The Bank of England is testing a payments structure that uses stablecoins and a digital pound together in cross-border trade finance.

Cointelegraph reported on Tuesday that the trial is being conducted at the Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab. It focuses on verifying whether stablecoin payments and digital pound settlement can operate within a single flow.

NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs are participating in the project. Under the structure, an exporter first receives an advance payment through a stablecoin payment network, and a UK importer later completes final settlement using a simulated digital pound. No real customer funds are used, and the digital pound is applied only in a simulated form.

The Bank of England drew a line, saying the trial does not imply future policy direction or support for any specific company or product. The central bank said experiments designed by participating firms should not be interpreted as a signal of future bank policy and should not be seen as approval of related companies or services. It has also not yet decided whether to issue a digital pound.

The trial focuses on whether it can reduce settlement delays and financing constraints faced by small and medium-sized companies in cross-border transactions. Exporters may have to wait several days to receive payment after shipping goods, tying up working capital in the process. The smaller the business, the more important access to trade finance becomes.

A separate project is also being carried out in parallel. Participating firms are testing ways to build credit profiles that small and medium-sized companies can use across multiple financial services by combining transaction data, open finance information and Dun & Bradstreet commercial risk data. Polygon Labs is providing the smart contract infrastructure needed for the process.

The trial coincides with the UK's push to refine its stablecoin regulatory framework. In June, the Bank of England published a draft regulatory framework for sterling-denominated stablecoins. The draft allows issuers to hold up to 70 percent of reserve assets in interest-bearing government bonds and sets a temporary issuance cap of up to 40 billion pounds per stablecoin. It marks a shift from an earlier plan to limit holdings by individuals and businesses to a model that directly manages issuance volume.

The Bank of England aims to finalise the rules by the end of 2026 and implement them in 2027. Stablecoins whose scale of use could grow large enough to affect UK financial stability will be regulated by the Bank of England, while non-systemic stablecoins will remain under the Financial Conduct Authority.

A revamp of traditional payment infrastructure is also being pursued at the same time. In May, the Bank of England proposed expanding weekend operation and daily operating hours for the real-time gross settlement system and the Clearing House Automated Payment System, moving to an effectively near year-round system. The measures are intended to support cross-border payments and new settlement models based on tokenisation.

Against this backdrop, the Bank of England in July approved HSBC's Orion platform to operate in the UK Digital Securities Sandbox. The platform is expected to support digital bond issuance, including digital gilts that Britain is pursuing. As stablecoin regulation, digital pound trials and reforms to existing payment networks proceed simultaneously, Britain is pushing step-by-step to reshape its financial infrastructure for an era of tokenised assets.