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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).
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.
To test this concept, UK Finance and 11 of members, supported by a strong team of vendors, are undertaking an 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, digital pounds (UK retail CBDC), 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 are hosting an RLN 101 webinar on 16th April, and an Innovator Day on 16th May. Please contact Rhiannon.Butterfield@ukfinance.org.uk if you have any questions or would like to learn more.
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