Despite the general consensus that the obstacles to union in this region now are greater than they were for Europe 50 years ago, I have a feeling that Asia will not take quite so long. I am not offering to make a bet on this, mainly because I do not think that many of us in this room will be around long enough to see how many years it really does take. But one reason that makes me think that Asia will not take so long is that we have a successful model to look to, which brings me to the main question: "Can the euro be a benchmark for Asian monetary co-operation?". My answer to this question is a resounding "yes". The creation of the euro has shown that effective monetary union can be achieved in a voluntary and co-operative way by countries with different economic, political and cultural traditions. While, as I have suggested in the discussion about "special considerations", there may be different ways of achieving a similar goal in Asia, the euro provides a precedent, a point of reference, a large realm of experience and expertise, and - I would certainly agree - a benchmark for any enterprise in monetary co-operation that we might wish to embark on in this region. BIS Review 19/2005  3
Multilateral connectivity is the direction that we need to go in order for crossborder payments to be optimised. 13. Jurisdictions’ digital payments infrastructure yield potential for cross-border connectivity. MAS has embarked on a pioneering journey with the Bank of Thailand to link up our respective national retail faster payment systems – PayNow in Singapore, and PromptPay in Thailand. This linkage between our two countries’ faster payment systems will go live in the middle of 2021. To achieve our eventual aim to facilitate global cross-border payments however, we need to progress towards multilateral digital connectivity. As a starting point, adoption of harmonised protocols across national digital payments systems and infrastructures are necessary. The ISO 20022 payments messaging standard is a clear example of such a protocol. The successfully-concluded hackathon presented earlier demonstrated the potential of this standard and APIs to enhance cross-border payments. Central banks need to explore the road to multilateral connectivity in cross-border payments together. 14. The future digital payments landscape is still emerging. It is thus necessary to explore multiple fronts in order to be future-ready. To this end, the Singapore Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub, with the support of MAS, is experimenting on platforms for multilateral connectivity through two of the projects that the Singapore Centre shared on earlier – the Foundational Digital Infrastructures Project based on traditional technologies, and Project Dunbar, a multilateral multi-CBDC wholesale 4/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  settlement platform. We also heard from the Hong Kong Centre two days ago about their Multiple CBDC Bridge project.