As part of the Saudi Central Bank’s (SAMA) pursuit to build a robust and innovative cross-border payments infrastructure in collaboration with various international financial institutions and central banks, SAMA has joined the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) mBridge project as a participant in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) platform.

The MVP platform is a multi-central bank digital currency (Wholesale CBDC) system that aims to facilitate cross-border payments between commercial banks in different jurisdictions. It is considered the first multi-wCBDC platform to reach the MVP phase of development.    

SAMA has been investigating the potential of wholesale CBDC, through the analysis of policy-related issues, to evaluate the feasibility of using wholesale CBDC to boost the effectiveness of cross-border payment and settlement between commercial banks.

In October 2020, the G20 during Saudi Arabia’s presidency agreed on a roadmap to enhance global cross-border payments, aiming to facilitate cheaper, faster, more inclusive and more transparent payment transactions. The roadmap called for an evaluation of the proposed local designs for the digital currency of several central banks and experimentation with its use in settling cross-border payments.