For Banks, It’s Time To Build

Digital asset pilots have done what pilots are designed to do: prove the technology functions inside of banks’ walls. Today, most banks now have a working proof of concept; some have several. That’s a reasonable place for banks to be. Pilot phases validate rails, integrations, and basic compliance postures. None of that work has been wasted.

Now, banks need to know if digital asset technology scales. They need to know what the customer experience looks like at volume. Where's the P&L impact? Can compliance and risk processes support it? These questions don't easily resolve at pilot scale. 

Three remarks from Circle’s Current NYC event highlight how leaders are thinking beyond pilots.

Pilots prove the technology. Production proves the rest.

Robert Mitchnick, Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock:

The idea of ‘let’s do baby steps and try to do some proof of concepts, just very small scale, make certain trade-offs just to get something off the ground.’ [It] sounds like a very plausible strategy. The track record has shown that it really hasn’t been.”

Coming from BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, the point carries weight. The cautious path most institutions agreed was prudent has not produced the results people expected. What Mitchnick named was the boundary of the pilot phase: what pilots can show, and what they can’t.

Take audit, as one example. A pilot can demonstrate that a digital asset transaction settles cleanly and gets recorded against a bank’s books. But a pilot can’t tell internal audit how to opine on smart-contract risk in a way that survives a regulatory exam. That’s a different muscle, and it develops only when the programs are producing the volume audit teams have to sign off on, week after week. The same logic runs through treasury staffing, AML typology, and operating-model design. Each needs a production environment to develop in.

We’ve seen what this looks like up close. Circle’s internal treasury moved $68 million in USDC across 11 flows and 8 entities in under 30 minutes, with about 90% of intercompany settlements clearing same-day. That’s a production process, a staffing schedule, an audit pattern, and a controls decision working together. The technology was just a part of the equation. 

The utility and money question only resolves at scale

Jeremy Allaire, Circle Co-Founder and CEO:

There are a lot of science projects. But you need to really get focused and ask: where is the utility, and where can I make money?”

Easier asked than answered. Take cross-border payments, the use case everyone points to as obvious. The trouble is that “obvious” and “visible in the P&L” aren’t the same thing. Cross-border revenue lines at most banks bundle correspondent-bank float with fee revenue. The cost of cutoff-window inefficiency doesn’t appear as a line item. It shows up as customer churn three quarters later, attributed to product. The dollar value of moving a corporate FX flow from a five-day cycle to a same-day one is real. It’s also genuinely hard to find inside the existing reporting.

The gap there is structural. P&L tools at most banks weren’t built for this question, and reworking them takes time. The banks already in production can produce those numbers because production volume makes customer behavior, attach rates, and actual revenue contribution visible. Pilots can’t generate that data, because pilots don’t have customers at the scale the question demands.

EY’s recent adoption survey put 13% of financial institutions and corporates currently using stablecoins, with 54% of non-users planning to start within 6–12 months. A lot of programs will hit production runways at roughly the same time.

Production-scale tests need production-scale partners

Alex Latorre, Partner at EY’s Financial Services Risk Management practice:

Find credible partners who can scale with you, who understand your requirements, and can actually deliver on your requirements.”

The criteria that worked for “can this vendor prove the tech works” aren’t the same as “can this partner carry institutional volume.” Pilots did the job they were scoped for, but stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchains are not bolt-on solutions, they are new rails and infrastructure for banks. The competence for evaluating them takes time to build.

The financial institutions already in production have an advantage as they have built this competence in practice. Some have built it themselves; many are partnering in ways that fit their operating models. What these institutions share are internal teams or partners that understand what bank-grade controls means in deployment and can integrate cleanly into existing payments and treasury operations. Naming those criteria early reduces the rework later.

The lever right now is acceleration

Stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain are a new layer of financial infrastructure. For banks, the decisions around these layers are infrastructure decisions, and infrastructure-grade decisions need infrastructure-grade data. That data only exists in production.

The lever banks have now is acceleration: choose the use cases where stablecoins can create measurable utility, pair them with partners that can meet bank-grade requirements, and move fast enough to generate the production data that matters.

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