In April this year fintech FIS announced Project Keystone, a network for digital money that is being developed with U.S. banks including Citizens, Fifth Third, Huntington Bank, KeyBank, and M&T Bank. Project Keystone enables banks to issue, transfer, and settle real bank deposits in digital form using Lyriq, a proprietary platform purpose-built by FIS for regulated financial institutions, with compliance, access controls, and auditability embedded into the core infrastructure.

FIS describes Lyriq as the foundational infrastructure layer of the firm’s digital assets strategy. It is a platform that financial institutions and their services connect to, rather than a single-use solution, and is built to support multiple use cases across the ecosystem over time. Julia Demidova, head of central bank digital currency (CBDC) and digital currencies product and strategy at FIS, spent more than four years leading the development of Lyriq from early product thinking and market positioning through to platform design, client use cases, regulatory considerations, operational readiness and launch. She discusses the platform, the new world of digital money and her career:

There are many forms of digital money. What are the differences between tokenized deposits versus stablecoins and CBDCs?

We talk about digital money as if it were one thing, but the forms differ in a fundamental way. A tokenized deposit is the money you already know, a commercial bank deposit, made digital. It never leaves the issuing bank’s balance sheet, so it remains regulated money and preserves the bank’s capacity to lend. Nothing new is created; existing money simply becomes programmable and available around the clock.

A stablecoin works differently. Rather than a claim on your bank, it is a claim on its issuer, which may be a bank or a non-bank, and on the pool of reserves standing behind it. That dependence on the issuer and the quality of its reserves is precisely why regulators in the UK and elsewhere are bringing stablecoin issuance, custody, and prudential standards inside the existing financial services perimeter.

At the far end of the spectrum sits the CBDC, money issued directly by the central bank, the digital equivalent of cash. The digital euro is the most advanced example among major economies, while the UK is still exploring a digital pound.

While the differences between these forms of digital money may not matter to consumers, they matter enormously to institutions, because they determine balance sheet treatment, regulatory obligations, and who controls the infrastructure. That is why banks, not consumers, are driving this market.

The simplest way to distinguish them is to ask three questions: who issues the money, whose liability is it and what ultimately gives it value.

A tokenized deposit is still a commercial bank deposit. The technology and form may change, but the underlying liability remains with the bank. From the bank’s perspective, that distinction matters because the deposit stays within the regulated banking model and on the bank’s balance sheet. What tokenization changes is how that money can move and interact with digital infrastructure for example, supporting near real-time settlement, 24/7 availability and atomic exchange with other tokenized assets.

Stablecoins have a different structure. Their value is typically maintained against a reference currency through reserves or other backing arrangements and the holder’s claim is ultimately determined by the legal structure of the issuer and the asset. That makes the quality and segregation of reserves, redemption rights, custody arrangements and the regulatory status of the issuer particularly important. This is also why stablecoins are increasingly being brought within formal payments and prudential regulatory frameworks.

A CBDC is different again because the underlying liability is that of the central bank. It brings central-bank money into a digital form that can potentially operate across modern payment and digital-asset infrastructure. The distribution model may still involve commercial banks and payment providers, but the nature of the money itself is fundamentally different because the exposure is to the central bank rather than to a commercial issuer.

For an end customer, these products may eventually feel very similar you see a balance and use it to make a payment. For a bank, however, they are not interchangeable. They have different implications for deposits, liquidity, regulation, settlement, interoperability and control of the customer relationship.

That is why I think the next phase of digital-money adoption will be driven heavily by banks. The question for them is no longer simply whether digital money will exist. It is which forms of digital money they want to support, what role they want to play in that ecosystem and how they connect those new forms of value to the banking and payments infrastructure they already operate.

It took four years to launch Lyriq. What was the biggest challenge? How did you celebrate the platform going live?

The biggest challenge was that we refused to take the shortcut. Most digital money infrastructure was built for crypto markets and retrofitted for banks, with compliance tools bolted on afterwards. We built Lyriq the other way around: compliance, identity verification, access controls, and auditability are embedded in the core of the platform, because that is what bank and regulatory standards demand.

The hardest engineering problem was integration. Digital money cannot run in a silo or an innovation lab; it has to interact with a bank’s general ledger, core banking system, and payment hubs for reconciliation, accounting, and liquidity purposes, and it has to do so regardless of which technology provider the bank uses. Rearchitecting for that, while guaranteeing that transactions either complete fully or fail cleanly, takes years, not weeks. We also insisted on proving the platform before launch to ensure it was fully fit for market.

The biggest challenge wasn’t building a digital ledger. It was building one that could operate as part of a bank’s real infrastructure. From the beginning, we designed Lyriq around the requirements financial institutions actually have: controlled issuance, identity and permissions, auditability, security, resilience and clear accountability for every transaction. Those capabilities couldn’t be treated as an additional compliance layer. They had to be part of the platform’s underlying design.

Integration is probably the most complex part of that journey. Banks don’t operate a single technology stack. Digital money has to coexist with core banking systems, payment infrastructure, general ledgers, liquidity processes, compliance systems and existing operational controls. So we have to think beyond the digital asset transaction itself and solve for what happens before it, after it and across the systems around it.

