Project Promissa is a joint experiment that aims to build a platform for digital tokenised promissory notes and allows a member nation to have a complete overview of all outstanding notes with different international financial institutions
Project Promissa is a digital tokenisation project. (Credit: Scott Graham on Unsplash)
BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre, a part of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), together with the Swiss National Bank and the World Bank, has launched Project Promissa.
Project Promissa is a joint experiment that aims to build a proof of concept (PoC) of a platform for digital tokenised financial instruments, including promissory notes.
According to BIS Innovation Hub, several international financial institutions, including multilateral development banks, are partly funded by financial instruments known as promissory notes.
Currently, member nations are being provided with operational controls to make subscription and contribution payments to institutions like the World Bank.
Most of the promissory notes are paper-based, and the custody of outstanding promissory notes can be digitised to address operational challenges and enhance efficiency.
Through Project Promissa, BIS Innovation Hub, the Swiss National Bank, and the World Bank aim to create a platform for digital tokenised promissory notes.
The International Monetary Fund is also participating in Project Promissa as an observer.
Project Promissa will leverage distributed ledger technology to simplify the management of the notes and provide a single source of truth for all counterparties throughout the notes’ lifecycles.
It allows a member nation, with its central bank serving as the designated custodian, to have a complete overview of all outstanding notes with different international financial institutions.
Simultaneously, international financial institutions, such as the multilateral development banks, can see the outstanding notes held by different central banks.
Recently, BIS Innovation Hub has launched Project Hertha, to identify financial crime patterns while preserving user privacy within a real-time payment system.
Project Hertha is a collaboration between the BIS Innovation Hub’s London Centre and the Bank of England.
It is designed to explore how network analytics could help identify financial crime patterns, whilst utilising a minimum set of data points, said BIS Innovation Hub.
The project will map current and emerging financial crime typologies in real-time payment systems, drawing upon lessons from instant payment systems and digital asset networks.
Also, it will build a synthetic dataset to test the way the typologies could be precisely identified while reducing false positives.