BRICS Bridge

BRICS Bridge (sometimes styled "BRICS Pay" in adjacent proposals) refers to a concept advanced primarily by Russia during its 2024 BRICS chairmanship for a multilateral payment and settlement system linking the central banks and commercial banking systems of BRICS member states. The idea was formally presented in the Russian Finance Ministry and Central Bank report "Improvement of the International Monetary and Financial System," released ahead of the Kazan Summit in October 2024.

The platform's stated goal is to enable cross-border transactions in local currencies and potentially in tokenized central bank assets (a form of wholesale CBDC interoperability), bypassing correspondent banking rails such as SWIFT and reducing exposure to secondary sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union. Conceptually, BRICS Bridge draws on the architecture of the Bank for International Settlements' mBridge project, which has experimented with multi-CBDC settlement among the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE.

Key features under discussion have included:

• Tokenized representations of national currencies issued by participating central banks
• A shared distributed ledger or messaging layer for settlement instructions
• Optional integration with existing national systems like Russia's SPFS, China's CIPS, and India's UPI

At the Kazan Summit, BRICS leaders endorsed continued study of payment infrastructure cooperation but did not formally launch BRICS Bridge. The joint declaration referred to expanding local-currency trade and exploring BRICS Clear (a settlement and depository concept) without committing to a binding timetable. Significant obstacles remain: China and India have shown caution about a project closely associated with sanctioned Russian entities, and the BIS in 2024 stepped back from mBridge amid concerns about sanctions circumvention. As of the Kazan declaration, BRICS Bridge remains a policy proposal under technical study rather than an operational system.