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Banking & Compliance

Pontes Went Live, 37 Banks Are Building A Euro Stablecoin, And The BIS Just Picked A Side: The Tokenised Money Race Is Now Real

On 21 September the Eurosystem switched on Pontes, letting tokenised wholesale transactions settle in central-bank money with Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, KfW and the European Investment Bank in the first wave. Three weeks earlier at Jackson Hole, the BIS's Pablo Hernández de Cos argued that tokenised deposits preserve the singleness of money in a way stablecoins - where deviations from par 'are the norm, and sizeable under stress' - do not. Qivalis, now 37 banks strong, is building a MiCA euro stablecoin on Ethereum for this half. Britain's six largest banks ran a live tokenised sterling pilot to mid-2026. The infrastructure arguments are over; what is left is a race about which form of digital money wins, and every compliance, payments and settlement system in the industry sits on the answer.

AlchmAI Editorial13 min read

21 Sept

Pontes went live, connecting DLT platforms to TARGET Services so tokenised wholesale trades settle in central-bank money

37 banks

In the Qivalis consortium building a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin on Ethereum, targeting H2 2026

40%

Minimum share of Qivalis reserves to be held as bank deposits, the rest in short-term eurozone government bonds, with 24-hour redemption

6 banks

Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander in the UK's live tokenised sterling deposit pilot, run to mid-2026

For most of the past decade, the argument about tokenised money was conducted in white papers. This month it moved into production. On 21 September the Eurosystem launched Pontes, a new piece of central-bank infrastructure that links distributed-ledger platforms to TARGET Services so that tokenised wholesale transactions can settle with finality in central-bank money. The first participants are not fintechs: Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, KfW and the European Investment Bank, alongside four ledger operators including Clearstream. The service is aimed squarely at institutions and market infrastructure, which distinguishes it from the retail digital euro, and it runs a dual settlement model - on the Eurosystem's own DLT platform with cash tokens, or in T2, with finality achieved once the T2 leg completes.

Pontes is the first deliverable of the Eurosystem's programme to make central-bank money fit for a tokenised future, and it lands three weeks after the most consequential speech of the year on the subject. At Jackson Hole on 28 August, the General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements, Pablo Hernández de Cos, set out a clear preference. Tokenised deposits - account-based bank liabilities on programmable platforms, settling between banks through central-bank accounts - preserve the singleness of money. Stablecoins circulating on public blockchains do not: when holders must trade between incompatible tokens in secondary markets, he said, deviations from par are the norm and sizeable under stress. He added a second concern that every compliance function will recognise - the majority of stablecoin balances sit in self-custodied wallets, which complicates anti-money-laundering enforcement in a way account-based banking does not.

What The Banks Are Actually Building

  • The Eurosystem: Pontes, live since 21 September, with further improvements to be introduced step by step. This is the settlement layer everything else in Europe will eventually plug into.
  • Qivalis: an Amsterdam consortium that onboarded 25 new banks to reach 37 members across 15 countries - including ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, Rabobank, Nordea and Intesa Sanpaolo - building a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin on Ethereum, with Fireblocks selected in March for custody, wallet and compliance infrastructure. Reserves backed one-to-one, at least 40% in bank deposits and the remainder in short-term eurozone government bonds, with 24-hour redemption. Target: the second half of 2026.
  • The United States: a group of 21 global banks planning a dollar stablecoin for launch by mid-2027, under the GENIUS Act framework that takes effect in January 2027 and restricts issuance to licensed depository institutions and approved non-banks, with one-to-one reserves and monthly disclosure.
  • The United Kingdom: UK Finance and the six largest banking groups - Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander - ran a live tokenised sterling deposit pilot from September 2025 to mid-2026 on Quant's infrastructure, testing three use cases: fraud reduction in online marketplace payments through programmable money, faster remortgaging, and on-chain settlement of tokenised assets. It was designed to interoperate with stablecoins and with Fnality, and to support the government's digital gilt.

The pattern across all four is the same, and it is the practical answer to the BIS's question. Banks are not choosing between tokenised deposits and stablecoins. They are building tokenised deposits to preserve liquidity and the deposit relationship, and issuing or backing stablecoins to reach public chains, cross-border payments and digital-asset markets - then deciding transaction by transaction which rail to use. That is a considerably more complicated world for anyone who runs a payments, treasury or compliance system than the one in which either form of money simply won.

Why This Is A Compliance Story Before It Is A Payments Story

We build compliance, regulatory and banking platforms for financial institutions, and our reading of this month's developments is that the interesting engineering is not in the tokens. It is in the controls that have to follow money across two very different rails without losing the properties regulators care about.

