UK Pushes Tokenisation Into Market Design Phase With New Wholesale Taskforce

The UK has moved its tokenisation agenda into a more operational phase, pairing a new industry taskforce with a policy push from regulators to figure out how wholesale markets should actually work when securities, collateral and cash move across digital ledgers. The immediate trigger is the first report from Wholesale Digital Markets Champion Chris Woolard, which sets out a roadmap for tokenised wholesale financial markets and frames the next year as a period for live use-case development rather than abstract advocacy. For the RWA market, that is an important transition point: the conversation is shifting from whether tokenisation matters to how market structure, liquidity and settlement should be built around it.

Woolard’s report was developed for the Chancellor with sector input and places the Digital Markets Champion Industry Taskforce at the center of the next stage. The contributor list in the report spans established banks, asset managers, market infrastructure firms and digital-asset specialists, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Circle, Coinbase, Euroclear UK & International, DTCC and LSEG-related entities. The group is expected to work through practical tokenisation priorities across UK wholesale markets, with an initial emphasis on tokenised repo and the surrounding mechanics needed to fund, mobilise and settle digital assets at institutional scale.

The economic argument in the report is deliberately expansive. Woolard says tokenised markets could strengthen London’s position as a global financial center while delivering productivity and cost benefits large enough to matter at the macro level. The report points to estimates of as much as £33 billion in additional annual economic output and £14 billion in annual tax revenue by 2035 if the UK captures enough of the market’s development. It also repeats the now-familiar projection that tokenised real-world assets could grow into an $88 trillion market by 2035, a scale that helps explain why governments and large financial institutions are now treating tokenisation as strategic infrastructure rather than a side experiment.

What makes the UK effort more credible is that it is arriving alongside concrete regulator work rather than in parallel to it. In May, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England published a joint vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale markets and opened a call for input on how regulation and infrastructure should evolve. The regulators said firms need greater certainty on prudential treatment, tokenised collateral and settlement instruments, and they explicitly tied tokenisation to lower costs, operational efficiency and new service creation. That message matters because it narrows one of the biggest gaps in the market today: enthusiasm for tokenised assets has advanced faster than clarity on the rules of engagement for systemically important workflows.

The policy stack around the initiative is also starting to look more like production planning. The FCA said it will consider how client-asset rules may need to evolve, while the Bank of England said it is working toward a live synchronisation service targeted for 2028 and is consulting on longer RTGS and CHAPS settlement hours, including steps toward near-24/7 availability. The FCA also noted that 16 firms continue to work in the Digital Securities Sandbox on live issuance and settlement of tokenised assets. In other words, the UK is not only writing reports; it is trying to align legal treatment, payment windows, collateral policy and test environments before larger volumes arrive.

Woolard’s report is also notable for refusing to reduce tokenisation to a single technology model. It discusses permissioned and permissionless networks, interoperability and legal finality, and even uses BlackRock’s BUIDL fund on Ethereum as a case study in hybrid market design. The point is not that wholesale markets will migrate wholesale onto one public chain, but that future infrastructure may combine public-network issuance layers with permissioned compliance, custody and risk controls. That framing is useful for RWA operators because it reflects how many live tokenised products already work in practice: regulated wrappers on top of open network settlement rails.

The core challenge now is less conceptual than coordinative. Tokenised repo, collateral mobility and cross-network settlement only work if market participants share standards for cash instruments, legal recognition, operational resilience and interoperability. The UK appears to understand that tokenisation is a network business, not a single-product launch. That is why the combination of Woolard’s roadmap, the regulator call for input and the ongoing sandbox work matters. If the effort succeeds, the UK will not simply host more tokenised assets; it will shape how major wholesale markets connect tokenised securities, tokenised money and regulated infrastructure into one investable system.