This culminated in the development of a blockchain-based prototype for digital multi-currency settlement in Phase 5. Through this project, the benefit to the industry had become clear, along with private incentives for commercialisation. With Project Ubin having paved the way, industry players are now better placed to pursue commercialisation opportunities. DBS Bank, JP Morgan and Temasek are leading the development of a digital multi-currency payments network aimed at enhancing commercial cross-border clearing and settlements globally. Looking back, this has been a great collaboration journey. MAS and the industry learnt from each other, created new knowledge, and strengthened relationships, and we created a strong ecosystem that is willing to collaborate to build better together. We will utilise the same model to explore the opportunities offered by other promising emerging technologies in future. Addressing Two Key Challenges 9. Looking ahead, central banks can play an active role in two key challenges: supporting sustainable growth through green finance, and enhancing cross-border payments to facilitate trade and investment. Let me start with sustainable growth. Harnessing innovation to support sustainable growth 10. Green finance today is hampered by challenges that reduce the incentive for investors to invest in green projects. Technology can be an enabler to overcome two of these challenges. First, to accurately verify and monitor the carbon footprint and resource consumption across an entire supply chain. This is necessary to address greenwashing and to build trust.

Multilateral connectivity is the direction that we need to go in order for crossborder payments to be optimised. 13. Jurisdictions’ digital payments infrastructure yield potential for cross-border connectivity. MAS has embarked on a pioneering journey with the Bank of Thailand to link up our respective national retail faster payment systems – PayNow in Singapore, and PromptPay in Thailand. This linkage between our two countries’ faster payment systems will go live in the middle of 2021. To achieve our eventual aim to facilitate global cross-border payments however, we need to progress towards multilateral digital connectivity. As a starting point, adoption of harmonised protocols across national digital payments systems and infrastructures are necessary. The ISO 20022 payments messaging standard is a clear example of such a protocol. The successfully-concluded hackathon presented earlier demonstrated the potential of this standard and APIs to enhance cross-border payments. Central banks need to explore the road to multilateral connectivity in cross-border payments together. 14. The future digital payments landscape is still emerging. It is thus necessary to explore multiple fronts in order to be future-ready. To this end, the Singapore Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub, with the support of MAS, is experimenting on platforms for multilateral connectivity through two of the projects that the Singapore Centre shared on earlier – the Foundational Digital Infrastructures Project based on traditional technologies, and Project Dunbar, a multilateral multi-CBDC wholesale 4/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  settlement platform. We also heard from the Hong Kong Centre two days ago about their Multiple CBDC Bridge project.