Wholesale Digital Markets Champion

Chris Woolard CBE was appointed the HM Treasury’s Wholesale Digital Markets Champion (‘DMC’) on 21 April 2026  to help create a tokenised wholesale financial markets system, boosting the UK’s global competitiveness and accelerating innovation across financial services.

Estimates put the tokenised real-world assets market at $88 trillion by 2035. The scale of the market – combined with other benefits of tokenisation – could result in a sizeable economic benefit for the UK. Up to £33 billion could be added to the UK’s annual economic output and £14 billion in annual tax revenues by 2035.

As delivery partner and secretariat to Chris Woolard CBE, the City of London Corporation is working with industry partners including TheCityUK, UK Finance, the Investment Association and Innovate Finance to drive the initiative and convene expertise from across the financial services sector.

The inaugural report, published on 13 July 2026, sets out actions for industry, supported by government and the UK regulators, to tokenise UK financial markets at scale – including building secondary markets, tokenising collateral and building on the issuance of DIGIT, the UK Digital Gilt instrument.

Over the next 12 months, the members of the cross-industry taskforce – currently 54 firms – will be working with the Wholesale Digital Markets Champion. They will be supported by the City of London Corporation, working closely with industry partners: TheCityUK, the Investment Association, UK Finance, Innovate Finance. The taskforce will drive delivery of live end-to-end use cases, focusing initially on tokenised repo. Nine Action Groups will be set up to deliver on priority areas across the market value chain and develop cross-cutting best practice standards.

Feedback and comments on the first report are very welcome from industry, especially from those who have not been engaged in this work to date, to ensure the proposed programme of work accurately reflects the priorities of the sector. All feedback should be sent to DigitalMarketsChampion@cityoflondon.gov.uk by Friday 4 September 2026.

Many of the immediate use cases and actions may skew towards fixed income as an area of the market that is advanced in its thinking and scale for the UK. We will consider the possibility of exploring additional asset classes, such as commodities, across the course of the year.

We will also establish the repo use case, with an aim of completing as much as possible to test and ideally run a live trial by spring 2027.

We will continue to provide updates on this page on the work of the Taskforce and Action Groups over the course of the next year.