Bank of France, Swiss National Bank Begin Cross-Border CBDC Experiment

The banks will experiment with cross-border settlements of two wholesale CBDCs and a French digital financial instrument on a distributed ledger technology platform.

By Tanzeel Akhtar

Jun 10, 2021 at 11:37 a.m. UTC

Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 1:09 p.m. UTC

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The Bank of France and the Swiss National Bank are starting a joint cross-border central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiment dubbed “Project Jura.” It will focus on the bank-to-bank wholesale lending market, not public transactions.

In an announcement Thursday, the Swiss National Bank said it will work with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and a “private sector consortium” led by Accenture, to experiment with wholesale CBDCs for cross-border settlement.
The private sector consortium of companies includes the Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse, Natixis, R3, SIX Digital Exchange, and UBS.
The Swiss National Bank said it has already been investigating tokenized assets with wholesale CBDC.
Project Jura will experiment with cross-border settlements of two wholesale CBDCs and a French digital financial instrument on a distributed ledger technology platform.
The transaction will involve the exchange of the financial instrument against a euro wholesale CBDC through a delivery (rather than payment) settlement mechanism, and the exchange of a euro wholesale CBDC against a Swiss franc wholesale CBDC through a payment versus payment settlement mechanism, said the Swiss National Bank.
The transactions will be settled between banks domiciled in France and in Switzerland.

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