UK to test Regulated Liability Network concept for retail payments
The move to expand the programme follows an earlier pilot in 2022 conducted by EY and a subsequent 'Discovery Phase' held in consultation with market participants, including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, Santander and Visa.
It follows a recent PoC run by the Federal Reserve with a clutch of top banks that demonstrated the feasibility of an interoperable network for wholesale payments operating on a shared multi-entity distributed ledger.
While the UK Discovery Phase explored the delivery of a RLN for wholesale paymnts, the PoC will track the retail consumer market. This would test the use case for a RLN that would provide commercial bank money with the equivalent programmability of a future digital pound, in this way ensuring competitive consistency in the event of a full scale CBDC roll out.
The importance of this was emphasised in a speech given in July by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who stated: "We want to encourage more thinking and action in the world of enhanced digital bank deposits - sometimes call tokenised deposits.
