NOBO, D&B & Polygon join Digital Pound Lab trade test

NOBO, Dun & Bradstreet, and Polygon Labs have been selected for Phase 2 of the Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab to test trade finance settlement and business identity tools in the central bank's experimental programme.

The consortium is developing two cross-border trade projects for small and medium-sized businesses. One focuses on creating a reusable credit identity for SMEs. The other tests an invoice factoring process in which an exporter receives an advance through a stablecoin rail and a UK importer completes settlement in digital pounds.

The lab is designed to explore how different forms of digital money could work together in payment systems. The work does not involve real customers or real money, but gives participants a controlled setting to examine interoperability between stablecoins and a potential digital pound.

NOBO took part in the programme's first phase, where it demonstrated conditional business-to-business escrow payments linked to trade finance workflows. In the second phase, it has added Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs to build a broader settlement and identity system.

Trade finance remains a weak point for many smaller exporters and importers because verification is often fragmented and settlements can take several days. Larger companies can usually absorb those delays through treasury operations and existing credit lines, but smaller firms can face a cash squeeze between shipping goods and receiving payment.

Identity model

The SME Bankable Profile project is led by NOBO, with support from Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon Labs. It combines wallet transaction signals, open finance data, and business intelligence to generate what the companies describe as a pre-qualified credit outcome that could be reused with different lenders or market participants.

Dun & Bradstreet is contributing commercial identity and risk data already used in credit assessment. Polygon Labs is providing the smart contract infrastructure intended to record the outcome and manage consent and the lifecycle of a deal.

The model could reduce the amount of manual checking required when smaller businesses seek finance. The aim is to let an SME hold a financial identity based on its transaction history rather than repeatedly supplying the same documents to each potential lender.

Settlement test

The second workstream centres on an electronic bill of lading-backed invoice factoring flow. Under the model being tested, an exporter would obtain an advance through a stablecoin settlement leg, while the importer would settle the final payment in digital pounds.

Polygon Labs said its Open Money Stack is being used for the stablecoin side of the test, including fiat-to-stablecoin conversion, wallets, and settlement infrastructure. The exercise is intended to examine whether public and private forms of digital money could operate together in a single trade finance transaction rather than through separate systems.

The experiment also feeds into a wider debate over how central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, and tokenised assets could coexist. Rather than replacing one another, the premise is that different digital instruments may serve different roles in future payment and settlement arrangements.

Ayo Ojerinola, Founder & CEO, NOBO Finance, said trade finance remains operationally complex.

"Trade finance is multi-party by nature, but the workflows, data, and settlement paths still don't connect cleanly. The Digital Pound Lab gives us a safe environment to test our innovations, improving coordination across participants, and transforming how cross-border trade actually works today," Ojerinola said.

Sara de la Torre, Head of Financial Services at Dun & Bradstreet, said established business identity data could help reduce friction in assessing smaller firms.

"Smoother trade finance for SMEs depends on trust - and that starts with reliable business identity and risk data. By bringing the D&B Commercial Graph into NOBO's work in the Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab, we are helping build trust between trading partners and financial institutions, making SMEs more visible and bankable within cross-border trade and making it easier to match trade with financing and reduce friction in transactions," de la Torre said.

Marc Boiron, Chief Executive Officer, Polygon Labs, said the project addresses the broader question of interoperability in digital payments.

"For digital money to actually move the world's trade, its different forms have to work together, public and private, central bank money and stablecoins. This experiment tests exactly that, an exporter paid instantly in stablecoins while the importer settles in a digital pound, in a single flow. Interoperability is what gets value moving, and it is what Polygon's Open Money Stack is built to enable. Regulators and central banks are asking the right questions, and we are glad to be part of that conversation at the infrastructure level," Boiron said.