Seven UK banks put tokenized sterling deposits into live customer use
Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander completed two remortgages and a marketplace purchase on shared infrastructure built by Quant, which the same day won the US Clearing House’s tokenized deposit network
- Seven banks took part: Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander.
- Three live transactions were announced on 24 September: two remortgage completions and one consumer marketplace purchase.
- EY, which ran project management, puts the collaboration behind GBTD at five years.
- The Clearing House named Quant for its US On-Chain Money Initiative on the same day, 24 September.
- UK Finance expects further pilots on digital-asset settlement over the next few months.
Shared bank infrastructure that has left the sandbox is a new workload for the integrators, MSPs and security vendors already inside these seven banks: core banking, mortgage origination and conveyancing systems now need connecting to a shared ledger, with the API, identity and monitoring work that implies. The partners with a financial-services practice, regulatory experience and existing bank paper win that work; those without will find the procurement door shut.
The second signal is concentration. A supplier that underpins both the UK and US projects is exactly what bank third-party risk teams are required to review, which means due diligence, resilience testing and exit-planning engagements for the consultancies and managed security service providers (MSSPs) that serve them.
“These transactions are real money moving on UK infrastructure, not an experiment.”Gilbert Verdian, founder and CEO, Quant
Seven UK banks – Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander – have completed the first live customer transactions using tokenized sterling deposits, UK Finance announced on 24 September. Three transactions ran on the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) platform: two remortgage completions and one purchase from a private seller on a consumer marketplace.
In the remortgage cases the customer’s deposits were locked and then released automatically at completion, and UK Finance says the technology can keep those funds earning interest until that point. The marketplace purchase locked the buyer’s funds until the goods had changed hands. UK Finance, the trade body that convened the project, says the pilots also explored a digital link to HM Land Registry to speed future transactions.
Quant’s second win of the day
The work grows out of the earlier Regulated Liability Network experiments, as PYMNTS reported on 24 September, and EY puts the collaboration behind GBTD at five years. Quant built the platform, EY ran project management and Linklaters wrote the rulebooks. UK Finance expects further pilots over the next few months in which the banks issue digital debt instruments that settle against tokenized deposits, with coupons paid the same way.
On the same day, The Clearing House in the US named Quant to run the interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer of its On-Chain Money Initiative, with connections to the RTP and CHIPS payment networks. That makes Quant the platform supplier to the flagship interbank tokenized deposit projects in both the UK and the US.
