The move to expand the programme follows an earlier pilot in 2022 conducted by EY and a subsequent ’Discovery Phase’ held  in consultation with market participants, including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, Santander and Visa. It follows a recent PoC run by the Federal Reserve with a clutch of top banks that demonstrated the feasibility of an interoperable network for wholesale payments operating on a shared multi-entity distributed ledger. While the UK Discovery Phase explored the delivery of a RLN for wholesale paymnts, the PoC will track the retail consumer market. This would test the use case for a RLN that would provide commercial bank money with the equivalent programmability of a future digital pound, in this way ensuring competitive consistency in the event of a full scale CBDC roll out. The importance of this was emphasised in a speech given in July by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who stated: "We want to encourage more thinking and action in the world of enhanced digital bank deposits - sometimes call tokenised deposits. So, yes, this is a call to action particularly to banks - don’t leave central banks as the only show in town." With a proof-of-concept on the horizon, UK Finance has issued a call for participants to join the programme: "If you think this work could be of interest, please reach out to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so you can be included in initial dialogue and judge whether you would like to be a participant for the next phase."