NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs have joined Phase 2 of the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab to test SME trade finance flows that combine stablecoin payments, digital pound settlement and reusable business identity.
- 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.
- The consortium will develop a reusable SME credit profile using transaction data, business intelligence and Polygon based smart contract infrastructure.
- A second workstream will test invoice factoring where exporters receive stablecoin advances while UK importers complete final settlement in digital pounds.
- The Digital Pound Lab uses no real customers or money and does not mean the Bank of England has decided to issue a digital pound.
According to a press release shared with crypto.news, the consortium will test two connected workstreams inside the central bank’s experimental programme, with Polygon Labs providing stablecoin settlement, wallet and smart contract infrastructure through its Open Money Stack.
The programme does not involve real customers or money, allowing the participants to examine how different forms of digital money and financial data could work together without operating in a live financial environment. NOBO, a UK fintech focused on digital trade finance infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses, completed Phase 1 after demonstrating conditional business-to-business escrow payments for trade finance.
Phase 2 adds Dun & Bradstreet’s commercial data and Polygon’s blockchain infrastructure to build out the identity and settlement components around that earlier work. The tests focus on cross-border SME trade, where verification can involve several parties and payments can take days to settle.
For smaller companies, NOBO said long settlement periods can leave working capital tied up between the shipment of goods and receipt of payment, while manual verification can also slow access to financing.
Digital Pound Lab will test a reusable SME credit profile
One workstream will develop what the consortium calls 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 already used by credit teams, while Polygon will supply smart contracts for consent management, verification and the lifecycle of financing deals.
Under the proposed model, an SME could carry a verified financial profile based partly on its transaction history instead of repeating the same assessment process when approaching another lender or financing market.
Sara de la Torre, head of financial services at Dun & Bradstreet, said access to reliable identity and risk information remains important when financial institutions assess smaller companies involved in international trade.
“Smoother trade finance for SMEs depends on trust,” de la Torre said, adding that the use of Dun & Bradstreet’s Commercial Graph in the experiment is intended to make SMEs easier for trading partners and financial institutions to verify.
The consortium said the resulting profile is designed to remain under the small business’s control and travel with it when seeking financing from different providers. Polygon’s smart contracts will anchor the verifiable outcome while controlling how consent and transaction processes are handled.
Stablecoins and digital pounds will settle different legs of one trade
A 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 the Open Money Stack.
The structure allows the participants to examine whether private stablecoins and central bank-issued digital money can operate within a single trade finance transaction rather than requiring one type of digital money to handle every stage.
“For digital money to actually move the world’s trade, its different forms have to work together, public and private, central bank money and stablecoins,” Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said.
Boiron 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 the payment systems.
Polygon’s Open Money Stack combines fiat conversion, wallets, stablecoin settlement and other payment infrastructure. The company has positioned the system as a single integration layer for applications and financial institutions that need to move between fiat currencies and stablecoins without building separate payment rails.
As crypto.news previously reported, PayPal USD became natively available through Polygon’s Open Money Stack in July, allowing businesses to use the Paxos-issued stablecoin alongside fiat ramps, wallets and compliance services. Polygon Labs said at the time that its network had settled more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions and was already being used by companies including Revolut and Stripe.
Bank of England has been preparing for several forms of digital money
The Digital Pound Lab forms part of the Bank of England’s continuing research into how a possible retail central bank digital currency could function alongside existing and emerging payment systems.
The central bank launched the lab as an experimental environment for exploring potential digital pound use cases, business models and technical requirements. In January 2025, the Digital Pound Lab was presented as a way for public authorities and private financial firms to test payment problems that a CBDC could potentially address.
The Bank of England has not decided to issue a digital pound. Its work has instead examined the design and infrastructure that would be required if policymakers later decide to proceed with one.
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.
As previously covered by crypto.news, Breeden said the central bank was also working on stablecoin rules while supporting tokenized financial infrastructure. Sixteen companies, including HSBC and Euroclear, were preparing tokenized asset launches through the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority’s Digital Securities Sandbox from late 2026.
The central bank subsequently finalized stablecoin rules in June, removing previously proposed limits on individual holdings of systemic stablecoins. The framework set an initial £40 billion issuance limit per token and allowed issuers to hold as much as 70% of their reserves in short-term government debt, compared with the 60% level proposed earlier.
Polygon has built more infrastructure around stablecoin payments
Polygon Labs has spent 2026 expanding infrastructure intended for regulated payments and stablecoin settlement, making the Digital Pound Lab experiment another institutional use of technology it has been developing for payment providers.
In May, Polygon reduced its average block time to 1.75 seconds, with software engineer Lucca Martins estimating that the change lifted theoretical throughput to about 3,260 transactions per second. The upgrade came as the network was adding infrastructure for stablecoin transactions and institutional settlement.
Polygon also introduced private stablecoin transfers using zero-knowledge proofs through an integration with Hinkal. The system routes payments through a shielded pool so transaction details can remain hidden from public view while Know Your Transaction compliance checks and regulatory audit records remain available.
For the Digital Pound Lab, Polygon’s role will focus on infrastructure rather than issuing the central bank money being tested. Its Open Money Stack will support the stablecoin payment leg, embedded wallets, fiat-to-stablecoin conversion and the smart contracts used in the SME identity workstream.
NOBO, meanwhile, will continue coordinating the trade finance model rather than providing the underlying credit itself. The company said it does not lend directly and instead provides infrastructure through which SMEs and financiers can structure, verify and settle transactions.
Ayo Ojerinola, founder and CEO of NOBO Finance, said trade finance remains a multi-party process in which workflows, data and settlement systems do not always connect cleanly.
“The Digital Pound Lab gives us a safe environment to test our innovations,” Ojerinola said, describing the programme as a way to test coordination between participants involved in cross-border trade.
