The Bank of England has selected a consortium led by fintech firm NOBO, along with Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs, to participate in Phase 2 of its Digital Pound Lab. This selection follows the successful completion of Phase 1 by NOBO, which demonstrated conditional business-to-business escrow payments relevant to trade workflows.
The lab operates as a controlled environment without real customers or live money. It is designed for evidence-based exploration rather than commercial deployment. The Bank of England has not made any regulatory commitment to issuing a digital pound, and the programme remains part of its broader consultative work on digital money.
SME Bankable Profile Development
The consortium will pursue two parallel workstreams during this phase. The first focuses on creating an SME Bankable Profile. NOBO will lead this effort in collaboration with its new partners. The project combines consent-driven wallet transaction data with open finance signals and commercial intelligence from Dun & Bradstreet.
A key component of this workstream is the D&B Commercial Graph. Polygon Labs provides the smart contract layer that anchors the verifiable credential. This layer governs consent and the deal lifecycle. The goal is to produce a reusable, pre-qualified credit outcome. The consortium aims to create a portable credit identity that an SME owns and can present to any lender or export market.
Electronic Bill of Lading Testing
The second workstream tests an electronic bill of lading-backed invoice factoring flow. Under this model, an exporter receives an advance via a stablecoin rail. The UK importer then completes the final settlement in digital pounds.
Polygon’s Open Money Stack bridges the two forms of digital money in a single transaction flow. This setup allows for the integration of regulated stablecoins and central bank money at the settlement layer. The International Chamber of Commerce estimates the global trade finance gap runs into trillions of dollars. SMEs are disproportionately affected because they often lack the treasury capacity to absorb slow settlement times.
Ayo Ojerinola, founder and chief executive of NOBO Finance, stated that trade finance is multi-party by nature. He noted that workflows, data, and settlement paths still do not connect cleanly. He added that the Digital Pound Lab provides a safe environment to test innovations. This testing aims to improve coordination across participants and transform how cross-border trade works.
Fragmented verification and manual document checks remain structural bottlenecks in the industry. This pilot sits within a wider push to use programmable money and tokenised assets to modernise payment infrastructure. The Bank of England’s agenda includes a retail central bank digital currency consultation and engagement with wholesale settlement models.
The interoperability question remains the central policy challenge. Central bank money, regulated stablecoins, and commercial bank money must interact effectively at the settlement layer. The Digital Pound Lab operates alongside comparable programmes run by the European Central Bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the BIS Innovation Hub.
For NOBO, selection into Phase 2 represents a meaningful regulatory validation moment. The lab carries no commercial licence or live deployment. The next substantive milestones involve the consortium’s Phase 2 findings. It remains unclear whether those results will be published by the Bank of England. NOBO may pursue a regulated product path on the back of the evidence generated.
Source: The Fintech Times
