Central Banking Awards 2025: third group of winners released

The Central Bank of Paraguay has won this year’s Central Banking Award for payment and market infrastructure development, after boosting financial inclusion with the launch of a new instant payment system. It is among the third group of 2025 award winners, unveiled today (March 18).

Other winners include the International Monetary Fund for its artificial intelligence initiative, while the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) wins the green award. Nasdaq wins the financial market infrastructure services award, Montran the payment services development award and Financial Network Analytics (FNA) the payment services initiative award.

Central Banking will publish the final group of award winners on March 20.

Payment and market infrastructure development: The Central Bank of Paraguay launched the SPI instant payment system in 2023. The system enables users to make free and instant payments around the clock, and led to a fourfold increase in daily transactions.

Payment volumes are projected to exceed 172 million by the end of 2025. The system has also supported the creation of more than 2 million new bank accounts, thereby driving a significant improvement in financial inclusion. Because a wide range of institutions – including fintech firms and credit unions – can access the system, it is able to reach a wider section of the country’s 7.5 million population.

“This award underscores our commitment to enhancing Paraguay’s payment systems,” says governor Carlos Carvallo Spalding. “We prioritise modernisation and efficiency to ensure secure, inclusive and resilient financial services.”

Artificial intelligence initiative: The IMF developed an AI tool to improve its monitoring of third-party risks, an area rapidly growing in importance for central banks and other institutions worldwide.

The fund employs upwards of 1,000 third-party providers around the world, making it a highly demanding task to supervise them all. The AI tool collects information from sources such as licensed databases, company annual reports, credit rating agency reports and news articles. It then generates a score to highlight any firms that pose outsized risks.

Li Bo, deputy managing director of the IMF and chair of its risk committee, says: “This recognition underscores the role of innovation in effective enterprise risk management. Using AI, we are enhancing our assessment and management of third-party risks and thus advancing our internal risk functions.”

Green award: The RBNZ has broken new ground by integrating climate risks into its stress testing framework, an approach that other central banks in Africa and Asia-Pacific are now seeking to emulate.

The framework is designed both to capture the financial stability risks from climate change and the transition to net zero, and to support the financial sector in developing the data and skills needed to manage climate-related risks. Banks are expected to do their own credit risk modelling on a micro level for some of the most exposed sectors, including agriculture and home loans.

Simone Robbers, assistant governor at the RBNZ, says “understanding, identifying and managing” climate-related risk is a “critical element” of financial resilience. “Our stress testing approach reflects New Zealand’s unique challenges, from impacts on key sectors to the financial effects of extreme weather and insurance retreat,” she says.

Financial market infrastructure services: Nasdaq has upgraded its cloud-based systems for central banks, adding a monetary operations portal to its existing suite of tools. The innovations, built on the Calypso platform, are helping central banks to cut costs and manage their FX reserves and other assets strategically and flexibly.

A next step for the firm is investigating how digital currency is issued and managed by central banks, as well as potential collateral tokenisation, and how this can be handled on its platforms.

“Central banks are on an extraordinary digital transformation journey, transitioning legacy systems to cloud-based platforms to keep pace with global capital market innovation,” says Gil Guillaumey, senior vice-president and head of capital markets technology at Nasdaq. “It is an honour for Nasdaq to be recognised for our leadership in addressing this industry-wide challenge.”

Payment services development: Montran has been working with several central banks to upgrade their core settlement infrastructure and fast payment systems. One of its most critical recent projects was the iBuraq instant payments system, which it rolled out in the Palestinian Territories in 2024, thus helping Palestinians displaced by conflict to conduct digital payments.

Another major project was the launch of an instant payment system in Romania. Between 2023 and 2024, Montran introduced QR code-based payments, thereby facilitating a wide range of transaction types between individuals, businesses and the government.

“This award reflects our commitment to delivering cutting-edge instant payment solutions that drive efficiency, security and financial inclusion – helping central banks and financial institutions worldwide build a more connected and resilient payments ecosystem,” says Alexander Esca, chairman and chief executive of Montran.

Payment services initiative: FNA’s Money Trails tool has helped Bank Negara Malaysia and Payments Network Malaysia (PayNet) to track and tackle fraud.

When individuals report an issue, the funds can be traced across the financial sector using data supplied by banks and PayNet. The country’s National Fraud Portal now maintains a database of “mule account holders” that act as conduits for stolen funds. Instant payments in the past enabled fraudsters to move money quickly and to cash out, but Money Trails allows stolen funds to be blocked in near-real time.

“FNA has been delighted to work with Bank Negara and PayNet Malaysia to enable tracking of suspicious funds, fighting crime, and helping recover stolen monies for scam victims,” says Florian Loecker, chief product and technology officer at FNA. “It is truly gratifying to apply our unique graph technology to play our part in solving such a pressing problem.”