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The UK government's Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, Chris Woolard, published his inaugural report to the Chancellor on July 13, setting out a plan to accelerate tokenisation across the country's wholesale financial markets and convening a cross-industry taskforce of 54 firms to help deliver it, according to a statement from the City of London Corporation, which is supporting the initiative alongside HM Treasury.
The taskforce brings together asset managers, banks and digital asset firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Barclays, Citi, UBS, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple and Fidelity International, alongside market infrastructure providers such as DTCC, Euroclear UK & International, LSEG and Fireblocks. Over the next 12 months, the group will work with Woolard on live end-to-end use cases, focusing first on tokenised repo, and will form nine action groups to address priority areas including primary issuance, tokenised collateral, tokenised funds, payment rails, legal and regulatory certainty, interoperability standards and financial crime compliance.
The report estimates that tokenisation could add up to £33 billion ($44.08 billion) to the UK's annual economic output and generate £14 billion in additional annual tax revenue by 2035, against a backdrop in which the global tokenized real-world asset market could reach $88 trillion by that year.
"As one of the world's largest and most international financial services markets, the UK is uniquely placed to become the global leader in wholesale market tokenisation," Woolard said in the statement. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said harnessing tokenisation would help keep UK markets competitive and "attract investment to the economy."
Woolard was appointed to the role in April, and the government published his terms of reference in June, which built on the Wholesale Financial Markets Digital Strategy published as part of last July's Leeds Reforms. Under that timeline, Monday's report and the launch of the taskforce fulfil the first of two milestones. Woolard is due to submit a fuller report on distributed ledger technology adoption and interoperability standards to the Chancellor by July 2027, the same point by which the taskforce's initial tokenised repo use case is meant to reach live execution.
Whether the taskforce can move from a list of priorities to an actual production tokenised repo trade within twelve months will be the first test of whether the initiative delivers more than another round of industry working groups.
