Bank of England outlines plans for an alias service as “important infrastructure” for any future digital pound, while indicating only deferred offline payments would feature initially.
The Bank of England has set out how a potential digital pound could be addressed to human-readable identifiers, positioning an alias service as core plumbing for routing and user experience, in a move that would matter for account-to-account checkout and payouts across UK retail and gambling.
The design notes, published on October 23, also indicate that any launch would support only deferred offline payments, with device-to-device transfers kept as an option for later.
“We are proposing an alias service in the digital pound ecosystem […] As important infrastructure, we consider that alias service functionality will need to be provided, to some degree, by the Bank as operator of the core digital pound infrastructure,” the BoE states.
It adds that the central bank would “play a role in maintaining the data repository that maps each independent account alias to… the PIP providing the account,” and would set scheme rules for how aliases are used.
Aliases could include mobile numbers, custom usernames or randomly generated three-word combinations, mapped to payment interface providers so payments and requests can be routed without exposing sort codes and account numbers. The note says the service must be reachable “whenever an independent alias is used to initiate or request a payment,” underscoring its role as critical infrastructure.
The BoE points to international examples where aliasing has supported take-up of account-to-account payments. Spain’s Bizum links mobile numbers to bank accounts and has since expanded from peer-to-peer into e-commerce and point of sale, helped by consistent user journeys across banking apps.
By contrast, UK service Paym closed in 2023 after low awareness and inconsistent execution. The BoE argues there is an “opportunity… to improve retail payments with account aliases” in the UK, including for business payments.
Two operating models are sketched out within the proposal. In one, the BoE, “potentially through a third party,” would host a central repository of independent aliases, reducing requirements on intermediaries but demanding strict privacy controls so “the Bank and Government would not access end-users’ personal data.”
In the other, each PIP would maintain a synchronised local repository, with the BoE “as ‘orchestrator’,” potentially supported by SDKs. The paper does not fix a final choice between them.
Online vs offline
A companion note sets out the Bank’s “emerging thinking” on offline payments. It defines two types. Deferred offline mirrors card behaviour today, allowing a payment to be initiated when connectivity is poor and completed when one party reconnects or through batch processing. This would cover common UK scenarios such as transport and unattended terminals.
Device offline would move value onto a device for peer-to-peer transfer without the ledger seeing it until reconnection.
“Our current thinking is that [device offline] functionality would not be available at launch,” the central bank writes, citing uncertain benefits relative to complexity, technology maturity and added risks such as double-spend and counterfeiting. The design would remain open to support device offline in future if the case strengthens.
Deferred offline would require clear scheme rules. The note says merchants would need to opt in, configure limits with their providers and understand “the risks they take in accepting deferred offline payments,” including what happens if funds are not available on reconnection. The BoE frames this as continuity for familiar UK use cases rather than an attempt to replicate cash-like transfers at launch.
Both papers emphasise their status in the broader design phase. “This note is exploratory and does not represent final policy or design decisions,” the alias document states, a line repeated in the offline paper. Any decision to proceed would follow the design phase and would require primary legislation before introduction.
For payments firms, the more immediate news lies in the centrality of aliasing to any digital pound blueprint. The Bank says the “core purpose of an alias service is to ensure a payment instruction or request is routed to the correct account,” with duplication checks and rules on issuance and use. That positioning places routing, addressing and privacy choices near the top of the technical agenda for intermediaries that would sit between consumers, merchants and the Bank’s core infrastructure.
The papers also situate the design work within ongoing work on the National Payments Vision, noting that the notes do not pre-judge outcomes from that process. The Bank reiterates that no decision has been taken on whether to build a digital pound.
