Banks are evaluating the risks and opportunities for adopting digital assets and blockchain rails as internet-native financial infrastructure.
Stablecoins have moved from the margins to the center of bank strategy discussion, pulled forward by client demand, faster-moving markets, and clearer regulatory trajectories. But the bigger shift is structural. Banks are beginning to treat regulated digital money and public-blockchain rails as internet-native financial infrastructure: a foundation for moving value with the same speed, availability, and programmability as information. Circle is leaning into that moment by working with banks on the infrastructure, liquidity, and connectivity required to power regulated digital money safely and at scale.
Circle’s Dante Disparte was recently joined by – Geoff Kot, Head of Business Platforms and Partnerships, Corporate and Investment Banking, Standard Chartered; Ole Matthiessen, Co-Head of Corporate Bank, Deutsche Bank; and Nader Souri, Head of Corporate Banking, BNY – to examine what changes when money moves at internet speed.
Always-on markets expose settlement friction
Markets don’t wait for banking hours anymore. That disconnect is increasingly visible wherever trading, collateral, and treasury operations require continuous availability while core settlement processes remain constrained by cutoffs and batching. It creates stress points that compound as trading, treasury, and customer expectations become ‘always on’. This shift is one of the clearest reasons stablecoins have become a board-level topic.
What once felt experimental is now being requested by clients who operate globally and don’t want their liquidity and settlement options constrained by banking hours.
The more markets become always-on, the more the legacy settlement calendar becomes a source of avoidable risk and trapped liquidity, not a neutral operating constraint.
Atomic settlement reduces risk and frees liquidity
When settlement can’t keep up with market velocity, participants compensate by tying up more capital, extending more credit, and holding more buffers “just in case.” Over time, those workarounds become systemic: they inflate intraday and overnight exposures, increase operational complexity, and constrain liquidity precisely when it’s most valuable.
With blockchain, money and assets are represented digitally and can settle near-instantly with something called “atomic settlement.” Done correctly, it reduces principal and counterparty risk while compressing settlement timelines. It can also unlock liquidity by shrinking the duration and uncertainty of exposure windows, freeing working capital that would otherwise sit idle in margin, prefunding, or operational buffers.
Blockchains are rails, digital assets are what rides them
The stablecoin conversation is often framed too narrowly around which institution issues what. The bigger point is functional: stablecoins are a settlement primitive. They are the rails that can connect tokenized assets to real-time delivery-versus-payment, tighter liquidity management, and lower-friction collateral movement.
That framing matters because tokenization is expanding beyond experiments into mainstream asset classes — funds, fixed income, and other instruments where operational overhead and settlement latency have real cost. In that world, the question isn’t whether traditional finance “becomes crypto.” It’s whether markets can evolve toward a more digital, interoperable form factor, where the distinction between on-chain and off-chain starts to fade in day-to-day operations.
Build, buy, or partner: why platforms win
If the opportunity is infrastructure-level, then strategy follows: platforms and network effects matter. Banks are starting to realize why “go it alone” is rarely the default. The stack is moving fast, standards are still coalescing, and meaningful adoption requires integration across ecosystems, not just a single institution’s balance sheet.
That reality creates an advantage for interoperable platforms: they compress time-to-market, reduce the cost of experimentation, and allow institutions to meet clients where they already operate. It also helps explain why stablecoins have moved from novelty to necessity. When clients begin to treat digital settlement as a baseline expectation and regulators begin to outline clearer frameworks, the bigger risk becomes sitting out.
Even where institutions decide to “build,” it tends to be targeted, driven by unique local market structures or licensing regimes rather than a wholesale decision to recreate the entire ecosystem internally.
Programmable money and agentic commerce
Pushing beyond today’s settlement pain points, digital money gets truly transformative when it comes to programmability. When money is native to software, it can carry logic — how it can be used, when it can move, what conditions must be met, and how it reconciles — without relying on layered manual processes.
That matters for emerging models like agentic commerce, where software agents could initiate and complete transactions on a user or business’s behalf. For that to work at scale, markets need a widely accepted digital settlement instrument that can operate inside machine-driven workflows, not just alongside them. If autonomous commerce grows, it will need an on-chain money layer that’s broadly usable and operationally reliable. Regulated stablecoins are a natural fit.
From edge case to core infra
Stablecoins are fast becoming impossible to ignore for banks when evaluating the financial tech stack. Always-on markets are exposing the cost of settlement friction; atomic settlement can shrink risk and release liquidity; tokenized assets demonstrate the utility of modern rails; platforms and partnerships accelerate adoption; and programmable money opens entirely new product surfaces.
Circle helps banks and institutions meet the moment safely by connecting regulated digital assets to enterprise-grade liquidity, controls, and global interoperability required for real-world adoption and utility at scale.
Watch the full discussion:
