September 10, 2026
Three stablecoin developments bankers should know about

The Stablecoin Banker is a periodic newsletter keeping bankers on top of the stablecoin industry. I highlight top stories that are relevant to banks, with my insights and commentary to draw out the most important conclusions.

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"What we're trying to say is, enough is enough. We need to reset."
— Corey LeBlanc, co-founder & CTO, Locality Bank, on the launch of the bank-owned BankChain Alliance (Aug. 25, 2026)

In This Issue

• Enter the Big Bank Coin
• Community banks get yet another tokenized deposit network
• India announces a national framework for agentic payments

Plus, tidbits you may have missed in our Coupon Clippings section.

The Big Banks Draw Their Line on Digital Money

Twenty-one financial institutions formally established a company to issue a single GENIUS Act–compliant stablecoin for interbank payments, digital-asset settlement, and eventual retail use, targeting a launch in the first half of 2027 with a euro token to follow. Named members include Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Fidelity, Capital One, PNC, TD, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Lloyds, MUFG, and Standard Bank. The venture grew out of a ten-bank research group formed in October 2025, and its token name, blockchain, and reserve custodian remain undecided. Sources [WSJ]

My Take:

The Big Bank Coin has been rumored since last summer. Perhaps it took the Stripe/Visa-led OpenUSD announcement to finally compel action.

What breaks the recent pattern is the membership: this consortium's roster has minimal overlap with OpenUSD with only BBVA in both. Plenty of big banks sit in more than one tokenized-deposit network, but on stablecoins they are picking a single side. Overseas the large banks are split — Japan's MUFG sits in the ownership consortium while rivals Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho went to OpenUSD — but in the US they are largely lining up behind the bank-owned coin while smaller and more fintech-friendly banks are supporting OpenUSD. One name is also conspicuously absent: JPMorgan.

The international nature of the consortium is the most intriguing part because we know that stablecoins are especially well suited for cross-border flows. The banks could achieve cheap and fast international payments without stablecoins, but doing so requires each member bank to take a credit position against other banks and settling over SWIFT later. This happens in practice on a bi-lateral basis, but not regularly. The stablecoin approach obviates this because as the stablecoin is used by bank customers to move funds, the banks simply hold a regulated, fully-reserved US dollar asset. International banks already do this through nostro accounts or NY Fed accounts, so the difference is only incremental.

Solving this may also crack one of stablecoin's persistent problems: local liquidity. Stablecoin payments companies offering fiat-to-stablecoin connectivity abroad routinely struggle to find local counterparties deep enough to trade at scale. This consortium can bring the largest banks' balance sheets to bear on exactly that. As on-/off-ramp providers, the banks can still earn FX spreads and fees, even if the Big Bank Coin they sell to customers gets swapped on-chain for other stablecoins.

The open question is how the consortium builds a GENIUS-compliant stablecoin while also solving the economics of sharing the upside. Proposed OCC/FDIC stablecoin issuer rules prevent holding reserves with foreign banks, which effectively blocks foreign banks directly participating in reserve yield generation. The consortium will need to figure out a workaround which might require some type of deposit daisychain, where US banks holding the reserves establish deposits with the foreign members, or a yield-sharing program.

Community banks appear to be on the sidelines on this one. They could utilize the Big Bank Coin for international payments, but doing so only maintains their dependency on the money center banks for correspondent services. It may be faster, but so would using any other major stablecoin. Thus, my suggestion to community bankers eyeing this announcement would be to double back to the likes of Circle, OpenUSD, etc. Those stablecoins may move money off your balance sheet, but that money was going abroad anyway, and at least with those issuers, you're not also strengthening the market position of the largest incumbents.

Community Banks Aren't Waiting: The BankChain Alliance

Forty state bankers associations have formed the BankChain Alliance, a group building a bank-owned, industry-governed blockchain for programmable payments using tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Led by Corey LeBlanc of Locality Bank, Howard Headlee of the Utah Bankers Association, and Kathy Kraninger of the Florida Bankers Association, the group models itself on the Federal Home Loan Bank system and frames the effort as an escape from the long implementation timelines and seven- to ten-year core-vendor contracts its members say leave smaller banks waiting and paying high costs. It has completed the first phase of a request-for-proposal process, is seeking a technology partner it would hold an ownership stake in, and plans to take the network live in 2027. Separately, Dallas Fed economists published a research note estimating deposit tokenization could decrease deposit stickiness and reduce banks' long-term lending capacity as they seek to hold shorter-duration assets. Sources [American Banker, Dallas Fed]

My Take:

I love the smell of tokenized deposit networks in the morning. Everyone wants to be involved. In the small-bank space we already have Vantage/Custodia's Hazel network and the recently announced network from the Independent Bankers Association of Texas. BankChain, sponsored by notable state bankers associations in Texas and Florida, aims to help small banks band together against larger competitors who are busy with Cari, FIS Keystone, Project Agora, and SWIFT. The competition is playing out on many fields at once: stablecoin versus tokenized deposit, big bank versus small bank, ICBA-aligned associations versus ABA-aligned associations.

Clearly, this dynamic is creating massive fragmentation, which creates confusion that dissuades adoption. Players wave off this concern by paying lip service to interoperability, but it's impossible to actually design a credible plan because the projects are all so early. Furthermore, the underlying tech providers are disincentivized from building it because greater interoperability allows transactions to settle where the network owner/builder cannot monetize. Thus, expect these networks to get bolted together later at great effort, delay, and cost. The history of chain bridging in crypto is a chilling precedent: many of the largest hacks have come through bridges. This sounds like a recipe for balkanization.

