T+1 in October 2027, tokenised settlement next: how the ECB and UK wire up digital securities
Victoria Shinder2 min readThe European Central Bank's Piero Cipollone told an EU T+1 Industry Committee event in Frankfurt on 29 October, in a speech the BIS republished on 2 November, that Europe will move securities settlement from two days to one on 11 October 2027. He described T+1 as a catalyst rather than a technical change: it forces post-trade processes to be standardised and automated, and inefficiencies tolerable under T+2 become hard to sustain. The Eurosystem's own settlement platform, T2S, already settles substantial volumes at T+1 and even T+0, he said, and its night-time settlement will be changed in June 2027 to fit the tighter timetable.
He then set out the tokenisation track. Since 30 March the Eurosystem has accepted marketable assets issued in DLT-based central securities depositories as collateral, and it is assessing whether assets on other DLT systems could qualify. Since 21 September its Pontes service has settled wholesale transactions in tokenised assets in central bank money, connecting market DLT platforms to the TARGET services; operating hours are to be extended significantly by mid-2027, with 24/7 availability in 2028 and immediate settlement finality on the Eurosystem DLT platform possibly next year. A longer project, Appia, is to produce a blueprint for an integrated European tokenised finance ecosystem by 2028. Cipollone's warning was about fragmentation: innovation should not recreate Europe's divisions in digital form, and old and new infrastructures have to work together.
The UK supplied a concrete example of the same problem on 2 November. HM Treasury said the Bank of England has approved a link between the HSBC and LSEG digital securities depositories so that investors can reach the pilot digital gilt, DIGIT, through either platform, explicitly to reduce fragmentation between digital platforms. The pilot is still expected by the first quarter of 2027.
What it means
Both authorities are converging on the same design principle: tokenised securities are useful only if they settle in central bank money and if the platforms holding them are connected rather than competing silos. The next year is mostly plumbing, testing T+1 and extending Pontes, but it decides whether digital bonds become a market or a set of separate experiments.