Fnality, the DLT payment market infrastructure backed by 17 major financial institutions, was due to launch the Sterling Fnality Payment System (FnPS) this month, but the date has been pushed back to Q3 2023.

The company says the decision was made in conjunction with the Bank of England “to allow more time to complete relevant onboarding and regulatory work.”

As previously reported, the platform was officially recognized by HM Treasury as a systemically important payment system in August, meaning that the Bank is its regulator.

The payment platform is designed to support settlement of tokenized assets. From the beginning, it planned to be multi-currency, including the British pound, the euro, the US dollar, the yen and the Canadian dollar.

A former director of Fnality, John Whelan of Santander, recently stated on Linkedin that we should see Fnality support GBP, Euro, USD in 2023. Fnality confirmed that it is making progress with its launch of wholesale payments in the US and Europe from “2023 onwards”. Our sources have said that the Finality Euro is moving forward, bolstered by Euroclear’s investment earlier this year.

On the other hand, in the last three or four months, the European Central Bank (ECB) has started talking about the possibility of a wholesale CBDC. But that doesn’t exclude the launch of Finality Europe. Technically, Fnality is a synthetic CBDC: a Fnality central bank account will back the coins, hence the need for the central bank buyout. Across the Atlantic, Fnality participated in a DLT initiative, Project Ion, promoted by DTCC in the United States.

From a time perspective, 2023 makes sense because that’s when DLT initiatives will ramp up. The UK will launch its IMF sandbox next year and the EU pilot DLT scheme will come into operation in March. The latter allows for limited exemption from certain EU regulations, such as allowing direct access to retail investors and supporting a single platform for digital securities trading and settlement.

Meanwhile, Fnality is in the process of raising additional funds and Nomura recently joined as its latest investor.

The full list of Fnality investors is Banco Santander, Bank of New York Mellon, Barclays, CIBC, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Euroclear, ING, KBC Group, Lloyds Banking Group, Mizuho, ​​MUFG Group, Nasdaq, Nomura, SMBC, State Street and UBS.

Last week, Fnality and Finteum, the DLT-based FX Swaps platform, announced a successful proof of concept for interoperability between their platforms. Fnality runs a separate network for each coin and uses a licensed variant of the Ethereum blockchain. The Fineteum platform is based on the R3 Corda enterprise blockchain. Settled the USD and GBP legs of the FX Swap on the two separate FnPS networks in a pay-versus-pay transaction. Finteum expects to go live in a similar timeframe as Fnality, with three banks registered so far.