform forward-looking regulatory approaches for tokenised money, particularly in cross-border payments and wholesale settlement.” For BOT, BLOOM is an input to its own rule-making.
Malaysia is working on digital money with both Hong Kong and Singapore
BNM’s membership comes less than three weeks after it agreed with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, in a statement published on 6 October, to set up a joint workstream on compliant cross-border stablecoin use between the two markets. BNM is now in two parallel efforts: a bilateral workstream with Hong Kong, which licenses issuers under its Stablecoins Ordinance, and a multilateral project led by Singapore. Firms operating in Malaysia should expect BNM’s position on accepting foreign stablecoins and tokenised deposits to be shaped by both.
A future where frictionless cross-border payments can be made using multiple digital monies is now closer to a tangible reality than a far-fetched fantasy.
Aznan bin Abdul Aziz, Deputy Governor, Bank Negara Malaysia, 23 October 2026
Neither release gives a timeline. The MAS announcement contains no trial dates and no deliverables, and it does not describe a Malaysian or Thai framework for issuing stablecoins. For now, the value to participants is access to three regulators in one forum while their approaches to digital money are still being written.
What to watch
- A first BLOOM output on cross-border acceptance and settlement, such as an implementation framework or industry report.
- Trials involving Malaysian or Thai institutions, including on public blockchains, which MAS invites on its BLOOM page.
- Further policymaker members from other jurisdictions.
- Terms of reference for the HKMA and BNM stablecoin workstream.
Primary sources
- MAS, MAS, Bank Negara Malaysia and Bank of Thailand Partner with Industry to Advance Cross-Border Settlement in Digital Money through BLOOM, 23 October 2026
- MAS, Annex A: List of BLOOM participants, 23 October 2026
- MAS, BLOOM, initiative page, 23 October 2026
- MAS, MAS Launches BLOOM Initiative to Extend Settlement Capabilities, 16 October 2025
- MAS and BNM, Launch of Cross-border Real-time Payment Systems Connectivity between Singapore and Malaysia, 17 November 2023
- MAS, Singapore and Thailand Launch World’s First Linkage of Real-time Payment Systems, 29 April 2021
Related: HKMA and Bank Negara Malaysia open a joint workstream on cross-border stablecoin use
Photo (cropped): Mrb Rafi, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
