While domestic payments have seen significant improvement in many jurisdictions in recent years, cross-border payments still face challenges such as high costs, low speed, limited access and insufficient transparency. The G20 has made it a priority to enhance cross-border payments and, in response to this call for action, the BIS Innovation Hub is coordinating experiments on how this might be done.1, 2 Many central banks are exploring retail central bank digital currencies (rCBDCs).

Some of these projects are at the proof-of-concept (PoC) stage, while others are in pilot trials and a handful have reached more mature phases.3 The requirements for interlinking these (domestic) rCBDC systems to support cross-border payments should be considered at the outset so that cross-border payments can be enabled when appropriate.

Project Icebreaker explores a specific way to interlink rCBDC systems (the hub-andspoke solution) with several additional features that would allow the Icebreaker model to be readily scaled up. In addition, these features would promote simplicity and interoperability, reduce settlement risk, and foster competition and transparency for cross-border rCBDC payments.