Faster settlement, not speculation, is what is pulling Britain’s biggest banks towards blockchain. A new survey from Lloyds Banking Group, published on 2 October 2026, found that 71% of senior decision-makers at major UK banks, insurers and asset managers now expect tokenisation — representing assets such as cash, bonds and funds digitally on blockchain infrastructure — to reshape financial services.
The poll, Lloyds’ tenth annual Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey, questioned 100 senior figures across the sector. Sixty percent named faster payments and settlement as tokenisation’s biggest opportunity, ahead of better collateral and liquidity management on 41%. Appetite for new technology generally has jumped too: 77% now call investment in emerging tech a growth priority, up from 41% a year ago, and 64% plan to increase capital spending over the next 12 months.
Rob Hale, Lloyds’ co-head of global markets, said the next step is turning separate pilot projects into “infrastructure that works at scale,” built on shared standards that connect digital and traditional markets.
Live tests are already running between rival banks
This isn’t just survey talk. UK Finance, the industry body, recently reported that interbank tokenised deposit tests involving Lloyds, NatWest and Barclays included two live remortgage transactions, where funds were locked while the property process continued and released automatically once it finished. A separate trial with HSBC simulated an online marketplace purchase, holding a buyer’s money until goods were confirmed as delivered.
The initiative — backing Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander, with support from Quant, EY and Linklaters — plans to set up a formal company and rulebook, with three digital bond issues due in the first quarter of 2027.
Lloyds has also been testing settlement using a dollar stablecoin. In a trial reported on 1 October, the bank settled $750,000 in live payment obligations with Visa using USDC in under an hour, including outside normal banking hours and over a weekend — obligations were booked through its Jersey branch, converted to USDC via Archax, and transferred across blockchain networks.
Regulators are moving in step
The Bank of England has proposed staged extensions to RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours towards near-24/7 availability, and a government-backed strategy estimates tokenisation adoption could add up to £33bn a year to UK economic output by 2035, built around a 54-firm task force targeting a first digital government bond by early 2027.
There’s a transatlantic dimension too: US and UK regulators, including the SEC, CFTC, FCA and Bank of England, have recommended a year-long programme of joint cross-border testing and shared technical standards.
None of this is a signal to buy anything — tokenisation here is about plumbing, not price. But for a sector that spent years treating blockchain as a crypto-only curiosity, a 71% expectation of disruption from the UK’s own high-street banks is a marker worth noting. This is informational coverage, not financial advice.
Sources: Lloyds Banking Group press release; crypto.news reporting on UK Finance’s tokenised deposit tests, the Lloyds–Visa USDC settlement trial, the Bank of England’s RTGS/CHAPS proposals, the UK tokenisation strategy and US–UK regulatory recommendations — all read in full on 3 October 2026.
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