Major UK banks—NatWest, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC UK, Barclays, Nationwide Building Society, Santander, and Monzo—have executed the first live retail transactions in the UK using tokenised sterling deposits, convened by trade body UK Finance under the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) initiative. The pilot covered three transaction types: two remortgage completions, in which deposit funds were locked and automatically released only once exact completion criteria were met, reducing manual checks and settlement delays while letting consumers keep earning interest on funds until completion; and a peer-to-peer consumer purchase, where funds were locked and released only once goods were successfully exchanged. The main objective is to demonstrate how tokenised commercial bank money can make payments more transparent, programmable, and efficient, while a digital link to HM Land Registry aims to improve future transaction efficiency. The transactions ran on the GBTD platform, built by blockchain infrastructure provider Quant, complementing separate work by the Bank of England, HM Treasury, the FCA, and the Payment Systems Regulator on the future of retail payments.

UK Banks Complete First Live Retail Trials Using Tokenised Deposits