Bank of England Taps Polygon and NOBO for Digital Pound Trade Trials

The project focuses on two distinct workstreams designed to modernize how smaller firms access capital and process international transactions. In the first, the group is developing a reusable SME credit profile. By combining transaction data from consent-based wallets with commercial intelligence provided by Dun & Bradstreet, the team hopes to create a pre-qualified identity that persists across different lenders, reducing the need for repetitive assessment processes. Polygon’s smart contract infrastructure will manage the consent and verification lifecycle, keeping the data under the business's control.

Integrating Central Bank and Private Digital Money

The second workstream explores invoice factoring through a dual-currency approach. The experiment tests a model where an exporter receives an advance via a private stablecoin, while the UK-based importer settles the final transaction using the digital pound. Polygon Labs provides the technical backbone for this interoperability through its Open Money Stack, testing whether public and private digital assets can function within a single trade sequence. While the Bank of England emphasizes that these trials involve no real money or customers and do not signal an official decision to launch a retail digital currency, the research is part of a broader effort to determine how tokenized deposits and stablecoins might eventually coexist within the UK’s financial infrastructure.