Today we're covering the UK Regulated Liability Network (RLN), which is an exciting new concept. 

I'm not going to steal Rhiannon's thunder, we're going to jump right in.

Rhiannon, can you tell us simply what the regulated liability network is? 

Thank you, Tess. 

The Regulated Liability Network is a concept for a new regulated financial market infrastructure that's designed to be a platform for innovation, one that would help to ensure functional consistency of money, create new settlement efficiencies and deliver new functionality in the payments ecosystem.

Super and why is it important Rhiannon? Why are people exploring this? Why now?

I think it's important for a number of reasons, I mean partly the strategic context in the UK we're at a bit of a pivotal moment for exploring the future of the UK payment systems we've seen from HMT, for example, their work on the National Payments Vision from the Bank of England who are exploring the digital pound concept and internationally, the likes of the BIS, Bank for International Settlements, are leading important work about what future payment systems might deliver and the forms of money that they might be based on. And here in the UK, the RLN project is helping us to explore many of the critical hypotheses that we want to test about what the future of money might look like.

What's kind of different or new or interesting about the RLN concept that you're exploring with your members?

I think the RLN is pretty unique at the moment in the ecosystem in terms of taking some of those hypotheses about tokenization, tokenization of commercial bank money, for example, about the use of distributed ledger technology and applying that to the regulated financial services ecosystem and really kind of testing this question of what are the benefits of tokenization and, and where do they accrue? 

If you use DLT technology, Distributed Ledger Technology, where do those benefits accrue and, and what are the options for creating a kind of a future payment system, a future settlement ecosystem that really extracts the most value from this new technology?

And maybe you could tell us a little bit more, more so in simple terms as far as that's possible, how the RLN would interface with a digital pound were the Bank of England to proceed with one?

I think that's quite a tricky question given that both the RLN and the digital pound are currently just concepts that are being explored. But the idea is that we want to create a kind of future payments ecosystem that delivers the best value and so the core question really is what's the right substrate that you need to underlie all of that. And so that's the thesis that we want to test. With the digital pound, there was the kind of infamous challenge from Andrew Bailey of we don't want to be the only game in town in terms of innovation. And I think the RLN project is a great example of the industry demonstrating that they're very much engaged and keen to be innovating and showing that they can be on the front edge, the cutting edge of change and improving payment systems. 

And what comes next for the RLN project? 

There's a lot still to be thought about. What's also really important is how the UK RLN work will complement some of the international projects, for example in the US the RSN, the regulated Settlement network project which is underway and for example the Bank of International Settlements Project Agorá which is going to be kicking off. 

And Rhiannon, where would you, where does Rhiannon Butterfield want to see the landscape of payments in 5/10/15/20 years' time? What would it look like? 

It's good question having been in payments nearly that long. I think for me personally, in the short term, I'm really excited to see more and more people engage with the concept of the RLN because I think what the, you know, the pace of growth and engagement we've seen in the idea to date has really only amplified and accelerated the great work we've been able to do as people from across the ecosystem come together particularly innovative community who will undoubtedly be leading the way in telling us what the settlement substrate needs to deliver. Longer term, I guess my hope is probably for something you know that is a really effective public private partnership model.

In the UK, I think this pivotal moment I mentioned that we're at with payments in the UK strategically really demonstrates that for us to move forward effectively and to keep our position as a world class, world leading ecosystem for payments we do have to have a really effective public-private relationship. So I hope that will really develop well over the next decade. 

And the concept of the UK RLN, so UK RLN, do you think as a proof of concept it could be a global RLN?

There's a really interesting question. 

I mean, at the moment the focus of our experimentation phase has been on domestic retail use cases. We've also explored a bond use case and kind of card POS use case. I think the project Agora work that the BIS is leading will certainly be a really enlightening experiment in terms of demonstrating how some of this new technology can be applied to cross-border. And I definitely have high hopes for the learnings from the UK RLN project being very important in feeding into that. 

Rhiannon, thank you for all of that, it was absolutely fascinating and thank you for joining us here today.

And thank you to you all for joining us with Rhiannon. 

I hope you found it enlightening. I certainly did. And I hope it sparked your curiosity about the rapidly evolving landscape of payments and the concept of the UK regulated liability network. 

Please do look out for our future insights in this series and we look forward to welcoming you again.

Thank you.