Bank for International Settlements

BIS banking services cover treasury, asset management and advisory work for central banks, monetary authorities and international organizations. Foreign exchange and gold services support the management of official reserves within that institutional customer base.

The BIS began operating in Basel in 1930, with banking services included in the founding mandate.

The BIS hosts and supports international committees that contribute analysis and standards for financial stability. The committees have their own governance arrangements, reporting lines and work agendas. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision develops international regulatory standards for banks.

Individual national authorities implement the relevant international standards through their respective frameworks. For banking teams, the distinction between a committee standard and an applicable domestic rule affects implementation planning.

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures promotes standards and recommendations for safe and efficient payment, clearing and settlement arrangements. That work connects policy cooperation with the financial infrastructure used by banks and payment providers.

Cross-border payments raise questions about different operating hours, processing chains and the information exchanged between institutions. Technology decisions in these areas require attention to settlement risk and the rules governing each participating system.

The BIS unified ledger concept brings tokenized central bank reserves, commercial bank money and financial assets into a common programmable environment. The concept concerns financial claims and their settlement relationships, while the technical design may use distributed ledger technology or another architecture.

A unified ledger can therefore be assessed through the money and assets being transferred and the conditions connecting those transfers. Project Agorá applies this line of experimentation to wholesale cross-border payments. A proposed architecture and an experimental project require separate evaluation from a permanent operational payment service.

The BIS Innovation Hub works with central banks on practical experiments addressing technology relevant to their mandates. The work covers artificial intelligence, tokenization and cybersecurity applications in central banking.

The institutional remit of the Bank for International Settlements extends beyond the BIS Innovation Hub and the project portfolio. Projects in the BIS Innovation Hub investigate technological and practical feasibility through experiments.

Project AISE is a technical proof of concept exploring responsible artificial intelligence use in supervisory analytics. The experiment uses synthetic data and retail payments supervision cases to compare different analytical approaches.

The project examines machine-readable reporting, knowledge graphs and constrained model-based analysis under comparable conditions. Financial teams evaluating related tools should ask how evidence remains traceable and how analysts review unsupported outputs. These questions connect central bank experimentation with RegTech applications across financial services.

The BIS Cyber Resilience Coordination Centre supports knowledge exchange and operational cyber resilience capabilities among central banks. The activities include specialist training, exercises and collaboration among security practitioners.

BIS Open Tech makes statistical and financial software available as reusable public goods. The software portfolio includes gingado for machine learning in economic and financial applications.