Pick a simple scenario. You are in the UK, you need to pay a supplier overseas. Today, that “one transfer” is usually a relay race: your bank checks you, messages the payment, lines up FX, routes through one or more correspondent banks, updates a chain of nostro and vostro accounts, then everyone reconciles their own records, often around cut off times and time zones. Each hop adds cost, delay, and the classic “where is my money right now?” fog.

Now replay the same payment in a tokenised settlement world. Instead of separate systems for messaging, compliance, reconciliation, FX, and settlement, the idea is that money and assets can be represented on a shared programmable platform so the transfer and the checks can happen as one integrated flow. The BIS has been very direct about the goal here: replace the complex chain of intermediaries and sequential account updates in correspondent banking with something more unified.

We keep it grounded by comparing three flavours of “digital money”, without the jargon soup:

1. Tokenised bank deposits: your commercial bank money, but represented as tokens, still sitting inside the familiar two tier system (banks plus central bank), just with faster, more automated settlement paths. Project Agorá is explicitly testing this direction by integrating tokenised deposits with tokenised wholesale central bank money on a multi currency “unified ledger” concept.

2. Stablecoins: useful in practice, but you inherit issuer and reserve quality risk. The BIS has repeatedly warned that stablecoins can fall short as “sound money” if backing and settlement assurances are uneven.

3. CBDCs: central bank money in digital form. We talk about the difference between retail and wholesale designs, and why experiments like Jura focus on safer PvP and DvP style settlement for institutions.

Practical bit to end on: what should you check before you hold any of this? We give you a simple checklist for reserves, redemption rights, who can freeze what, what “final settlement” actually means, and how much privacy you realistically get in each model. We also zoom out to the bigger question: if tokenisation makes payments faster and cheaper, who gets more power, you, banks, or the state? (Sometimes the answer is “yes”.)

This episode uses a bit of AI magic in the background to help research and structure the discussion, but if you want to do a future human interview or conversation, email podcast@beitmenotyou.online.

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