Stablecoins are no longer a why question for banks. The hard part is operating them
The interesting question about stablecoins is no longer whether they are useful. It is whether banks can run them safely at scale, and that is a much harder thing to answer. Stablecoins processed roughly $33trn in transaction volume in 2025, according to Bloomberg, but a large share of that was trading reuse, with coins circulating multiple times a day across exchanges rather than settling real-world payments. The more telling signal is where genuine demand is concentrating: cross-border B2B payments, intraday treasury operations and platform-native disbursements. These are precisely the corridors where traditional rails are slowest and most expensive, which is why attention is moving from why stablecoins matter to how they fit inside existing banking systems.
That shift matters because it reframes the constraint. Recent infrastructure work suggests legacy systems are not, in themselves, the binding limit on adoption. Swift has run pilots with SG-Forge, a Societe Generale subsidiary, UBS and the decentralised oracle platform Chainlink, demonstrating that tokenised assets and regulated stablecoins can be settled across existing banking infrastructure using ISO 20022 messaging standards already in place at financial institutions. Integration challenges remain, but the experiments push back on the idea that incumbent rails are the problem.
Three routes in, each with a cost
The real difficulty is that every entry point carries trade-offs. Banks face three broad choices: issue stablecoins, accept them, or integrate them into payment and treasury systems. Issuing creates an immediate redemption expectation, forcing banks to hold sufficient reserves and manage the balance-sheet and liquidity impact. Accepting third-party coins introduces fresh compliance and fraud exposure, from tracing the source of funds to meeting sanctions requirements. Integrating them into settlement is the most fundamental shift of all. When finality happens in seconds, the batching, end-of-day reconciliation and deferred liquidity movement that underpin existing operations simply no longer hold. Stablecoins, in short, expose operating models built for a slower world.
Regulation has removed the excuses
The policy backdrop has changed the equation. The GENIUS Act in the US and MiCA in Europe have introduced licensed issuers, transparent reserve requirements and firm AML expectations, making compliance non-negotiable. The institutions moving fastest are not packaging stablecoins as a crypto product but treating them as settlement infrastructure, piloting specific high-friction flows with clear custody, redemption and AML controls, and building a rail-agnostic payment stack so stablecoin rails sit alongside traditional ones. Success is measured in settlement speed and cost per transfer, but just as much in governance and day-to-day execution.
Source: Electronic Payments International.
