MoneyHive
University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group announce groundbreaking agentic AI research programme
- The University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group have launched a four‑year research partnership to explore how AI can support software and data engineering.
- The project will help Lloyds Banking Group implement agentic AI at scale within their software engineering practice, while giving University researchers a unique opportunity to study large‑scale engineering transformation in a real‑world setting.
- The partnership will create a PhD, a Masters of Research and a post‑doctoral role.
- The project’s findings will guide how Lloyds Group scales the use of agentic AI across wider data and engineering teams and contribute to the development of best practice, national policy and industry standards.
A new research partnership between the University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group is setting out to explore the potential of AI to support software and data engineering.
Over the next four years, the partners will explore how large language model-based coding tools called agentic AIs could support and enhance the work of software and data engineers at Lloyds Banking Group.
Agentic AIs are software tools which act as semi-autonomous ‘agents’ to complete tasks of varying complexity. In software and data engineering, they are already being used to write and debug code, solve technical problems, and perform a variety of project management tasks.
As the UK’s largest digital bank, Lloyds Banking Group is investing significantly in developing new digital software and services, alongside training and new skills for colleagues, to support its 28 million customers.
The University’s research team and Lloyds Banking Group will work together to design experiments that test the efficacy of agentic AI for high priority activities in individual software teams. The team will use a variety of empirical software engineering research techniques to gather evidence, such as data mining.
The project will help Lloyds Banking Group implement an agentic AI approach to software and data engineering and measure the impact across their organisation. At the same time, it will provide software engineering researchers at the University with a rare opportunity to study and contribute to a large-scale transformation to software and data engineering practice.
The collaboration will create a PhD and a Masters of Research position at the University, along with a post-doctoral research associate post to work with Lloyds’ software engineering teams.
Dr Tim Storer, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, will lead the University’s side of the partnership along with colleague Dr Peggy Gregory.
Dr Storer said: “Agentic-driven software engineering is a fast-developing sector with the potential to enable human engineers to work more efficiently by automating some tasks and allowing them to focus their skills on higher-level work.
“However, there has been relatively little research in industry on how integrating agentic AI into software engineering practices can be done effectively in large-scale organisations.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with Lloyds Banking Group on this groundbreaking project. Together, we will enable the Group’s plans to increase their software development capacity, produce high-quality research for the benefit of all, and influence national policy and industry standards.”
Lloyds Banking Group’s contribution will be led by Dr Shane Montague, Head of Research Engineering, with executive sponsorship from Professor Andrew McDonald, Enterprise Data Provisioning, Technology Platform Lead.
Dr Shane Montague said: “Lloyds Banking Group’s mission to Help Britain Prosper means leading innovation that genuinely improves how engineering gets done, with a focus on delivering enhanced digital services for our customers.
Each quarter, the partnership will task Lloyds Banking Group’s software and data engineers in Bristol, Manchester and Hyderabad to work with their agentic AI counterparts on a different type of task with the aim to measure the impact on quality and speed of delivery.
As the partnership continues, the Group will develop and improve their understanding of how to harness the benefits of agentic AI. Successful projects will be rolled out across the Group’s wider data teams, and eventually to all software and data engineering teams.
At the same time, Glasgow researchers will work alongside the teams to gather evidence on each project’s impact on efficiency, workflow and the day-to-day work of the teams.
Together, the partners will publish regular research papers documenting their work and develop best-practice documents to help organisations of all scales integrate AI into their software and data product development processes.
Every Life Moment Is a Money Moment
By Dia Banerji, Founder and CEO, Cherpa.ai
Separation. Redundancy. Having a baby. Losing a parent. Caring for an ageing relative. Retiring.
Every one of these moments comes with money questions. And for most people, those questions arrive at exactly the wrong time, when you are stressed, stretched, and trying to hold the rest of life together.
In some ways, I have been trying to make money simpler for people my whole career. I spent over 20 years in financial services, building products, shaping propositions, and working with customers at scale. I saw the best of what our industry can do, and I also saw a pattern that kept repeating.
The people who need help most are often the least likely to get it.
Not because they are not capable. Not because they are not trying. But because the industry still expects people to work out what they need, hunt it down across multiple sources, and then stitch it together for themselves, translating generic education into decisions that make sense for their own lives, often in the very moments they have the least capacity to do so.
The problem is not knowledge, it is design
Financial services impact everyone and it should work for everyone.
