In a roundtable "Shaping the Future of Cross-border Transaction Compliance" held during the Singapore FinTech Festival in 2023, a major challenge identified was the increasing intricacy of sanctions screening and compliance with capital flow management measures. Additionally, participants highlighted the importance of developing interoperable and modular technological solutions that can adapt to various regulatory environments. The discussion introduced the concept of programmable compliance. This concept envisions smart contracts with embedded policy and regulatory implementations for digital assets, as a potential direction for the future. 

This roundtable will continue the dialogue on programable compliance with an emphasis on privacy-enhancing technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation in the compliance context. The roundtable will also focus on the key efficiency gains emanating from Project Mandala, a BIS Innovation Hub initiative, which aims to facilitate peer-to-peer exchanges of compliance requirements and data between financial institutions, utilising cryptographic proofs for verifiable compliance.

Key Discussion Points:
1. Enhancing Cross-Border Transaction Integrity: The roundtable will explore how programmable compliance can address challenges in ensuring consistent regulatory compliance across various jurisdictions, particularly in cross-border digital transactions.
2. Embedding Compliance into Digital Assets: A significant focus will be on the opportunities and challenges of incorporating compliance checks directly into digital assets through smart contracts, aiming to streamline and automate regulatory compliance processes.
3. Balancing Compliance and Data Privacy: Another key aspect will be the need to balance regulatory compliance with data privacy concerns, ensuring that programmable compliance mechanisms do not compromise sensitive information.
4. Overcoming Technological Barriers: The roundtable will delve into the technological hurdles of implementing programmable compliance in existing digital payment systems and how to design adaptable smart contracts that meet evolving regulatory requirements.

This session will convene industry stakeholders, governments promoting investment in industry 4.0 initiatives and anchors of green lending programs to provide input to further development of plans for ‘_verifiable machine identity_’ as a cornerstone for scalable markets in granular, trusted green reporting data. It will build on the roundtable held at the Point Zero Forum in Zürich in July 2024, where experts discussed this concept and its potential to enhance the quality and integrity of green reporting data as well as reduce the costs of sourcing and controlled sharing of it, especially across different value chains, providers and geographies. 
 
The roundtable in Zürich highlighted the legal and financial risks that companies will face if they cannot trust and prove the data on which they make claims about their environmental impact. Stakeholders outlined the opportunities & challenges in acquiring and meaningfully combining data even from machines that are equipped with smart data collection mechanisms. It highlighted (i) the opportunity to build on governance structures for decentralised identity of legal entities (e.g. GLEIF) to enhance trust in data originated by machines, and (ii) the need to build on approaches in Digital Public Infrastructure to better engage market incentives as well as controls over data, especially if SMEs further down the value chain and often in emerging economies are to engage materially in the digital transformation necessary - not just to track - but also reduce emissions and contribute to broader sustainability goals.
 
This session in Singapore will present an outline of the verifiable Machine Identity concept and advance the working group’s efforts by further engagement with potential partners and stakeholders, in particular:
(i)    firms in specific sectors including the property management, logistics and manufacturing,
(ii)    government agencies and private investors supporting deployment of industry 4.0 technologies and business models that collect and leverage operational data to increase productivity, quality and efficiency, and
(iii)   financial institutions with existing green finance programs that impose audit and reporting conditions on intermediaries.

Practical development of trusted machine-issued reporting data should be based on existing industry capabilities and build on related government and policy lender initiatives that have common interests in advancing the use of scalable data management and reporting for both economic growth and sustainability. 
 
The session will also discuss the relationship with emerging initiatives in Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The broader development of the digital and ‘ledger based’ economy will require not only persons, currency and organisations to be reflected in digital ecosystems: machines and objects are further elements of the economy that will need to be represented in ledger-based ecosystems and other efforts to create more equitable and inclusive data sharing ecosystems.