NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs have been selected to take part in Phase 2 of the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab. The programme is a sandbox where the central bank and outside companies test, with no real money involved, whether a digital pound could work alongside other forms of digital money, including stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value, usually by tracking a currency like the US dollar.
The consortium’s task is trade finance, the lending and payment arrangements that let a business ship goods abroad and get paid before or during the wait for the buyer’s money to arrive. For a small or mid-sized exporter, that wait can freeze cash they need to keep operating, and lenders often hesitate because it is hard to verify a small company’s finances quickly. NOBO, a UK trade finance platform, ran a related pilot in Phase 1 involving escrow-style payments held until agreed conditions are met. Phase 2 extends that work with two new partners.
“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.”
Ayo Ojerinola, Founder & CEO, NOBO Finance
The first workstream, an “SME Bankable Profile,” combines a business’s payment history with commercial data from Dun & Bradstreet, best known for the D-U-N-S Number used to identify companies worldwide, and blockchain infrastructure from Polygon Labs to produce a portable credit record a small business could reuse with different lenders instead of restarting checks each time.
“Smoother trade finance for SMEs depends on trust – and that starts with reliable business identity and risk data. By bringing the D&B Commercial Graph™ into NOBO’s work in the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab, we are helping build trust between trading partners and financial institutions, making SMEs more visible and bankable within cross-border trade and making it easier to match trade with financing and reduce friction in transactions.”
Sara de la Torre, Head of Financial Services at Dun & Bradstreet
The second tests a specific payment flow: an exporter is paid within seconds through a stablecoin, while the UK importer settles the same transaction in a digital pound, a central bank digital currency the Bank of England has not yet decided whether to launch. Polygon Labs supplies the stablecoin settlement layer, and the flow also involves an electronic bill of lading, a digital shipping document that can trigger payment automatically once verified.
Why the pilot currency matters
The pilot sits inside a wider debate about which currencies actually move through stablecoin rails. Nearly all stablecoins in circulation are pegged to the US dollar, since users and liquidity have concentrated there over the past several years. Last week the International Monetary Fund warned that local-currency stablecoins in emerging markets could end up speeding up dollarisation rather than protecting against it, since dollar tokens already hold the liquidity and user base that new local alternatives would need to compete with. The warning was mainly targeting emerging economies, but the same dynamic applies to any currency that isn’t the dollar, including good-old sterling.
That is another reason why this experiment matters. The Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab is not positioning a digital pound to replace stablecoins, but testing whether the two can be combined in one transaction, with sterling handling final settlement even as a dollar-linked stablecoin moves the money instantly across the border. If it works, it offers one answer to the dollarisation question: keep the domestic currency in the flow by settling in it, rather than trying to out-compete dollar stablecoins on their own terms.
“For digital money to actually move the world’s trade, its different forms have to work together, public and private, central bank money and stablecoins. This experiment tests exactly that, an exporter paid instantly in stablecoins while the importer settles in a digital pound, in a single flow. Interoperability is what gets value moving, and it is what Polygon’s Open Money Stack is built to enable. Regulators and central banks are asking the right questions, and we are glad to be part of that conversation at the infrastructure level.”
Marc Boiron, CEO, Polygon Labs
Phase 2 of the Lab is expected to run into the second half of 2026, after which the Bank plans to publish findings from participants. No decision has been made on whether a digital pound will ultimately launch.
