UK Finance announces new Regulated Liability Network experimentation phase

Notes to editors

Notes to Editor 

More information about the RLN concept can be found here: www.regulatedliabilitynetwork.org 

More information about the UK Finance Project:  https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/regulated-liability-network 

For more information please call the UK Finance press office on 020 7416 6750 or email press@ukfinance.org.uk  

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Jana Mackintosh, Managing Director, UK Finance said: “We are delighted to bring together several of our members to explore an inclusive design for all digital money.  It is important that the UK financial community works in close collaboration with public sector stakeholders to explore our common objective – to equip the UK with world leading financial infrastructure.  Our work is designed to inform the best way forward for all forms of regulated digital money.” 

Lee Braine, Managing Director – Advanced Technologies, Chief Technology Office, Barclays said: “It is great to see the financial services industry collaborating to push the envelope of payments innovation. We hope these experiments will provide insights into how a common platform for innovation could enhance customer experiences with new payments functionality and also mitigate the risk of fragmentation in retail payment markets.” 

Tiina Lee, Chief Executive Officer, Citi UK said: “The RLN project is an opportunity for the UK to become a world leader in the design of next generation value transfer systems. Shared ledger technology has the potential to bring about 24/7, multi-asset, programmable settlement venues that can support the emerging needs of the rapidly developing digital economy.” 

Tom Wood, Head of Global Payments Solutions, HSBC UK said: “HSBC is committed to exploring more efficient and secure payment alternatives to benefit our customers, and to ensure customer privacy and safety.  During this experimentation phase, we are actively working with UK partners to build the Regulated Liability Network for both retail and wholesale use cases, and believe the RLN can accelerate payment innovation in the UK market. We look forward to working with the RLN community to continue this journey.” 

Peter Left, Head of Digital and Markets Innovation, Lloyds Banking Group said: “As a commercially led approach, RLN can unlock new features for customers’ money across a range of retail and wholesale use cases. The enhanced interoperability between digital customer journeys, digital money, digital financial assets and real-world assets can help future proof the UK’s role as a global leader in financial services.” 

Raj Dhamodharan, Executive Vice President, Blockchain & Digital Assets, Mastercard said: “As the tokenised economy evolves, collaboration is key to unlocking the potential of new, regulated forms of programmable money. We believe in the potential of commercial bank deposits to not only facilitate smoother transactions but also foster innovative applications. We look forward to the collective work to explore how the UK RLN project can enable greater interoperability and security.” 

Lee McNabb, Head of Group Payments Strategy & Research, NatWest said: “We are at a pivotal point in shaping the future of money and asset movement in the UK and beyond. The RLN concept provides an opportunity to collaborate openly with peers, regulators and innovators to help understand what that future could look like. Innovation and experimentation are critical to understand what could work for our customers - improving existing journeys to create tangible benefit and change while ensuring safety and simplicity.” 

Paul Horlock, Chief Payments Office, Santander said: “RLN provides an excellent vehicle to experiment with the programmability of smart contracts; bringing together the customer journey and customer money in the form of regulated, tokenised money and assets through a shared ledger. We’re hugely excited about resulting opportunities to reduce friction, improve efficiency and enhance competition. We believe that the initial use case of online purchase, supported by DvP (delivery-versus-payment) can be particularly useful in the context of authorised push payment fraud, which at this point is such a challenge for customers and financial institutions alike.” 

Tim Moncrieff, Global Head of Strategic Growth Initiatives, Visa Money Movement said: “Over the last two decades, there has been enormous innovation and change on the front-end of payments with fast, flexible and frictionless solutions now widely available, however, in many instances, settlement remains less immediate and is typically constrained by siloed ledgers and batch processes. RLN presents a great opportunity for the industry to collaborate on the potential to drive innovation and modernisation in settlement through a network of value that could help to underpin continued innovation across payments.”