AML / Financial Crime in International

Key dates

2026-06-23

BIS published the press release and pre-released the relevant Annual Economic Report 2026 chapter

2026-06-28

BIS plans to publish the full Annual Economic Report 2026 and the BIS Annual Report 2025/26

Suggested considerations

• Compliance teams may wish to assess whether any stablecoin-related business line depends on assumptions about parity redeemability, interoperability, or reserve quality that BIS identifies as weak points.
• Firms involved in tokenisation initiatives may wish to map their proposed operating model against the two-tier framework BIS endorses, especially where central bank money, commercial bank money, and tokenised assets would interact on programmable platforms.
• Banks and payment providers may wish to review funding, liquidity, and settlement assumptions for any products that could materially increase stablecoin usage or tokenised-money circulation.
• Crypto-facing firms may wish to examine whether current controls for financial crime, ledger interoperability, and customer redemption rights would satisfy a more stringent supervisory approach if stablecoins are used at scale.
• Market infrastructure and capital markets firms may wish to consider whether a unified-ledger or tokenised-deposit architecture could reduce reconciliation and settlement frictions in cross-border or wholesale workflows.
• Risk and policy teams may wish to monitor BIS follow-on publications, including the full Annual Economic Report 2026, for more detailed supervisory or implementation signals when it is published on 2026-06-28.

What changed

The publication is a policy signal, not a binding rule. BIS argues that tokenisation—digital representation of assets on programmable platforms—can be embedded in the current monetary architecture, where central banks provide the monetary anchor and commercial banks provide services to the public, to enable programmable payments and other efficiencies. BIS also states that current stablecoin designs fall short of the key properties of money, particularly singleness, meaning the ability to redeem different forms of money exactly at par for central bank money.