Fnality’s new payments system successfully completes its first live transactions

The international consortium of major global banks focused on creating a new blockchain-based payment system, known as Fnality, recently managed to successfully complete its first live transactions. This represents a major achievement for the consortium, and it brings it one step closer to its goal of enabling the adoption of tokenized assets and marketplaces.

Fnality completes its first live transactions

The first live payments were made by Banco Santander, Lloyds Banking Group, and UBS. These financial institutions used an Omnibus account held by the DLT-based Sterling Fnality Payment System (£FnPS) in the Bank of England (BoE) RTGS service.

The first phase of the process is subject to limitations put in place by the Bank of England. The phase itself was focused on making sure that system can maintain its functionality and resilience in a live environment. After that, the following steps will entail scaling £FnPS operations, which will be under the direct supervision by the central bank.

Ensuring that everything works as intended will allow the consortium of banks to move on from relying only on GBP, and establish FnPSs in other core currencies. The next ones that Fnality wishes to include in the program are the US dollar and the euro. Along the way, this would allow it to invite more banks to join and participate in the initiative.

Furthermore, it will be able to roll out a range of value-adding functionalities, such as digital securities settlement, conditional payments, intraday FX swaps, intraday repos, and more.

One step closer to achieving Fnality’s vision

The CEO of Fnality UK, Angus Fletcher, commented on the success of conducting live transactions, stating that the milestone marks the culmination of major efforts by Fnality, but also its key partners, shareholders, participants, and even the UK authorities.

The move also took place right as the world is preparing to step into 2024, which is when the consortium will double down on scaling up operations within a managed and approved framework, as set up by the Bank of England. After that, the plan is to steadily progress toward unlocking new use cases in the existing market.

UBS’s managing director for principal investments and strategic ventures, Hyder Jaffrey, also commented on the new development. He said that transacting the first live payments through Fnality’s technology is evidence that the consortium’s initial vision is starting to come to life.

This will lead to the creation of a brand new, systemically important global payment system, which he sees as a type of event that is witnessed only once in a generation. He noted that UBS, alongside Santander and Lloyds, as well as Fnality itself, have witnessed a very real step in the creation of such a system. Now, all the participants look forward to seeing new transformational use cases built on the rails that Fnality is setting up right now.

It is also worth noting that Fnality recently held a Series B funding round, which managed to raise £77.7. The round was co-led by BNP Paribas and Goldman Sachs. Fnality held the round with the goal of establishing a global liquidity management ecosystem for digital payment models. That includes models in both the emerging tokenized asset markets and wholesale financial markets.