Fnality has appointed three former central bank officials to its UK and European boards, deepening the regulated blockchain settlement firm’s ties to central banking as it expands beyond its live sterling network.
Former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Jon Cunliffe will chair the board of Fnality’s UK entity, while former Deutsche Bundesbank payments executive Jochen Metzger has joined the supervisory board of Fnality Europe and is expected to become its chair. Prof. Dr. Ron Berndsen, former head of oversight at De Nederlandsche Bank, also joins the supervisory board of the Germany-based European business.
Cunliffe previously served as the Bank of England’s deputy governor for financial stability, chaired the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures at the Bank for International Settlements, and sat on the G20 Financial Stability Board’s steering committee. Metzger helped lead development of the Eurosystem’s TARGET2, T2S and TIPS systems during his time at the Bundesbank. Berndsen currently serves as a senior independent non-executive director of LCH Limited and LCH SA.
Fnality operates DLT-based wholesale payment systems that allow participating financial institutions to settle obligations using central bank money balances. Its Sterling Fnality Payment System launched in 2023 and is regulated by the Bank of England. The company has also established Fnality Europe GmbH in Eschborn, Germany, and Fnality Bank U.S. in Stamford, Connecticut, as it pursues euro- and dollar-denominated versions of the network.
“It is really important that we find a way to get central banks and central bank money at the heart of the new technologies that were pioneered in the crypto world,” Cunliffe said. “Some of those technologies are coming to the mainstream world of finance because they offer better functionality and speed.”
Fnality Group CEO Michelle Neal said regulated on-chain settlement services in central bank money are “a prerequisite for tokenised asset markets to scale for wholesale use.”
The company, founded in 2019, is backed by Goldman Sachs, UBS, Banco Santander, Bank of America and Citigroup. It raised $136 million in Series C funding in September 2025, bringing total funding since 2019 to more than $280 million. Its live sterling system has been used for real-time settlement of tokenized securities through delivery versus payment, foreign exchange transactions using payment versus payment, and repo transactions.
The appointments come amid a broader institutional push into tokenized market infrastructure, with Swift deploying a blockchain ledger for cross-border tokenized deposit payments and other banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered and Wells Fargo testing digital money models.
