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Updated 15 min read

Stablecoins in 2027. What banks have to decide now

Real stablecoin payments were about $390 billion in 2025. US rules take effect on January 18, 2027. Three decisions can’t wait.

Emily Carter

Fintech and banking

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Real stablecoin payments came to about $390 billion last year. McKinsey puts that at roughly 0.02% of all the money the world moves.

So why do 58% of commercial banks in a Visa survey say they are already piloting stablecoins or planning to move first?

The answer is deposits. Deloitte estimates that payment stablecoins could put more than $1 trillion of them at risk. And the US rules stop being theory on January 18, 2027, when the GENIUS Act takes effect.

Stablecoins are a main theme in 18 of the 65 industry reports we read this year, from McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Visa, Mastercard and PwC. Read together, they leave a bank three decisions to make before January. They also point to a quieter flow of bank money that is already an order of magnitude bigger than stablecoin payments.

The first decision is the one that tempts boards most: whether to issue a coin at all.

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The short version

  • Real use is small. Stablecoin payments were about $390 billion in 2025, and B2B was about $226 billion of that (McKinsey).
  • Supply has stalled. About $301 billion was in circulation on October 21, 2026, per DefiLlama. That is roughly where McKinsey found it in early 2026.
  • The rules arrive in 2027. The GENIUS Act takes effect on January 18, 2027. Issuers cannot pay interest, but the fight over rewards paid by third parties is still open.
  • Banks are moving in groups. Qivalis has 37 European banks behind a euro coin. A separate group of 21 institutions plans a dollar coin for the first half of 2027.
  • The bigger flow is bank money. Tokenized deposits already move more than $4 trillion a year, an order of magnitude more than stablecoin payments (McKinsey).
  • Trust is the bank’s edge. US intent to use stablecoins rises from 36% to 56% when bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance are added (Visa).

1. Issue, join or rent: few banks should issue a coin alone

The temptation is easy to see. An issuer keeps the yield on the reserves behind the coin. BCG’s digital assets team estimates Tether made $98 million in profit per employee in 2024.

But this market is built for two players. Tether’s USDT alone holds about 61% of supply as of October 2026, per DefiLlama. Visa counted more than 97% of all supply in USDT and USDC a year earlier.

BCG is direct about what that means for a bank. One bank rarely has the distribution to get its coin accepted across wallets, exchanges, merchants and payment corridors. Without that reach, the coin sits idle.

The stronger case is a coin issued with other banks. BCG gives three reasons: a hedge in case stablecoins do win, pooled bank distribution, and shared cost and risk. That is a strategic option, not a short-term business case.

The big banks have read it the same way:

  • In Europe, Qivalis is a euro stablecoin company backed by 37 banks across 15 countries, including ING, BNP Paribas and UniCredit. De Nederlandsche Bank authorised it as an e-money institution on October 14, 2026. By Qivalis’s own count, only 0.2% of stablecoins in circulation are in euros.
  • In the US, 21 institutions, including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, said on September 1, 2026 that they will set up a company this year and take a dollar coin to market in the first half of 2027. JPMorgan is in neither group. It is betting on its deposit token instead (more in section 4).
  • Smaller banks can rent. Deloitte points to Fiserv’s FIUSD, built with Circle for its 3,000 bank clients, so a regional bank can offer a stablecoin without running one.

Deloitte’s banking outlook lists seven roles a bank can play: issuer, custodian, reserve bank, on- and off-ramp processor, platform builder, value-added services, or access through a partner’s platform. Issuing is one role out of seven.

What to do in 2027. Pick your role before you pick a coin. BCG frames the board choice as embrace, allow or wait: issue with others as a hedge, work with third-party coins, or watch. Most banks outside the top tier will join or rent.

Whatever you choose, BCG argues the better return sits in the customer interface. That means bank-grade wallets and custody, so clients hold digital money with you whichever coin wins. Many of your customers already keep a crypto wallet somewhere else.

2. Defend deposits: the yield fight did not end with the law

The GENIUS Act is clear on one point. A licensed issuer may not pay holders interest or yield solely for holding, using or keeping the coin.

It says nothing about the exchange or app in between. Deloitte flagged this in October 2025: issuers cannot pay interest, but non-issuers can offer “rewards”.

