UK Finance, the trade association for the UK financial sector, has published a paper, “Plan for Growth: From Strategy to Delivery”. The paper positions tokenization as central to payments reform, urging sufficient regulatory flexibility to support the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) project. UK Finance has been coordinating live GBTD pilots with the UK’s six largest banks, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander, giving it direct visibility into regulatory hurdles.
The report warns that regulatory uncertainty related to tokenized deposits could delay the project or encourage activity to migrate elsewhere. It estimates up to £3 billion in benefits from tokenized deposits and calls on the Treasury and FCA’s review of payment laws to signal support for GBTD, allowing it and “similar industry-led projects to develop iteratively.”
During a speech at the UK Finance Growth Delivery Summit this week, UK Finance CEO David Post discussed the use cases being piloted through GBTD, including account-to-account payment, enabling safer house purchase payments and digital bonds. Post urged the government to “allow industry to innovate, and put capital at risk,” warning that without a commercial model “there will be no innovation and no growth. Now is the time to embrace change, and let the regulators take one step back to allow industry to deliver.”
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