Fnality appoints ex-BoE, Bundesbank, and DNB figures as regulatory hearings loom
Key points
- Sir Jon Cunliffe, former Bank of England Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, has been appointed Chair of Fnality UK.
- Jochen Metzger, architect of TARGET2, T2S, and TIPS at the Bundesbank, is expected to chair the newly formed Fnality Europe supervisory board, joined by Ron Berndsen, formerly of De Nederlandsche Bank.
- Fnality's US subsidiary holds an 18-month interim approval as a state-chartered innovation bank granted in April 2025, with an extension hearing scheduled for next week.
- The Eurosystem's wholesale DLT platform, Pontes, is set to launch within two weeks, placing Fnality Europe in a competitive race to establish euro-denominated settlement.
- £FnPS has been live since late 2023 but has publicly onboarded only four banks from its 24-strong institutional backer base, with a US approval potentially the catalyst for broader rollout.
Fnality, the wholesale distributed-ledger settlement network using tokenised central bank money, has named three former senior central bankers to board and supervisory roles across its UK and European subsidiaries. Sir Jon Cunliffe, former Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, takes the chair of Fnality UK. In Europe, a newly formed supervisory board at Fnality Europe will be headed by Jochen Metzger, who built TARGET2, T2S, and TIPS during his tenure at the Bundesbank, alongside Ron Berndsen, formerly head of oversight at De Nederlandsche Bank and currently chair of risk committees at LCH Ltd and LCH SA.
The timing is pointed. Fnality’s US subsidiary is at a decision point: it received an 18-month interim approval as a state-chartered innovation bank in April 2025, with a hearing for an extension scheduled imminently. On the European side, the Eurosystem’s own wholesale DLT infrastructure, Pontes, is due to launch within two weeks, meaning Fnality Europe is entering a market just as the institutional baseline is being set. The UK leg, the sterling Fnality Payment System (£FnPS), has been live since late 2023 but has publicly onboarded only four banks, Lloyds, Santander, UBS, and BNP Paribas, from a shareholder base of 24 institutional backers.
The board composition completes a jurisdictional triangle. The US is covered by existing executives: Group CEO Michelle Neal previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and David Eisner, formerly of the US Treasury, has chaired Fnality International since early 2023. Taken together, the appointments appear less about governance housekeeping and more about positioning credibility with regulators in each target market at a moment when approvals and infrastructure launches in those markets are converging. Berndsen’s LCH connection carries specific commercial weight, given that collateral management was among the first live use cases for £FnPS.