In what it called a ”landmark event”, London-based fintech firm Fnality has successfully commenced live transactions with DLT-based wholesale payments. Achieved through the Sterling Fnality Payment System (£FnPS), the inaugural transaction was described in a press release as bringing together, “for the first time”, “the safety and institutional quality of central bank funds in a systemic wholesale payment system” with blockchain technology.
The transaction leveraged an omnibus account held by £FnPS in the Bank of England’s (BoE) real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system. Lloyds Banking Group, Banco Santander, and UBS were the initial participants.
Following the success of its first transaction, Fnality has revealed that its focus will now shift to scaling £FnPS operations in a “managed and phased approach”, including establishing FnPSs in other core currencies such as USD and Euro, onboarding more participant banks, and rolling out a range of value adding functionalities from digital securities settlement to intraday repos and more.
A sign of what’s to come
Beyond demonstrating Fnality’s functionality, the firm believes that this milestone “evidences the first foundations of a broader multi-jurisdictional vision; one that enables a seamless global liquidity management ecosystem by empowering new digital payment models for payment (P), payment versus payment (PvP), and delivery versus payment (DvP) transactions in both wholesale financial markets and emerging tokenised asset markets”.
In a Linkedin announcement, Fnality International CEO Rhomaios Ram called the transaction a “major step forward” in achieving the abovementioned vision, and echoed a participant’s comment that this was a “once in a generation event”.
