November 17th, 2025

Four stablecoin developments bankers should know about

Welcome to the latest edition of The Stablecoin Banker, a periodic newsletter to help the banking community stay on top of the most relevant stories in the stablecoin industry. We highlight top stories that are relevant to banks, with our insights and commentary to draw out the most important conclusions.

If you find this content useful, please feel free to forward it to your friends and colleagues. They can also subscribe directly. If you’re interested in stablecoin services for your bank, feel free to reach out to us at Omnia.

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In This Issue

• Another Crack in the Payment Card Armor
• The Great Charter Race: While Banks Lobby Against It, Fintechs Are Already Building
• When Machines Start Spending: AI Agents Meet Stablecoin Payments
• From Crypto to Cash: Global Regulators Simultaneously Legitimize Stablecoins

Another Crack in the Payment Card Armor

Visa and Mastercard reached a revised $38 billion settlement in their 20-year antitrust case with merchants, proposing to reduce credit card interchange fees (currently averaging 2.35%) by 0.1 percentage point for five years and cap standard consumer card rates at 1.25% for eight years. Most significantly, the settlement would end the “honor all cards” rule that has required merchants to accept all Visa and Mastercard products—including premium rewards cards that carry interchange fees as high as 2.5%—or accept none at all. Under the proposed agreement, merchants gain “unfettered ability” to surcharge up to 3% on credit card payments and can selectively reject entire card categories. The settlement requires court approval from Judge Margo Brodie, who rejected a previous $30 billion version in June 2024. [WSJ, Reuters, Fortune]

My Take:

The “honor all cards” rule was a key enabler of premium rewards card growth, shifting the cost of better consumer rewards onto merchants while preventing merchants from guiding or incentivizing card choice whatsoever. Theoretically, a merchant can now reject premium cards or add card surcharges selectively - a potent shift from trying to incentivize cash payments with broad cash discounts to tapping into loss aversion psychology by charging a cost for using only certain cards. Your 2% reward card will feel a lot different when you get charged 3% more to use it, compared to forgoing a similarly sized cash discount.

The transition won’t happen overnight - merchants face operational complexity and consumer backlash risk. But economic pressure will drive experimentation, likely starting with broad credit surcharges before evolving to card-type-specific fees as POS systems mature. Merchants typically prefer to keep the point-of-sale experience as simple as possible because at that moment, closing the sale is more important than saving a percent. However, there are plenty of ways to phase in these changes over time, plus advances in consumer checkout tools like AI shopping agents will make complex method-of-payment decisions much easier.

This clearly only helps stablecoin based payment methods. The biggest pushback for using stablecoin in US consumer payments has been that they don’t benefit from interchange and thus can’t compete on rewards. Stablecoin issuers are already approaching payment service providers with pass-through incentives to merchants (See 1% cash back on USDC plan from Shopify). We may see similar behavior from the fintech wallet providers that increasingly support stablecoin access for 200+ million Americans, now including via CashApp and Revolut. Many of these providers also power payment acceptance for millions of merchants.

Why won’t consumers simply just shift to debit cards? At the moment that a consumer faces an upcharge, their default behavior pattern is disrupted, and they are primed to thoughtfully engage in the choice of the replacement payment method. Retailers understand this: the best time to sell something is when the buyer is in a state of flux. If the fintech wallets/stablecoins step in at that moment with a bonus, it will look especially attractive compared to a punitive upcharge on credit cards.

Banks that assume disrupted consumers will default to debit cards are betting that inertia wins over incentives. That’s a bet against every fintech wallet provider and PSP deploying cash back on purchases with stablecoin at exactly the moment consumers are reconsidering their payment choices and the rails are coming together to disintermediate the card networks and banks.

The Great Charter Race: While Banks Lobby Against It, Fintechs Are Already Building

OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould defended bringing crypto firms into the regulated banking system through trust charters, calling it “the only way” to level the playing field and establish oversight of nonbanks that currently operate outside the OCC’s supervisory reach. His remarks at The Clearing House’s annual conference came as multiple banking trade groups mobilized against crypto charter applications. The ICBA filed a letter opposing Coinbase’s trust charter application. Separately, the Bank Policy Institute submitted letters urging the OCC to reject five pending trust charter applications from Circle, Ripple, Paxos, National Digital Trust Company, and Wise. Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal fired back at the ICBA, accusing bank lobbyists of “protectionism” disguised as consumer protection. [BankingDive, ICBA, BPI]

My Take:

Rather than criticize the banking lobby’s defensive posture, I want to thank them: you’re systematically identifying every risk factor that regulators need to address as tokenized assets integrate into the financial system. The healthy outcome of your opposition should be a more resilient system with proper guardrails.

But while banks write comment letters, the world is changing underneath them. Money is becoming more fluid while fintechs build faster and cheaper—it’s now possible to build a full banking-like experience in a few months with stablecoins. Governments worldwide are implementing digital asset regulations, and in the US, stablecoins are here to stay following the GENIUS Act. Gould himself wants to bring new activities into the regulatory perimeter rather than take “an ostrich approach, where we put our head in the sand and we’re not really observing what’s going on out there.”

Digital assets have hit escape velocity. Blockchains have birthed a fundamentally new form of money that behaves differently from anything banks have worked with before. Among stablecoins’ defining characteristics is composability: fintechs can assemble payment rails, wallets, and card networks on blockchain’s common interface—no banks required.

Banks should be asking themselves, their boards, and their regulators how they can more aggressively do what digital asset companies are doing, whether that’s crypto trading, stablecoin services, or wallets and custody. The choice isn’t whether this technology gets adopted—it’s whether banks will participate in shaping it, or watch from the sidelines as federally-chartered fintechs do it instead.

