Revolut Picked to Test Stablecoins in UK’s Regulatory Sandbox
Revolut is among four companies being tapped to test stablecoin use in the U.K.
The London-based FinTech has been chosen to take part in the Regulatory Sandbox program, which lets companies trial stablecoin products in real world settings with proper safeguards, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced Wednesday (Feb. 25).
“We are supporting UK stablecoin issuers to ensure they can be trusted for payments, settlement and trading,” Matthew Long, director of payments and digital assets at the FCA, said in a news release. “It will benefit consumers and financial transactions and help to deliver the FCA’s strategy and the Government’s National Payments Vision.”
In addition to Revolut, the other companies involved in the program are Monee Financial Technologies, ReStabilise and VVTX. The FCA said its tests will focus mainly on stablecoin issuance, with each company representing a range of stablecoin uses, such as payments, crypto trading and wholesale settlement.
The testing is set to start during the first quarter of the year, with the FCA hoping to use the findings to help shape the U.K.’s final stablecoin rules later in the year.
The FCA’s announcement comes as Revolut is still waiting for a full banking license from the U.K. The company was technically licensed in 2024 after a three-year wait, but is in the “mobilization phase,” which limits its deposits to 50,000 pounds.
The company’s stablecoin-related offerings include giving customers the ability to swap between stablecoins and fiat currency, a service announced in November.
In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday (Feb. 24) about the “unavoidable paradox” at the center of the coins’ growth story: these tokenized assets promise to modernize money by making dollars “programmable, portable and instantaneous,” but their most compelling benefit may not be technical at all.
“Instead, it may stem from something more prosaic, and potentially more controversial: the ability to move value through channels that ask fewer questions than the traditional banking system,” the report added.
Financial regulation, the report continued, is expensive by design, with banks investing billions each year on anti-money laundering (AML) programs, sanctions screening and regulatory reporting. Customers rarely notice these costs, but they play a role in everything from wire fees to onboarding timelines.
“Stablecoin ecosystems shift where those costs reside,” PYMNTS wrote. “Exchanges and regulated issuers perform know-your-customer when users convert fiat into tokens. But once assets enter the blockchain, transactions between self-custodied wallets occur outside of regulated financial institutions.”
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