Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest and HSBC Complete UK's First Interbank Tokenized Deposit Transactions

LONDON — A group of major UK banks — Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest, and a separate group including HSBC — said they completed the country's first interbank transactions using tokenized deposits, under a pilot known as the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) project. Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest executed two mortgage-related transactions, while the HSBC-led group ran a person-to-person payment designed to simulate an online marketplace purchase.

The trials, supported by blockchain technology provider Quant, tested the ability to move tokenized commercial bank money — a blockchain-based representation of ordinary bank deposits — across separate institutions rather than within a single bank's own ledger. That distinction matters because most previous tokenized-deposit experiments by individual banks have stayed contained within one institution's systems; moving value between separate banks's tokenized ledgers is a materially different technical and settlement problem.

Proponents of tokenized deposits argue the approach could speed up settlement and reduce reconciliation costs for transactions like mortgage completions and person-to-person payments, while preserving the regulatory status of the underlying money as ordinary commercial bank deposits rather than a new form of currency ��� a distinction UK regulators and the banks involved have emphasized as they position tokenized deposits differently from stablecoins.

The pilot is described as a trial rather than a production rollout, and the banks involved have not announced a timeline for offering tokenized deposit transfers to retail or business customers. Interbank settlement infrastructure changes of this kind typically require extended testing, coordination with the Bank of England and other UK regulators, and broader industry buy-in before any customer-facing service would launch.