When Machines Start Spending: AI Agents Meet Stablecoin Payments

The payment infrastructure for AI-driven commerce is rapidly taking shape as major platforms position themselves for autonomous transactions. PayPal partnered with OpenAI to embed its wallet directly into ChatGPT, making tens of millions of merchants discoverable within conversational AI starting in 2026. Simultaneously, Amazon filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI to stop its Comet browser agent from making purchases on Amazon’s platform. [PayPal, TechCrunch, Retail Dive]

My Take

PayPal just embedded stablecoin payments into the largest AI platform in the world, and Amazon immediately filed a lawsuit because it knows exactly what comes next: when AI agents start making purchasing decisions, the platforms that built empires on controlling discovery and checkout face existential disruption.

This matters because PayPal solved the three-sided coordination problem that has stalled every payment innovation for decades. The Visa/Mastercard settlement removes one barrier—merchants can now reject premium cards and offer alternative payment methods. PayPal’s ChatGPT integration breaks this deadlock: 400 million users already have PYUSD access, tens of millions of merchants already accept PayPal checkout, and AI agents eliminate the need for consumers or merchants to change any behavior.

The truly disruptive element isn’t that stablecoins become available in ChatGPT. It’s that AI agents convert checkout from an emotional, habit-driven moment into pure algorithmic optimization. When a consumer delegates purchasing authority to an AI agent, that agent will select stablecoins if they offer even marginal advantages—instant settlement, lower merchant fees, cash-back incentives. The consumer never has to learn what a stablecoin is.

The use cases for stablecoins are growing all around us, yet banks still tell me “my customers aren’t asking for stablecoins” because they think that stablecoin is the product, when it’s the tool to enable superior customer experiences. PayPal, Square, Coinbase, and Revolut understand this and are building those experiences right now. Forward-thinking banks that offer stablecoin services today will position themselves as partners in this infrastructure buildout—not forced adopters of it.

From Crypto to Cash: Global Regulators Simultaneously Legitimize Stablecoins

Global banking regulators are establishing frameworks that integrate stablecoins into traditional financial systems, signaling a fundamental shift from prohibition to legitimization. The Financial Accounting Standards Board voted to clarify whether stablecoins qualify as cash equivalents with guidance expected by mid-2026, while the Basel Committee reviews punitive capital requirements. Most dramatically, the Bank of England proposed offering emergency central bank liquidity to systemic stablecoin issuers—treating them as critical payment infrastructure—with implementation targeted for 2026. [CFO Dive, Bloomberg, Bank of England]

My Take

The Bank of England just proposed offering emergency liquidity facilities to systemic stablecoin issuers—the same backstop reserved for institutions whose failure would threaten the financial system. Let that sink in. When a G7 central bank prepares to bail out stablecoin issuers, they’re acknowledging these instruments will become payment infrastructure on par with major banks.

Simultaneous action by FASB and Basel reveals changed regulatory philosophy. For years, regulators treated stablecoins as novel risks requiring containment. Now they’re building protective frameworks because they’ve concluded mass adoption is inevitable. FASB’s move to reclassify stablecoins as cash equivalents will broadly unblock corporates to hold and use stablecoins just like they do cash deposits and money market instruments.

These developments validate the banks already developing stablecoin services. They have placed their bets on the trendline of regulation, and they will be rewarded with first-mover advantages to compete directly with fintech challengers.

Coupon Clippings

SoFi Becomes the First National Bank to Offer Retail Crypto Trading

SoFi became the first federally chartered, FDIC-insured national bank to offer direct cryptocurrency trading to retail customers following new OCC guidance. The bank emphasized that 60% of crypto-interested members prefer trading through a licensed bank over exchanges like Coinbase or Robinhood. SoFi announced plans to launch a USD stablecoin in 2026 along with crypto-enabled remittances and lending products. [Full Story]

Blockchain Payments Consortium Launches to Standardize Stablecoins

Seven major blockchain networks—Fireblocks, Polygon, Solana, Stellar, TON, Monad, and Mysten Labs—launched the Blockchain Payments Consortium (BPC), first focused on standardizing cross-chain transactions. While settlements using stablecoin are solved already, important primitives like cross-chain, reversibility, and payment metadata are missing. When customers can send USDC across any blockchain as easily as they Zelle today, fragmentation stops being an excuse for banks to wait. [Full Story]

Ripple/Mastercard/Gemini/WebBank RLUSD Credit Card Partnership

Ripple partnered with Mastercard, Gemini, and WebBank to pilot stablecoin settlement for credit card transactions using RLUSD, enabling WebBank (issuer of the Gemini Credit Card) to settle Mastercard transactions via blockchain instead of traditional multi-day clearing processes. Visa’s stablecoin settlement program is already processing billions of dollars annually from traditional card issuers. Issuers should pay attention to this space because the capital efficiency gains can help their business. [Full Story]

JPMorgan goes live with JPMD

JPMorgan’s deposit token went live on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, moving from pilot to production for all institutional clients with 24/7 near-instant settlement. The bank announced plans to expand JPMD to additional blockchains, launch a euro version (JPME) in 2026, and integrate with Singapore’s DBS Bank for cross-token settlements. It’s not either-or: banks can start with proven stablecoins today and onboard deposit token networks when they are ready for production. [Full Story]

“Crypto is real. Blockchain is real. Stablecoins are real... It will be used by all of us to facilitate better transactions and customer service.” — Jamie Dimon (reformed crypto hater), October 28, 2025.