Huw van Steenis

Advised senior Bank officials on innovation strategy, fintech competitiveness and the intersection of technology with monetary and financial stability policy. Through public reports, private briefings and industry dialogues, helped translate technical considerations — such as distributed ledger tradeoffs, settlement finality, and identity/privacy design — into actionable policy options for how a digital pound might be built and integrated with existing payment rails. Played a key role in convening cross‑sector working groups that include banks, payment firms and technology providers, thereby influencing industry readiness and the technical standards that will govern GBP token projects. By bridging technical debates and policymaker priorities, contributed to shaping the Bank’s research agenda and procurement choices around pilots and proof‑of‑concepts, which in turn determine how quickly commercial participants can test GBP token models and what architectures are favoured (permissioned ledgers, tokenised reserves, etc.). This direction-setting role affects developer ecosystems, vendor selection and interoperability approaches that are central to whether GBP becomes a widely used native unit on distributed ledgers or remains peripheral to crypto settlement flows. The adviser’s influence is therefore technical and pragmatic: not setting law, but shaping the practical blueprints that regulators and market participants will implement when tokenising sterling.