BLOOM: Southeast Asia's alliance for cross-border digital payments

A concrete regional initiative

On October 23, 2026, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand were officially joining BLOOM, the initiative launched in 2025 to move digital money between jurisdictions. The project builds on instant payment applications already connected across the three countries, and aims to move beyond simple QR codes to settlement in regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits, where money actually changes hands.

BLOOM presents itself as a public-private platform bringing together regulators, central banks, payment networks and technology providers. Private-sector participants include Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Airwallex, Maybank, ShopeePay and the World Bank Group. Targeted use cases cover retail payments, corporate treasury management and trade finance, with the objective of cutting settlement times from several business days to just a few seconds.

The technological and historical context

MAS has already led several flagship projects, including Project Ubin (2016–2020) on interbank settlement using distributed ledgers, followed by Project Guardian (2022), dedicated to asset tokenization. Since late 2023, the Global Layer One initiative has been working on shared infrastructure for tokenized assets, preparing the technical foundations for BLOOM. Malaysia, meanwhile, participated in the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Project Dunbar and launched a multi-CBDC platform in 2022, while Thailand developed Project Inthanon as early as 2018, followed by Inthanon-LionRock and mBridge, with pilots processing more than 22 million dollars in 2022.

These precedents show that the region already has solid experience with blockchain and instant payments. The PayNow-PromptPay connection, introduced in 2021, enabled a Singaporean consumer to pay a Thai merchant using a QR code, but final settlement still passes through correspondent banks, generating costs above 6% for a $200 transfer, well above the UN target of 3% by 2030.

Economic challenges and the outlook

BLOOM seeks to break dependence on dollar-backed stablecoins, which account for more than 99% of global supply. By encouraging locally issued regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits, the three countries aim to bring intra-Asian trade flows back into local currencies, in accordance with the regional connectivity agreement signed in 2022. This strategy should help reduce transaction fees, speed up settlement and strengthen ASEAN's monetary sovereignty.

The project still needs to move from prototype to production before the end of 2027, the deadline for the G20's cross-border payment targets: 75% of transactions in less than an hour and an average cost below 1%. If BLOOM succeeds, it could become the reference model for other regions seeking to modernize their payment infrastructure while managing stablecoin-related risks.