Fnality Adds Cunliffe, Metzger, and Berndsen to UK and European Boards
Key points
- Sir Jon Cunliffe, former Bank of England Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, has been appointed chair of Fnality's UK board of directors.
- Jochen Metzger, former Deutsche Bundesbank Director General for Payments and Settlement Systems, joins Fnality Europe's new supervisory board and is expected to serve as its chair.
- Prof Dr. Ron Berndsen, former De Nederlandsche Bank oversight official and current risk committee chair at LCH Limited and LCH SA, also joins the Fnality Europe supervisory board.
- Cunliffe stated that Fnality is the only firm to have progressed a Sterling payment system through the Bank of England's authorisation process.
- Metzger identified cross-border connectivity between regional settlement systems across reserve currencies as the core problem Fnality is building to solve.
Fnality, the blockchain-based settlement infrastructure firm, has appointed three former senior central bankers to its governance structures in the United Kingdom and Europe. Sir Jon Cunliffe, formerly Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, takes the chair of Fnality’s UK board of directors. Jochen Metzger, former Director General for Payments and Settlement Systems at Deutsche Bundesbank, joins the newly formed Fnality Europe supervisory board and is expected to serve as its chair. Prof Dr. Ron Berndsen, formerly a senior oversight and market infrastructure official at De Nederlandsche Bank and currently chair of the risk committees at both LCH Limited and LCH SA, also joins the Fnality Europe supervisory board.
The appointments signal a deliberate effort by Fnality to anchor its governance in central bank credibility as it presses toward broader deployment of what it describes as a world-first on-chain cross-border settlement service in central bank money balances. All three appointees bring decades of experience spanning the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Eurosystem infrastructure bodies, and major payments systems including TARGET2, T2S, and TIPS. Cunliffe noted that Fnality is the only firm to have taken a Sterling payment system through the Bank of England’s authorisation process, framing settlement in central bank money as essential to financial stability as tokenisation accelerates.
Metzger pointed to connecting regional settlement systems across different reserve currencies as the unsolved layer of the problem that Fnality is targeting, a framing that positions the firm’s cross-border ambitions as complementary to, rather than competing with, European central bank digital infrastructure work. For wholesale market participants watching the tokenised asset space, the composition of these boards is a governance signal worth weighing: central banks and regulators are unlikely to have missed that their own former officials are now embedded inside Fnality’s oversight structure.