Yet the experience most people have is fragmented and exhausting. One app for budgeting. Another for savings. Another for pensions. Another for benefits. Another for insurance. Each tool does something useful in isolation, but real life does not arrive in neat categories.
If you are going through a separation, you might need to rethink your mortgage, update your pension beneficiary, understand what help exists for short term bills, and decide what to tackle first. Those are connected questions, but our tools split them into separate journeys, leaving the person to join the dots. We assume information equals empowerment. Too often it is just cognitive load, and when life is already full, it becomes disengagement rather than better decisions.
The same is true for financial education. The industry has invested heavily in it, and rightly so, but it is usually delivered at a distance from real life, generic, broad, and rarely anchored to the moment someone is actually living through. It tells you what people like you should think about, not what it means for you, right now, in your specific situation.
And if the choice is between a webinar on pension consolidation and the next season of Bridgerton, I know which one I am choosing, and I have worked in pension!
People do not need more content. They need clarity.
The advice gap, and the missing middle
There is another layer to this. Regulated advice is essential for big, complex decisions. But most everyday money questions are not asking for a product recommendation. They are asking for direction, options, and reassurance.
People want to know things like:
- What support can I access right now
- What should I change first
- What am I missing
- What is the “obvious” thing that everyone else seems to know
Often the most valuable intervention is not a recommendation. It is connecting the dots.
Before we built anything, we surveyed people about money confidence. Nine in ten told us they could improve. Many said they feel anxious just thinking about their finances. A meaningful number said they do not seek help from anyone at all. And the words people used stuck with me:
“I don’t need a PhD in financial products. Just tell me what’s relevant to me.”
“My budgeting app shames me for buying a coffee. Too many apps, too little help.”
“Make me feel safe asking stupid questions.”
That last line matters more than it seems. Because the real barrier is often emotional. Shame, fear of getting it wrong, fear of being judged, fear of being sold to, fear of admitting you do not understand.
What should the future feel like
I believe we are entering a new era of financial support. One where the default experience is not search, not generic content, and not a cold handoff into a process designed for specialists.
The future should feel more like this:
One front door. A conversation. Your life context. The options that matter to you.
Not to replace regulated advice, and not to turn every question into a product journey. Instead, to help people navigate the messy, human moments where money is involved, which is most moments.
To do that well, three things have to change.
First, we have to start from life moments, not financial categories. Life is the organising system. The tools should follow.
Second, we have to make information genuinely usable. That means connecting it, prioritising it, and presenting it in plain language, with next steps that feel doable.
Third, we have to treat trust and privacy as design requirements, not legal footnotes. Many people are understandably reluctant to share bank data with a new app.
Building a new front door to financial support
Cherpa exists to meet people right where they are. When life changes, money questions do not arrive neatly labelled. They arrive tangled, emotional, and urgent, and yet we still ask people to navigate a maze of tools, terminology, and generic content.
So we are taking a different approach. We start where real life starts, with the moment, not the product. One conversation that helps someone orient quickly, join the dots across the areas that matter, and move from noise to a clear set of options and next steps. The ambition is to create a trusted front door, a place people can begin, without needing to hand over more data than they are comfortable sharing.
That shift, from fear to agency, is the outcome I care about.
Why this is personal
I lost my dad when I was fourteen. I watched my mum try to navigate a financial system that gave her no useful answers during the hardest moment of her life. That memory has never left me.
It is one thing to know, intellectually, that help exists. It is another to live the reality of not being able to find it, understand it, or know what applies to you.
That is why I keep coming back to this belief.
Every life moment is a money moment. And nobody should have to face them alone.
Dia Banerji is the Founder and CEO of Cherpa.ai, based in Edinburgh.
Tech giants urged to join fight against soaring scam ads in UK
Social media giants are being urged to join the fight against the soaring number of scam ads in the UK and to pay their fair share in combatting online fraud. The call comes ahead of the Government’s National Fraud Strategy, set to be published imminently.
The Payments Association (TPA), wants a Home Office-led overhaul of how online fraud is fought in the UK and set out the sector’s view on the way forward and how to take action at its PAY360 event in London this month.
Scam ads use AI tools to impersonate trusted brands and exploit social media algorithms to appear at the top of shoppers’ search results. They offer fake products or services to steal money or personal data.
Recent years have seen a surge in scam ads on sites like X, Facebook and Instagram. It is estimated that UK shoppers see an average of 185 scam ads a month.