Congress tried to close that gap. The Senate draft of the crypto market-structure bill, the CLARITY Act, would have banned passive, deposit-like yield paid by platforms. It would still allow rewards tied to real activity. On September 15, 2026, the Senate failed to move to the bill, 49 votes to 50. As of October 2026, it has not passed the Senate.

That hands the question to regulators. On October 21, 2026, the OCC finalized its GENIUS Act rule. It kept the ban on issuers paying yield. It dropped a proposed presumption that reward deals run through third parties break the law. Instead, American Banker reports, the OCC will judge each arrangement on its own facts. The other banking regulators still have to finish their rules.

So the threat to deposits is real, and its size is unsettled. The estimates spread wide:

  • Deloitte says more than $1 trillion of bank deposits could be at risk. The industry forecasts it collects for payment stablecoins in 2030 run from a bearish $500 billion to a bullish $3.7 trillion.
  • Accenture cites a US Treasury estimate from April 2025: nearly 40% of US deposits could be at risk from stablecoins alone, mostly non-interest-bearing transaction balances.
  • BCG sets a ceiling. Without a change in the monetary system, it expects stablecoins to top out near 15% of global M2, about $9 trillion. In its fastest scenario, banks end up with 14% less revenue and 30% less profit by 2035 than in the base case.

McKinsey’s team explains why this hurts more than a normal outflow. For every $1,000 moved into a third-party stablecoin, only about 15% typically comes back to banks as wholesale reserves. The other 85% mostly goes into assets such as US Treasuries.

Deloitte expects the money to come from three places: corporate working capital in low-yield transaction accounts, retail balances kept for 24/7 payments, and cross-border float trapped in nostro and vostro accounts.

What to do in 2027. Map your deposits against those three buckets. Know how much sits in non-interest-bearing operating accounts, and which clients would move it for a reward.

Then decide how you answer. You can price the operating account better, offer your own coin through a consortium, or move large clients to tokenized deposits. Tokenized deposits can pay interest. A coin from a licensed issuer cannot.

3. Start with B2B and cross-border, not the checkout

The real volume is in business payments. McKinsey puts B2B at about $226 billion in 2025, roughly 60% of real stablecoin payments, up from $27 billion in 2024.

It is also concentrated. Payments sent from Asia came to about $245 billion, 60% of the total, mostly from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Global payroll and remittances were about $90 billion, under 1% of that segment’s flows.

Figure 1. Real stablecoin payments by selected use, 2025 ($ billion)
UseValue
B2B payments226
Global payroll and remittances90
Capital markets settlement8
Card-linked spending4.5

Source: McKinsey, “Stablecoins in payments”, February 2026. Selected uses only; the total of about $390 billion includes other categories.

Commercial banks point the same way. In a Visa Direct and Finextra survey of 520 commercial banking leaders, 67% named cross-border payments as a stablecoin use case and 62% named internal treasury and cash management. Only 2% think their cross-border offering is good enough today. 57% plan to invest in digital currencies or tokenized assets for cross-border over the next five years.

McKinsey’s payments team heard the same in interviews. Roughly two-thirds of the executives they spoke to see stablecoins and tokenized deposits as wholesale settlement tools, not consumer currencies.

The reports are just as clear about where stablecoins add little. McKinsey lists domestic payments where instant rails are already cheap, and mature corridors such as euro to sterling. It also lists anything with refunds or a long gap between payment and delivery, because a stablecoin transfer cannot be reversed.

We hear the same in our strategy workshops with banks. The stablecoin question usually starts with a treasury team asking why a payment to a supplier abroad still takes days.

Retail will come later, and mostly through cards. Deloitte forecasts more than $200 billion of US retail payments will be stablecoin-enabled by 2030, about 2.5% of US noncash transactions. McKinsey puts stablecoin-linked card spending at $4.5 billion in 2025, up 673%. Visa already has more than 130 card programs running on stablecoin wallets. Visa’s European team calls cards the bridge: the customer swipes as usual, and the new rail sits underneath.

What to do in 2027. Pick two or three corridors where your corporate clients wait days for correspondent banks. Start with treasury moves and supplier payments. For retail, treat the card as the bridge. Don’t build a new checkout.

4. The quieter shift: tokenized deposits

Most headlines are about stablecoins. Most of the volume is not.

