Project Nexus: The BIS Bid to Wire the World’s Instant Payment Rails Together

Five Central Banks Just Picked Who Builds the Pipes

On February 9, 2026, Nexus Global Payments (NGP) announced it had selected a joint venture between Malaysia’s PayNet and Singapore’s NETS as the Nexus Technical Operator (NTO), following a competitive international procurement process. The appointment is the clearest signal yet that a five-year-old research project inside the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is turning into production infrastructure.

NGP itself is young. The entity was incorporated on April 3, 2025 by five central banks — the Reserve Bank of India, Bank Negara Malaysia, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Bank of Thailand — specifically to carry Project Nexus from BIS-run pilot into a live, commercially operated payment scheme. Indonesia has not joined as a founding member; Bank Indonesia is participating only as a “special observer” during this phase, according to Fintech News Singapore’s coverage of the NGP launch.

The systems being wired together are five of Asia’s busiest domestic instant-payment rails: India’s UPI, Malaysia’s DuitNow, the Philippines’ InstaPay, Singapore’s PayNow/FAST, and Thailand’s PromptPay. Instead of each country negotiating a separate bilateral link to every other country — the current model for most cross-border retail payment corridors — Nexus proposes a single hub that any domestic instant-payment operator connects to once, then can reach every other connected country automatically.

Technical development is scheduled to begin in early 2026, with go-live targeted for 2027, NGP’s announcement states. “Our partnership with PayNet and NETS is a major milestone towards our vision for an interoperable global payments network,” NGP chief executive Andrew McCormack said in the announcement. PayNet chief executive Praveen Rajan added that the selection “reflects trust in Malaysia’s capabilities” built through its domestic DuitNow service.

How Nexus Actually Moves Money

Project Nexus began in 2022 as the BIS Innovation Hub’s first payments-sector project, built out of the Singapore Centre. The BIS spent two years running a proof-of-concept before publishing, in July 2024, a comprehensive 75-page blueprint covering the scheme’s governance framework, commercial model, and technology architecture — plus separate implementation guides for ISO 20022 messaging and API standards. In 2025 the BIS formally handed the project to the newly incorporated NGP entity to carry into live deployment, its role shifting from designer to advisor.

The design goal is speed: cross-border transfers should clear “within 60 seconds in most cases,” per the BIS’s own project description. That target isn’t arbitrary — it maps directly onto the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments, which sets an end-2027 deadline for 75% of cross-border retail payments to have funds available to the recipient within one hour, a global average retail-payment cost of no more than 1% (no corridor above 3%), and a remittance cost target of no more than 3% globally by 2030. Project Nexus is one of the flagship technical efforts meant to help the G20’s member central banks actually hit those numbers, rather than a stand-alone product.

Building the plumbing itself falls to the NTO. Endava, a publicly listed technology consultancy, confirmed it will lead the end-to-end design and engineering of the Nexus platform alongside Amazon Web Services, which supplies cloud infrastructure and AI tooling. The PayNet-NETS joint venture, as NTO, will operate the platform once live — handling compliance with international standards, cybersecurity, operational resilience, and onboarding new domestic instant-payment operators as additional countries join, per Fintech News Singapore’s report on the appointment.

For India specifically, Nexus membership is a notable structural shift. The Reserve Bank of India had already built bilateral UPI links with seven individual countries, but joining Nexus marks RBI’s first participation in a multilateral instant-payment scheme — one connection standardized against a shared rulebook instead of seven separate bespoke agreements, each with its own technical and legal terms to maintain.

What Payments and Fintech Leaders Should Do About It

1. Map Nexus against your existing correspondent-banking corridors now, not at go-live

If your institution routes retail or SME payments through any of the five founding corridors — India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand — start modeling what a sub-60-second, standardized-rulebook alternative does to your current correspondent-banking fees and float. Nexus won’t touch high-value wholesale flows first; it’s targeting retail and remittance volume, so treat this as a threat to your lowest-margin, highest-volume corridors before it’s a threat to anything else. Waiting until the 2027 go-live to run the numbers means reacting after competitors have already repriced.

2. Don’t assume “instant payments” means “instant compliance” — budget for the AML layer separately

Nexus standardizes messaging and settlement mechanics via ISO 20022, but it does not remove each country’s own AML, sanctions-screening, and FX-conversion obligations — those still sit with the domestic instant-payment operators and their participating banks. Institutions that plan around Nexus as a pure speed upgrade, without separately re-costing their compliance stack for near-real-time transaction volumes, will hit the same bottleneck that slows every other faster-payments rollout: screening that can’t keep pace with settlement.

3. Track the technical operator’s onboarding criteria, not just NGP’s press releases

The PayNet-NETS joint venture, not NGP’s board, will set the actual technical requirements for how a domestic instant-payment operator or licensed participant connects — API specifications, uptime requirements, liquidity pre-funding rules. Those operational details, expected to firm up as development proceeds through 2026, will determine real integration cost and timeline far more than the high-level scheme announcements. Assign someone to monitor NTO technical publications directly rather than relying on secondary coverage.

Where This Fits in the G20’s 2027 Deadline

Project Nexus is a test case for whether the G20’s 2020 cross-border payments roadmap survives contact with real infrastructure. The roadmap set ambitious 2027 targets for cost, speed, and access years before anyone had built a working multilateral instant-payment hub at scale — Nexus is effectively the first attempt to prove the model can work beyond a handful of bilateral pilots. If the PayNet-NETS build hits its 2027 go-live and the five founding corridors see real cost and speed improvements, expect the BIS and FSB to push the same hub-and-spoke architecture toward other regional blocs, since the G20’s remittance-cost target explicitly runs through 2030, well past this first cohort’s launch. If the build slips or the economics don’t clear for smaller participating banks, Nexus becomes a cautionary data point for every other regional interoperability initiative watching from the sidelines — including the growing number of continental and regional payment schemes elsewhere that face the same bilateral-link cost problem Nexus is trying to solve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Project Nexus — Bank for International Settlements
• Nexus: A Blueprint for Instant Cross-Border Payments — BIS Publication
• Nexus Global Payments Appoints Technical Operator
• Endava Confirmed as Technical Partner for Nexus Global Payments — Endava Investor Relations
• Nexus Global Payments Appoints PayNet-NETS Joint Venture as Technical Operator — Fintech News Singapore
• Reserve Bank of India Joins Project Nexus — Global Finance Magazine
• Nexus Global Payments Officially Launches — Fintech News Singapore
• G20 Targets for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments — Financial Stability Board