A step toward the future of payments

Since the beginning of 2024, UK Finance and RLN participants have been working on a detailed experiment around the concept of an RLN. This initiative seeks to bridge the gap between private innovation and regulatory frameworks, ensuring that any advances in payment technology are consistent with the principles that underpin the ‘singleness of money’– the idea that money should maintain a consistent value across different forms.

The Experimentation Phase delved into three key areas: business, technology, and legal frameworks. The findings highlighted how tokenised deposits, operating within the current legal and regulatory structures of the UK, can provide the next step in the evolution of commercial bank money. Crucially, this phase demonstrated that an RLN could deliver significant benefits in real-world applications, including potentially reducing payment fraud and streamlining complex transactions, such as property purchases.

UK RLN Hackathon 20-21 November 2024

The UK RLN is hosting a two-day hackathon beginning on 20th November 2024. This event invites teams of up to five participants to prototype their own use cases on top of the ‘platform for innovation’ developed during the UK RLN Experimentation Phase by R3, the infrastructure platform building digital solutions for financial markets, and Quant, the digital finance pioneer. By providing industry participants with the opportunity to build new use cases that leverage the capabilities of the UK RLN platform, the hackathon is driving innovation in the UK, demonstrating how the programmability of money can transform the way value and assets are transferred and managed.

FinTechs, BigTechs, financial institutions, and other industry players will explore and experiment with novel solutions for the future of payments on a shared ledger underpinned by R3’s Corda network. R3’s own team will trial a cross-border payments use case that simulates payment processing and settlement between a non-UK system and the UK RLN. They will explore how interactions between these systems can be mediated by a new cross-jurisdictional component to simplify compliance checks while minimising settlement risk using cryptographic techniques. This solution offers financial institutions increased transparency in cross-border transactions and lower compliance efforts thanks to standardisation, while retail and corporate customers would benefit from faster payment execution.

R3 and Quant, alongside DXC Technology and Coadjute, served as technology partners on the UK RLN delivering a multi-issuer DLT-based Tokenisation Platform, a comprehensive API for interaction with all forms of money, and an Orchestration Layer. Representatives from R3 and Quant will be present at the hackathon to provide teams with technical advice and support throughout the event.