An initiative involving seven U.K. banks completed the first live customer transactions using tokenized sterling deposits, banking and finance industry organization UK Finance said in a Thursday (Sept. 24) press release.
The transactions were delivered through the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) initiative, which was convened by UK Finance and involves the U.K. banks Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander, according to the release.
The GBTD platform on which the transactions were executed was developed by Quant as a shared U.K. industry infrastructure for tokenized commercial bank money, the release said.
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In one of the live retail transactions, GBTD participants executed two remortgage completions in which deposit funds were “locked” and then automatically released at completion, per the release. This reduced manual checks and settlement delays, UK Finance said in the release.
Another involved a consumer marketplace transaction in which a consumer purchased an item from a private seller. The programmable tokenized deposits enabled money to be “locked” in the buyer’s account and then released only when the goods were successfully exchanged, according to the release. This helped reduce transaction risk, UK Finance said.
The GBTD participants plan to conduct further pilots in the coming months to demonstrate digital asset settlement by linking tokenized customer money with digital assets, per the release.
“These live transactions show how tokenized deposits can deliver practical, real-world benefits, contingent payments that give customers greater control over their money,” Jana Mackintosh, managing director of payments and innovation at UK Finance, said in the release. “By bringing the industry together, GBTD is demonstrating how tokenized deposits can strengthen the U.K.’s payments infrastructure, support innovation across the economy and drive the U.K.’s competitiveness internationally.”
UK Finance announced in September 2025 that it and several financial institutions launched a pilot project that would include the first U.K. live transactions of tokenized sterling deposits.
The group said the pilot phase builds upon the successes of earlier phases of the U.K. Regulated Liability Network (RLN) project, which was experimenting with a new type of financial market infrastructure that includes tokenization, programmability and other new capabilities for payments and settlement.
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