The interbank settlement network landscape: Partior, Fnality, RLN, and mBridge

A new generation of settlement networks is being built to move money between institutions without the relay chain of correspondent banking. Four names come up in almost every serious conversation: Partior, Fnality, the Regulated Liability Network, and Project mBridge. They are routinely lumped together, and they should not be, because they differ on the most important question in settlement: what, exactly, is the money that moves.

This page takes each in turn, on the public record, and then looks at what the pattern means for an institution deciding where to place its bets.

Partior: commercial bank money on a shared ledger

Partior was announced in April 2021 by DBS, J.P. Morgan, and Temasek, growing out of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Ubin, with Standard Chartered investing in 2022. It is a shared-ledger network for wholesale payments built on digitised commercial bank money: balances on the ledger are liabilities of its settlement banks, and settlement is atomic, with the network advertising 24/7 payment-versus-payment FX settlement with guaranteed finality.

By its own timeline, Partior went live with commercial flows of USD, EUR, and SGD in 2023. Its Series B raised more than $60 million in July 2024, led by Peak XV Partners, closing at $80 million that November when Deutsche Bank joined as a strategic investor; Deutsche Bank completed its first euro-denominated cross-border payment on the network in September 2025, with DBS as beneficiary bank. Banks named on the network include DBS, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Emirates NBD, and NH NongHyup. Partior publishes no volume figures.

Fnality: central bank money, held in omnibus accounts

Fnality International was created in June 2019 as the commercialisation of the Utility Settlement Coin project, with a £50 million Series A from fourteen founding shareholders including Santander, BNY Mellon, Barclays, UBS, State Street, and Nasdaq. Its design goal is the strongest form of settlement asset available: funds held at the central bank. The Sterling Fnality Payment System, live since 14 December 2023, settles in balances backed one-for-one by funds in an omnibus account within the Bank of England’s RTGS service, and was granted settlement finality designation in December 2024.

Fnality raised a $136 million Series C in September 2025, led by WisdomTree, Bank of America, Citi, KBC Group, Temasek, and Tradeweb, with the proceeds aimed at expansion to further major currencies and at settlement interoperability with stablecoins and tokenised deposits. It is backed by more than twenty of the world’s largest financial institutions, and its earmarking capability, developed with Santander, Lloyds, and UBS, brings conditionality to funds in the sterling system: institutions can program funds to move only in exchange for a specified asset or on a defined market event. Like Partior, Fnality publishes no volume figures.

The Regulated Liability Network: a testbed, then a pilot

The RLN began as a concept from Citi’s Tony McLaughlin: one shared network on which regulated liabilities of many kinds, tokenised commercial bank deposits, wholesale central bank money, and regulated stablecoins, could settle together. The idea has been influential well beyond its own projects; it is widely credited with inspiring the BIS’s unified ledger concept.

As infrastructure, it has so far lived as experiments. The New York Fed’s Innovation Center ran a US proof of concept and published findings in July 2023: the architecture delivered settlement finality and near-real-time simultaneous settlement, and the legal workstream found no insuperable legal impediments under existing US frameworks. The NYIC was equally clear that it committed to no future phases. The UK ran an experimentation phase with eleven members including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Santander UK, Mastercard, and Visa, concluding in September 2024 that programmable payments worked and that UK law was flexible enough to support implementation. That work now has a live successor: a UK Finance pilot delivering the first UK transactions in tokenised sterling deposits, with six major UK banks, running to mid-2026.

Project mBridge: the multi-CBDC platform

mBridge is the central-bank project among the four: a common platform for instant cross-border payments built by the BIS Innovation Hub with the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE, with Saudi Arabia joining in 2024, on which participating central banks issue and settle their own digital currencies. It ran a real-value pilot in 2022 and reached minimum viable product stage in mid-2024, at which point it had 31 observing members including the ECB, IMF, and World Bank.

Then, in October 2024, the BIS handed the project to its partners and left. Agustín Carstens, the BIS General Manager, was blunt about why and why not: mBridge was “not the ‘BRICS bridge’”, he said that October, and also “not mature enough to start operating; it is many years away from that”. The platform continues under its five central bank owners. Reporting in May 2026 put its processed volume at roughly $55.5 billion across more than 4,000 transactions, with about 95% settled in digital yuan, which would make it, in practice, a renminbi-denominated settlement rail for China-Gulf trade; those figures come from a single Forbes report and have no primary-source confirmation.

The pattern, and the incumbent’s answer

Set side by side, the four networks share a shape and differ on substance. All are membership consortia: banks or central banks own the network, and access comes through joining. Each settles one kind of money: commercial bank money on Partior, central bank money on Fnality, tokenised deposits in the RLN’s successor pilot, central bank digital currencies on mBridge. And none of them interoperates with the others; the only published connective work is at the technical-standards level, such as Fnality contributing its settlement protocol principles to an open-source interoperability project.

The incumbent has noticed. In September 2025, Swift announced it would add a shared ledger to its own infrastructure, developed with more than 30 financial institutions, with 24/7 real-time cross-border payment as the first use case and interoperability with existing and emerging networks as a stated design goal. The network that connects eleven thousand banks is, in effect, conceding that settlement is moving to shared, programmable ledgers, and racing to be one.

For an institution, the strategic picture is awkward. The new networks are real, funded, and in several cases live. But value on any of them reaches only as far as the membership, each holds a different settlement asset, and liquidity fragments across venues that do not connect. Committing to one is a bet on how the map settles.

Where Frame fits

Frame is not another network on this map, and that is the point. Frame is the settlement layer for global finance: one integration to orchestrate payments at scale across fiat rails, stablecoins, and tokenised deposits, with compliance enforced on every transaction and settlement in minutes instead of days.

The networks above each answer the question “on whose ledger, in whose money, does settlement happen?” with a single choice, bounded by membership. Frame treats that as a routing decision rather than an allegiance. A payment enters through one integration; Frame’s Rules Engine evaluates it against the policies that govern it, inside settlement rather than before or after; and the transfer completes on whichever rail fits the corridor and the counterparty, producing verifiable evidence that its conditions were met. Banks, payment providers, exchanges, platforms, and enterprises get the benefit these networks are being built for, fast and final settlement under enforced rules, without wagering their infrastructure on which consortium’s map wins.