Malaysia and Thailand central banks join MAS-led BLOOM initiative on cross-border digital money

Implications for lenders

For lenders in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, BLOOM may eventually shorten settlement times for cross-border disbursements, repayments and remittance-linked loans, but with 3 central banks only at the stage of designing common approaches, current funding and collections processes are unlikely to be affected for now. Compliance teams can follow the programmable-controls work, since identity and sanctions checks built into digital money may change how screening is evidenced.

Implications

Facts

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said on 23 October 2026 that Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) had joined BLOOM as policymaker members. BLOOM, which stands for borderless, liquid, open, online and multi-currency, is a public-private initiative on the cross-border use of digital money, including tokenised bank deposits and regulated stablecoins. MAS launched it in October 2025. The initiative now has 3 central-bank members, up from MAS alone at the October 2025 launch. ¹

MAS named 9 new industry participants: Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group. ² Existing participants named in the release include DBS, OCBC, UOB, Kasikornbank, Standard Chartered, J.P. Morgan, Ant International, Stripe, Circle and StraitsX.

The three central banks will work with industry on common approaches to accepting, exchanging and settling different forms of digital money across institutions, networks and jurisdictions, and on how international standards and each jurisdiction's supervisory expectations apply to such transactions. The three focus areas are acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability between digital-money arrangements, and programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls. Use cases named are payments, treasury and trade finance. The release gives no timelines, transaction volumes or deliverable dates.

Analysis

Over the year since its launch, BLOOM has moved from a Singapore initiative to one with central-bank members from three ASEAN economies. For BNM it is the second regional digital-money track this month: on 2 October BNM and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority agreed to set up a joint policy workstream on compliant cross-border stablecoin use, also without a launch date.

BLOOM sits alongside Singapore's domestic rule-making. MAS consulted from 1 September to 16 October 2026 on stablecoin rules under the Payment Services Act, including par redemption and a ban on paying interest on MAS-regulated stablecoins. The BLOOM release says the cross-border work will allow for differences in local requirements, so the shape of Malaysian and Thai rules for tokenised deposits and stablecoins will matter as much as the Singapore framework.

The participant list mixes regional banks (Maybank, Kasikornbank and Singapore's three local banks), card networks and consumer wallets such as ShopeePay. That points to use beyond interbank wholesale settlement, but the release describes trials and common approaches rather than a live service.

Counterpoints and uncertainties

BLOOM is a framework for trials and common approaches, not a payment network, and the release sets no dates. Malaysia and Thailand have not published how tokenised deposits or stablecoins will be regulated locally, and differences in those rules could limit interoperability. Overlapping initiatives (BLOOM, the HKMA–BNM stablecoin workstream and Nexus for instant payments) may compete for the same bank resources.