  1. 01Singleness has to be monitored, not assumed. A treasury that holds tokenised deposits and stablecoins side by side needs to know, in real time, when the stablecoin leg is trading away from par. The BIS says deviations are sizeable under stress; a control that only checks at end of day will discover that after the loss.
  2. 02AML moves from account to wallet. The self-custody point is the hard one. Screening an account holder is a solved problem; screening a public-chain wallet that a counterparty controls is a different discipline, and the compliance stack that handles both without two separate teams and two separate rule sets does not exist off the shelf.
  3. 03Programmable money needs programmable controls. The UK pilot's most interesting use case - fraud reduction in marketplace payments through programmable conditions - is only as safe as the logic that writes those conditions. That logic is now part of the regulated perimeter, and it needs the same change control, testing and audit trail as any other consequential financial code.
  4. 04Atomic settlement removes the reconciliation window. Pontes-style delivery-versus-payment finality is genuinely better than the T+2 world it replaces, and it also removes the overnight window in which most firms currently catch their own mistakes. Systems built around that window - and most are - need rethinking, exactly as extended trading hours are forcing on the equity side.
  5. 05Reserve transparency becomes a data-ingestion problem. GENIUS-era monthly reserve disclosures and MiCA reserve rules mean a firm holding several issuers' coins needs to ingest, normalise and monitor reserve composition continuously. That is unglamorous plumbing, and it is where the risk will actually be found.

“The tokens are the easy part. The hard part is a compliance system that can follow a pound from a deposit ledger onto a public chain and back, and still answer a regulator's questions at the end of it.”

The British Angle, Argued Plainly

We are partial, and we think the evidence supports being partial. Britain ran a live, six-bank, three-use-case tokenised sterling pilot before the Eurosystem's settlement layer existed and before the US had a stablecoin statute in force. It did so on a model that keeps money inside the regulated banking perimeter - which is precisely the model the BIS has now endorsed from the Jackson Hole podium - and it designed the pilot to interoperate with stablecoins and with Fnality rather than to pick a winner. That is the same pragmatic, outcomes-first posture the FCA takes with AI, and it is why London remains the natural place to build the systems that sit between the two forms of money.

The honest counterweight is timing. The Eurosystem has shipped a production settlement layer; the UK's pilot ended in mid-2026 with its regulatory follow-through - the stablecoin regime the Treasury has promised - still to land. Pilots that conclude without a next phase are how Britain has historically turned first-mover advantage into a case study for other people's markets, and there is a real risk of repeating that here. The National Payments Vision and the digital gilt give the framework; what the industry needs in the next twelve months is the regime, and the banks' willingness to move from pilot to product without waiting for perfect clarity.

What To Do About It

  1. 01Map every place your systems assume money is one thing. Treasury, payments, reconciliation, AML screening, client reporting. Each one will need to handle two rails with different settlement, different custody and different regulatory treatment.
  2. 02Build the wallet-screening capability now, even if you hold no stablecoins yet. Your counterparties will, and you will need to assess their wallets before you need to assess your own.
  3. 03Treat programmable-money logic as regulated code. Version it, test it, review it and log its execution as you would an algorithmic trading rule.
  4. 04Re-examine anything that depends on the overnight settlement window. Atomic settlement is coming to whichever markets you operate in, and it will remove your margin for error along with your reconciliation delay.
  5. 05Follow Pontes and Qivalis as engineering roadmaps rather than news. The interfaces they publish are the interfaces your systems will have to speak within two years.

The Bottom Line

In the space of a month the tokenised money debate stopped being theoretical. The Eurosystem's Pontes went live on 21 September with Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, KfW and the EIB settling tokenised trades in central-bank money; Qivalis grew to 37 banks building a MiCA euro stablecoin for this half; 21 global banks are targeting a dollar stablecoin by mid-2027; and the BIS used Jackson Hole to argue that tokenised deposits preserve the singleness of money while stablecoins deviate from par under stress. Britain's six largest banks ran the live sterling pilot that proved the deposit-based model works, and now need a regime to build on. For the institutions in the middle of all this, the lesson is that the banks have chosen both forms of money rather than one, and the systems that will matter are the compliance, settlement and monitoring layers that can follow a pound across both rails without dropping a control. That is the banking and compliance platform work we do in London, and this month is the clearest signal yet that it has moved from optional to overdue.

References & Further Reading

tokenised depositsstablecoinsCompliance & Regulatory SystemsBanking Portals & InterfacesPontesAI Agency UKsettlement
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AlchmAI Editorial

Research and analysis, London

The AlchmAI team writes about the markets, technology and regulation we work with every day. We build trading platforms, real-time charts and AI analysis tools for brokers, prop firms and fintech teams from our office in Mayfair, London. Every article lists its sources. Nothing we publish is investment advice.

This article is general information and commentary. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Important information

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