UK's Quant to power The Clearing House's US deposit network

The Clearing House, the US payments operator owned by 25 of the country's largest financial institutions, said on 24 September 2026 that it had selected Quant, a London-headquartered fintech, to build the core technology layer for its On-Chain Money Initiative. The initiative aims to let American banks clear and settle tokenised deposits — commercial-bank money represented on a programmable ledger — and connect that activity to The Clearing House's existing RTP and CHIPS payment rails. The Clearing House expects the network to become available to participating US institutions in the first half of 2027.

For UK readers, the story is not simply an American infrastructure contract. Quant is the same company that built the platform behind the UK Finance-convened Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) initiative, which completed its first live retail pilots earlier this month. A UK-registered fintech now sits inside the plumbing of separate US and UK tokenised-deposit projects, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, at a moment when British regulators have already settled the basic supervisory position — UK bank issuers of tokenised deposits fall under Prudential Regulation Authority and Financial Conduct Authority oversight — even as the wider legislative and policy framework for tokenised payments remains under consultation and phased commencement.

What Quant will provide

According to both parties' announcements, Quant will supply the interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer for the On-Chain Money Initiative. In practice, that means Quant's technology is meant to coordinate how tokenised-deposit transactions are cleared and settled, and to connect that activity with existing fiat payment infrastructure, including RTP and CHIPS. The Clearing House remains the network operator. Neither announcement discloses the contract's value, its duration, or the underlying technical architecture — including which blockchains or ledgers will be supported, how the system will be governed, or what resilience and privacy safeguards are built in.

What a tokenised deposit is

A tokenised deposit is not a new type of money. It remains a claim on the commercial bank that issued it, but that claim is represented on a programmable ledger. This distinguishes it from a stablecoin, which is typically issued by a non-bank entity, and from a central bank digital currency, which would be a direct liability of a central bank.

The Bank of England, in its 2024 discussion paper on innovation in money and payments, draws a further distinction that matters for anyone trying to understand why interbank infrastructure like The Clearing House's is still needed at all. Some tokenised deposit claims are non-transferable and require settlement in central-bank money whenever value moves between banks, much as conventional payments do today. Others are transferable and can, in principle, be self-settling, because the recipient of the token effectively becomes a customer of the issuing bank. The model chosen has direct consequences for how — and how often — interbank settlement rails are invoked.

Where RTP and CHIPS fit in

The Clearing House's own description of the initiative, first announced on 5 June 2026, frames the goal as connecting blockchain-based bank money to existing fiat systems rather than replacing them. The intended benefits include 24/7 interbank settlement, automated workflows and richer transaction data. RTP and CHIPS are named as the rails the tokenised layer will connect to.

What is not published is the detail a payments specialist would want: whether RTP or CHIPS will provide final settlement for every transaction, act only as a liquidity or conversion bridge, or serve as a fallback. The Clearing House says its US payment networks together clear and settle more than $2tn (US dollars) a day across wire, automated clearing house, cheque-image and real-time payments — a company-reported figure, not an independently audited one, and a measure of the operator's existing scale rather than of tokenised-deposit volume, which has not yet launched.

It is also worth noting what ownership does not tell you. The Clearing House says 25 large US financial institutions own it, but the announcements do not say which institutions, if any, have committed to use the On-Chain Money Initiative at launch. A list of confirmed initial participants has not been published.

A familiar name from the GBTD project

Quant Network Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 09798383, with a registered address in London, and describes itself as headquartered in central London. It developed the technology platform behind GBTD, the shared UK industry infrastructure for tokenised sterling deposits convened by UK Finance.

That UK project has already moved from pilot design into live transactions. In September 2026, UK Finance reported that seven participating institutions — Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander — completed what it described as the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits: two remortgage completions and one consumer marketplace transaction. GBTD was also accepted in 2026 into the Bank of England's Synchronisation Lab, which explores how external ledgers can coordinate with settlement in central-bank money.

The two projects are comparable in that Quant supplies infrastructure to both, but the sources reviewed do not establish that they share identical software, governance or operating models. They should be read as separate, parallel efforts rather than as one system extended across borders.

How UK regulators treat tokenised deposits

British banks issuing tokenised deposits remain subject to Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) prudential supervision and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) conduct regulation, in line with the cross-authority roadmap on innovation in payments that the Bank of England, FCA and PRA published on 6 November 2023. Retail tokenised deposits are expected to be structured as deposits eligible for depositor protection where the applicable conditions are met — but this is conditional, not automatic. Eligibility for Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) cover depends on the specific legal claim, the depositor and the issuing institution, and readers should not assume every token, customer or balance is covered.

The Bank of England has also flagged a structural concern specific to transferable tokenised deposits: maintaining the "singleness of money", meaning that different forms of bank money continue to exchange at par with one another. Tokenisation that allows value to move between banks without passing through conventional settlement mechanisms could, in principle, put that parity at risk, which is part of why the Synchronisation Lab work on coordinating with central-bank-money settlement matters.

HM Treasury's consultation on modernising payment services regulation, published on 14 July 2026, sets out a "same risk, same regulatory outcome" principle intended to let a single framework accommodate both traditional and tokenised payments. That document states that the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026, made on 4 February 2026, have ensured tokenised deposits fall within the established legal definition of a deposit. Readers should note a timing gap here: while specified preparatory provisions of those regulations took effect earlier, most of the instrument's substantive provisions are not scheduled for full commencement until 25 October 2027. The government's policy description and the statutory commencement timetable are two different things, and the consultation itself remains open, so its proposals are not yet final rules.

What to treat with caution

Quant's own announcement quotes its chief executive describing tokenised deposits as the "de facto" way banks move money on-chain. Nothing in the reviewed material — including The Clearing House's June 2026 announcement, which frames the initiative as a response to "growing demand" rather than as evidence of an already-dominant model — supports that as an established market fact. It is an attributed claim from an interested party, not a measured outcome.

What happens next

The first half of 2027 is a target window The Clearing House has set for itself, not a confirmed date; no exact launch date has been published. The initial list of participating US institutions, the commercial terms of Quant's appointment, and the detailed technical architecture of the network — including exactly how and when RTP or CHIPS will be invoked for a given transaction — have not been disclosed. Readers who want to track progress should follow The Clearing House's own programme updates directly, alongside the Bank of England's Synchronisation Lab page and UK Finance's GBTD reporting for the comparable British project.