Bank of England taps Polygon consortium for digital pound trade finance tests 
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. According to a press release shared with cryptonews, 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.
