#19: Modernizing Payments Settlement Engines

26 Jan

30th January 2025

With:

| Baltazar Rodríguez (BIS Innovation Hub)

| Animesh Ghosh (Currency Network)

In Session #19, Baltazar Rodríguez (BIS Innovation Hub) and Animesh Ghosh (Currency Network) join FNA to pull back the curtain on Project FuSSE (Fully Scalable Settlement Engine). Historically, payment systems have been built as "black boxes"—hard to update and even harder to scale. FuSSE, a collaboration between the BIS and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), breaks this mold by testing a prototype that achieves 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) using a modular microservices architecture.

The project isn't just about speed; it is about future-proofing. Our guests discuss how FuSSE integrates quantum-resistant cryptography to protect against tomorrow's cyber threats and utilizes Liquidity Saving Mechanisms (LSMs) to ensure efficiency. By making these settlement "blocks" open-source and adaptable, FuSSE provides a blueprint for central banks—particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean—to build modern, inclusive, and resilient financial backbones.

This session covered:

The Microservices Shift: Moving from monolithic "all-in-one" systems to a modular design where services like signing, validation, and ledger entries scale independently.
Quantum Readiness: How Project FuSSE adopts "crypto-agility," allowing central banks to plug in new quantum-resistant algorithms as global standards evolve.
Scalability at Scale: Analyzing the 10,000 TPS benchmark and the project's ability to handle massive transaction volumes with minimal resource overhead.
Liquidity Efficiency: The role of the FuSSE engine in orchestrating complex liquidity-saving mechanisms to reduce the intraday capital requirements for banks.
The IDB Partnership: Why modular infrastructure is the "missing link" for financial inclusion in regions where high-cost legacy tech has historically been a barrier.
Private-Sector Synergy: How companies like Currency Network are collaborating with global bodies to deliver open-source public goods for the central banking community.

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