Money That Never Sleeps: What JERA, J.P. Morgan and the BIS Reveal About the Next Shape of Corporate Treasury

A yen account that runs around the clock, opened first by JERA

On June 29, 2026, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, the bank's blockchain unit, added the Australian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi and Singapore dollar to its Blockchain Deposit Account (BDA) network. Together with the existing US dollar, euro and British pound, the network now covers eight currencies, which the bank describes as the broadest available for blockchain-based settlement and on-chain foreign exchange.

The first client of the yen-denominated account is JERA Global Markets. Its parent, JERA, is Japan's largest power generation company, owned in equal halves by the TEPCO group and Chubu Electric Power, and JERA Global Markets trades LNG, power and coal worldwide from a base in Singapore with additional offices in Tokyo, London, Houston and Brisbane. The firm will use the BDA to manage intragroup treasury flows and optimise liquidity. Its senior finance executive noted that for a global energy trader operating across commodities, markets and time zones, the ability to move yen on an always-on basis is an important step in modernising treasury operations.

A crucial distinction: the BDA is not a stablecoin. Client deposits held at J.P. Morgan are represented digitally on a permissioned blockchain the bank operates, and transactions settle within the regulated banking perimeter. The accounts also support programmable payments, in which funds move automatically according to pre-set conditions, such as sweeping balances above a threshold into another account or converting currency without manual intervention. Cumulative volume across the Kinexys platform has surpassed 4 trillion US dollars, with average daily transaction value of roughly 7 billion dollars.

Project Agorá settles real value in an average of 80 seconds

The second development is more public in character. Project Agorá, convened by the BIS together with the Institute of International Finance, conducted real-value testing in July 2026 and published the results on July 29 and 30.

Twenty-eight private sector institutions and central banks took part, settling transactions totalling approximately 800,000 Swiss francs (around 993,000 US dollars) across 17 transaction scenarios, with individual values ranging from CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000. Six currencies were involved: the Swiss franc, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, South Korean won and US dollar. Participating central banks included the Bank of England, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank, while private sector participants included J.P. Morgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, MUFG and Mizuho.

The average time from payment initiation to settlement was approximately 80 seconds. What the BIS emphasises is that this was achieved despite the prototype not being integrated with existing real-time gross settlement and core banking systems. Test transactions interacted with those external systems using established ISO 20022 standards, specifically pacs.008, pacs.009 and camt.053, reflecting a design philosophy of interoperating with existing infrastructure rather than replacing it. Participants cited end-to-end visibility of payment status and routing as a practical benefit alongside speed itself.

Tokenising money inside the banking system: the second answer

The previous report in this series examined the Bank of Italy's field experiment, which demonstrated empirically that most of the cost of a stablecoin remittance arises at the fiat conversion points, the on-ramp and off-ramp, with the on-chain leg averaging just 0.4%.

Agorá and the BDA represent the opposite approach to the same problem. Where a stablecoin transfer leaves the banking system and then re-enters it, both of these initiatives tokenise money that already exists inside that system: central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. Because the value never exits, the entry and exit friction never arises. The legal analysis published with Agorá's May prototype findings, confirming that tokenisation does not alter the legal characterisation of or obligations attached to reserves and deposits, and that settlement finality is achievable across all seven participating jurisdictions, is central to this design.

Two roads to faster and cheaper cross-border settlement are therefore running in parallel: stablecoins on public chains, and tokenised regulated bank money. J.P. Morgan has positioned the latter as the future core of institutional digital payments, and the bank, along with Bank of America and Citi, has been reported to be preparing a shared tokenised deposit network targeted at 2027.

Automation does not eliminate human judgment

Practitioners should note an important caveat. In the Agorá testing, participating institutions had to complete compliance checks before payment instructions were submitted, and for dual-currency transactions the cross-currency provider manually confirmed the corresponding amount. Approximately 250 public and private sector staff took part across payments, compliance, risk and legal functions. The BIS concluded that the exercise helped institutions assess the organisational implications of adopting such a platform in future.

