Earlier today Bloomberg reported that Barclays is talking to technology providers “exploring the use of digital asset technology for various banking services.” Potential stablecoin and tokenized deposit solutions are on the cards, with the intention of making a selection by April. A Barclays spokesperson declined to comment to Ledger Insights.
Barclays has been engaged in the digital money space for some time, including a presence on the Bank of England’s CBDC Technology Forum for the digital pound and as an investor in institutional settlement network Fnality. The news comes at a time that other UK banks are making progress with tokenized deposits. At least three banks, HSBC, Lloyds and Standard Chartered, have standalone tokenized deposit solutions. While HSBC’s and Standard Chartered’s solutions are live in certain jurisdictions, Lloyds recently conducted a pilot transaction.
Barclays is currently involved in at least three initiatives which are relevant for this latest news. Firstly, it is a participant in the UK multibank tokenized deposit solution GBTD. While there are now dozens of live tokenized deposit solutions, multibank offerings are rare and also far more useful. Single bank solutions allow you to pay others at the same bank, whereas multibank solutions enable more typical cross bank payments. By their nature they involve compromises around which use cases all the banks agree to pursue. Should a bank want to explore different applications a standalone option may be preferable. But they need to be able to address interoperability to enable payments to other banks. This is where the second initiative comes in.
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