R3, the infrastructure platform building digital solutions for financial markets, and Quant, the digital finance pioneer, announce the release of the results of UK Finance’s UK Regulated Liability Network.
The report which follows work with UK Finance with eleven of its members and partners on “a new experimentation phase.”
This is a new type of financial market infrastructure “that can deliver new capabilities for payments and settlement, including tokenization and programmability.”
R3 and Quant were selected by the UK RLN, alongside DXC Technology and Coadjute, as technology partners in exploring “a number of use cases and in particular the technology workstream which delivered a multi- issuer DLT-based Tokenization Platform, a comprehensive API for interaction with all forms of money, and an Orchestration Layer.”
Kate Karimson, R3’s Chief Commercial Officer, said the company is committed to progressing financial markets and to enabling an open, trusted, and advanced digital economy.
Implementation of the Orchestration Layer seamlessly “connected the Tokenisation Platform to different ledgers and integrated with existing systems (e.g. Open Banking, Project Rosalind, and simulated RTGS).”
Together with other participants, R3 and Quant reviewed and worked “on various technical, legal and business case questions surrounding the development of an RLN” and the main conclusions are:
- Such a platform, in collaboration with other important initiatives such as Open Banking, could deliver economic value and support innovation in the market.
- New functionality, such as programmable payments and locking/unlocking of funds, could be delivered across a range of use cases.
It could provide new and innovative firms “with a single, common point of access to enable them to interface with established institutions, and enhanced payment and settlement systems.”
The legal and regulatory framework of the UK “is sufficiently flexible to support the implementation of an RLN.”
R3 has brought its ability to “deliver complex pioneering projects for regulated markets whilst providing the critical distributed ledger capability, via Corda, its leading open permissioned DLT platform, powering the tokenization of assets and currencies connecting global markets.”
Quant enabled programmability and interoperability “across different forms of money by delivering the orchestration and API layer to the project with its Overledger platform.”
Jana Mackintosh, Managing Director of Payments, Innovation and Operational Resilience at UK Finance, explained that £11 trillion worth of payments is processed in the UK annually.
“The success of the RLN experiment shows the potential of technology to transform the customer experience and deliver economic value and benefits for society. The Experimentation Phase demonstrated the power of industry collaboration to deliver a platform for innovation in the UK. The private sector wants to invest in the future of commercial bank money but needs a partnership with regulators to do so.”
