On 1 July 2025, the Bank of England (BoE) published a speech by Victoria Cleland (Executive Director, Payments) entitled Synchronisation and beyond: enabling the next wave of financial innovation.

In her speech Victoria Cleland gives an update on the BoE’s plans for a synchronised settlement and programme of experiments in wholesale payments. She highlights how the BoE is laying the foundations for innovation in payments to enable broader benefits and economic growth.

Key points in the speech include:

  • The renewed Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service, RT2, went live on 28 April 2025. It is delivering on all four of the core objectives: higher resilience, broader access, wider interoperability, and improved user functionality.
  • There are plans to introduce a Synchronisation Lab following experiments like Project Meridian and Project Meridian FX. The Lab will be the first step in the BoE’s journey to synchronisation implementation and will provide learnings in a number of areas. It will help produce practical insights for the BoE as operators of the new RT2 platform. It is also a useful step for prospective synchronisation operators to test their operational readiness. And it is an opportunity for members of the wider ecosystem that could emerge around synchronisation operators – including payment service providers and asset ledgers – to get a real feel for what is to come.
  • The BoE has launched a programme of wholesale experiments, testing the relative merits of different methods of central bank money settlement for innovative payment systems. The first of these experiments will apply the tools built in Project Meridian to innovative use cases in tokenised securities settlement, supported by technical assistance from the BIS Innovation Hub London.
  • The BoE will build a robust body of evidence comparing the capabilities of wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and synchronisation in supporting new forms of settlement in central bank money. This will be included in the BoE’s final report of the Wholesale Experiments Programme in the second half of 2026. It will also inform the BoE’s assessment of whether wholesale CBDC offers tangible benefits that merit deeper exploration through additional experiments, alongside further improvements to RTGS.