UK Finance engages Quant and R3 to support Regulated Liability Network experimentation phase
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) specialist Quant and enterprise software and services firm R3 have been tasked with producing a technology prototype to support the experimentation phase of the Regulated Liability Network (RLN) in the UK.
UK Finance’s RLN enters experimentation phase
The development of the RLN is being led by London-based trade association UK Finance with support from EY. UK Finance describes its latest project as “a common platform for innovation across multiple forms of money”, including traditional and tokenised commercial bank deposits.
It intends to utilise DLT and shared ledgers to establish a new channel for making payments and transacting and settling liabilities, with the likes of Barclays, HSBC, Mastercard, Visa, NatWest and Standard Chartered among confirmed participants.
The project is, as of this week, entering its experimentation phase, which UK Finance says will explore the network’s “foundational capabilities” as well as its “functional and non-functional requirements” and supporting legal framework.
Use cases expected to be addressed by this phase, which is to run until the summer, include both retail and wholesale payments such as payment-upon-delivery for physical products, property purchasing, and the issuance and settlement of a digital bond.
“This project is being run to test hypotheses about the envisaged benefits of a UK RLN as a platform-for-innovation, and will be integral to futureproofing and progressing the UK’s financial infrastructure,” explains Jana Mackintosh, managing director of payment innovation and resilience at UK Finance.
For its part, Quant says it will provide an orchestration and API layer for the network by leveraging its Overledger platform, which has previously been extended to the Bank of England’s Project Rosalind, an initiative by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and BofE to facilitate retail CBDC payments through the consolidation of both the private sector and monetary authorities.
“Quant’s experience developing connectivity and smart contracts will prove invaluable to the UK RLN proof-of-concept as we look to simulate the integration of participants’ existing systems and explore payments programmability,” Mackintosh adds.
R3 will lend the network its tokenisation platform Corda, as well as its digital currency solution, as a means of providing the “critical shared ledger capability”.
UK Finance says that it intends to publish the results of the network’s experimentation phase after the upcoming summer.
