No regulatory pathway or public infrastructure for mutual credit and B2B obligation-clearing
The local currency era is over: the Bristol Pound wound down in 2020–21 and the Lewes Pound, the last town pound, ended in 2025. The technically superior successor, mutual credit and multilateral invoice netting (Mutual Credit Services' Local Loop Merseyside clearing club; the Open Credit Network), is nascent, privately funded and sits in regulatory grey space across e-money, credit and payments perimeters, with no FCA guidance and no participation from anchor institutions such as councils or NHS trusts.
Multilateral netting can release SME cash flow without bank credit, valuable in downturns and credit deserts. Sardinia's Sardex proved regional scale is possible. Without perimeter clarity or a credible public pilot, UK schemes cannot sign risk-averse anchor institutions, so networks never reach clearing-critical mass.
FCA perimeter guidance or a dedicated sandbox cohort for mutual-credit/obligation-clearing schemes; one publicly evaluated city-region pilot with local-authority anchor participation; open interoperability standards between networks.
// Build together: Counterparty: FCA sandbox cohort plus one volunteer local authority anchoring a city-region obligation-clearing pilot.
Multilateral netting could free SME cash flow, but the model is nascent, sits in regulatory grey space, and lacks any anchor institution or dated trigger to force progress.
One gap, several dossiers: entries folded into this one (1)
The research pass surfaced this gap independently in more than one domain. Those entries are merged here so the map counts it once: the same proportionate FCA route plus shared public clearing infrastructure for mutual credit, both citing Sardex.
№ 114 · No proportionate regulatory route for mutual credit and community currencies (Portable sovereignty)
The UK's paper town pounds are gone (Bristol Pound closed 2020; the Lewes Pound was last used in 2025). Mutual credit networks (Mutual Credit Services' trade clubs, timebanks under Timebanking UK) operate in a grey zone between e-money, consumer-credit rules and the incoming FCA cryptoasset regime, which was calibrated for capitalised stablecoin issuers (authorisation gateway opens September 2026 with a £350k minimum capital floor; full regime October 2027). No FCA perimeter guidance or sandbox tier addresses non-speculative community exchange systems; the Bank of England's Digital Securities Sandbox is wholesale-only.
Its fill: FCA perimeter guidance plus a proportionate sandbox tier for mutual credit and community currencies, and seed funding for shared national clearing infrastructure that local trade clubs and timebanks can plug into.