The Bank of England‘s Digital Pound Lab has selected NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs as a consortium for Phase 2 of its experimental programme, which tests whether stablecoins and a potential digital pound can work alongside each other to modernise cross-border trade finance infrastructure.
NOBO, a UK fintech building digital trade finance rails for small and medium-sized enterprises, completed Phase 1 of the lab independently, demonstrating conditional B2B escrow payments relevant to trade workflows. Phase 2 extends that foundation into a full settlement and identity stack, with Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs brought in as named partners.
The lab operates without real customers or live money and is designed as a controlled environment for evidence-based exploration. No regulatory commitment to a digital pound has been made by the Bank of England, and the programme sits within the central bank’s broader consultative work on digital money.
Two workstreams
The consortium will pursue two parallel workstreams. The first is an SME Bankable Profile, led by NOBO with both partners. It combines consent-driven wallet transaction data with open finance signals and Dun & Bradstreet’s commercial intelligence, including the D&B Commercial Graph, to produce a reusable, pre-qualified credit outcome. Polygon Labs provides the smart contract layer that anchors the verifiable credential and governs consent and deal lifecycle. The goal is a portable credit identity that an SME owns and can present to any lender or export market.
The second workstream tests an electronic bill of lading-backed invoice factoring flow. Under this model, an exporter receives an advance via a stablecoin rail while the UK importer completes final settlement in digital pounds, using Polygon’s Open Money Stack to bridge the two forms of digital money in a single transaction flow.
Ayo Ojerinola, founder and chief executive of NOBO Finance, said: “Trade finance is multi-party by nature, but the workflows, data, and settlement paths still don’t connect cleanly. The Digital Pound Lab gives us a safe environment to test our innovations, improving coordination across participants, and transforming how cross-border trade actually works today.”
Regulatory and market context
The trade finance liquidity gap the consortium is targeting is well-documented. The International Chamber of Commerce has estimated that the global trade finance gap runs into trillions of dollars, with SMEs disproportionately affected because they lack the treasury capacity to absorb slow settlement and the credit history to satisfy correspondent bank requirements. Fragmented verification and manual document checks remain the structural bottleneck.
This pilot sits within a wider UK and international push to use programmable money and tokenised assets to modernise wholesale and commercial payment infrastructure. The Bank of England’s broader digital money agenda, which includes a retail CBDC consultation and engagement with wholesale settlement models, places the Digital Pound Lab alongside comparable programmes run by the European Central Bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the BIS Innovation Hub. The interoperability question, how central bank money, regulated stablecoins and commercial bank money interact at the settlement layer, is the central policy challenge all of them are navigating.
For NOBO, selection into Phase 2 represents a meaningful regulatory validation moment, even though the lab carries no commercial licence or live deployment. The next substantive milestones will be the consortium’s Phase 2 findings, whether those results are published by the Bank of England, and whether NOBO pursues a regulated product path on the back of the evidence generated.
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