Q: You previously said digital assets were moving from experimentation towards the mainstream. What has changed since then?
What’s exciting is that we’re starting to see some of the ideas we’ve been exploring put into practice.
Through the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) project, we’ve now helped deliver the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits – digital versions of money held in a bank account – including remortgage transactions and person-to-person payments. It’s an important milestone for payments innovation in the UK because it starts to show how this technology could solve real problems.
When buying a home, for example, there are multiple parties and processes involved, and the movement of money needs to happen at precisely the right point. Being able to programme payments so that they move when agreed conditions are met has the potential to make experiences like that more efficient and give customers more control.
Q: Beyond the UK, how are digital assets changing the way money moves internationally?
We’re starting to see similar progress. Project Agorá brings together the public and private sectors to explore how tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits could support wholesale cross-border payments. Recent testing went beyond simulation and showed that the prototype could handle several different types of international payment. Once a payment was submitted, it took about 80 seconds on average to complete.
What's interesting to me isn't simply the speed. Moving money internationally can involve different institutions, currencies and systems, so there's a real opportunity to simplify some of that complexity.
Q: We’re also hearing more about agentic commerce. How might AI change not just how we pay, but how purchasing decisions and transactions happen?
Agentic commerce is really interesting because it could change the role multiple parties play in a transaction. We're already familiar with AI helping us search, compare and make decisions. An AI agent could go further and carry out several steps on our behalf within the parameters we’ve set.
Imagine asking an AI agent to arrange a work trip. It could compare trains and hotels against your budget and preferences, build the itinerary, make the bookings and pay, asking for approval where you've required it. That has the potential to remove friction from routine tasks, but it also raises important questions. How does a merchant know that an agent is genuine? How does your bank know that a payment reflects the instructions you've given?
For me, that means trust and choice need to be built in from the outset. AI may be able to do more on our behalf, but customers still need to understand what’s happening and remain in control.
Q: Why is collaboration between banks becoming so important as payments evolve?
Payments is a network business, they don't happen in isolation. If every organisation develops these technologies in its own way, you risk creating more complexity rather than less.
With agentic commerce, for example, we’ve been working with leading banks around the world on shared principles around transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice and interoperability, helping establish a framework for AI’s role in payments for products and services.
That same spirit of collaboration runs through the work we're doing on tokenised money, both in the UK and internationally. No single organisation knows what the future of money looks like – we need to test ideas together, learn from them and build an ecosystem that works for customers.
Q: If we look ahead a few years, what do you think customers will notice about this transformation, and what will remain invisible to them?
We're moving into a world where different technologies and forms of money could play different roles, depending on the transaction and what people need. For me, I always ask: is this making something genuinely better for customers?
They shouldn’t necessarily have to understand the technology sitting underneath all of this. If we get it right, all they should notice is a simpler, safer and more seamless experience.
