Wholesale tokenization has spent two years as a controlled prototype. This week it started moving real money. Lloyds Banking Group confirmed it has completed three live tokenised deposit transactions through Project Agorá, the Bank for International Settlements initiative that is testing whether tokenised commercial bank deposits can settle cross-border payments faster and with fewer intermediate steps than today’s correspondent banking rails. CaixaBank, one of more than 40 private sector institutions in the programme, is participating alongside it. The shift from simulation to real value is the story: a BIS-convened rail for tokenised deposits is now moving from architecture papers into settled transactions between commercial banks.
From prototype to real value testing
Project Agorá is convened by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance and brings together eight central banks, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France within the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, and the Bank of Canada, with more than 40 commercial banks and financial institutions, including Lloyds and CaixaBank, exploring a shared programmable platform for tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. The programme’s own description of its goals is specific: atomic, all or nothing settlement across currencies and jurisdictions, privacy protection at both the balance and transaction level, and support for conditional and always on payments, capabilities that today’s correspondent banking messaging system was never built to offer natively.
Lloyds says its three transactions moved the initiative from prototype into what it calls real-value testing. In one, the bank’s Corporate Markets business converted Swiss francs into sterling, with Lloyds Bank providing the sterling settlement leg. The distinguishing feature was not the currency pair but the sequencing: the foreign exchange conversion, the payment, and the settlement were linked so that all three happened simultaneously, rather than as separate steps that each carry their own timing and counterparty risk. Lloyds also acted as a customer bank in two further transactions, settling in Swiss francs and euros respectively, using tokenised deposits rather than the traditional nostro and correspondent structures that route most cross-border bank transfers today.
Why simultaneous settlement matters more than the technology
Cross-border payments today typically separate FX conversion, payment instruction, and final settlement into distinct steps, each exposed to timing risk, and each requiring a bank to hold or fund a position while the other steps catch up. Collapsing those steps into a single atomic transaction removes the window in which a counterparty could default after one leg completes but before the others do, the same principal risk that has justified decades of correspondent banking infrastructure built specifically to manage it. Peter Left, Lloyds’ Head of Digital & Markets Innovation, put the milestone in exactly those terms: “Moving from prototypes to live transactions is an important step in understanding how tokenised deposits could work in real payment scenarios.”
Why banks are testing this inside a BIS-run rail, not building their own
The choice to test through Project Agorá rather than a bank-built or vendor-built alternative is itself informative. A BIS and IIF-convened platform gives participating banks central bank engagement and a shared standard from day one, rather than requiring each institution to negotiate bilateral tokenisation arrangements with every counterparty bank it wants to settle with. That mirrors the logic behind Swift’s own blockchain-based shared ledger, which Lloyds also joined as one of 17 pilot banks: global banks are converging on shared, regulator-adjacent infrastructure for tokenised value rather than each building a proprietary rail and hoping counterparties adopt it. For CaixaBank and the other Project Agorá participants, the appeal is the same. Central bank involvement keeps the settlement asset inside the regulated banking perimeter, a materially different risk profile from a non-bank stablecoin, while still delivering the always-on, conditional-payment functionality that has made stablecoins attractive to corporate treasurers in the first place.
What this means for the finance leader
For treasury and payments executives, the practical implications are still early stage but worth tracking now rather than after general availability. First, this remains real-value testing, not production rollout. Lloyds’ three transactions, and CaixaBank’s parallel participation, are proof that the settlement mechanics work with real money, not a signal that corporate clients can route payments through Project Agorá today. Second, the banks moving first, Lloyds, CaixaBank, and the roughly 40 other institutions in the programme, are likely to have a head start on tokenised deposit capability once it reaches production, which is a relevant factor for treasurers reviewing which banking relationships to deepen for cross-border and multi-currency operations. Third, the simultaneous settlement model directly targets a cost center every treasury already tracks: the funding and timing risk built into holding positions across separate FX, payment, and settlement legs. Finance leaders with meaningful Swiss franc, sterling, or euro cross-border flows through Lloyds or CaixaBank should ask their relationship teams directly what participation in Project Agorá’s real-value phase means for their own settlement timelines, and when.
What to watch next
The next signal to watch is scale: whether Project Agorá’s real-value testing expands beyond these initial transactions into higher volumes and additional currency pairs, and whether other participating banks beyond Lloyds and CaixaBank disclose their own live transactions. A parallel signal is whether the eight central banks in the programme begin discussing a timeline for broader availability, since Project Agorá, like Swift’s shared ledger, is still explicitly a pilot rather than a committed production service. Lloyds has been building toward this for over a year, including a 2025 collaboration with Aberdeen Investments and Archax on tokenised money market fund units and UK gilts used as FX trade collateral, and an earlier 2026 transaction the bank has described as the UK’s first public blockchain transaction using tokenised deposits. Project Agorá’s real-value phase is the next rung on that ladder, and the banks that move through it first are positioning themselves to set the terms of tokenised settlement before it becomes standard infrastructure rather than after.
Source: Lloyds Banking Group
