Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined MAS’s BLOOM initiative alongside nine industry participants, including Ripple, Visa and Mastercard.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has widened its BLOOM initiative to include Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand as policymaker members, marking the first extension of the programme’s regulatory backing beyond Singapore since it was launched last year. According to MAS, the move is designed to support common approaches to using digital money across borders, while still allowing for the different supervisory rules that apply in each jurisdiction.
The expansion comes as the initiative also takes in nine new industry participants, among them Ripple, Visa, Mastercard and the World Bank Group. Other newcomers include Airwallex, Maybank, Monee, Nium, ShopeePay and several existing players in digital assets and payments infrastructure. MAS said the broader group will work on how tokenised bank liabilities, regulated stablecoins and other forms of digital money can be accepted, exchanged and settled more efficiently between institutions and across markets.
The initiative focuses on three practical areas: cross-border acceptance and settlement, interoperability between different digital-money systems, and programmable controls such as identity checks, sanctions screening and transaction limits. That agenda reflects a wider regional shift. Malaysia and Thailand have both been advancing their own domestic projects around tokenised money, while Singapore has already been consulting on a stablecoin regime that would require full reserve backing and would not permit interest payments to holders.
Officials from all three central banks framed the partnership as a step towards more usable cross-border payments. Leong Sing Chiong, deputy managing director for markets and development at MAS, said the future of finance will involve multiple forms of digital money operating across different institutions and markets. Aznan Abdul Aziz, deputy governor at Bank Negara Malaysia, said the central bank sees a future where frictionless cross-border payments can be made using multiple digital monies. Dr. Daranee Saeju, deputy governor at the Bank of Thailand, said the aim is to help inform forward-looking regulatory approaches for tokenised money.
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