Malaysia and Thailand join Singapore's BLOOM digital-money project as Visa, Mastercard, Ripple and the World Bank sign on

Three Southeast Asian central banks are now working together on cross-border digital money. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said on Friday, October 23, 2026, that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined BLOOM, its project for settling cross-border payments in tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins, as policymaker members.

BLOOM, short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, is a public-private initiative launched by MAS in October 2025, per The Block and Cointelegraph, that brings policymakers, banks, payment networks and technology providers together. The three authorities will work with industry on common approaches to how digital money is accepted, exchanged and settled across borders, with three focus areas: acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability between different digital money arrangements, and programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls, MAS said.

The membership list grew too. New participants are Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group, which joins as a multilateral development bank, according to MAS. Existing members include Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Kasikornbank, OCBC, Partior, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB and Xweave.

Leong Sing Chiong, MAS deputy managing director for markets and development, said: "The future of finance will involve multiple forms of digital money operating across different institutions and markets." Bank of Thailand deputy governor Daranee Saeju said BLOOM would help it examine regulatory approaches to tokenised money, per The Block.

Ripple said in March that it would test trade payments in its RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger under BLOOM, The Block noted, and Malaysia's central bank announced three ringgit stablecoin and tokenised deposit tests for 2026 in February, per Cointelegraph. What to watch: any live pilots the three central banks announce.