The Stablecoin Stack Is Coming for Your Treasury Department

Every major bank consortium is building stablecoins. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Citi, BofA, and UBS are exploring reserve-backed digital money on public blockchains. ING and UniCredit are launching a MiCAR-compliant EUR stablecoin. Japan’s three largest banks signed an MOU for joint issuance. The DTCC is considering its own. Fidelity is in.

This isn’t crypto hype. This is infrastructure.

And if you’re a CFO or treasurer still managing cash across bank portals and SWIFT, you need to understand what’s coming before it arrives.

Stablecoins aren’t one rail. They’re a stack.

The biggest misconception about stablecoins in payments is that they’re a single alternative to SWIFT or ACH. They’re not. Stablecoin infrastructure is a layered stack of interoperating systems, each with its own vendors, compliance requirements, and integration points.

FXC Intelligence just published the first independent buyer’s guide breaking this down. The stack looks roughly like this:

Providers fall into two camps: modular point solutions that handle one layer, and vertically integrated platforms that try to do it all. Neither model has won yet.

The numbers are already real

McKinsey and Artemis Analytics put actual stablecoin payment volume at $390 billion in 2025. Not trading volume. Not DeFi shuffling. Real payments.

The breakdown matters for treasury:

• B2B payments: $226 billion (60% of total)
• B2B growth: 733% year-over-year
• Cross-border is the use case: The G20 wants remittance costs below 3% by 2027. Stablecoins are one of the few rails that can actually get there

B2B cross-border is where the money is. And it’s growing faster than anyone predicted even two years ago.

What this means for CFOs and treasury teams

Here’s the problem nobody is talking about: your treasury infrastructure wasn’t built for this.

Today, most corporate treasuries manage 2-3 payment rails. Bank wires. ACH. Maybe SWIFT for international. Each has well-understood settlement times, compliance requirements, and reconciliation workflows.

Now add stablecoin rails. Each bank consortium’s stablecoin will have different regulatory jurisdictions, reporting requirements, and settlement mechanics. USDC on Ethereum settles differently than a Goldman consortium token on a permissioned chain. A MiCAR-compliant EUR stablecoin has different compliance obligations than a JPY stablecoin issued by Japanese mega-banks.

You’re going from 2-3 rails to potentially 5-8+. And your current tools can’t handle it.

The “stablecoin sandwich” problem

The most common enterprise pattern is what the industry calls the stablecoin sandwich: fiat in, stablecoin transfer, fiat out. It’s faster and cheaper than correspondent banking for cross-border B2B payments.

But to run this at scale, treasury teams need:

• Real-time visibility into stablecoin positions alongside fiat balances
• Automated conversion at optimal rates across both traditional and stablecoin rails
• Reconciliation across on-chain and off-chain transactions in a single view
• Audit trails that satisfy both traditional banking compliance and blockchain-native reporting

No legacy treasury management system handles this today. Not Kyriba. Not SAP. Not FIS. Their architectures were built for batch processing over SWIFT and host-to-host connections. Adding real-time, multi-chain stablecoin support isn’t a feature update. It’s a rebuild.

The compliance moat is the real story

As every major bank launches its own stablecoin, the compliance landscape fragments. Each stablecoin will carry:

• Different regulatory jurisdictions and licensing requirements
• Distinct sanctions screening obligations
• Unique reporting formats and audit trail standards
• Varying settlement finality rules

For CFOs already dealing with multi-currency, multi-entity complexity, this is an order of magnitude increase in compliance surface area. The companies that solve this, that provide verified, auditable treasury operations across every rail (traditional and stablecoin), will own the next decade of corporate finance infrastructure.

What to do now

You don’t need to adopt stablecoins today. But you do need to make decisions now that don’t lock you out of using them in 12-18 months.

1. Audit your treasury stack for rail-agnosticism. Can your current TMS add a new payment rail without a 6-month integration project? If not, you’re building technical debt against the future.

2. Understand the stack, not just the stablecoin. The issuance layer (Circle, Tether) gets the headlines. But the orchestration layer, the part that routes payments across rails, manages liquidity, and reconciles everything in real-time, is where the actual value lives for treasury teams.

3. Talk to your banks about their stablecoin plans. If your primary banking partner is in one of these consortiums, their stablecoin will become a payment rail you’re expected to support. Get ahead of it.

4. Separate “stablecoin as investment” from “stablecoin as payment rail.” Treasury teams earning yield on USDC is interesting. Treasury teams routing $50M in cross-border supplier payments through stablecoin rails because it’s faster and 70% cheaper than SWIFT? That’s transformative.

The stablecoin infrastructure stack is being built right now. The question for CFOs isn’t whether to adopt it. It’s whether your treasury infrastructure will be ready when your banking partners hand you a new rail and expect you to use it.

Sources: McKinsey + Artemis Analytics (stablecoin payment volume), FXC Intelligence Buyer’s Guide (infrastructure stack), The Payments Association (cross-border payments 2026), FSB/G20 (remittance cost targets), bank consortium press releases (Goldman, ING, MUFG, DTCC, Fidelity)