The pilot will test tokenised deposits in three flows:
The choice of tokenised deposits reflects the policy preference to keep innovation inside the banking perimeter. Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said in July he could not see the need for bank-issued or third-party stablecoins relative to tokenisation of deposits, and the Financial Conduct Authority’s stablecoin regime is not expected to be finalised until the end of 2026.
Quant says it will provide the programmable money layer for live tokenized deposit transactions, with interoperability across bank ledgers and UK payment infrastructure, including RTGS/CHAPS, Faster Payments, Open Banking interfaces, and tokenized-deposit platforms.
Forward-looking effects are most visible in fraud economics, settlement costs, and working-capital timing. UK retail payments fraud continues to be dominated by authorized push-payment scams and marketplace fraud, and programmability can embed funds-release conditions and verified counterparties.
Execution depends on interoperability across ledgers and schemes, which the pilot is designed to test. UK Finance’s RLN work describes a multi-issuer platform and orchestration layer that interacts with different forms of money and existing rails.
HSBC’s head of global payments solutions said the strongest client demand is in cross-border applications, even as the first tests are domestic, and noted that bank-to-bank interoperability has limited potential to date.
If the GBTD pilot proves shared programmability across retail and wholesale flows, production rollouts would begin where programmable conditions and synchronised settlement add the most value: high-risk P2P marketplace flows, mortgage completions, and selected DvP asset settlements. Bank-to-bank interoperability and fraud controls would be embedded from day one.
