Fnality has processed live payments on its Sterling Fnality Payments System (£FnPS).
These initial live payments, in the first phase of its distributed-ledger technology-based digital financial market infrastructure and regulated payments system, were processed via an omnibus account held by £FnPS in the Bank of England’s real-time gross settlement system.
It will now focus on scaling volume through this digital payments channel via a phased expansion, subject to meeting the operational and supervisory expectations set by the Bank of England for the next phase of this project.
Fnality indicates that this will lay the foundation for establishing FnPSs in other core currencies including USD and EUR, as well as onboarding a wider range of banks to this payments service and including additional value-added functions including conditional payments, digital securities settlement, intraday repo and intraday FX swaps.
The company indicates that this milestone, which was achieved with key participation from banks including Banco Santander, Lloyds Banking Group and UBS, confirms the start of a wider multi-jurisdictional vision, enabling a global liquidity management network supporting PvP and DvP transactions in wholesale financial markets and emerging tokenised asset markets.
The £FPS was recognised and accredited by the Bank of England and the Payment Systems Regulator in August 2022 and is connected to CHAPS.
Reflecting on the launch of live payments on the system, Fnality UK CEO Angus Fletcher says: “This marks the culmination of significant efforts by Fnality, our shareholders and participants, our key partners, as well as the UK authorities.
“As we step into 2024, our focus sharpens on scaling up operations within a managed and approved framework as set out by the Bank of England, and steadily progressing towards unlocking new market use cases.”
Samantha Emery, director of Payments Industry and Development at Lloyds Banking Group, adds: “Our partnership with Fnality will help us to meet our own objectives of Helping Britain Prosper, while aligning to the UK Government’s ambition of putting the UK on the map as being a global fintech hub.
“Lloyds Banking Group has played a key role at the heart of this, through both strategic investment and technical deployment, which has enhanced our own colleagues’ expertise in an important new domain for financial services.”
John Whelan, managing director of Digital Assets at Banco Santander, comments: “Banco Santander has been part of the visionary Fnality story since the beginning. As one of its founders, we are delighted to be one of the inaugural banks to make payments on the first of its kind — a wholesale digital-cash settlement system. Systems like Fnality will help eliminate settlement risk and make wholesale payments instant and make wholesale payments instant and 24/7.”
