Seven of Britain's biggest banks have taken programmable sterling out of the sandbox and into a live run. UK Finance said on 24 September that Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander had completed the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits — ordinary pounds already sitting in customer accounts, represented on a shared blockchain and released automatically only when an agreed condition was met.
Two of the transactions were remortgage completions. Deposit funds were locked and then released between institutions the moment the property transfer was confirmed, cutting manual checks and settlement delays and letting the customer keep earning interest on the money until completion. The pilots also tested a digital link with HM Land Registry, exploring whether the conveyancing paperwork behind those completions could be tightened later. The third was a consumer marketplace purchase: a buyer dealing with a private seller, the payment held in the buyer's account and released only once the goods had actually been exchanged.
That last design is the one with a consumer's name on it. It is programmable escrow wired into the banking system rather than bolted on top of it, built for the buyer who pays a stranger and has no guarantee the item will ever arrive.
What actually moved
"Interbank" is the word doing the work. Banks have spent more than a decade building blockchain rails for deposits, bonds and currencies, and each built a private one, so none of them could transact with the others. GBTD is the shared layer intended to fix that. Quant built the platform, EY ran the project, and Linklaters wrote the legal agreements and the rulebook. Lloyds, NatWest and Barclays ran the two remortgage completions; a trio of banks including HSBC ran the person-to-person marketplace test.
What moved was not a new currency. A tokenised deposit is a digital record of money you already hold in a bank account, and it keeps the legal status of a deposit, including Financial Services Compensation Scheme cover. That is the substantive difference from a stablecoin, typically issued by a private company outside the banking system. The Bank of England has been clear that it would rather Britain's banks innovate with tokenised deposits than with privately issued stablecoins, and GBTD's written evidence to the Financial Services Regulation Committee argues that tokenised deposits should be the UK's preferred domestic programmable payment method, because bank money already carries the consumer protections and prudential rules.
What "live" does not cover yet
In the marketplace test, no real goods changed hands — the delivery step was simulated. That is normal for a pilot, and it is worth stating plainly because the headline is easy to overread. Nor does anything here create a commercial product or a revenue line. The pilots are due to conclude by the end of 2026, and the participants plan to set up a company and a governing rulebook to carry GBTD from pilot into production, targeting 2027.
These live transactions show how tokenised deposits can deliver practical, real-world benefits and contingent payments that give customers greater control over their money.
Who has to live with the rulebook
The policy stakes sit one layer below the technology, and they are largely about stablecoins. In its evidence to parliament, GBTD puts the domestic case bluntly: the UK economy leans unusually hard on bank-based credit creation, and a large migration of sterling deposits into non-bank stablecoins would shrink the pool available to lend and raise the cost of borrowing. The group also warns it could weaken monetary policy transmission and long-run demand for sterling. GBTD backs the Bank's proposals for systemic sterling stablecoins: a 40:60 split in backing assets, a continued ban on paying interest to coinholders, and holding limits.
Read together, that is an argument about who gets to issue the money British households and businesses run on, and the answer the industry wants is the banks, with programmability added. The regulators around the project — the Bank of England, HM Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator — have been reworking the retail payments plumbing in parallel. What the live transactions change is narrower but real: tokenised commercial bank money is no longer a claim about the future, because there is now a record of it moving between competitors on shared rails.
The next test is already scheduled. The banks plan to issue three digital bonds in the first quarter of 2027 that can be traded and settled using tokenised deposits, a step toward atomic settlement of tokenised gilts. The same idea is moving in the United States, where The Clearing House, a banking association and payments company, announced its own interbank tokenised deposit project in June. Two of the three live use cases here moved money between banks to buy property; the third moved money between strangers to buy a second-hand item. The distance between a remortgage and a marketplace purchase is the whole pitch — and the reason the banks want the rulebook settled before anyone else writes one.