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The Bank of England has selected 18 organisations to take part in its Synchronisation Lab, a Bank-run programme designed to let prospective “synchronisation operators” test how transactions on external ledgers could be coordinated with settlement in the UK’s renewed RTGS service (RT2), according to the central bank’s programme description. The Bank said the Lab is expected to launch in spring 2026 and run for around six months, with the stated purpose of validating design choices for an RT2 synchronisation capability and demonstrating end-to-end “synchronised settlement” flows.
The participant list published by the Bank includes use cases directly adjacent to property transaction workflows: LMS and PEXA are listed under a “house purchase” focus, with descriptions referencing housing purchase/remortgage transaction flows and integration with HM Land Registry. Transpact is listed in a multi-purpose category and, in the Bank’s summary, includes “property sale/purchases” among the use cases it plans to test in the Lab.
A separate report by Ledger Insights described the announcement as the selection of “ten projects” for RTGS atomic settlement trials and said 18 companies are involved across those projects, while characterising the current phase as a simulation rather than a live, real-money system. Ledger Insights also noted that participation in the synchronisation concept is not limited to RTGS account holders, and that DLT operators and their users could also participate.
In its “terms of participation,” the Bank defines synchronisation as the conditional settlement of funds in RT2 against assets on external ledgers—funds settle “if and only if” the external asset also settles—and says synchronisation introduces a new type of entity, a “synchronisation operator,” to orchestrate these movements. The same document says the Lab will be run in two cohorts starting around two weeks apart and will operate across three eight-week testing and development phases, with findings intended to inform design and delivery decisions for a potential future live RT2 synchronisation capability.
The Bank frames the Lab as building on its Project Meridian work, which examined how a synchronisation interface could bridge RTGS infrastructure with DLT-based tokenised securities settlement and support atomic settlement in central bank money for tokenised securities transactions. On the Lab page, the Bank also states it is not a regulatory sandbox and will not support real-money payments, and that it expects to publish a report summarising key learnings after the Lab closes.
For issuers, infrastructure providers, and platforms building tokenised asset and RWA workflows, the immediate impact is access (for selected participants and their counterparties/users) to a Bank-provided simulation environment to demonstrate end-to-end synchronised settlement interactions with RT2 concepts rather than executing live settlement. For real-estate-adjacent flows specifically, the Bank’s published use cases include house purchase/remortgage and title-registration integrations, but the Bank explicitly notes the Lab is not a regulatory sandbox and will not run real-money payments.
