UK Picks Six Banks to Lead First Digital Gilt Pilot

The choice to run DIGIT outside the main debt programme is the telling detail: it lets the UK test sovereign issuance on distributed ledger infrastructure without committing the conventional gilt stack to it, while HSBC's Orion gets a state-level reference that private issuers cannot provide. The pilot's real audience is other sovereigns and large issuers weighing similar platforms, not retail investors. Whether the pilot stays a one-off experiment or becomes a recurring issuance channel is the open question.