Malaysia and Thailand just joined Singapore's BLOOM: the plan to make stablecoin and tokenised money cross borders

What is BLOOM? It is Singapore's attempt to make digital money move between countries as easily as it moves inside one. On 23 October, the Monetary Authority of Singapore announced that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined the initiative as policymaker members, a step that turns a Singapore project into a three country effort, according to the MAS announcement.

The industry list grew too. Nine new participants joined, including Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Maybank and the World Bank Group, as reported by Ledger Insights. For anyone who sends money between Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, or runs a business that does, this is one of the most important payment stories of the year.

What does BLOOM actually do?

BLOOM is a public private partnership. Its goal is to develop common approaches for using digital money across borders, so that a payment can move from one form of money to another without every bank and fintech signing a separate deal with every other one. The digital money in question is tokenised bank deposits, which are ordinary bank balances recorded on a blockchain style ledger, and regulated stablecoins, which are tokens fully backed by cash and short term assets.

The work is organised into three strands. The first covers acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions. The second covers interoperability between different digital money arrangements. The third covers programmable controls such as identity verification and sanctions screening. MAS says the aim is to reduce the need for financial institutions to set up separate arrangements with each counterparty or market.

That problem is real. For the foreseeable future there will be several tokenised deposit networks, several regulated stablecoins and several card and fintech rails, and a single cross border payment may cross more than one of them. Today, every handoff between two forms of money rests on a bilateral agreement covering legal terms, technical integration and compliance, and those agreements do not scale.

Who is in BLOOM now?

The membership reads like a map of who wants to own the next generation of payments. Existing industry members include Singapore's three big banks, DBS, OCBC and UOB, global banks JPMorgan and Standard Chartered, stablecoin issuers Circle, Anchorage Digital and StraitsX, payment companies Nium, Airwallex and Stripe, and the interbank settlement network Partior.

The new joiners broaden the picture. Visa and Mastercard bring the card networks that already dominate consumer payments in the region. Ripple brings a firm built around cross border settlement. Maybank brings Malaysia's largest bank, and the World Bank Group brings a development lens that matters for smaller economies.

When three central banks agree on the rules for digital money, the region stops building payment islands and starts building bridges.

The central bank members are the real news. Without Malaysian and Thai regulators at the table, any cross border model built in Singapore would still need to be renegotiated at each border. With them, the three governments can work toward rules that recognise each other's digital money from the start.

Why Malaysia and Thailand joined now

Both countries have been building their own digital money plans. Bank Negara Malaysia onboarded pilot projects in February 2026 to test ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits under its Digital Asset Innovation Hub. The Bank of Thailand has said it plans a baht stablecoin that must be fully backed one to one by baht reserves, with the first phase limited to financial institutions for settlement.

Joining BLOOM lets each central bank shape the regional standard instead of adapting to it later. It also fits a wider pattern of cooperation. Bank Negara Malaysia agreed this month to explore cross border stablecoin use with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, which we covered in our report on Hong Kong and Malaysia's stablecoin workstream.

For Thailand, there is also a practical motive. The Bank of Thailand has been cracking down on unauthorised cross border payments, including peer to peer yuan transfers through foreign wallets. A regulated, standards based route for digital money gives it a legal alternative to the grey channels it is trying to close.

What it means for payments in Southeast Asia

BLOOM sits alongside other regional projects rather than replacing them. Project Nexus links national instant payment systems such as PayNow, DuitNow and PromptPay, while BLOOM focuses on tokenised money and stablecoins. We compared the competing networks in our report on the race to rewire Asia's cross border payments.

For businesses, the potential gains are faster settlement, lower costs and fewer intermediaries. The practical changes to watch include:

• Cross border settlement between Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand in tokenised deposits or regulated stablecoins
• Common standards for identity checks and sanctions screening built into the money itself
• Card networks such as Visa and Mastercard connecting their rails to tokenised money
• Local banks such as Maybank offering digital money services to corporate clients
• Fewer bilateral deals needed for fintechs to operate across the three markets

None of this happens overnight. BLOOM is a framework for experiments and common approaches, not a live payment system, and the hardest questions, from legal recognition to liquidity management, still need answers.

What comes next for BLOOM

The next milestones will be trials. MAS has invited banks, financial institutions and settlement network operators to test models under BLOOM, and with two more central banks involved, those trials can now span real corridors rather than staying inside Singapore. Watch for announcements around the Singapore FinTech Festival in November, when MAS traditionally showcases progress.

Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam are the obvious candidates to join next. Each has large remittance and trade flows with Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and each is developing its own rules for stablecoins and tokenised assets. A BLOOM that covers the whole of ASEAN would be a genuine regional payment standard.

For now, the message is clear. Southeast Asia's central banks are choosing to cooperate on digital money rather than compete, and the private sector, from card giants to stablecoin issuers, wants a seat in the room where the rules are written.

Malaysia and Thailand's decision to join BLOOM turns Singapore's digital money project into a genuine regional effort. With card networks, stablecoin issuers and major banks already inside, the initiative now has the regulators and the industry players needed to design cross border digital money that works from day one. The trials that follow will show whether Southeast Asia can build shared payment rails before fragmented ones take hold.