UK challenger bank Monument plans to tokenize £250 million in retail deposits

According to CoinDesk, while Wall Street giants like JPMorgan and Citi have processed huge amounts of money through blockchain, tokenized payment services are still primarily aimed at institutional clients and licensed networks. JPMorgan's Kinexys blockchain platform has processed over $3 trillion, and Citi Token Services handles billions of dollars in cross-border payments daily, neither of which is open to regular savings users.

The UK challenger bank Monument Bank is attempting to fill this gap. The bank has a balance sheet size of approximately $2.4 billion and plans to tokenize up to £250 million (about $335 million) of retail customer deposits on the privacy public chain Midnight. These deposits will still earn interest, be fully backed by the bank, can be exchanged 1:1 for pounds, and are protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. The project utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to protect customer data and meet regulatory requirements, allowing users to engage without needing to understand or directly use cryptocurrencies.

Mintoo Bhandari, founder of Monument Bank, stated that most tokenization projects are currently internal bank projects and have not yet truly allowed retail users to participate directly in tokenization. In the long term, the bank plans to offer fractional private equity, tokenized structured products, and Lombard loans to customers through regular banking applications under compliance, and is considering licensing related infrastructure to other banks through its subsidiary Monument Technology.