McKinsey estimates that big banks already move more than $4 trillion a year through tokenized deposit systems. That is an order of magnitude more than stablecoin payments. These flows sit inside existing treasury, liquidity and intercompany workflows, so nobody sees them.

JPMorgan shows it best. Its JPM Coin deposit token has been live for institutional clients on Base, a public blockchain, since November 2025. It went live on Ethereum on October 19, 2026. JPMorgan says its Kinexys platform has processed over $4 trillion since launch, about $7 billion a day on average.

Why banks like them. A tokenized deposit stays on the bank’s balance sheet. It is regulated as a deposit. It can pay interest. For a corporate treasurer that matters: blockchain-speed settlement without leaving the main bank, and without giving up yield.

The catch is fragmentation. A tokenized dollar from one bank does not easily swap for one from another. BCG’s verdict for most banks: “a tokenized deposit without interoperability is likely to be a feature.”

Work on that gap has started. On June 5, 2026, The Clearing House, owned by 25 of the largest US financial institutions, announced a plan for a network to clear and settle tokenized deposits between banks. It is meant to work alongside existing rails such as RTP and CHIPS. McKinsey cites a Citi projection that bank-led tokens could support $100 trillion to $140 trillion of annual flows by 2030.

What to do in 2027. Unless you are one of the very largest banks, don’t build a private token for your own clients alone. Plan how you connect to shared networks. And look at the first job tokenized deposits do well: the cash side of trades in tokenized bonds and funds, where both legs have to settle at once.

Where the reports disagree

How big the market is. The same year produces wildly different numbers, because each firm counts something different:

  • McKinsey: about $390 billion of real payments.
  • BCG: $350 billion to $550 billion of payments, out of $62 trillion of raw transfers, or about $4.2 trillion after removing bots and routing.
  • Visa: over $10 trillion of adjusted volume.
  • Accenture: $10.7 trillion of payment-related volume out of $51 trillion over 12 months.
  • Deloitte: $33 trillion of transaction volume.

When someone quotes a stablecoin number in a board meeting, ask what it counts.

How much is out there. Visa counted $274 billion at the end of 2025. PwC Italy had more than $301 billion a month earlier. BCG’s payments report says $260 billion in mid-2026. DefiLlama shows about $301 billion in October 2026. The trackers include different tokens, so the gaps are partly bookkeeping. On any of them, supply barely moved in 2026, while forecasts of $2 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030 keep getting quoted.

Payments or assets first. Visa warns that firms without a stablecoin strategy risk losing payment volume to blockchain-native rivals. BCG’s fintech report is more cautious: it expects tokenized assets, not stablecoin payments, to drive the next wave.

Even the bank numbers differ. McKinsey put Kinexys at $2 billion to $3 billion a day. JPMorgan’s own October 2026 figure is about $7 billion. The bank’s number is newer and may not measure the same thing, which is one more reason to check the date and the definition before you quote either.

What I’m watching in 2027

  • January 18, 2027. The GENIUS Act takes effect. Then come the first cases where the OCC decides whether a reward program counts as interest.
  • Two bank coins. Does the 21-institution dollar coin ship in the first half of 2027? Does Qivalis start issuing?
  • Supply. If it stays near $300 billion after the rules land, the idea that clear rules will bring demand looks weaker than it sounds today.
  • July 18, 2028. Three years after enactment, US platforms may only sell coins from permitted issuers, with some exceptions. I expect that deadline, more than the January one, to decide which coins stay on US platforms.
  • Customers. In Visa’s survey, 56% of Americans have never heard of stablecoins. Yet 60-61% would trust a commercial bank or a payment network to offer them. Globally, 69% say trust depends more on who offers a new way to move money than on the technology.
Figure 2. US intent to use stablecoins for transfers, by who offers them (%)
ScenarioValue
Baseline36
Offered by an existing financial provider45
With bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance (hypothetical)56

Source: Visa Direct, “Money Travels: 2026 Digital Remittances Adoption Report”, 2026. Visa notes that stablecoins are not covered by deposit insurance today.

On stablecoins, the payment volumes are small and the deposit risk is not. So pick your role, protect the operating account, and build the wallet your corporate clients will open first. Few customers pick a payment rail. They pick a provider they trust. In Visa’s survey, that still includes the bank.

Sources

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