Programmable money does not remove the need for human verification and judgment. If anything, workload rises during the initial implementation phase. Authority levels and transaction limits must be defined, anomalous activity must be monitored, and responsibility for incident response must be assigned. The destination should be a state in which routine transfers proceed automatically under pre-agreed rules while people concentrate on exceptions and consequential decisions. Only then does money that never sleeps become genuinely convenient for the humans around it.

It should also be stressed that Agorá is not a commercial service. The next phase, running through the fourth quarter of 2026, will examine transaction capacity and system resilience, with technical specifications targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Production deployment would require connecting each participating institution's live RTGS and core banking infrastructure to the shared ledger in real time, a substantial engineering, legal and governance undertaking spanning multiple currency jurisdictions. The BIS has not indicated a commercialisation timeline.

Business Development Insights

1. Redesigning the treasury operating model matters more than the technology itself. The first obstacle a company meets when adopting always-on funding infrastructure is not systems integration but operational design: who holds execution authority and up to what limit, how per-transaction and daily caps are set, and who receives escalations when something goes wrong at three in the morning on a holiday. That roughly 250 staff from payments, compliance, risk and legal functions participated in the Agorá test signals that this shift extends well beyond the treasury department. For Japanese corporates, clear demand will emerge for consulting that converts treasury operations into rule-based processes with defined exception handling, and for managed services providing round-the-clock monitoring and alerting.
2. The practical question is not stablecoins versus tokenised deposits but how to combine them. The on- and off-ramp friction identified by the Bank of Italy is a structural cost of the public-chain model. Tokenised deposits avoid that friction but restrict participation to corporates admitted to a given bank's network, and require the counterparty to sit on the same network. A workable division therefore emerges: tokenised deposits for large, repeated intragroup flows and settlements with major counterparties, and stablecoins for small, numerous, long-tail payees. The commercial opportunity lies in a treasury orchestration layer that presents both rails through a single interface from the business user's perspective.
3. Adoption will hinge on ISO 20022-based interoperability with existing systems. That Agorá achieved 80-second settlement without direct RTGS or core banking integration, connecting to external systems through standard messages such as pacs.008, strongly suggests that competitive outcomes in this field will be determined not by ledger performance but by how frictionlessly the platform connects to systems companies already run. In Japan, message standardisation for corporate payments has advanced through the Zengin EDI system and related initiatives, and there is a multi-year opportunity in the connectivity layer joining ERP and accounting systems to tokenised settlement platforms, along with the systems integration work required to deploy it. The revenue sits upstream and downstream of tokenisation, not in tokenisation itself.

Sources

• NADA NEWS, "If money moves around the clock, when do humans sleep? Editor-in-chief column on JERA and the BIS" https://www.nadanews.com/362116/
• J.P. Morgan, "Kinexys Expands Blockchain Deposit Accounts in Asia-Pacific", June 29, 2026 https://www.jpmorgan.com/payments/newsroom/kinexys-apac-blockchain-deposit-accounts
• Bank for International Settlements, "Project Agorá – Real value testing", July 29, 2026 https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/agora/rvt.htm
• BIS, "Project Agorá shows how tokenisation can improve wholesale cross-border payments; work will advance to real-value testing", May 27, 2026 https://www.bis.org/press/p260527.htm
• CoinDesk, "J.P. Morgan Broadens Blockchain Settlement Network as Banks Modernize Cross-Border Payments", June 29, 2026 https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/06/29/j-p-morgan-broadens-blockchain-settlement-network-as-banks-modernize-cross-border-payments
• CoinDesk, "Global Banks Test Tokenized Money for Cross-Border Payments in $1 Million BIS Pilot", July 30, 2026 https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/07/30/global-banks-test-tokenized-money-for-cross-border-payments-in-usd1-million-bis-pilot
• PYMNTS, "Project Agorá Cuts Cross-Border Payment Times to 80 Seconds" https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-payments/2026/project-agora-cuts-cross-border-payment-times-80-seconds/