Lloyds survey: 71% of UK finance chiefs back tokenisation shift

A Lloyds survey of 100 senior UK finance leaders finds tokenisation moving from experiment to strategic infrastructure priority.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Sat, 10 October 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A long corridor in a data center is lined with dark server racks displaying glowing blue and green indicator lights, leading to a glass-partitioned office space with desks and computers, brightly lit by overhead ceiling panels.

The UK's largest financial institutions have moved decisively behind tokenisation, with nearly three quarters of senior leaders expecting the technology to reshape how money and assets move through the financial system. That is the headline finding from Lloyds' tenth annual Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey, published this week, which polled 100 decision-makers across banks, insurers, financial sponsors, and asset and wealth managers.

The survey's most striking data point is not the 71% tokenisation figure itself but the acceleration in technology investment sitting behind it. The share of institutions treating new and emerging technologies as a growth priority has nearly doubled in a single year, rising from 41% in 2025 to 77% in 2026. Almost two thirds (64%) plan to increase capital expenditure over the next 12 months. That kind of year-on-year movement in a survey of large, conservative institutions suggests a sentiment shift that has crossed from exploratory to committed.

From experiment to live infrastructure

Lloyds is not merely running surveys. Earlier this year it completed what it describes as the UK's first public blockchain transaction using tokenised deposits to purchase a tokenised gilt, executed alongside digital-asset exchange Archax and the Canton Network. The transaction is notable because it connected two distinct tokenised instruments, a liability-side deposit and an asset-side government security, on a public chain, rather than a permissioned sandbox. That is a meaningful step beyond proof-of-concept territory.

When asked which benefits matter most, respondents ranked faster payments and settlement first, cited by 60%, followed by collateral and liquidity management at 41%. Rob Hale, Co-Head of Global Markets at Lloyds, framed the ambition clearly: "The real opportunity is to make financial markets work faster, more efficiently and with greater flexibility for clients. Faster settlement, more efficient use of collateral and better movement of liquidity are tangible benefits that boost balance sheets. The next phase is about turning those individual use cases into infrastructure that works at scale, with the interoperability and common standards needed to connect digital and traditional markets."

The convergence angle: financial rails as cross-sector infrastructure

The strategic significance of this survey extends well beyond the balance sheets of UK high-street banks. Tokenised financial infrastructure is increasingly the connective tissue that other disruptive sectors depend on. Clean-energy project finance, for instance, is already exploring tokenised carbon credits and renewable-energy certificates as a mechanism to unlock illiquid capital. In life sciences, tokenised royalty streams and IP-backed securities are being tested as an alternative funding route for early-stage drug development, where traditional debt markets are poorly suited to binary clinical risk. If UK financial institutions succeed in building interoperable tokenised rails at scale, the second-order beneficiaries will span sectors far removed from traditional banking.

The geopolitical and competitive dimension is also sharpening. The European Central Bank's wholesale CBDC trials, Singapore's Project Guardian, and Hong Kong's tokenised green bond programme all represent competing bets on where the dominant standard for digital financial infrastructure will be set. The UK's Financial Market Infrastructure Sandbox, launched under the previous regulatory cycle, provides the experimental runway, but the Lloyds survey data suggests UK institutions are now moving faster than the regulatory architecture that was designed to contain the experiment. Modernising financial and market infrastructure was identified by survey respondents as one of the UK's greatest economic opportunities over the coming year, a signal that industry appetite may outpace policy design.

For cross-sector investors, the read-across is straightforward. Capital flowing into tokenisation is not purely a fintech story: it is an infrastructure bet with implications for settlement risk across asset classes, for the cost of capital in emerging-market sovereign debt, and for the speed at which illiquid alternative assets, from private credit to real estate to biotech royalties, can be mobilised. The institutions that move earliest to establish interoperable standards will shape the terms on which every other sector accesses digital liquidity. The survey suggests the UK's largest players believe that race is now underway.