Partior CEO Humphrey Valenbreder
The National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) has signed a memorandum of understanding with blockchain settlement network Partior to study whether the Bahraini dinar (BHD) can be settled on the Singaporean firm’s rails, with NBB acting as the currency’s settlement bank.
Read the fine print and the ambition shrinks to its proper size. The MoU commits the two parties to evaluate an operating model, implementation requirements and technical feasibility, and to work out what Bahrain’s regulators would require. There is no launch date, no live service and no disclosed financial terms. It is, for now, a feasibility study with a signing ceremony.
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Still, the deal says a good deal about where Partior wants to go, and why a piece of Singapore-born financial plumbing keeps turning up in the Gulf.
The plumbing problem
Cross-border bank payments still run largely on correspondent banking: chains of banks holding accounts with one another (the “nostro” and “vostro” accounts of banking jargon), each link adding time, fees and opacity. A transfer can take days, and billions sit idle in pre-funded accounts around the world, waiting for business hours to overlap.
Partior’s answer is a shared ledger on which member banks settle with each other directly and around the clock, using tokenised commercial bank money rather than cryptocurrencies or stablecoins. Each currency is anchored by a settlement bank that holds the real money and issues its digital twin on the network.
The network currently supports three currencies, the US dollar, the euro and the Singapore dollar, through its founding settlement banks, as e27 has explained before.
Adding the dinar would therefore be a first on two counts: a new currency and a new settlement jurisdiction. NBB would do for the dinar what JP Morgan, DBS and Deutsche Bank do for the dollar, the Singapore dollar and the euro.
A Singapore idea, exported
Partior was set up in 2021 by DBS, JP Morgan and Temasek, building on the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Ubin experiments with blockchain-based interbank settlement.
Standard Chartered led its Series A in 2022, and Deutsche Bank later joined as a strategic investor in a Series B that reached US$80 million.
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The Gulf has since become its busiest expansion front. Emirates NBD went live with real-time cross-border dollar settlement on the network, with JP Morgan acting as settlement bank in the first phase. When Partior announced its Series B, it named the UAE dirham, the Qatari riyal and the Saudi riyal among currencies it planned to add, alongside the Malaysian ringgit. The dinar was not on that list, which makes NBB a new opportunity rather than a pipeline delivery.
Partior chief executive Humphrey Valenbreder framed the deal as building on the company’s “growing presence across the GCC”. NBB’s Vineet Munot was more guarded, saying the bank would weigh the technical, operational and regulatory considerations before deciding on its value. That caution is the most honest line in the announcement.
Why a small currency matters
The dinar is pegged to the US dollar at roughly US$2.66 per dinar, making it one of the world’s highest-valued currencies but a modest one by volume. For Partior, the prize is less the dinar flow itself than proof that a mid-sized jurisdiction can bring its local currency onto the network, with a local bank as anchor and a local regulator comfortable with the arrangement.
That proof matters for Southeast Asia. Every currency Partior adds beyond its founding trio is a dry run for the ringgit, the baht, the rupiah or the peso. Asia’s cross-border payment flows are enormous, pegged at a US$23.8 trillion opportunity in one contributor’s analysis, yet they remain split across currencies with thin direct liquidity between them.
The Gulf also hosts large communities of Filipino and Indonesian workers, so Gulf-ASEAN corridors are hardly abstract. But a caveat applies: Partior is wholesale, bank-to-bank infrastructure. Faster interbank settlement only reaches a migrant worker’s family if banks and remittance firms pass the savings on, and that has rarely been automatic.
A crowded field
Partior is far from alone. Its own investor JP Morgan runs Kinexys, a blockchain payments network for corporate clients. Swift is building a blockchain-based ledger with Consensys.
Project mBridge, a multi-central-bank platform whose members include the Bank of Thailand and the central banks of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, settles in central bank digital currencies.
Project Nexus, incubated by the Bank for International Settlements, aims to link instant payment systems, including those of Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.
Then there are stablecoins, which are chasing the same corridors from the other direction. Circle has agreed to buy Singapore’s Tazapay for US$400 million, while SBI has backed dtcpay’s Japan-SEA stablecoin corridors. Partior’s quiet selling point is that it keeps money inside the regulated banking system, sidestepping the dollarisation worries that stablecoins raise for emerging-market central banks.
MoUs are cheap
Bank-led blockchain consortia have a mixed record. Trade finance networks such as we.trade and Contour were wound down after banks failed to route enough business through them. Partior has done better than most: it is live, it has several settlement banks and it is building round-the-clock liquidity with LSEG’s Digital Settlement House, with production targeted from early 2027.
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The NBB agreement will be worth more than a press release only when two things happen: the dinar actually goes live, and banks outside the founding circle start sending real volume through it. Until then, Bahrain is a promising line on Partior’s map, not a corridor.
The post Why a small Gulf currency matters for Partior’s Southeast Asian ambitions appeared first on e27.