The FCA has held early talks with banks on regulating tokenized gold, while HSBC's Hong Kong product has processed over $2.2 billion across 276,000 transactions.
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The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has held early discussions with industry participants, including several large banks, about how it might regulate tokenized gold, according to people familiar with the regulator's plans. The FCA declined to comment when asked about the talks.
The discussions sit inside a broader push, led jointly by the FCA and the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, to bring distributed-ledger technology into UK wholesale markets. Earlier this year, the two regulators said they planned to "set out further policy for consideration later this year on how tokenised collateral can operate under the existing regulatory framework."
FCA documents already put a marker down on where gold fits into its collateral thinking. In a joint call for input with the Bank of England, the regulator said it is "reviewing tokenised collateral eligibility, recognising the benefits of using tokenised Money Market Funds (MMFs) and tokenised gold as uncleared over-the-counter (OTC) collateral." That consultation closed for responses on 3 July 2026. A separate policy statement the FCA issued in April, covering tokenized fund registers, does not touch gold at all.
The city handles about 70% of global gold trading volume. Asian gold hubs are moving on their own in the meantime: Hong Kong is building a gold-clearing system aimed at becoming Asia's top bullion hub, set to launch in July 2026, and Hong Kong and Shanghai have described plans to work together on it. One government official called it "the dawn of a new chapter… in which Hong Kong and Shanghai join forces to shape the future of global gold markets."
While regulators work out the rules, at least one bank has already built a live product. HSBC has offered a tokenized gold product to retail customers in Hong Kong for just over two years; the tokens represent ownership rights in physical gold bars held by the bank as the backing asset. HSBC said more than $2.2 billion of the product has changed hands across over 276,000 transactions since launch.
That volume is a real-world test of the exact property the World Gold Council has been promoting. Tokenisation, the council said this year, means gold ownership "would no longer be constrained by bar sizes, vault locations or fragmented settlement mechanisms."
HSBC's product runs in Hong Kong's retail market, not the UK wholesale collateral space the FCA is reviewing. The two are structurally different use cases, though both rest on the same broader tokenization concept seen across financial markets, where traditional assets are represented through digital tokens.
The tokenized gold talks are one piece of a larger UK effort to digitise wholesale finance. Chris Woolard, the Treasury's newly appointed wholesale digital markets champion, has said the UK could gain a £33 billion economic boost if it accelerates that shift. Whether tokenized gold becomes a formal, named part of that framework, with specific banks publicly attached to it, is still unresolved. The FCA and PRA's only on-record commitment is to set out "further policy… later this year" on tokenized collateral generally, and there is no confirmed gold-specific timetable; the claim that banks are already at the table currently rests on people familiar with the discussions rather than an on-record regulatory statement.
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