Project Nexus wants to let any country’s instant payment system talk to any other country’s with a single connection. It’s not live yet, 2027 is the real target and the membership list looks nothing like the “de-dollarization bloc” narrative around it. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia just walked away from the BIS’s other flagship interlinking project entirely. Here’s what’s actually built, who’s actually in, and why “no real choice” is a harder claim to sustain than it sounds.

What Project Nexus Actually Is

Project Nexus is a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub initiative specifically its Singapore Centre designed to solve a real, structural problem like connecting domestic instant payment systems (IPS) across countries without forcing every pair of nations to build a custom bilateral bridge. Today, if Country A’s instant-payment rail wants to talk to Country B’s, someone has to negotiate a bespoke legal, technical, and compliance framework for that one relationship, and repeat the entire process for Country C. Nexus proposes a single hub model instead, a domestic system connects once, and gains reach to every other connected country’s rails through that one link, with Nexus handling message translation, FX matching, and baseline AML/sanctions screening automatically.

The Timeline

Project Nexus began in 2021 as an experimental BIS concept, with early prototype testing connecting the Eurosystem’s TIPS, Malaysia’s RPP, and Singapore’s FAST systems using test data only no real money moved in this phase.

On July 1, 2024, BIS published the completed blueprint for Nexus’s next phase, and the Reserve Bank of India formally joined as a founding member alongside Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, the “Core Five.” Indonesia joined as a special observer, not a full member, at this stage.

In March 2025, the five founding central banks incorporated Nexus Global Payments (NGP) in Singapore, a dedicated not-for-profit entity to operationalize and govern the scheme going forward, formally taking the project out of BIS’s hands.

On April 28, 2025, NGP launched a tender to appoint a technical operator to actually build and run the platform.

As of today, NGP is operational as a governing entity, with the ECB/Eurosystem (via TIPS) and Bank Indonesia continuing in special observer status, and a signed MOU with FLAR (the Latin American Reserve Fund) to explore future connectivity. Target go-live is 2027.

What’s real and confirmed, a governing entity exists, a technical operator tender has run, founding membership is locked in, and India’s UPI which handles over 400 million transactions daily gives the network genuinely enormous potential scale once live. What’s not yet real are actual live cross-border payment volume through Nexus. This is closer to advanced pre-launch infrastructure than an operating global payment rail.

Who’s Actually In

The founding five, with their national instant-payment systems: Reserve Bank of India (UPI), Bank Negara Malaysia (DuitNow), Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (InstaPay), Monetary Authority of Singapore (PayNow/FAST), and Bank of Thailand (PromptPay). Special observers: Bank Indonesia and the ECB/Eurosystem (TIPS). A signed MOU, not membership, with FLAR for future Latin American connectivity.

Of the five founding members, exactly one (India) is a BRICS country the rest are ASEAN economies with no particular anti-Western alignment, and a special observer seat is held by the European Central Bank itself. This is much more accurately described as a Southeast Asia-anchored payments consortium with growing Western institutional engagement than a bloc built to route around Western finance.

The Africa Gap

Africa is absent from Nexus’s core, expansion, or observer tiers. Africa has instead built its own comparable infrastructure independently, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), backed by Afreximbank, designed to settle intra-African trade in local currencies without routing through external clearing houses. Nothing in the public record indicates Africa was deliberately excluded rather than simply not prioritized in Nexus’s founding partnerships, the more likely explanation is that Africa had its own regional infrastructure priority already underway.

mBridge and the Saudi Exit

Project Nexus’s most useful comparison point is mBridge, a different BIS-incubated project (multi-CBDC wholesale settlement, not retail instant-payment interlinking), and one whose recent history is directly relevant here.

mBridge launched in 2021 through BIS’s Hong Kong Centre, developed with the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE. It reached “minimum viable product” stage in mid-2024, at which point BIS withdrew (October 2024) and handed the project to its participating central banks then-BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens stated explicitly that mBridge was not built as a BRICS platform and that participants would need to comply with international sanctions regardless. Saudi Arabia joined as a full participant in June 2024, completed its own proof-of-concept by May 2025, and as reported by the Financial Times six days ago has now formally exited the project, with SAMA describing the departure as its planned original timeline.

