INTEL: Malaysia and Thailand join Singapore’s BLOOM digital money initiative
Malaysia and Thailand’s central banks have joined Singapore’s BLOOM initiative to advance cross-border payments involving regulated stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced on October 23, 2026, that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand had joined the initiative as policymaker members.
The three central banks will work with financial institutions and payment providers to develop common approaches for accepting, exchanging and settling digital money across different countries and financial networks.
Visa, Mastercard and Ripple join the initiative
BLOOM has also expanded its industry participation to include Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Airwallex, Maybank, Monee, Nium, ShopeePay and the World Bank Group.
Existing participants include Circle, Coinbase, JPMorgan, DBS, Standard Chartered and Stripe.
The expanded collaboration brings together central banks, major payment networks and cryptocurrency companies to address practical barriers to international digital money transfers.
How the cross-border payment framework will work
The initiative focuses on three areas:
- Cross-border settlement: Establishing common approaches for transferring and settling different forms of digital money between institutions and countries.
- Interoperability: Enabling separate payment networks and digital money systems to work together.
- Transaction safeguards: Incorporating identity verification, sanctions screening and other compliance controls.
MAS says the framework could reduce the need for financial institutions to establish separate arrangements with every counterparty or market, potentially lowering implementation costs and accelerating deployment.
BLOOM was introduced in October 2025. The latest expansion represents broader regulatory and industry cooperation, rather than the launch of a new public payment service.
No commercial rollout date was announced.
