The banking sector is starting to ask a more practical question about stablecoins. Are banks ready to operate them safely at scale?
Such questions are the result of deeper structural changes reshaping the market. In 2025, stablecoins processed roughly $33 trillion in transaction volume, according to Bloomberg. A large proportion of that volume was trading reuse, stablecoins circulating multiple times a day across exchanges, rather than settling real-world payments.
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The more revealing signal is where use cases are concentrating, for example in cross-border B2B payments, intraday treasury operations, and platform-native disbursements. These are precisely the corridors where traditional rails are slowest and most expensive and where stablecoins offer a faster and cheaper alternative.
As adoption concentrates in these high-friction areas, attention is shifting from why stablecoins are useful to how they can be operationalised within existing banking systems. Importantly, this might not require entirely new infrastructure.
Swift, the incumbent cross-border payment giant, recently ran pilots with SG‑Forge, a Société Generale subsidiary investment fund, UBS, a Swiss investment bank, and Chainlink, a decentralised Oracle platform. They have demonstrated that tokenised assets and regulated stablecoins can be settled via existing banking infrastructure, using ISO 20022 messaging standards already available at financial institutions. While integration challenges remain, these experiments push back on the assumption that legacy banking systems are, in themselves, a binding constraint on adoption.
The real challenge for the market is that every route in carries trade-offs. Banks effectively face three choices: issue stablecoins, accept them, or integrate them into payment and treasury systems. Each has implications for risk, liquidity management and day-to-day operations.
To start with, issuing stablecoins creates immediate expectations that customers can redeem them at any time. This means banks must hold sufficient reserves and carefully manage the impact on their balance sheets and liquidity.
Accepting third-party stablecoins also introduces new compliance and fraud challenges. For example, checking where funds have come from, meeting sanctions requirements and managing risks embedded in the underlying technology.
Integrating stablecoins into settlement infrastructure brings an even more fundamental shift.
When finality happens in seconds, processes built around batching, end-of-day reconciliation and deferred liquidity movement no longer hold.
In short, stablecoins expose operating models designed for traditional rails.
From theory to real activity
Stablecoins are redefining how value settles. The organisations moving fastest are grounding their approach in real business flows and piloting stablecoin usage in specific, high-friction areas, such as cross-border supplier payments or intraday treasury movements.
These initiatives are designed with clear controls around custody, redemption and AML, and are tied directly to operational outcomes. This reflects a growing recognition that stablecoins should be treated as settlement infrastructure, rather than a mere crypto product to be packaged and sold.
For most institutions, the first step is finding out where stablecoins will add the most value. Then, they must bring together treasury, risk, compliance and operations teams, and modernise the payment stack so it becomes rail-agnostic. This allows stablecoin rails to sit alongside existing traditional rails.
Success is measured by speed of settlement and cost per transfer, as well as process redesign, governance, and day-to-day execution.
Regulation changes the equation
Frameworks such as the GENIUS Act in the US and MiCA in Europe have, over the past year or so, provided long-awaited structure. By introducing licensed issuers, transparent reserve requirements and robust AML expectations, they have made compliance non-negotiable.
Regulatory clarity is a milestone. Stablecoins have become relevant to mainstream financial institutions and can now be discussed as part of regulated financial infrastructure, rather than a fringe asset class.
Compliance under these regimes is not optional or lightweight and demands institution‑grade governance, risk management, and operational resilience.
Banks must now reassess their operating models. This includes evaluating product strategy, custody and reserve management capabilities, AML integration, third‑party risk, and balance‑sheet treatment within a more defined and supervised environment. Those that move early will be better positioned to shape use cases and standards. Meanwhile, those who delay risk being constrained by legacy models as stablecoins increasingly intersect with regulated payment rails.
The real differentiator
By focusing on integration, controls and real flows, rather than treating stablecoins primarily as a commercial offering, these institutions must position themselves to operate confidently in a hybrid payments environment.
Stablecoins are emerging as a parallel settlement layer alongside traditional payment rails. The real differentiator will be how deeply stablecoins are embedded into core operating models.
Institutions that focus on integration with treasury, liquidity, compliance, and settlement functions, rather than treating stablecoins as a standalone commercial product, will be best positioned to support real economic flows at scale.
In a hybrid payments environment, stablecoins are not competing with existing rails, but redefining how settlement occurs across them.
Banks are approaching a crossroads. Either they invest now to embed stablecoins within regulated financial infrastructure, or risk watching that infrastructure evolve around them – shifting value, influence, and control elsewhere.
Neha Dasani, Payments Delivery Lead at RedCompass Labs