The Payments Association wants a fairer regulatory framework for fighting online fraud. While social media platforms generate revenue from all advertising, real and fake, it is financial institutions that bear the brunt of combatting the crime.
Consumers conned by fake adverts lose money individually, and the total impact is adding up. According to recent data from Juniper Research, UK shoppers lost £44 million to fake ad scams in 2025 – that figure is set to rise to £84 million by 2030.
The fraud is called Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud because consumers are conned into voluntarily handing over their money.
Tougher consumer protection regulations have seen a mandatory reimbursement threshold for APP fraud imposed in October 2024 and payment service providers have reimbursed 87% of all scam-related losses since this was implemented.
But social media giants, where fraud originates, pay nothing to reimburse shoppers who become victims of crime on their platforms.
It is estimated that social media platforms generated £3.8bn in revenue from scam ads in 2025, roughly ten per cent of all social media ad revenue. Advertising on social media is set to grow by 120 per cent in the next five years to be worth £84bn by 2030.
Last month The Payments Association published its manifesto for 2026, called Making Britain a Payments Powerhouse.
It outlined plans for the Home Office to draw up a new “shared responsibility framework” which would see liability for economic crime “shared proportionately amongst stakeholders based on origination data”.
The UK is a major target of scam ads. In 2025 alone it is estimated to account for 95 billion scam ad impressions – this figure is set to rise to 137 billion by 2030.
Riccardo Tordera Ricchi, TPA Vice President – Policy and Government Relations, said: “Payment firms are expected to stop fraud at the point money is transferred when the real crime has been committed upstream – through digital communication and scam advertising.
“It cannot be right that while social media platforms benefit from the revenue generated by online fraud, consumers and payment firms are left to pick up the bill for that crime.”
The Payments Association wants Ministers to tighten Britain’s National Fraud Strategy (of which a major update is due imminently) by extending the Economic Crime Levy to both social media and telecoms companies.
The levy is a government charge imposed on more than 4,000 businesses regulated under Anti-Money Laundering laws.
Depending on their size, companies pay a flat annual fee – ranging from £10m to £1bn – to fund initiatives to combat money laundering and economic crime. From next month (April) thousands of larger firms will face substantial increases in the fee.
At its PAY360 event this month, The Payments Association will publish a paper also calling on social media giants to do more to detect and prevent online fraud.
It wants big tech and telecoms firms to sign up to the Online Fraud Charter, improve fraud detection protocols and strengthen verification of online advertisers.
The Association is also calling for new legislation to allow for better data sharing across industries and the creation of a new UK Digital Payments Fraud Centre – an independent hub that uses AI to detect fraud trends and co-ordinate responses across payments, telecoms, e-commerce and law enforcement.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves last year signalled the Government was considering a greater role for tech and telecommunications firms in battling fraud.
Launching Turnkey PI and unveiling our rebrand: a new chapter in insolvency technology
By Turnkey, the cloud-based insolvency software provider.
After over four decades of supporting insolvency professionals with powerful, reliable technology, we are introducing a new product, Turnkey PI, and stepping into a bold new era with our rebrand. It’s more than a refreshed logo or updated colour palette: it’s a reflection of who we’ve become and where we’re going.
A natural next step: Welcome Turnkey PI
For over four decades, we’ve been focused on doing one thing exceptionally well: supporting corporate insolvency professionals with robust, purpose-built technology. Since then, we’ve grown in experience, capability, and reach – and we’ve realised something: we weren’t just a corporate insolvency software provider anymore; we were becoming a broader technology partner to modern insolvency practices. Globally.
As a matter of fact, one of the biggest drivers behind our rebrand is something we’re incredibly proud of: the launch of Turnkey PI (Personal Insolvency). It’s an important step for us, and it signals something bigger: that Turnkey is growing to support the full landscape of the insolvency industry.
Turnkey PI goes beyond our existing capabilities by delivering connected, client-centric tools built specifically for personal insolvency practitioners. At its heart is a secure, intuitive Client Portal where clients can submit and track queries, upload documents, make secure payments, approve actions electronically, and monitor real-time case progress through a clear dashboard.
“This product matters because it can affect people who are in debt in an unbelievably positive way.” – Craig McDonnell, Director at Turnkey
Alongside this, a fully integrated Communications Hub centralises email, SMS, and WhatsApp in one place, automatically storing all correspondence against the case file. The result is a complete audit trail that strengthens compliance, improves transparency, and reduces administrative workload.
