OpenPayd, Swift, and Mambu representatives examined the state of tokenised payments and what it will take for the industry to scale.
Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and CBDCs are all being built at the same time, none of them are fully ready.
This was the starting point for one of Money20/20 Europe’s ‘The Tokenised Bank: Disruption or distraction?’ panel, where OpenPayd’s CEO Iana Dimitrova, Swift’s Tokenised Assets Product Lead Thomas Dugauquier, and Mambu’s VP of Payments and Strategy, Victor Mithouard discussed how far new forms of digital money need to travel before they fulfil the promise surrounding them for years.
Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, CBDCs: promising but not yet ready
Stablecoins, Dugauquier argued, are the most embedded on-chain payment tool currently in existence – but their primary use remains trading activity on exchanges rather than real payment flows.
Tokenised deposits are processing higher volumes for payments purposes, but lack the interoperability needed to function as a genuine alternative. CBDCs are the most promising in theory – a risk-free asset that would be widely adopted the moment it lands on-chain – but availability remains limited, with Europe among the few jurisdictions moving meaningfully in that direction.
On the Money20/20 panel, Dimitrova pushed back on the idea that stablecoins had failed to penetrate treasury management, pointing to OpenPayd’s own experience as one of Circle‘s first design partners. The company has been testing cross-border transactions that convert sterling into stablecoin and then into local currency – Mexican peso or Brazilian real – in under 40 seconds.
“The benefits in terms of cost and speed, and now security and traceability, have been proven,” she said. “It is now a matter of adoption.” The volume of stablecoin cross-border payments remains relatively small, she acknowledged, but the infrastructure being built around it is moving fast, and she was confident the picture would look materially different within a year.
Whether stablecoins and tokenised deposits are competitors or complementary to one another was a key talking point, but Dugauquier was clear the two serve different functions. Stablecoins have reached sufficient scale and liquidity to work well for payments as an off-balance sheet activity, but the larger macroeconomic opportunity lies with tokenised deposits.
Properly regulated, they could provide the trust of a store of value without the collateralisation burden, while also enabling the atomic settlement and fungibility that would release liquidity currently locked into the system.
“Two to three days of liquidity is trapped in the economy because of the way we settle,” he said on the Money20/20 panel. “Tokenised deposits, done properly, change that.”
At Money20/20: Correspondent banking is not going away
The Money20/20 panel also noted tokenisation was not a wholesale replacement for correspondent banking infrastructure, but would, for many years, continue to sit alongside it.
Not every correspondent banking corridor is poorly served, Dugauquier argued the better use case of tokenisation is identifying which payments are underserved by existing fiat infrastructure and therefore candidates for digital rails.
He framed it around three drivers – always-on payment execution, trapped liquidity, and programmability – as the criteria for determining where tokenised settlement adds value.
Dimitrova built on that with a concept she called the stablecoin sandwich: using stablecoins to circumvent the middle legs of a cross-border transaction, particularly in emerging markets where the underlying infrastructure is simply absent, while continuing to use legacy rails for the first and last mile.
The institutions that will succeed in this environment, she argued, are those that treat fiat, stablecoins and tokenised deposits as different instruments for different purposes – and build the orchestration capability to route transactions dynamically across all of them.
Mithouard arguing that the institutions which succeed in embracing this transformation will be those that treat fiat, stablecoins and tokenised deposits as different instruments for different purposes and build the orchestration capability to route across all three. “There is no consensus yet on exactly which use cases map to which instrument,” he said, “and that evolves with regulation — so the single most important thing is to invest in agility.”
Infrastructure first, scale later
While tokenisation exists now, adoption has not been so easily forthcoming. Regulatory frameworks remain incomplete or absent in many jurisdictions, interoperability standards have not been agreed, and achieving network effect at the scale required – continent-level, at minimum – takes a lot of time.
Dugauquier pointed to instant payments in Europe, where the consumer benefits were obvious, yet many banks resisted adoption because the commercial case for them individually was not obvious.
Tokenised deposits face the same multi-layered challenge of aligning an ecosystem of thousands of institutions behind standards that are simultaneously safe, interoperable and cost-efficient.
