Treasury names six banks to lead the UK's first digital gilt

HM Treasury has appointed six banks as joint lead managers for the pilot issuance of the Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT), the UK’s first digitally native government bond. The banks are Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Morgan Stanley, NatWest and RBC Capital Markets.

City minister Lucy Rigby announced the appointments on 6 October in a keynote at Digital Assets Week. They complete the procurement process and allow investor engagement to begin.

“The appointment of Lead Managers marks an important step as we work towards issuance early next year,” said Rigby, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury. The pilot “is expected to take place by Q1 2027”.

What the banks will do

The Treasury says the lead managers will provide “traditional Lead Manager services, including underwriting services, supporting investor engagement and distributing DIGIT on issuance day”. They were chosen in a competitive procurement against “transparent and objective criteria”.

The appointments follow two earlier steps:

• February: HSBC was appointed as DLT supplier.
• July: HSBC and London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) signed a memorandum of understanding to deliver a bilateral Digital Securities Depository link.

Design

According to the Treasury, DIGIT will be:

• digitally native
• short-dated
• issued on a platform operating within the Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS)
• settled on-chain
• independent of the government’s main debt management programme

The pilot has two stated aims. One is to explore how DLT can be applied to UK sovereign debt issuance. The other is to “catalyse the development of UK based DLT infrastructure and the adoption of DLT across UK financial markets”.

The appointment comes two weeks after FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi listed “progress on digital gilt issuance” among recent UK steps on tokenisation. In the same speech he noted that HSBC Orion had become the first entrant approved to provide live Digital Securities Depository services.

Why it matters

The pilot is small and runs separately from the main gilt programme, so it will not affect benchmark liquidity. It will, however, test the parts of the system that tokenisation projects usually find hardest, at sovereign scale: on-chain settlement, depository links and investor onboarding.

Several groups have operational questions to answer before issuance:

• Gilt desks and custodians: how they will hold and settle the instrument, and whether existing collateral and repo arrangements can accept it.
• Buy-side firms: whether their mandates and custody agreements permit a DSS-issued security.
• LSEG: the bilateral link with HSBC is the part to watch. It will show whether digital and traditional depositories can work together, or whether liquidity in tokenised gilts stays on one platform.

Sources

• HM Treasury, “UK takes next step towards first digitally native government bond”, 6 October 2026 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-takes-next-step-towards-first-digitally-native-government-bond
• FCA, speech by Nikhil Rathi, 22 September 2026 — https://www.fca.org.uk/news/speeches/building-next-generation-market-infrastructure