Over the years, our product suite has become more sophisticated, more integrated, and more intuitive. The old brand no longer fully represented the technology behind it. Our new look is modern, confident, and purposeful designed to visually express the clarity and ease our solutions deliver.
“This milestone brings our growth strategy to life – transforming our vision into delivery through a reimagined, modern brand that better reflects who we are today and provides a strong foundation for continued expansion.” – Deborah Baxter, CEO at Turnkey
This new phase is also a reflection of the people behind it. There’s a real sense of pride across the business in what we’ve achieved and where we’re heading, and it’s that collective energy that’s powering this next stage for Turnkey.
Merchant Transact 360: The Event Shaping the Future of Merchant Payments
Co-located with PAY360, Europe’s largest payments event, Merchant Transact 360 is the new, dedicated conference for merchant payment professionals. On the 25-26 March 2026, the event will welcome 400+ attendees, including 200+ leading merchants, for two days of curated insight, innovation and networking.
In an increasingly complex ecosystem, Merchants look 10-15 years ahead, anticipating how future generations will shop, pay and consume, Merchant Transact 360 brings the community together to explore what’s next at a time when seamless money movement and agile payments strategies are becoming central to growth.
A Merchant-Led Agenda
Shaped by The Payments Association’s Merchant Payments Working Group, with input from leaders at Spotify, BT, Frasers Group, Sky, DAZN and Jaguar Land Rover, the agenda reflects the issues merchants are tackling right now.
Across keynotes, panel discussions and closed-door roundtables, 50+ speakers will address the sector’s most urgent themes:
- Maximising revenue and reducing loss – Increase acceptance, optimise methods, fix failure points and mitigate emerging fraud.
- Enhancing customer experience – Deliver seamless checkout experiences that match evolving payment preferences.
- Reducing operational costs – Cut fees, eliminate hidden costs and streamline your payments tech stack.
- Navigating compliance and regulation – Stay ahead of new open banking, data and security requirements with reduced internal strain.
- Driving strategic growth – Transform payments into a growth driver through analytics, fraud insights and cross-border expansion.
Purpose-Built for Merchants
- A two-day conference dedicated solely to merchant payments
- Peer-to-peer roundtables for confidential, experience-driven discussion
- AI-powered matchmaking to help attendees connect with the right people
- A VIP lounge exclusively for merchant teams
The event welcomes attendees from across retail, hospitality, telecom, travel and digital services, including members of our growing merchant community such as BT Group, Coop, Marriott, New Look, Flutter Entertainment and Sky.
Why Attend?
Merchant Transact 360 is the only event built for merchants rather than around them. It provides:
- Access to merchant-focused insights and practical case studies
- The opportunity to meet 200+ fellow merchants and industry partners
- Direct engagement with decision-makers who influence payments strategy
- A platform to showcase and discover solutions that drive measurable impact
Whether you aim to streamline costs, improve customer experience, reduce fraud, or re-position payments as a strategic growth tool, Merchant Transact 360 offers the essential space to connect, learn and lead.
Get your tickets here.
Use Code FintechScotland20 to save 20% off your delegate pass.
Where Banking Is Heading: From Vision to Execution in London this May
Banking Transformation Summit | 19–20 May | Tobacco Dock, London
The Banking Transformation Summit is the definitive gathering for senior executives driving real change inside Europe’s leading banks and building societies to shape what’s next in banking. Returning to London on 19–20 May, a verified audience of 1,000 decision-makers will convene at Tobacco Dock; a first-class venue delivering premium hospitality for all attendees, and located a convenient distance from London’s financial districts and major transport links for ease of travel.
What to expect: agenda and themes
Carefully curated to ensure high-value connection and strategic clarity, the two-day agenda addresses the decisions, technologies and leadership challenges actively reshaping banking today. Day One focuses on vision and where banking is heading, exploring what’s changing across the industry, the forces shaping the future of financial services, and what leaders need to be thinking about next as regulation, technology, and customer expectations continue to evolve. Day Two turns vision into execution, examining how ideas translate into action inside complex banking environments, what actually works in practice, and how teams move forward with confidence and clarity.
