On 2 July 2025, the Bank of England (BoE) published a speech by Sasha Mills (Executive Director, Financial Market Infrastructure) entitled Building tomorrow’s markets: the digitalisation of finance.

In her speech Sasha Mills discusses how innovation can be harnessed to develop the foundations and functions of tomorrow’s financial markets, how they fit together and key developments to build that future, including the BoE’s updated thinking on settlement assets.

Key points in the speech include:

• There will soon be a consultation on the UK’s systemic stablecoin regime, following up from the earlier Discussion Paper on systemic retail stablecoins published in November 2023. This will sit alongside the Financial Conduct Authority’s consultation on their requirements for non-systemic stablecoins, which has already been published.
• Consistent with the BoE’s position in the Discussion Paper, it is also considering introducing holding limits for systemic stablecoins. These limits would be transitional and allow the financial system to adjust to new forms of digital money.
• The BoE is considering the role that stablecoins could play in supporting innovation in the Digital Securities Sandbox. It will be putting out further information on this later in the year.
• To ensure the BoE continues to meet the evolving needs of the UK payments ecosystem, it has identified a series of enhancements as part of the Future Roadmap for Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS). This includes working with industry on the introduction of a synchronisation interface (which would allow the conditional settlement of funds in RTGS accounts against assets on a variety of external asset ledgers – including those based on distributed ledger technology).
• The BoE will shortly be publishing its approach to onboarding of new financial market infrastructures entering the BoE’s regulatory remit. This will set out a risk-based and proportionate approach for how firms can mobilise and scale as FMIs in the permanent regulatory regimes.