Funding Round and Strategic Goals
Fnality, a leading blockchain-based payments firm, has successfully closed a $136 million Series C funding round. This significant investment includes new backers such as WisdomTree, Bank of America, Citi, and KBC Group, who are joining an already impressive roster of global financial institutions that includes Santander, BNY Mellon, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs, among others.
The company has stated that this capital will be used to strengthen its balance sheet, accelerate product development, and advance its efforts to meet regulatory requirements. The primary goal is to expand its wholesale payments infrastructure, positioning the platform for broader adoption once the necessary regulatory approvals are secured. The strong continued interest from major banks signals a clear push within the industry to integrate ledger-based solutions for payments using central bank money.
How Fnality Works and What It Could Change
Fnality is building a network that uses distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enable the real-time, peer-to-peer transfer of central bank money between financial institutions. Essentially, it creates digital tokens that represent claims on reserves held directly at central banks, supporting currencies like sterling, euros, dollars, and yen.
This model aims to bring significant efficiency gains to wholesale financial markets. By enabling 24/7 settlement with finality in seconds, Fnality’s system could reduce the reliance on traditional payment rails like SWIFT, which have limited operating hours. This has the potential to lower back-office costs, minimize reconciliation overhead, and reduce the demand for intraday liquidity that institutions currently need to manage.
Adoption is expected to begin with internal pilots within the founding banks, allowing them to test the system’s impact before extending it to correspondent banking networks. A key differentiator for Fnality is that its tokens are backed by central bank money, which is considered the safest form of settlement asset. The platform and its smart contract controls are designed to be audited under strict prudential, KYC and AML standards.
The next critical milestone for Fnality is obtaining regulatory approval to go live. The outcome of forthcoming tests will be the true indicator of whether this model can successfully lower costs and free up liquidity in day-to-day wholesale markets, thereby validating the thesis behind the substantial funding and backing from major institutions.