Across the two days, 150 world-class speakers will share practical, battle-tested insights and honest perspectives on what’s working today and what’s coming next, providing actionable, take-home learnings to apply to your own strategies. Through keynotes, panels, roundtables, lightning talks and demos, they’ll divulge exclusive case studies across six core themes, reflecting the most important challenges and opportunities banks are facing:
- The AI Frontier: Explore how generative AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics are transforming customer engagement, fraud detection, risk management, and operations.
- Intelligent Infrastructure: Learn how banks are simplifying legacy environments, improving resilience, and building the foundations for AI-powered transformation.
- Money in Motion: Discover how the flow of money is changing, with real-time payments, instant settlement, digital identity, and the platforms powering embedded finance.
- Trust in the System: Explore how banks are strengthening defences, improving detection and response, and protecting customers while still enabling innovation.
- Power to the People: Dive into how banks are redesigning services that are faster, simpler, and more relevant while meeting rising expectations and Consumer Duty.
- Human & Machine Leadership: Learn how banks adapt their culture, operating models, and ways of working as automation and AI reshape roles, teams, and decision-making.
Networking, audience and how to attend
Every detail has been centred around connection, from the event app with messaging and meeting booking functionality, to networking breaks and more informal drinks receptions – ensuring you network and connect with the transformation leaders driving real change. With 62% of attendees at VP-level and above, and more than 120 banks and building societies in attendance, you’re 5x more likely to meet a bank than at other European Fintech conferences.
This year, to protect the experience, attendance is capped at just 750 complimentary tickets for banks and building societies, and limited sponsorship opportunities are available on a first-come first-served basis.
Visit the links below to learn more.
Banks & Building Societies Apply to Attend for Free: https://hubs.ly/Q03_lXt10
Sponsorship Enquiries: https://hubs.ly/Q03_lYm90
2026 and Beyond: FinTech Scotland’s Next Chapter
A Message from Aleks Tomczyk
In 2025, global fintech investment rose by 21% to $53bn, signalling a welcome return to growth across most markets. The US remained the global leader at $25.1bn, while the UK reclaimed second place with $3.6bn. These figures are more than just encouraging – they point to renewed confidence across the fintech ecosystem and set a strong foundation for 2026.
Against this backdrop, I feel a genuine sense excitement and responsibility as Chief Executive of FinTech Scotland. We’re at a pivotal moment for the cluster: it’s vibrant, the ambition is real, and the opportunities ahead of us are immense.
My immediate focus is clear, centred on three priorities.
Firstly, we will strengthen and scale our innovation programmes to deliver real value across the ecosystem including measurable social impact.
That means deepening the work already underway and improving on it:
- Through our award-winning Financial Regulation Innovation Lab, we will continue to strengthen the collaboration between innovators and regulators, ensuring Scotland remains at the forefront of fintech that supports regulation and reducing operating costs whilst improving consumer outcomes.
- With the Centre of Excellence in Digital Trust, led by Edinburgh Napier University, delivered in partnership with Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, we will position Scotland as a global innovator at the intersection of digital trust, identity, crypto and data in financial services.
- We will scale the Finance and Health Lab, driving better financial wellbeing, resilience and long-term financial health for people across Scotland.
Secondly, we will build sharper, more targeted support for fintech entrepreneurs – from idea through to international scale-up.
This means clearer enabling pathways, stronger networks, better access to funding, and programmes (including our Innovation Labs) grounded in real company needs. Alongside this, we will amplify Scotland’s presence in priority global markets, making our firms more visible, better connected, and bringing more of Scotland’s fintech innovation onto the world stage.
Thirdly, we will drive greater collaboration across the ecosystem.
By enabling connections inside and outside Scotland amongst our strategic partners, fintechs, academic institutions and in related professional services we will help financial services and fintech companies large and small to prosper. This will be made possible by strong foundations – an excellent talent pool, world class research base and great, forward thinking, existing financial services companies – we will help to strengthen them, further.
These three things will result in growth, create high-value jobs, attract inward investment, encourage new startups and strengthen resilience in the cluster. Fintech will play an enhanced critical role in Scotland’s economic future.
I have a background in technology innovation and business building. I have run major change projects in financial services. I have built two fintechs from the ground up.
One of the things that has always excited me most is the role of people, networks and ecosystems in innovation. Technology doesn’t create change – people do. Innovation succeeds best when stakeholders collaborate to solve real problems, when trust is built, and when ambition and success are shared.
I am confident that by building further on our fintech community, and by staying focused, collaborative and ambitious, we can deliver tangible impact for our companies large and small, our people, and our country – plus companies and people elsewhere.
