On 18 May 2026, the Bank of England (BoE) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) (the Regulators) published a joint call for input on the future of tokenisation for UK wholesale financial markets.

Background

The Regulators set out that this paper follows on from the Government‘s Wholesale Financial Markets Digital Strategy (WFMDS) published in July 2025 and that it is intended to set out a shared vision for how innovative technologies can effectively be adopted in UK wholesale financial markets in line with the Government’s wider strategy.

Summary

The Regulators make clear that responses to this paper will inform a joint Roadmap, building directly on the Government’s WFMDS, that is aimed at firms across the wholesale ecosystem and the focus is on tokenised securities (such as bonds, cash equities, and fund units), although the Regulators also make clear that they will look beyond this in future. As a result, at a high level, the Regulators set out that this paper seeks to:

  • Set out a potential framework to consider the future use of tokenisation in wholesale markets, both the long-term end state and the transition to that.
  • Make clear the most important infrastructure, policy and regulatory principles and operational considerations that we propose to follow in any future changes to policy and regulations.
  • Make specific proposals in areas including the regulatory regime for issuing and exchanging digital assets, prudential and collateral treatment, and central bank money settlement of digital asset transactions.
  • Offer an initial roadmap of initiatives that will support market evolution, to help industry engage with the Regulators.

The paper also sets out certain priority areas for the Regulators, which they will be focussing on in order to achieve their overarching goals, in particular:

  • Regulating the issuance and settlement of digital securities: Establishing comprehensive regulatory regime for the issuance and settlement of digital securities, that supports UK capital markets.
  • Prudential Treatment of tokenised assets: Ensuring that there is equivalent treatment of tokenised and non-tokenised assets (subject to equivalent risks and regulatory outcomes) across 3 areas: (1) Prudential treatment, (2) Tokenised collateral in central bank operations, and (3) Tokenised collateral for central clearing at CCPs.
  • Access to innovative central bank money settlement: Ensuring that digital asset ledgers can access programmable settlement in central bank money.
  • Market functioning and issuance: Ensuring that the UK has have clean and resilient markets, where tokenisation directly and indirectly encourages primary issuance in the UK and provides capital to the real economy.
  • Specified investment cryptoasset (SIC) custody: Establishing a safeguarding framework for SICs that ensures adequate protection of clients’ SICs and operates effectively in a market where tokenised and non-tokenised structures coexist.
  • Supporting HMT’s DIGIT Pilot: Ensuring that there is a successful DIGIT issuance to catalyse UK‑based DLT infrastructure and the adoption of DLT in UK financial markets.

Next steps

The Regulators have asked for responses to this call for input by 3 July 2026.