The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and participating financial institutions (FIs) finished testing of Project Agila, which will enable FIs to transfer funds to each other even outside regular business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays.
The transactions can be securely supported by open-source distributed ledger technology through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Project Agila is a proof-of-concept of the BSP’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) at the wholesale level. The evaluation with FIs covered functional, performance, security, exploratory, end-to-end, and programmability testing.
“Wholesale CBDCs are expected to enhance liquidity management, reduce settlement risks, and support financial stability,” BSP Governor Eli M. Remolona Jr. said. “Insights from this project will guide the BSP’s CBDC roadmap. Our goal is to leverage new technologies to further enhance the efficiency and resilience of the national payment system,” he added.
CBDCs are digital money denominated in the national unit of account and are direct liabilities of the central bank. Wholesale CBDCs may be used by commercial banks and other FIs for interbank payments, securities transactions, and cross-border payments.
Project Agila aims to help the BSP and participating FIs explore and test the potential of CBDCs, while evaluating if this technology can help improve the country’s large-value payment system.
