UK Wholesale Digital Markets Report Targets £33bn Gain but Overlooks Key Players

A report commissioned from UK Wholesale Digital Markets Champion and EY partner Chris Woolard sets out a strategic vision for the UK to capture up to £33 billion in annual economic benefits from tokenisation by 2035, a figure drawn from a separate Barclays and PwC forecast. The paper frames tokenisation as a network game requiring agile national action, with the UK’s dominant positions in foreign exchange, over-the-counter derivatives, repo, and funding markets explicitly identified as the stakes.

The report catalogues existing initiatives: plans to issue the UK’s first natively digital government bond (DIGIT), the live Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), a framework for tokenised funds, and the private sector’s work toward a tokenised deposit product under the GBTD initiative. Woolard’s stated objective is to draw these discrete projects into a coherent national strategy rather than leave them as isolated pilots, and the paper calls explicitly for louder international signalling that the UK is open for business and investment.

The report’s credibility is undercut by conspicuous omissions. Fnality, the wholesale payment system using central bank money that counts numerous global systemically important banks as well as the DTCC and Euroclear among its backers, receives only a passing reference in a page-47 annex despite participating in the Taskforce working groups. Finteum, a tokenised foreign exchange swaps start-up with UBS, Goldman Sachs, and NatWest as members, is absent entirely, as are Brevan Howard and Marex. For a paper explicitly concerned with moving from pilots to production, the decision to overlook firms with live operational experience is a material analytical gap, even if the broader objectives the report outlines carry genuine value.