Digital Pound Lab Selects NOBO, D&B & Polygon for Phase 2 Trade Finance Settlement Projects
The Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab has selected NOBO, Dun & Bradstreet, and Polygon Labs to participate in Phase 2 of its experimental programme. The consortium is developing two cross-border trade projects for small and medium-sized businesses that aim to improve the efficiency of trade finance settlement.
One project focuses on creating a reusable credit identity for SMEs by combining wallet transaction signals, open finance data, and business intelligence. Dun & Bradstreet is contributing commercial identity and risk data already used in credit assessment, while Polygon Labs is providing the smart contract infrastructure to record the outcome and manage consent.
The second workstream centres on an electronic bill of lading-backed invoice factoring flow that enables exporters to receive advances through a stablecoin settlement leg, while importers settle the final payment in digital pounds. The experiment aims to examine whether public and private forms of digital money can operate together in a single trade finance transaction.
Ayo Ojerinola, Founder & CEO of NOBO Finance, said that trade finance remains operationally complex due to the lack of clean workflows, data, and settlement paths between participants. Sara de la Torre, Head of Financial Services at Dun & Bradstreet, added that established business identity data can help reduce friction in assessing smaller firms.