Saudi Arabia’s central bank, SAMA, has confirmed it withdrew from mBridge, the China-led platform that lets central banks settle cross-border payments directly in their own digital currencies, bypassing the US dollar and SWIFT as intermediaries. The confirmation came only after the Financial Times asked SAMA about it — the withdrawal itself was never separately announced, even though SAMA says it happened more than a year ago.
By SAMA’s own account, its involvement traces back to 2023, when it joined as an observer under the Bank for International Settlements. It became a full participating member in 2024, working alongside China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and the BIS on the platform’s minimum viable product. SAMA completed its proof-of-concept trial on 13 May 2025 and says it has not been a participating member since — a step it frames as the planned end point of a research programme into central bank digital currencies, not a rupture.
Who this affects most directly is the small circle of central banks still building mBridge out — the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the UAE and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, joined this year by the Monetary Authority of Macau, which went live in June. It also affects how governments and institutions elsewhere read the durability of non-dollar payment infrastructure, since Saudi Arabia was the platform’s most geopolitically significant member outside the founding Asian bloc.
The Unresolved Question Behind SAMA’s Framing
SAMA’s own explanation — a research programme reaching its natural end — is not the only account in circulation. The Financial Times, whose reporting underlies this story, put the US-pressure question directly to sources close to the matter and got two different answers. One source said it would be “inaccurate to draw any wider inference” from the withdrawal, since Saudi Arabia’s participation had been limited from the start. A second source offered something closer to a middle position: SAMA no longer wanted its participation publicly associated with the project, but the Kingdom continues to engage with mBridge — just more quietly than before.
That second account matters more than a routine non-denial denial. If SAMA’s involvement really were just a finished research exercise, there would be little reason to prefer silence over a straightforward statement — SAMA could simply have said so at the time. Instead, the exit went unannounced for over a year and only surfaced because a newsroom asked. Read against the earlier, separate exit of the BIS itself from mBridge in October 2024 — an exit FT had previously reported came under US pressure, even though then-BIS chief Agustín Carstens said the institution “graduated” out for non-political reasons — a pattern starts to look less like coincidence and more like a template: step back quietly, describe it afterward as planned, and let the “was it political” question sit unresolved rather than answered. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the BIS has put a name to any pressure it may have felt, and none of the reporting establishes that directly — but the shared shape of both exits is itself a data point Zagdim readers tracking payment-rail politics should weigh.
mBridge Keeps Building Without Its Highest-Profile Departures
The more concrete signal, though, is what has not stopped. Despite the BIS’s 2024 exit and Saudi Arabia’s 2025 one, mBridge has kept moving toward actual use rather than remaining a pilot. Macau’s monetary authority joined the platform this year and activated the system for participating banks on 2 June 2026 — and three Macau-based banks completed 23 cross-border transactions on that very first day, according to Financial Times reporting relayed by Livemint. That is a small number in absolute terms, but it is a different kind of evidence than a policy statement: it shows the remaining members treating mBridge as live settlement infrastructure, not a research exercise winding down.
This is where the story’s real tension sits — not in whether Saudi Arabia felt pressure, but in what its and the BIS’s departures actually cost the project. Both exits removed a Western-aligned or BIS-adjacent name from the participant list; neither removed operational capacity, since neither Saudi Arabia nor the BIS was running the settlement rails day to day. What’s left is a tighter, more homogeneous core — China, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand and the UAE — which may make mBridge easier to govern and expand among aligned members even as it becomes easier for Washington to characterize as a China-led bloc rather than a neutral multilateral experiment. Cornell economist Eswar Prasad, speaking to the FT, captured the bind facing everyone still in or near the project: many US allies see genuine economic upside in reducing dependence on a dollar-dominated system, but remain highly sensitive to US resistance toward anything that dilutes the dollar’s role or elevates the renminbi’s. Former White House official Daleep Singh’s specific worry — that China could end up setting mBridge’s standards for privacy, security, interoperability and sanctions enforcement — is a concern about who writes the rules of a system that is visibly still growing, not a shrinking one.
Zagdim’s View — For readers tracking where cross-border payment infrastructure is heading, the SAMA exit is not evidence that non-dollar settlement rails are stalling — the opposite signal, Macau’s live transaction volume, points the other way. What it does mark is a sorting: the countries willing to be publicly associated with a China-led payment platform are narrowing toward China’s own regional and economic partners, while US-aligned states that experimented early are stepping back from visibility even when, as one source suggests, they haven’t fully stepped away. Anyone with cross-border payment exposure through banking relationships, remittance routes, or institutional counterparties in this region should treat this as a milestone in which infrastructure is consolidating and around whom — not as a signal that the dollar-based system is under near-term threat, and not as a reason to change how any individual payment is routed today.
References
Sada News Agency – Saudi Central Bank Withdraws from Chinese Cross-Border Payment Platform / Livemint – Saudi Arabia Exits mBridge: Can China-Led Platform Still Challenge US Dollar, Become Global Cross-Border Payment System? / Traders Union – Saudi Arabia Exits mBridge Cross-Border Payments Project Amid Digital Currency Scrutiny
