NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs have joined Phase 2 of the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab to test cross-border SME trade finance flows that combine stablecoin payments, digital pound settlement and reusable business identity. The experimental programme does not use real customers or money and does not mean the Bank of England has decided to issue a digital pound.
The consortium will test two connected workstreams. The first will develop an SME Bankable Profile, combining transaction information from consent-based wallets with open finance data and business intelligence to generate a reusable, pre-qualified credit outcome. NOBO will lead the work alongside Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs. Dun & Bradstreet will provide commercial intelligence and risk indicators, while Polygon will supply smart contracts for consent management, verification and the lifecycle of financing deals.
The second workstream will test invoice factoring backed by an electronic bill of lading, or eBL, using separate digital-money rails within the same transaction. Under the test, an exporter would receive an advance through a stablecoin payment while a UK importer would complete the final settlement using digital pounds. Polygon Labs will provide infrastructure for the stablecoin portion through its Open Money Stack, which combines fiat conversion, wallets, stablecoin settlement and other payment infrastructure.
Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said different forms of digital money must work together for digital money to move world trade. He described the experiment as a test of an exporter receiving stablecoins while an importer settles with digital pounds in the same flow, with interoperability handling movement between payment systems.
NOBO completed Phase 1 after demonstrating conditional business-to-business escrow payments for trade finance. The company said long settlement periods can leave working capital tied up between shipment and receipt of payment for smaller companies, while manual verification can slow access to financing. Dun & Bradstreet’s head of financial services Sara de la Torre said smoother trade finance for SMEs depends on trust, and that the use of its Commercial Graph is intended to make SMEs easier for trading partners and financial institutions to verify.
The Bank of England launched the Digital Pound Lab as an experimental environment for exploring potential digital pound use cases, business models and technical requirements. By May, Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said the UK’s future retail payment infrastructure could accommodate several forms of digital money, including tokenized bank deposits, regulated stablecoins and a possible digital pound. The central bank finalized stablecoin rules in June, removing previously proposed limits on individual holdings of systemic stablecoins.
Polygon has been expanding infrastructure for regulated payments and stablecoin settlement. In May, it reduced its average block time to 1.75 seconds, lifting theoretical throughput to about 3,260 transactions per second. PayPal USD became natively available through Polygon’s Open Money Stack in July, and Polygon Labs said its network had settled more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions and was already used by companies including Revolut and Stripe.
