A British challenger bank wants to put retail savings on a blockchain JPMorgan won't touch

JPMorgan's Kinexys platform has settled more than $3 trillion in transactions, and Citi Token Services handles billions of dollars in cross-border payments every day. Yet despite that scale, neither product serves an ordinary person with a savings account. A U.K. challenger bank with about $2.4 billion on its balance sheet now intends to cross that line, according to CoinDesk.

Monument Bank is preparing to tokenize up to £250 million ($335 million) of retail customer deposits on Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain. The deposits would stay interest-bearing, fully backed by the bank and redeemable one-for-one in pounds sterling, with Financial Services Compensation Scheme protection within the scheme's limits. According to Monument founder Mintoo Bhandari, no institution has yet let retail customers take part directly in tokenization.

The bank's plan highlights a divide running through the tokenized-money industry. Wall Street institutions have spent years building blockchain rails, but the projects stay locked inside permissioned networks or serve institutional clients only. Bhandari argued this is structural rather than incidental: most tokens currently used for money transfer belong to internal projects, and so far they have not meaningfully changed the business for either the bank or the consumer.

Tokenized deposits differ from stablecoins in a key respect. A deposit token is a claim on the issuing bank, meaning it can earn interest, sit inside the regulated banking system and potentially be programmed to settle against tokenized assets. Monument's banking licence allows it to pay interest on deposits, which stablecoin issuers cannot do. The customer experience, Bhandari said, is meant to look like an ordinary sterling deposit withdrawable on demand, with no need for users to know that blockchain sits underneath.

Why institutional blockchains stay walled off

Fahmi Syed, president of the Midnight Foundation, pointed to privacy as the reason large banks keep their networks closed. Banks cannot risk exposing clients' transaction data or commercial relationships, so they build private ledgers. The problem comes when those ledgers need to talk to each other: connecting them requires bridges or similar mechanisms, and that is where data leaks. JPMorgan and Citi have acknowledged the issue themselves, Syed said. Midnight's answer is zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic tools that let a bank confirm a customer or transaction meets certain conditions without placing personal data onchain.

The infrastructure question shows up in treasury operations too. Jerald David, CEO of Lynq Network, told CoinDesk that institutional treasury desks often run three systems for the same function: a tokenized deposit with one client, a regulated stablecoin with another and a conventional correspondent account with a third. Idle liquidity spread across five networks is five times the capital inefficiency of liquidity held in one place, he said, and capital can end up stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. His example: a fund repaid in stablecoins on a Saturday morning cannot use that cash to meet a margin call before Monday, because the prime broker's treasury only operates during banking hours and rejects digital assets. The money exists but cannot be deployed where it is needed.

If the retail deposit plan succeeds, Monument wants to go further. Longer term, customers could gain access to fractional private equity, tokenized structured products and Lombard lending, all inside a regulated banking app and subject to the appropriate permissions. Bhandari also plans to license the technology to other banks through a separate vehicle, Monument Technology.

The broader test, as Bhandari framed it, is no longer whether banks can tokenize money, since they demonstrably can. It is whether tokenized money can be made useful to consumers while keeping the privacy, regulatory safeguards and trust that separate a bank deposit from a crypto token. He was blunt about the competition: most of the world's banks call themselves digital because they have an app, while running core architectures that date to the 1970s.