At the same time, participant banks connected their core banking systems to their own GCUL API instances. But these participant banks don’t need a large Google Cloud footprint. Instead, they can connect to GCUL nodes via Remote Procedure Call from their existing on-premise deployments and manage private key material through solutions other than KMS. Regardless of the setup, transactions are seamlessly routed to the shared global GCUL nodes.
Whether GCUL is exposed to a bank’s client or used merely as a bank backend is entirely at the integrating institution’s discretion. The banks participating in the pilot chose the latter, utilizing the ledger to upgrade their backend infrastructure. With GCUL under the hood, they improved intra-day transaction performance and provided customers with the user experience they were already accustomed to.
Regulatory compliance and governance by design
To join the Swiss Franc currency network on GCUL, participants must have regulatory licenses that let them perform third-party transfers and issue commercial bank money. Crucially, features like token and account management are not rigid network-wide limitations. Instead, they rely entirely on the currency operator and its specific rulebook. This standardizes fees, limits, settlement times, and technical configurations.
Managing counterparty risk is central to this governance. Rather than relying on unscalable bilateral agreements or complex clearinghouse default waterfalls, GCUL mitigates risk through these currency operator-enforced issuance limits.
It’s important to distinguish GCUL’s broader feature set from the concrete pilot setup. In the pilot, both participating banks operated with conservative initial limits based on their credit ratings in order to safely prove the architecture. But beyond the pilot, the network frees up capital by periodically netting outstanding obligations, which frees banks from having to fund and settle every transaction.
Looking ahead, risk management can be further innovated. One clever future enhancement would be to allow participants to dynamically increase their issuance limits by committing digital assets as collateral in segregated accounts, using solutions like Crypto Finance’s AnchorNote pledging solution. These assets could then be used to instantly settle outstanding street-side obligations, virtually eliminating counterparty risk without tying up traditional liquidity reserves.
The future
While Crypto Finance’s pilot was designed to focus on domestic commercial bank money transfers in Switzerland, GCUL’s programmable architecture and high-performance smart contract language, GCULpy, are paving the way for deeper innovation. As institutions like Crypto Finance scale their use of GCUL, the network can expand to support real-time cross-currency settlement, automated foreign exchange, and dynamic collateral management involving tokenized digital assets. And looking further ahead, this infrastructure has laid the groundwork for next-generation financial services that range from point-of-sale payments to autonomous, AI-driven agentic payments.
The pilot proved that deploying high-performance, blockchain-based payment rails doesn’t mean compromising on strict regulatory compliance or core banking stability. By combining the high-throughput of GCUL with a secure, API-driven integration architecture, commercial banks can offer stablecoin-like speed to their customers while seamlessly preserving their capital efficiency. Ultimately, this compliant-by-design approach targets the operational bottlenecks of traditional finance while mitigating the inherent risks and complexities of public blockchains.
To learn how your institution can build on this blueprint to fundamentally upgrade your operational payments infrastructure, contact Google Cloud Sales to explore the Google Cloud Universal Ledger.
The team would also like to thank Phil Dettwiler, Andras Miklos, Ignazio Pollina, and Ozan Kizildogan at Crypto Finance and Googlers Chris Esch, Ishan Singh, Olena Clayton, and Stathis Onasoglou for their contributions.
