Six UK High Street Banks Complete World's First Live Tokenised Sterling Deposit Transactions Under Industry Pilot
Six UK High Street Banks Complete World’s First Live Tokenised Sterling Deposit Transactions Under Industry Pilot #
UK Finance, the financial services trade body, has launched a live pilot programme that has produced the world’s first interbank transactions using tokenised sterling deposits.
Six of the country’s largest lenders, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander, are participating in the initiative, known as the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) project. Announced on Friday 26 September, the programme will run until mid-2026, supported by London-based blockchain interoperability firm Quant, with legal counsel from Linklaters and advisory support from EY.
Tokenised sterling deposits are digital representations of conventional commercial bank money. They carry the same regulatory protections as traditional deposits but add programmability features: funds can be locked and made visible to a counterparty but released only when agreed contractual conditions are met, reducing the risk of fraud and failed settlements.
The pilot will test three real-world use cases. The first involves person-to-person payments through online marketplaces, where programmable controls are intended to reduce payment fraud and boost buyer confidence. The second targets the UK mortgage market, with tokenised money introduced into the remortgaging process to improve transparency and combat conveyancing fraud. The third focuses on digital asset settlement, exploring how tokenised bank deposits can serve as the cash leg of transactions involving bonds and other digital securities.
The GBTD initiative builds on the UK Regulated Liability Network (RLN), a shared-ledger infrastructure experiment conducted in 2024 that brought together the same six banks alongside Citi, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, Virgin Money and Visa. A September 2024 UK Finance report from that exercise concluded that a blockchain-powered settlement network could enable programmable payments, reduce fraud, and cut the cost of failed transactions across a system that processes an estimated $14.5 trillion in UK payments annually.
The pilot platform is designed to be interoperable across different forms of digital money and payment systems, and will offer tokenisation-as-a-service, allowing institutions without their own tokenised deposit infrastructure to connect to the network. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has previously stated public support for tokenised deposits as the preferred form of digital currency in the UK, indicating that successful pilots could influence central bank policy on digital money.
UK Finance said it will host events and stakeholder updates throughout the pilot period and has invited other institutions to express their interest in joining the programme.
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