Central Bank Digital Currencies: Swiss National Bank collaborates with Banque de France and BIS

“It is essential for central banks to stay on top of technological developments. The Swiss National Bank is already investigating the settlement of tokenised assets with wholesale CBDC as part of Project Helvetia. We are looking forward to expanding this analysis to a cross-border context by participating in this exciting initiative,” said Andréa M. Maechler, Member of the Governing Board, Swiss National Bank.

The experiment (“Project Jura”) will explore cross-border settlement with two wholesale CBDCs and a French digital financial instrument on a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. It will involve the exchange of the financial instrument against a euro wholesale CBDC through a delivery versus payment (DvP) settlement mechanism and the exchange of a euro wholesale CBDC against a Swiss franc wholesale CBDC through a payment versus payment (PvP) settlement mechanism. These transactions will be settled between banks domiciled in France and in Switzerland, respectively.

BIS Innovation Hub

“The G20 has made enhancing cross-border payments a priority and laid out a multi-year roadmap to coordinate efforts. The experiment contributes to this work by exploring how wholesale CBDC could enhance speed, efficiency and transparency in cross-border use cases. The BIS Innovation Hub facilitates central bank experimentation into technological public goods. We are excited to join this project, which complements other CBDC experiments that we are working on,” said Benoît Cœuré, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub.

The Swiss National Bank press release: Swiss National Bank, Banque de France and Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub collaborate for experiment in cross-border wholesale CBDC (snb.ch)