Fnality: settlement in central bank money

Fnality answers the question every wholesale settlement design eventually reaches: settle in what? Commercial bank money carries the credit of a commercial bank. Stablecoins carry the credit of an issuer and its reserves. Fnality went to the top of the hierarchy: its systems settle in digital balances backed one-for-one by funds held at the central bank, and its sterling system has been doing so live since December 2023, the first regulated DLT-based wholesale payment system in the world.

The omnibus account model

The mechanism is elegantly simple. Participants pay funds into an omnibus account held at the Bank of England. The Sterling Fnality Payment System then operates a shared ledger of digital balances backed one-for-one by that account. Moving value between participants is an update on the ledger, available around the clock, with settlement finality at the moment of transfer, while the backing money never leaves the central bank.

That design gets institutions the two things RTGS systems already give them, central bank money and finality, plus the two things RTGS operating hours cannot: 24/7 availability and programmability. The regulatory treatment matches the ambition: HM Treasury recognized the sterling system as systemically important in 2022, before it even went live, and it holds settlement finality designation from December 2024.

Who owns it and where it is going

Fnality is owned by more than twenty institutions that make up a cross-section of wholesale finance: global banks including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Goldman Sachs, ING, Lloyds, Mizuho, MUFG, Nomura, Santander, SMBC, and UBS, and market infrastructures and investors including DTCC, Euroclear, Nasdaq Ventures, State Street, Temasek, Tradeweb, and WisdomTree. Its September 2025 Series C raised 136 million dollars, led by WisdomTree, Bank of America, Citi, KBC Group, Temasek, and Tradeweb.

The roadmap runs in two directions. One is functional: delivery-versus-payment settlement of tokenized securities using an earmarking feature, on-demand FX payment-versus-payment through the OSTTRA and Baton Systems network, and real-time repo settlement with Broadridge. The other is geographic, and the United States is the test case. Fnality has said it is securing an innovation bank charter from the Connecticut Department of Banking and has applied for a joint account with the Federal Reserve to operate a Dollar Fnality Payment System; a public hearing was held in March 2025. As of mid-2026 no launch has been announced, a useful reminder that in this model the constraint is regulatory approval per jurisdiction, not technology.

The boundary

Fnality’s strengths define its edges. One currency settles live today, sterling, and each additional currency requires its own central bank relationship, its own account structure, and its own approvals. Settlement happens between participants; the membership is deep but narrow, skewed to the institutions that own it. Value inside the system enjoys the best credit quality in finance, and a payment to any counterparty outside it exits into the ordinary correspondent world. Like every club network, it solves settlement completely within its perimeter, and the perimeter is the product. The wider consequence, networks that do not connect to each other, is the defining pattern of the current landscape, mapped fully in the interbank settlement network landscape.

Where Frame fits

Frame is the settlement layer for global finance: one integration to orchestrate payments at scale across fiat rails, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits, with compliance enforced on every transaction and settlement in seconds instead of days.

Fnality sits at the credit-quality summit of a landscape that also includes commercial bank consortia, stablecoin networks, and upgraded fiat rails, each partial by design. Frame is rail-neutral across them: a payment enters through one integration, and Frame routes it over whichever rail fits the corridor, the counterparty, and the policy that governs it, with Frame’s Rules Engine evaluating every transaction against its governing policies before it settles. For banks, payment providers, exchanges, platforms, and enterprises, the venues on the map stay what they are, venues; the layer above them is where coverage comes from.

See how a rail-neutral settlement layer works: the Frame Blueprint.