Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Bank of England’s trial to update the Real-Time Gross Settlement system by use of an interledger programme to synchronise payments.

As the Bank of England explained in their article ‘FinTech Accelerator Proof of Concept’, the Bank of England’s trial found that the Interledger Protocol was able to support synchronisation of payments between two Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) ledgers. The trial highlighted the importance of ensuring that the Bank’s High Value Payments System is able to support multicurrency transactions and cross-border payments, and of ensuring that the Bank’s new RTGS system is compatible with the growing use of new technologies.