About the BIS Innovation Hub
Updated 14 January 2025
The BIS Innovation Hub aims to foster international collaboration on innovative financial technology within the central banking community. Our mandate is threefold:
- to identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends in technology affecting central banking
- to develop public goods in the technology space geared towards improving the functioning of the global financial system
- to serve as a focal point for a network of central bank experts on innovation
BIS Innovation Hub projects are experimental in nature, for the purpose of investigating technological and practical feasibility.
2025-26 work programme
- At the start of 2025, the Innovation Hub's project portfolio consisted of 26 active projects and 31 projects completed since its establishment in 2019. We started 16 new projects in 2024.
- Our first two new projects in 2025 will explore AI-based tools supporting supervision and green finance. We will look to identify synergies among our existing project portfolio.
- Our work programme is focused on strengthening horizon scanning activities to track new technological developments and identify gaps for further central bank innovation.
- We will deepen collaboration on technological innovation among our network of central bank experts.
Our work programme underscores our commitment to explore the art of the possible, building on the experience gained in the first five years. We will continue to share insights with the central banking community and help them to harness technology to fulfil their vital role in maintaining economic and financial stability for the public good.
The current work programme reflects the start of a more mature phase of the Innovation Hub after it marked its fifth anniversary, with seven centres operating worldwide, 31 projects completed and another 26 under way.
Highlights include:
- Enhancing horizon scanning capabilities to identify trends and developments in financial technology that could have a meaningful impact on central banks
- Exploring synergies between different projects and themes, focusing on developing solutions to support central banks in their core responsibilities of the provision of money, monetary policy, payments infrastructure, financial stability, and regulation and supervision
- Launching two new projects using AI-enabled tools:
- Project AISE (Artificial Intelligence Supervisor Enhancer) proposes to develop a virtual assistant for financial supervisors capable of automating key tasks and enhancing on-site supervision.
- Project Gaia will build on the already developed proof of concept, which addressed the specific use case of climate-related risk analysis, by extending it to other uses cases within and beyond the theme of green finance
- Further developing ongoing projects such as Project Agora in which partners from seven central banks and over 40 private sector financial institutions are exploring how tokenisation can enhance wholesale cross-border payments.
- Exploring the potential of central bank community-driven ecosystems in the creation of code and other solutions that can add value to the central banking world
Some of our more advanced projects have shown they may hold promise for deployment beyond the conceptual work undertaken with the BIS. With all BIS projects, implementation is ultimately a decision for partner central banks. In 2024, the Innovation Hub announced that two significant projects developed with central bank partners would be handed over to those partners. Project Nexus moved towards live implementation by the partner central banks together with their countries' instant payment providers. Project mBridge, which has successfully reached the minimum viable product stage, is being handed over to the central bank partners.
- Upcoming projects focus on safety and security, green finance and next generation financial infrastructures.
- Additional work on advanced data analytics and tokenisation are also planned.
- The Innovation Hub completed 12 projects in 2023 and eight more are ongoing.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) today announced the first batch of six new projects in its 2024 Innovation Hub work programme, including experimentations on cyber security, fighting financial crime, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and green finance.
As the financial industry adopts new technologies, we need to understand how they affect central banks' core work. Central banks are actively examining the potential for novel technologies to help deliver on their mandates. After completing 12 projects in 2023, we are looking forward to another busy year ahead, in collaboration with central banks, international organisations and other partners.
Tokenisation is an important area where we have already launched one project and are planning more initiatives. Safety is another crucial area. We need to find ways to improve the efficiency of services like payments, without ever compromising on security, following the principle set by the G20 countries.
New projects
Project Leap, from the Eurosystem Centre, starts its phase II, aiming to "quantum-proof" payment systems, after successfully establishing a quantum-safe communication channel between the central banks of France and Germany in its first phase. Now, the project will show how a payment system can be protected from the potential threat of quantum computers, which may be able to break the encryption systems used nowadays to protect financial transactions.
Project Symbiosis, from the Hong Kong Centre, will test the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data technologies for supply chain disclosure and adaptation. The project will seek to improve the tracking of so-called Scope 3 emissions, which are less well defined and harder to track. It will do this by working with the private sector and civil society organisations in creating AI-supported methodologies for emissions disclosures by small and medium-sized companies.
Also from the Hong Kong Centre, Project Aurum enters a new phase in which it will study the privacy of payments in retail CBDCs. The goal is to leverage expertise from academia and privacy regulators to advance central banks' understanding of privacy in the design of CBDC systems.
Led by the Singapore Centre, Project NGFS Data Directory 2.0 will rebuild the data directory platform of the Network for Greening the Financial System. While the directory's first version was built to systematically identify and map climate-related data gaps, the revised version will aim to facilitate searching and browsing through data sources, making the directory more usable as a public resource.
The recently started Project Promissa tests the feasibility of tokenising promissory notes, financial instruments that help fund multilateral development banks and other international financial institutions. In many cases, these are still paper-based. The project will use distributed ledger technology to simplify their management and transparency. It is conducted jointly with the Swiss National Bank and the World Bank, with the International Monetary Fund as observer.
Project Hertha, launched by the London Centre, aims to test the use of network analytics to help identify financial crime patterns in payment systems. It will map current and emerging financial crime typologies in real-time payment systems, drawing upon lessons from instant payment systems and digital asset networks.
In just over four years, the Innovation Hub has carried out almost 30 projects in various areas and has gone from a handful of people to a 90-strong staff. I am very proud of the work we have done. However, technology will not slow down for anyone, and digitalisation affects everyone. It is our job to make sure technology serves economically meaningful activities.
All these new initiatives will be added to existing projects that various Innovation Hub Centres will continue to develop this year: FuSSE, Gaia, Mandala, Nexus phase IV, Pyxtrial, Rio and Viridis.
During 2023, the Innovation Hub concluded projects Atlas, Aurora, Dynamo, Icebreaker, Leap Phase I, Mariana, Meridian, Nexus Phase II, Polaris, Rosalind Phases I and II, Sela and Tourbillon.
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