The Bank of England has named NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs as participants in the second phase of its Digital Pound Lab, where the consortium will test how stablecoins and a potential digital pound could interoperate to improve cross-border trade finance.
The BoE’s Digital Pound Lab is an experimental platform that allows financial and technology companies to prototype potential products and payment use cases for a future digital pound, the UK’s proposed central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Participants can use the simulated infrastructure to experiment with digital pound wallets, online and in-store payments, QR and NFC transactions, conditional payments, refunds, request-to-pay features, authentication and privacy tools. The Lab also provides a separate smart-contract platform for testing interoperability between blockchain systems and the centralized demonstration ledger.
NOBO previously completed Phase 1, demonstrating conditional B2B escrow payments designed for trade finance use cases. Phase 2 expands that foundation by bringing in Dun & Bradstreet’s commercial intelligence and Polygon Labs’ blockchain infrastructure.
The project aims to tackle the financing gap created by slow settlement and limited credit access for cross-border SMEs. Manual verification and fragmented financial data can make it difficult for smaller businesses to prove their creditworthiness, while waiting for international payments can tie up vital working capital.
