BSP Completes Testing for Project Agila

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and participating financial institutions (FIs) have completed the testing for Project Agila, which will allow FIs to transfer funds to each other even during off-business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays. These transactions can safely be supported by open-source distributed ledger technology through the 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.