Both BIS’s 2024 exit and Saudi Arabia’s 2026 exit have been tied by some reporting to pressure from the Trump administration, linked to earlier discussions about mBridge potentially evolving into a “BRICS Bridge” encompassing sanctioned states like Russia. mBridge continues under China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE (with Macau going live on the platform earlier in 2026) per an Atlantic Council figure cited by PYMNTS, the platform had processed 4,047 transactions worth $55.49 billion as of November 2025, with the digital renminbi accounting for roughly 95% of that volume.

Saudi Arabia’s clean, low-drama exit after a planned proof-of-concept is real evidence against a “join or face permanent commercial isolation” framing of this infrastructure. It looks much more like what SAMA itself describes it as, a bounded technology trial that concluded on schedule, with Saudi Arabia keeping other options open it separately partnered with Ripple via Riyad Bank’s Jeel unit in January 2026. Genuine optionality exists, at least for economically significant players with alternatives.

How Commercial Banks Interact With These Systems

Neither Nexus nor mBridge is retail-facing infrastructure a commercial bank’s customers touch directly both operate as two-tier systems. Central banks manage the underlying settlement ledger or hold the wholesale digital currency, approved commercial banks get access nodes or permissions to actually transact. During mBridge’s pilot phases, dozens of commercial banks including HSBC and Standard Chartered were onboarded to test real-value cross-border corporate payments under this model.

For a commercial bank, three conditions gate participation: central bank has to be a participant or have an interoperable arrangement; banks have to build to the platform’s compliance rulebook, with AML/CFT checks increasingly embedded directly into smart contract or DLT logic; and, for CBDC-based platforms like mBridge specifically, they need to hold accounts or tokens of the relevant wholesale CBDCs.

For banks in non-participating jurisdictions, there’s genuinely no gateway, a structural fact, not a choice. But for banks in participating jurisdictions, “choice” is a normal competitive calculation, not geopolitical coercion. If domestic market moves to instant, cheaper cross-border rails and they don’t connect, they lose corporate clients to competitors who did the same dynamic playing out with Pontes in Europe.

The “Financial Control Grid” Framing Doesn’t Hold Up

The idea that this infrastructure is building toward “absolute, friction-free systemic control”, a closing perimeter that makes non-participation impossible overstates both the coordination and the intent actually visible in the record.

The institutions involved don’t behave like a unified control apparatus. BIS’s own leadership went out of its way to publicly reject the idea that mBridge was built to help BRICS states evade sanctions, and BIS voluntarily exited mBridge once it matured rather than retaining control, hard to square with a deliberate consolidation-of-control narrative. The Saudi mBridge exit is live, recent, real-world evidence that participation is genuinely reversible for a state with sufficient economic weight and alternatives.

The reality is embedding AML/sanctions screening directly into transaction-layer code, rather than handling it through slower, discretionary manual review, is a genuine shift toward automated, less negotiable compliance enforcement. That’s worth tracking closely. But “automated enforcement of existing sanctions law” and “, a deliberately engineered architecture of absolute geopolitical control” are different claims, and the evidence supports the former far more clearly than the latter.

This is a gradual, still-contested hardening of compliance-by-default in cross-border payments not a finished or inevitable “closing perimeter.”

Nexus Global Payments exists as an incorporated entity with a real founding-member roster, a completed technical blueprint, a signed observer relationship with the ECB, and India’s UPI as its anchor member, targeting a 2027 go-live. What’s not yet real is the actual live cross-border payment volume through the platform. Separately, mBridge shows both halves of this story at once real, meaningful transaction volume ($55.49 billion processed) alongside a clean, voluntary Saudi exit that complicates any narrative of inescapable lock-in. The infrastructure shift is real and significant. It’s also moving slower, and leaving more genuine optionality on the table, than either the “de-dollarization is here” coverage or the “closing perimeter of control” framing suggests.

This analysis reflects official BIS, Bank Negara Malaysia, and Global Finance Magazine sources, and reporting from the Financial Times (via KuCoin, Business Standard, Ledger Insights, crypto.news, and Coinpaprika), Payment Labs, and Global Government Finance, current as of September 26, 2026.