Senior leaders at UK’s banking institutions, insurers, asset managers and financial sponsors increasingly view tokenisation as a force that will reshape how money and securities move through the financial system.
Findings from Lloyds Banking Group’s tenth annual Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey show that 71 per cent of respondents expect the technology to alter the future of financial services.
The poll covered 100 senior decision-makers and ran from 13 April to 19 May 2026.
For the survey, tokenization was defined as the use of digital technology to represent conventional assets—such as cash deposits or securities—on secure, programmable systems.
In practice, this means items including cash, bonds and funds can be recorded on blockchain-based infrastructure and transferred more efficiently, while the legal protections associated with traditional instruments remain in place.
Respondents pointed to concrete operational gains. Sixty per cent named faster payments and settlement as the leading opportunity.
A further 41 per cent highlighted improved handling of collateral and liquidity.
By placing assets and payments on digital rails, institutions can settle trades more quickly, manage collateral with less friction and trigger transactions automatically once agreed conditions are met.
Those changes can simplify workflows and cut operational complexity.
The same efficiencies could release capital and liquidity that currently sit idle while transactions clear.
Lloyds noted that shortening the time and resources required to move money and assets may free resources for lending, investment and wider economic activity.
Modernising the market infrastructure that supports those flows was also ranked among the UK’s strongest economic opportunities for the year ahead.Interest in the technology sits inside a broader rise in technology spending.
More than three-quarters of the institutions surveyed—77 per cent—now treat investment in new and emerging technologies as a growth priority, nearly double the 41 per cent recorded in 2025.
Sixty-four per cent plan to raise capital expenditure over the next 12 months.
Lisa Francis, Global Head of Corporate and Institutional Banking Coverage at Lloyds, observed that firms have long focused on improving customer-facing channels and are now turning attention to the systems underneath them.
She described tokenisation as part of that shift, with organisations examining how it can support safer, trusted transactions, raise efficiency, improve capital use and open the door to new products.
Institutions that convert the concept into working solutions, she said, are likely to secure the largest advantage.
Rob Hale, Co-Head of Global Markets at Lloyds, framed the practical prize as markets that operate more quickly, more efficiently and with greater flexibility for clients.
Faster settlement, better collateral use and smoother liquidity movement can strengthen balance sheets, he noted.
The next stage, in his view, is to move from isolated trials to infrastructure that functions at scale, underpinned by interoperability and shared standards that link digital and conventional markets.
Lloyds has already taken part in such trials. Earlier in 2026 the bank, working with Archax and the Canton Network, completed what it described as the UK’s first public-blockchain transaction in which tokenised deposits were used to buy a tokenised gilt.
The exercise illustrated one route by which digital representations of money and securities might change settlement and collateral flows.
The survey results suggest that tokenisation has moved from a peripheral experiment toward a mainstream expectation among the UK’s largest financial institutions, even as questions of standards, interoperability and scaled infrastructure remain open.