Regulated Liability Network

What is the RLN?

In recent years, there has been significant innovation within payments and new forms of digital money, including public (e.g. CBDC) and private (e.g tokenised deposit) initiatives. There could be advantages to promoting broader collaboration to design a unified approach for the future of regulated money in the UK, where all digital pounds are sufficiently smart and interoperable.

The Regulated Liability Network (RLN) is positioned as a financial market infrastructure (FMI), operating a shared ledger with central bank money, commercial bank money and electronic money on the same network. It would have a number of partitions for each regulated entity to be able to record, transfer and settle their liabilities.

The purpose of the RLN is to create a new substrate for sovereign, regulated currencies that enables innovation around commercial bank money and is not just limited to central bank liabilities. Some of the core features of RLN would mean that it is ‘always on’, ‘programmable’ and can support ‘multi-asset’ settlement, thanks to the adoption of the distributed ledger technology (DLT).

What is happening now?

In 2023, UK Finance ran a Discovery Phase for the UK Regulated Liability Network (RLN). Outputs and information about the Discovery Phase can be found here.

In December 2023, UK Finance and 11 of members, supported by a strong team of vendors, began work experimentation phase, which will build a simulation of the foundational RLN platform, capabilities, and functionality to enable programmable payments in commercial bank money across retail and wholesale to demonstrate the incremental value above what is available in today's payment landscape. The work will also explore the relevant business, legal and regulatory considerations.

The UK RLN testing environment will provide a common ‘platform for innovation’ across multiple forms of money, including existing commercial bank deposits and a shared ledger for tokenised commercial bank deposits. The RLN’s platform technology delivered through a public and private partnership will enable digital innovation while preserving the uniformity of money.

We are keen throughout this project to engage with interested parties, particularly innovators that may wish to make use of the platform in the future. We hosted an RLN 101 webinar on 16 April, and an Innovator Day on 16 May. You can watch the recording of that event here. 

In September 2024 we published the final reports of the UK Regulated Liability Network Experimentation Phase, which can be found here.

Hackathon – November 2024

In September, we announced that we would be running a UK RLN hackathon from 20-21 Nov 2024.

The hackathon will be a two-day event to provide you with an opportunity to prototype your own use cases on top of the 'platform for innovation’ developed during the RLN Experimentation Phase

• Date: 20-21 November 2024
• Location: EY Fintech Lab, 25 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London
• Who can register: FinTechs, BigTechs, financial institutions, and other industry participants
• Participating teams: Up to 5 people per team, at least one team member must be in person, remaining team members can be in person or remote
• Recommended knowledge: Payments functionality, REST APIs
• Reasons to participate:
  • explore, experiment and innovate novel solutions for the future of payments
  • network with industry participants using the latest developments in the payments ecosystem
  • present your idea, use case and prototype to a wider audience
  • learn and have fun!

Please contact Rhiannon.Butterfield@ukfinance.org.uk if you have any questions or would like to learn more.