Lloyds Banking Group, Banco Santander and UBS made the first live payments, using an Omnibus account held by the DLT-based Sterling Fnality Payment System (£FnPS) in the Bank of England RTGS service.

This initial phase, focused on ensuring system resilience and functionality in a live environment, is subject to limits set by the Bank of England. The next steps will entail scaling £FnPS operations under the supervision of the central bank.

This will pave the way for establishing FnPSs in other core currencies including USD and EUR, onboarding more participant banks, and rolling-out a range of value-adding functionalities including conditional payments, digital securities settlement, intraday repos, intraday FX swaps, and more.

Angus Fletcher, CEO of Fnality UK, comments: “This marks the culmination of significant efforts by Fnality, our shareholders and participants, our key partners, as well as the UK authorities. As we step into 2024, our focus sharpens on scaling up operations within a managed and approved framework as set out by the Bank of England, and steadily progressing towards unlocking new market use cases.”

Last month, Fnality raised £77.7 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas to help meet its goal of establishing a global liquidity management ecosystem for new digital payment models in both wholesale financial markets and emerging tokenised asset markets.

Hyder Jaffrey, managing director, principal investments and strategic ventures at UBS, says: “Transacting the first live payments over Fnality is evidence of the Fnality vision coming to life. The creation of a new systemically important global payment system is a once in a generation event. In conjunction with our partners at Lloyds and Santander, we and Fnality have evidenced a very real step in such a creation and we look forward to further evidencing new transformational use cases built upon Fnality rails.”