BMO Joins Project Agorá to Explore Tokenised Cross-Border Payments

What happened

BMO has announced that it is joining Project Agorá, a global public-private collaboration convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The initiative is exploring how tokenisation and programmability could improve wholesale cross-border payments.

BMO's participation places it within a multi-party research effort rather than a standalone pilot. The project brings together public and private institutions, reflecting its design as a shared exploration of how payment infrastructure might evolve. The available reporting, which comes from Finextra, focuses on BMO's entry into the initiative and its stated purpose. It does not set out a detailed timetable, deliverables or commercial terms.

Why it matters

Wholesale cross-border payments are a demanding test of digital infrastructure. Value moves between banks, currencies and jurisdictions, and each hand-off adds cost, delay and reconciliation effort. Tokenisation, which represents assets on shared digital ledgers, and programmability, which lets rules be embedded in how a transaction executes, are two levers that could change how that movement is orchestrated. For leaders in digital transformation, the question is less about any single product and more about whether the underlying operating model can become faster, more transparent and easier to automate.

The people affected extend well beyond the banks themselves. Corporate treasurers, trade finance teams and the businesses that depend on predictable settlement all experience the outcome of back-office design. If the infrastructure beneath cross-border payments changes, the visible result for those customers will be felt in clarity of status, timing of funds and the number of manual exceptions they must resolve. Any programme of this kind therefore sits at the intersection of technology modernisation and the everyday experience of the people who rely on it.

The Renascence take

Most coverage of initiatives like this will focus on the technology and the institutions involved. The more consequential question is whether the customer experience of cross-border payments improves in a way that clients can actually notice. Design work usually begins with the friction people feel, such as opaque fees, unclear timing and repeated checks, rather than with the ledger.

Participation in an industry collaboration is a signal of intent, not a service improvement, and customers will judge the difference on arrival times and clarity of status. The behavioural principle underneath is simple: people tolerate complexity they can see through, but they punish uncertainty. Operators watching this space should map the end-to-end payment journey now, identify where clients wait or chase, and treat any new infrastructure as a chance to remove those moments rather than simply relocating them. Measure success in fewer enquiries and fewer exceptions, not in the number of pilots joined.