National Bank of Cambodia's Bakong scale now reads as settlement infrastructure
Governor Chea Serey's September 2025 Bakong scale disclosure is materially stronger because earlier National Bank of Cambodia releases already linked Bakong to large-value and financial-market settlement, while the NBC Platform showed live foreign-exchange workflow. The combined signal is institutional, not merely consumer-fintech adoption.
Key takeaways
- • National Bank of Cambodia's September 2025 Bakong scale disclosure matters because it lands on top of earlier official evidence that Bakong is being extended into large-value and financial-market settlement, while parallel central-bank infrastructure is already carrying meaningful foreign-exchange flow.
- • That combination makes Cambodia legible as a treasury-and-settlement market, not only a payments-adoption story.
Trigger
Keynote Speech By H.E. Dr. Chea Serey At Asia Finance Forum
At the Asia Finance Forum on September 25, 2025, Governor Chea Serey said Bakong connected 70 institutions, supported more than 34 million user accounts, and had processed more than 600 million transactions worth over USD 104 billion. A central-bank scale disclosure of that size is notable on its own. What turns it into an institutional signal is the prior NBC record: by May 2025 the central bank had already described a Bakong large-value leg for interbank and financial-market settlement, and by August 2025 it had disclosed material foreign-exchange throughput on the NBC Platform.
Open source documentSN Desk view
National Bank of Cambodia's 2025 publications let institutional readers separate three layers that are often flattened into one narrative. First, Bakong has national reach and transaction depth. Second, Bakong LVPS is not framed by the central bank as a consumer convenience feature; it is framed as a pilot for interbank large-value movement, retail-net settlement, and financial-market payments. The Annual Report 2024 also said Bakong LVPS had been rolled out on May 2, 2024 and had 39 participating institutions by mid-August 2025. Third, the same annual report said foreign-exchange transactions on the NBC Platform reached USD 2.7 billion across 1,971 transactions in 2024, up 42 percent from 2023. Read together, those disclosures support a clearer market reading: Cambodia is building a multi-institution bank-money rail with operational significance for treasury routing, settlement state, and reconciliation.
The stronger reading emphasizes institutional control points - participant network, large-value movement, FX leg, and evidence of throughput - rather than defaulting to a retail-wallet or tokenization narrative. The public evidence supports a bank-money and settlement-control framing. It does not yet support broader claims that Cambodia has already delivered a universal institutional DvP stack or that Bakong itself should be described as a generic stablecoin market.