In the years ahead, I look forward to meeting many of you – employees, founders, investors, academics, regulators and partners – because relationships are the bedrock of success. I welcome your ideas, your energy and your feedback, and I encourage you to reach out to us here any time.
Here’s to the journey ahead.
FinTech Scotland marks its eighth anniversary reinforcing its position as one of Europe’s leading fintech clusters
Marking its eighth anniversary, FinTech Scotland reports that the nation’s fintech cluster has more than doubled in size in the past five years – from just over 120 firms in 2020 to more than 260 – confirming Scotland’s position as one of Europe’s most dynamic and collaborative fintech clusters.
This growth has been driven by higher levels of investment, deeper partnerships across industry, academia and the public sector, and more businesses scaling up and trading internationally.
Innovation in practice has also taken a major step forward, with the 10-year FinTech Research and Innovation Roadmap now embedded and over 40% of recommended actions under way. Central to this has been the 2025 award-winning Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL), which plays a key role in creating the right conditions for collaboration and product development. A recent example is the partnership between Amiqus and Virgin Money: through the FRIL programme, Amiqus moved from an initial pilot to live production with Virgin Money, using AI to transform business banking onboarding – demonstrating the capability and scalability of its platform.
In 2025, the cluster also launched two major new initiatives: the Centre of Excellence in Distributed Ledger Technology, focusing on digital assets, payments and tokenisation, with digital trust at its core, and the Finance and Health Lab a pilot cross-sector research and innovation programme dedicated to improving financial wellbeing, resilience and long-term financial health in Scotland.
Looking ahead to 2026, FinTech Scotland will focus on translating innovation into economic and social value, in line with UK industrial policy priorities, and enabling all participating in the cluster to thrive.
Aleks Tomczyk, Chief Executive of FinTech Scotland, said:
“The doubling of Scotland’s fintech density is a clear signal that our collaborative and cluster-based approach is working. The Research and Innovation Roadmap provided a national framework to accelerate purposeful innovation, and it’s been inspiring to see how fintech entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and universities have got behind that shared vision.
As I begin 2026 as FinTech Scotland’s new Chief Executive, I look forward to leading our plans to support the next stages of cluster growth and thereby accelerate successful business growth and innovation in financial technology.”
Jane Martin, Managing Director of Innovation and Investment at Scottish Enterprise, added:
“A major strength for Scotland is its connected fintech cluster, an inclusive network of entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry leaders working together to solve real world challenges. This growth shows that Scotland can have a global impact by focusing on purposeful and collaborative innovation.”
Callum Murray, CEO of leading fintech firm Amiqus, said:
“FinTech Scotland has provided practical ongoing support to Amiqus and many other fintech scale ups across the country for many years. Our involvement in their FRIL innovation programme dramatically accelerated relationships with large scale banks, built trust in our capability to deliver at scale and directly led to us securing a new ongoing client partnership. We look forward to the collaborative opportunities working with the Fintech Scotland team over the years ahead.”
Exploring the Digital Pound: The Bank of England’s Latest Update
The Bank of England and HM Treasury have shared their latest update on the progress towards a potential digital pound, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that could serve as a base for the next generation of retail payments in the UK.
The two bodies are moving through the design phase, their focus remaining on developing a detailed blueprint for how a digital pound could work in practice. This includes rigorous experimentation through the Digital Pound Lab and continuous collaboration with industry stakeholders. Together, this work will inform a joint assessment by the Bank and HM Treasury, with a decision on next steps expected in 2026.
The update also introduces two new design notes that explore the technical and practical dimensions of a digital pound:
- Alias Service: Examines how using account aliases (such as email addresses or phone numbers) could simplify retail payments, enhancing usability and security. The paper also explores the Bank’s potential role in enabling such a service across the payments ecosystem.
- Offline Payments: Explores how the digital pound could support deferred offline transactions, including applications in transport, vending, and other unattended terminals. The paper also considers how device-to-device payments could operate securely without a live internet connection.
The exploration of a UK digital currency represents a great opportunity for innovation across the financial services sector. New payment architectures, trust frameworks and identity services will offer fintech innovators in Scotland and across the UK an opportunity to play a role in shaping and testing these emerging models.
We’re looking forward to collaborating on this initiative through the Digital TRUST Centre of Excellence that FinTech Scotland recently set up in collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow and Scottish Enterprise.