On 10 June 2024, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a detailed blueprint for Project Nexus, a platform designed to connect national instant payment systems (IPS) across borders. The project aimed to enable instant cross-border retail payments by interlinking existing domestic systems rather than building new infrastructure.
The Nexus Concept
Project Nexus proposed a multilateral approach to cross-border instant payments. Rather than requiring each pair of countries to negotiate bilateral connections - which would require n*(n-1)/2 links for n countries - Nexus provided a common gateway that each country's IPS could connect to once. The gateway would handle message translation, compliance coordination, and FX conversion.
The initial participating countries were India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand - representing some of the most advanced instant payment systems in Asia-Pacific: UPI, DuitNow, InstaPay, FAST, and PromptPay.
How It Would Work
Under the Nexus model, a consumer in Singapore using FAST could send an instant payment to a recipient in India using UPI. The payment would flow from the sender's bank through FAST, to the Nexus gateway, through UPI, and into the recipient's bank account - all within seconds.
The Nexus gateway would coordinate with FX providers to convert currencies and would handle the regulatory compliance requirements (sanctions screening, fraud checks) that each jurisdiction requires. Each country's domestic IPS would continue to operate independently; Nexus would only handle the cross-border interconnection.
Building on Bilateral Links
Nexus built on the experience of existing bilateral IPS links in the region: Singapore-Thailand (FAST-PromptPay), Singapore-India (FAST-UPI), and Malaysia-Indonesia (DuitNow-QRIS). These bilateral connections had demonstrated the technical feasibility of IPS interlinking but scaling bilaterally was not sustainable for connecting many systems.
Significance
Project Nexus represented the BIS's most concrete proposal for addressing the G20 roadmap target of faster, cheaper cross-border payments. If successful, it could create a network effect: each new country joining Nexus would gain instant connectivity to all existing members, making the platform increasingly valuable as it scaled.
In 2025, the project moved from blueprint to entity formation, with the five central banks incorporating Nexus Global Payments as a formal organization to manage the platform.
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