The path to the next-generation monetary and financial system lies in safeguarding trust in money: BIS
Digital innovation is transforming finance, potentially enabling greater competition and efficiency in payment systems and financial intermediation. However, it also poses new macro-financial challenges and raises the broader question of how to preserve trust in money in the digital age...
BIS published a 23 June 2026 press release summarizing a special chapter of its Annual Economic Report 2026 on the future monetary and financial system. The message for compliance teams is that BIS favors integrating tokenisation into the existing two-tier system rather than treating stablecoins as the core monetary instrument, because current stablecoin designs do not sufficiently preserve trust, singleness, redeemability, or financial integrity.
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.
Compliance impact
The publication has strategic significance but no direct binding compliance obligations. Its practical impact is that supervisors and policymakers may increasingly scrutinize stablecoin redeemability, reserve quality, financial crime controls, and interoperability, while encouraging tokenised-money models that preserve central bank money as the anchor.
References
- [1] bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm
- [2] globalgovernmentfinance.com/bis-releases-game-changing-bl... third-party
- [3] linkedin.com/posts/bis_digital-innovation-is-reshaping-fi... third-party
- [4] bantamjoe.com/2025/06/25/the-bis-next-generation-monetary... third-party
- [5] bispodcast.libsyn.com/bis-media-briefing-the-next-generat... third-party
- [6] linkedin.com/posts/bis_the-next-generation-monetary-and-f... third-party
- [7] linkedin.com/posts/nocash-events_bis-next-generation-mone... third-party
AI-generated analysis. May contain errors or omissions — verify with the original BIS source before acting. Full disclaimer.