Bank of England Taps Polygon Labs for Digital Pound Lab Phase 2
The Bank of England has selected Polygon Labs, NOBO Finance, and Dun & Bradstreet to run the next phase of its Digital Pound Lab. These companies will test how a central bank digital pound and private stablecoins can settle different parts of cross-border trade deals.
The issue at hand is that small businesses often face slow and costly trade finance due to verification being split across multiple parties, with settlement taking days. Large companies can afford this delay through treasury operations, but smaller firms struggle with a cash squeeze between shipping goods and receiving payment.
The consortium of Polygon Labs, NOBO Finance, and Dun & Bradstreet is building two connected projects inside the central bank's experimental program. The first project creates an SME Bankable Profile that allows small businesses to carry a profile between lenders instead of re-submitting paperwork each time. Dun & Bradstreet handles risk data for this project, while Polygon Labs provides smart contracts.
Polygon also handles the stablecoin portion of the second project, testing whether businesses can receive early payments on invoices by using electronic shipping documents as collateral. The SME Bankable Profile is created by combining three data sources: wallet transaction signals, open-finance data, and Dun & Bradstreet's commercial records.