The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority have set out the next phase of their work on tokenisation in wholesale financial markets, publishing Feedback Statement FS26/1 on 14 September 2026. The joint document gathers 123 responses to the Call for Input the two authorities issued in May and maps where policy goes next.
The strongest signal from respondents was impatience with the status quo. Firms across traditional finance and digital assets, among them banks, exchanges, custodians and market-infrastructure providers, urged the regulators to move beyond pilots and sandboxes toward full production and permanence, and warned that the absence of a settled, long-term framework was holding back investment.
What the industry said
Support for tokenisation was broad. The authorities reported that respondents were generally very supportive of the direction they had set out, agreeing that the technology is a significant opportunity for UK markets. Views on urgency and priorities differed, but one use case stood out: collateral. Improving how collateral can be moved and mobilised was, by some distance, the most frequently cited near-term benefit, while ideas such as round-the-clock trading and instant settlement were mostly raised only in that context.
Looking further out, respondents pointed to newer possibilities as the longer-term prize: programmable financial instruments, tokenised funds and collateral arrangements, more flexible financing for businesses and fresh cross-border activity.
How the regulators are approaching it
The Bank and the FCA are keeping to a technology-neutral stance built on a “same risk, same regulatory outcome” principle. They say they will not pick winners between competing platforms, and they expect tokenised and non-tokenised markets to run alongside each other for a prolonged period, describing the transition as unlikely to be short.
When the two authorities first set out their shared vision in May, Bank of England deputy governor for financial stability Sarah Breeden said:
"The task now is for public and private sectors together to build on these strong foundations, moving from pilots to production to support financial stability and sustainable growth."
Sarah Breeden, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, Bank of England
The workstreams that matter for compliance
FS26/1 sets out several strands of work. On collateral, the Bank will look at accepting tokenised assets and stablecoins as eligible collateral in its Sterling Monetary Framework operations, and plans to consult later in 2026 on central counterparties accepting tokenised collateral. On settlement, the authorities note that stablecoins can already be used as a settlement asset in the Digital Securities Sandbox, subject to conditions, while industry pressed for statutory settlement finality to provide insolvency protection. The two authorities have already set out a joint rulebook for systemic stablecoins, which governs the settlement assets in question.
On custody, most respondents favoured a safeguarding regime for regulated cryptoassets broadly aligned with the FCA’s existing custody rules, with targeted additions for crypto-specific risks such as private-key management; the FCA plans to consult on those rules in the first half of 2027 and will assess firms under the current regime in the meantime. Custody has become a supervisory priority on both sides of the Channel, with ESMA putting crypto-asset service provider custody resilience under EU review. On interoperability, firms want a dedicated workstream covering legal and cross-border questions rather than only technical standards, and the authorities intend to pursue this through international bodies. That concern is well founded, given warnings that diverging stablecoin rules threaten tokenisation. The regulators also reaffirmed their ambition for digital-asset ledgers to settle in programmable central bank money, alongside work to extend the operating hours of the UK’s real-time payment system.
What happens next
The headline deliverable is still to come: a joint Tokenisation Roadmap, with specific target dates for each workstream, which the authorities say they will publish later in 2026. Alongside FS26/1 the FCA also opened a separate Call for Input on tokenised gold. For compliance teams the direction of travel is clear enough to plan around, with the UK signalling that tokenised wholesale markets are moving from proof of concept toward permanent, supervised infrastructure, and collateral, custody and settlement the areas to watch first.
