Seven UK banks have moved tokenized sterling deposits for real customers, starting with two remortgages

What happened

UK Finance said on 24 September 2026 that banks in the Great British Tokenised Deposit initiative, which it convenes, had completed "the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits". Seven banks are named: Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander. This desk's clusters of 13 July and 10 September described GBTD as six banks, on the sources each cited; the initiative's own page names seven. Three transactions are described. In two remortgage completions deposit funds were "'locked' and then automatically released at completion", and the page adds: "For mortgage transactions, the technology can also ensure customers continue to earn interest on funds held in their accounts until completion." The pilots also explored connecting digitally with HM Land Registry. In a consumer marketplace transaction a buyer paid a private seller, with the money locked in the buyer's account and released only when the goods changed hands. The transactions ran on the GBTD platform, which UK Finance says Quant developed "as a shared UK industry infrastructure for tokenised commercial bank money". Ledger Insights adds that each bank runs its own tokenized deposit, so the platform supplies a messaging layer for interoperability and clearing between them. The next stage is named but not dated. "Further pilots are expected over the next few months to demonstrate digital-asset settlement", and banks in the project "will issue digital debt instruments that can be traded and settled, with coupons paid in tokenised deposits", which UK Finance describes as delivery versus payment versus reserves.

Why it matters

The feature the release leads with is the one a stablecoin is forbidden to offer. Money locked for a remortgage keeps earning interest in the customer's own account until completion, because it never leaves the bank's balance sheet; the same week, the Federal Reserve proposed a presumption against a stablecoin issuer paying holders even indirectly. A tokenized deposit is still a deposit, and the lock is a condition on it rather than a transfer of it, which is why UK Finance can describe these as payments that give customers "greater control over their money" without any change in who holds the claim. The choice of first use says something too. Where the Eurosystem's Pontes, launched three days earlier, starts with wholesale settlement among fourteen institutions, GBTD's first live transactions are retail: a house purchase and a private sale. The case being made is against failed completions and authorised push payment fraud, which is a conditional payments argument and not a settlement asset one.

What is not settled

No value, no number of customers and no timetable for a service is given for any of the three transactions, so the scale of what went live is not known. Whether the next pilots will settle against central bank money is also not stated: the page names delivery versus payment versus reserves as the benefit, and does not say which reserves or through what connection to the Bank of England. The reports do not agree with the page on who said what. CoinDesk attributes the sentence "These live transactions show how tokenized deposits can deliver practical, real-world benefits" to Lucy Rigby, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury. The page attributes it, spelt "tokenised", to Jana Mackintosh, Managing Director of Payments and Innovation at UK Finance, and quotes Ms Rigby separately: "These first live transactions mark a critical milestone for payments innovation in the UK." CoinDesk's headline calls these the world's first interbank transactions using tokenized deposits; UK Finance claims only the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits. The page could be read only through one rendering, since www.ukfinance.org.uk refused direct requests, and its wording was checked against a full reprint of the release.