On 29 April 2025, the Bank of England (BoE) published a speech by its deputy governor for markets and banking, Dave Ramsden, on its role in wholesale payments infrastructure and innovation.
Key points from the speech include:
- The BoE began its changeover to the renewed Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) core settlement engine on 28 April 2025, following a multi-year project to build a completely new platform.
- A consultation paper is planned on whether to extend settlement hours for RTGS, possibly in phases with the potential to enable access to settlement to near 24/7. The BoE also wants to expand further access to RTGS accounts for settlement.
- The next stage in the BoE’s work is to explore the introduction of a synchronised settlement interface to allow the RTGS platform to interoperate with other ledgers, including tokenised asset ledgers, to achieve “atomic settlement”. It intends to launch a ‘synchronisation lab’ – a platform that would simulate the synchronisation interface that the BoE is designing, and enable prospective synchronisation operators to develop and showcase viable propositions by facilitating hands-on experimentation across multiple use cases. It anticipates reporting findings in 2026, focusing on learnings for the design and build of a future live RTGS synchronisation capability.
- In parallel, the BoE is also beginning a programme of wholesale experiments to test the use cases, functionalities and prospective designs of a wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency. The first of these will test synchronised settlement of a tokenised bond and the BoE aims to report its first findings in H2 2026.
- The BoE also plans to explore a further experiment later in 2025 on how central bank money can be transacted and settled on an external programmable ledger that the BoE does not control.