Saudi Arabia says it stopped participating in mBridge, a China-led cross-border central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform, in May 2025, but a first-person account from a payments professional suggests Saudi banks continued testing it months later.
Launched in 2021, mBridge is a cross-border digital currency project developed by the BIS Innovation Hub with the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE.
The idea was to let central and commercial banks settle cross-border payments directly using CBDCs. Saudi Arabia joined as a full participant in 2024.
- The Saudi Central Bank (also known just as SAMA), told the Financial Times, a British business newspaper, that it completed its mBridge proof-of-concept on May 13, 2025 and was no longer a participating member after that date.
- But a first-person article published by PaymentTalks, a payments industry publication, says four Saudi banks were still running a live mBridge pilot inside SAMA's sandbox between August and November 2025.
- The author, a payments professional who says they worked directly on the pilot, wrote that they were "the functional point of contact for one of four Saudi banks" involved in the test.
- They added that their bank "executed a transaction using eSAR" and settled it directly with HSBC Hong Kong.
- The account, however, hasn't been independently confirmed by SAMA, HSBC or the unidentified Saudi banks.
Still, it lines up with one detail in the FT report. A person familiar with the matter told the newspaper that SAMA no longer wanted to be publicly involved with mBridge after leaving, while continuing to engage with the project more discreetly.
- SAMA joined mBridge as a participant in June 2024 to test cross-border settlement using wholesale CBDCs. Its announcement at the time didn't give a public end date for that participation.
- There is also another oddity as the Bank for International Settlements, an organization owned by central banks, still lists SAMA among mBridge's project partners, even though the Saudi central bank now says it left more than a year ago.
The Coinformer reached out to SAMA and will update the story if it responds.