We also made a deliberate decision not to build Lyriq around one particular digital currency or one use case. The same infrastructure needed to support different forms of regulated digital value, including tokenized deposits, stablecoins and central bank money, while allowing each institution to apply its own rules, governance and operating model. Getting that foundation right took time.

Going live was therefore much more than a technology milestone for me. After four years of design decisions, engineering, testing and quite a few difficult conversations along the way, we finally had a platform that banks could actually use rather than another digital-asset experiment. We did mark the moment as a team, of course, but I think the real celebration was seeing the conversation change. We were no longer talking about what we planned to build. We could show something that was live and start talking to banks about what they wanted to do with it next.

Why did FIS launch Project Keystone?

We launched Project Keystone because we saw a gap between the way digital money was developing and the way banks actually need to operate. Banks are the cornerstone of trust in the financial system, yet much of the digital money infrastructure built over the past decade asks them to cede control to third parties.

The digital money space has never lacked technology looking for adoption. What it lacked was banks moving together, with shared administration and shared infrastructure. The market has fragmented into dozens of platforms and networks, each with its own pocket of liquidity. No bank can integrate with all of them, and every network a bank does not join is liquidity it misses. Project Keystone is the answer to that fragmentation, a network for digital money designed, owned, and administered by banks themselves.

There has been significant innovation across stablecoins, tokenized deposits and blockchain-based payment networks, but much of that innovation has developed in separate ecosystems. For banks, that creates a practical problem. They don’t want to connect to an ever-growing number of closed networks, each with different technology, operating rules and pools of liquidity. Keystone takes a different approach. We are bringing banks together around shared infrastructure where they can move regulated bank money between one another while retaining the governance, controls and accountability they expect from existing financial-market infrastructure.

Have any other banks joined Project Keystone beyond the initial six firms? What is the progress?

Interest since the April announcement has been significant, and we are in active conversations with institutions interested in joining as founding members. What has been most encouraging is the breadth of that interest, from national banks through to regional and trust institutions, which validates the founding principle that this has to be a network that works for institutions of every size, charter, and core provider.

How does Project Keystone fit into FIS’s digital asset strategy?

Lyriq is the foundational infrastructure layer while project Keystone is the network layer built on top. This includes the shared, bank-administered rails that let those institutions transact with each other.

Around them sits a portfolio that spans the full money lifecycle. Our partnership with Circle brought stablecoin payments into the Money Movement Hub for 24/7 cross-border settlement, and FIS Digital Liquidity Gateway opened capital markets access by enabling loan tokenization for securitisation. Together, that gives financial institutions the tools to participate across the spectrum, from payments and settlement through to issuance and liquidity.

Our job is to build infrastructure that supports tokenized deposits, bank-issued stablecoins, fund and real-world asset tokenization, or eventually CBDCs such as the digital euro or a digital pound, so banks stay in control of money in motion whichever way the market settles.

Lyriq provides the underlying digital asset infrastructure. It gives institutions the capabilities to issue, hold, transfer and manage regulated digital value, with the controls, permissions and integration points that banks require. Keystone takes that foundation and applies it to a network model, bringing financial institutions together so they can transact with one another using shared rules and infrastructure.

But we don’t see digital assets as a standalone ecosystem. Digital money still has to connect to payments, liquidity, treasury, core banking and capital markets. That is why the wider FIS strategy matters. We can connect digital asset infrastructure into capabilities that banks already use rather than asking them to operate an entirely separate technology stack.
We are also deliberately not making a single bet on what the dominant form of digital money will be. Different markets may develop differently. Tokenized commercial bank deposits may be important in one use case, regulated stablecoins in another and central bank digital currencies may eventually form another part of that landscape.

The infrastructure therefore needs to accommodate multiple forms of regulated value and allow them to interact with existing money and payment systems.”

What advice would you give to women who work in finance?

My advice would be not to wait until you feel completely ready before taking on something bigger. Finance can still be an environment where people feel they need to prove they know everything before they speak, particularly when the conversation becomes highly technical. In my experience, some of the most important career opportunities come from being prepared to step into areas that are still developing and work things out as you go.

I’ve moved across different parts of financial services, from strategy and commercial roles into payments, digital assets and technology. I didn’t follow a perfectly linear career path and I actually think that has been an advantage. It taught me to ask questions, understand different perspectives and become comfortable working across disciplines.

I would say: build real expertise, expertise gives you something much more durable. Understand your subject deeply enough that you can challenge assumptions, make decisions and explain complicated issues in simple terms. And don’t assume you need to change your personality to succeed. There are many different ways to lead. You can be ambitious, technically credible and decisive without trying to replicate somebody else’s leadership style.

How do you relax outside work?

My work can be quite intense, so outside it I try to do the opposite and properly disconnect. Spending time with my family is the biggest part of that, particularly when we can get away and travel together. I find a change of environment is usually the quickest way for me to stop thinking about work.