The Bank of England has selected Polygon Labs, UK fintech NOBO Finance, and business-data provider Dun & Bradstreet to conduct the next round of its Digital Pound Lab. The consortium will test how a central bank digital pound alongside private stablecoins could settle different components of a single cross-border trade transaction.

The Trade Finance Problem

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) engaged in importing and exporting, trade finance remains slow and expensive. Verification is fragmented across multiple parties, and settlement can take days. While large corporations can absorb these delays through treasury operations, smaller firms often face a cash squeeze between shipping goods and receiving payment. The Asian Development Bank has estimated the global trade finance gap at approximately $1.7 trillion, with SMEs disproportionately rejected for financing. The Bank of England is exploring whether different forms of digital money working in concert can address this bottleneck.

Two Connected Projects

The consortium is building two interconnected projects within the central bank's experimental program. The first, called the SME Bankable Profile, creates a portable profile that small businesses can carry between lenders, eliminating the need to re-submit the same paperwork each time they seek financing. This profile is constructed from three data sources: wallet transaction signals, open-finance data, and Dun & Bradstreet's commercial records. Dun & Bradstreet supplies the risk data, while Polygon Labs provides the smart contracts.

The second project tests whether businesses can obtain early invoice payments by using electronic shipping documents as collateral. Polygon handles the stablecoin settlement portion through its Open Money Stack, which manages fiat-to-stablecoin conversion, wallets, and settlement.

Not Yet Operational

The Bank of England has emphasized that the Lab involves no real customers and no real money. Participation in the testing does not signal any decision to issue a digital pound. The Bank of England and HM Treasury have not yet committed to building a digital pound and are still consulting on whether one is needed.

NOBO Finance advanced to Phase 2 following its Phase 1 success with conditional B2B escrow payments. The new phase incorporates Dun & Bradstreet's business data and Polygon's blockchain infrastructure to enhance security and efficiency.

Polygon's Growing Footprint

Polygon's network processed 743 million transactions in the second quarter of 2026, a 160% increase from the same period a year earlier — a surge driven largely by stablecoin transfers. The network has settled more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions to date and counts Revolut and Stripe among its users.

Next Steps

The findings from Phase 2 will inform the Bank of England and HM Treasury's assessment of the digital pound ahead of their next steps later in 2026. The results will also feed into a broader global conversation: the European Central Bank is in its preparation phase for a potential digital euro, and other central banks including the Bank for International Settlements have been coordinating cross-border CBDC interoperability experiments through projects like Agora, which similarly explore multi-currency settlement using unified ledgers.