Bank of England Brings Polygon, NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet Into Digital Pound Lab Phase Two for Stablecoin-CBDC Settlement Tests
Bank of England Brings Polygon, NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet Into Digital Pound Lab Phase Two for Stablecoin-CBDC Settlement Tests #
The Bank of England has selected Polygon Labs, NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet to participate as a consortium in the second phase of its Digital Pound Lab, where the group will test whether a public stablecoin rail and a simulated central bank digital currency can settle two legs of the same cross-border trade payment simultaneously.
The consortium is one of 12 participant groups chosen for Phase 2, which follows an initial “Operation Stage” that ran between August and November 2025. According to Polygon Labs’ announcement, the second phase expands the scope of experimentation to include cross-border stablecoin settlement alongside a domestic tokenised digital pound, examining how different forms of programmable money can be coordinated within a single transaction.
The scenario under test is a trade-finance case for small and medium-sized enterprises. Exporters receive stablecoin advances on Polygon’s network while UK importers complete their side of the same transaction in a simulated digital pound environment. Both legs must settle atomically, meaning they complete together or not at all. The goal is to remove the settlement risk found in conventional cross-border transactions, where one side of a deal can complete while the other does not.
Polygon’s Open Money Stack provides the smart-contract infrastructure that orchestrates the stablecoin settlement leg. Dun & Bradstreet contributes business-intelligence data to a second workstream, in which the consortium will build reusable, on-chain SME credit profiles: portable records anchored as verifiable smart contracts that any permitted lender could access without commissioning a fresh credit assessment.
The Bank of England has been clear about the scope of the work. The Digital Pound Lab is a simulated test environment, not a regulatory sandbox. No real customers, real funds, or formal regulatory review are attached to the work, and the central bank has stated that selecting participants does not signal any decision to issue a digital pound. Findings from Phase 2 are expected to inform a go/no-go assessment by the Bank and HM Treasury later in 2026, before any parliamentary decision would be required.
The tests address a question central banks have been working through: whether privately issued stablecoins and a potential sovereign digital currency can interoperate within a single payment flow rather than run as separate systems. The UK trade-finance sector has a significant financing gap for smaller businesses, and the consortium’s work is intended to show whether atomic dual-currency settlement could support faster, cheaper cross-border transactions without requiring wholesale replacement of existing payment infrastructure.
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