In its paper, the Fed highlights that from a bank's perspective, a bank-issued stablecoin and a deposit token aren't all that different. The Fed paper hints at this by noting that deposits held in tokenized form are "hotter" and will need to be backed by shorter-duration assets, which sounds a lot like how banks treat deposits held by stablecoin issuers.

The fragmentation problem and the fact that tokenized deposits share the same mobility problems as stablecoin reserves are leading me to wonder if a bank consortium-issued stablecoin like the Big Bank Coin (but more egalitarian) is actually the elegant solution. Banks reflexively swung into deposit tokenization as a response to stablecoins and the perceived risk to the deposit base. The bank consortium-issued stablecoin model addresses that concern by parking reserves in deposit accounts. Stablecoin can be issued on public chains while utilizing smart contract logic to layer on compliance guarantees and other special features when moving between member banks, mimicking the benefit of restricted networks for tokenized deposits while maintaining open network access for stablecoins. Net settlement - a key feature of fiat networks like CHIPS - also works. When a depositor at bank A sends a consortium coin to bank B (also in the consortium), the mint/burn mechanisms end up acting like nostro/vostro accounts that can be settled periodically. The only difference is that the stablecoin lacks FDIC protection, but if it's only used in-transit for payments between banks, and converted back into deposits upon receipt, this is an exceedingly narrow difference.

Alas, I doubt the tokenized deposit promoters will restructure around a consortium stablecoin. So, what's the average banker to do amid the confusion? Given the significant fragmentation and volatility, and the high cost for banks to integrate new payment systems, the incentive is to wait. Meanwhile, the use cases, product design, and actual transactional flow for stablecoin continue to solidify. Banks that want to meaningfully engage ought to consider stablecoin as the opportunity to gain real operational and product experience with commercial potential. That will serve them well if and when a viable deposit token network emerges from the fray.

India Puts AI Agents on the Payment Rails

The National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the UPI real-time payments network, said it will unveil a standardized "Unified Agent Protocol", allowing AI agents to execute payments within limits a user sets in advance. The protocol is not a new payment rail. It standardizes two existing UPI features: third party delegation and payment pre-authorization. This allows merchants to integrate once rather than negotiating separately with each AI platform. The design separates the discovery and shopping layer from the payment-execution layer. Merchants stand up Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers exposing catalog, pricing, and checkout to AI services; and at payment time, the agent hands off the session to a pre-authorized UPI debit. Sources [Inc42, MediaNama]

My Take:

I love watching fast-payments developments in countries where tighter regulatory control forces innovation onto the banking system. Brazil did it with Pix, which reached roughly 170 million users just five years after launch. India did it with UPI, which now clears more than 23 billion transactions a month. UPI is integrated into more than 700 banks, enabling 24x7 real-time consumer and business payments across the country.

UPI has been building to this moment for years. It already supports delegated payments through UPI Circle, which lets a user authorize a trusted party to pay on their behalf. This feature was built in 2024 to extend the utility of UPI to users like children, elderly parents and domestic employees, enabling them to spend from the main accountholder's balance without needing full credentials. UPI also has Reserve Pay, launched in 2025, which lets a user pre-allocate funds for future transactions within a limit framework, enabling subscription payments. Importantly, UPI does not move up the stack into discovery or shopping. It leaves that to individual merchants, who expose MCP servers for agents to assemble a cart and hand off to the payment step.

By standardizing these primitives and focusing on payment alone, India lowers the bar for agentic payments. The agent only needs to understand MCP for cart assembly, which is already widely used, and integrate once into UPI's tooling.

Clearly this isn't a model for the US, where we lack a robust real time pay-by-bank option built for commerce, and where there's no standard for payment pre-authorization beyond positive pay, a check-fraud control from the 1990s. But watching places like India tells us how consumers and businesses actually want to use agentic payments. One lesson already lands: banks hold the primary customer relationship and the primitives are becoming clear. Banks will need agent-friendly methods of payment like single-use tokenized card numbers and stablecoins, pre-authorization and limit controls, and API or MCP interfaces. The challenge for banks is that the necessary upgrades will require changes from multiple vendors including the core/sidecore, digital banking, and compliance and risk tooling. This is why banks that serve a more tech-savvy customer base ought to be formulating a high level plan sooner rather than later.

Coupon Clippings

CLARITY Act Heads to a Cloture Vote With the Community-Bank Lobby Pulling the Brakes

The CLARITY Act faces a 60-vote cloture test on September 15 to end debate of the bill and force a final vote. This comes after a pre-recess delay that got tangled up in ethics-rule fights and banking-sector opposition. The bill would give the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over digital-commodity spot markets while leaving investment-contract assets with the SEC, and extend "commodity pool" rules to digital-asset activity. Prediction markets aren't optimistic: Polymarket recently reported the odds of passage this year at roughly 17%. Part of that drag is coming from the community-bank lobby, as ICBA CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey has warned that the bill leaves a stablecoin "loophole" letting these instruments look and behave like deposits, alongside trust-bank charters and "skinny" payment master accounts that reach the payment system without carrying a bank's full obligations. Once again, whether or not CLARITY passes, banks have the regulatory clarity they need to engage with stablecoins. [Full Story]

CIMB Runs a Tokenized Sukuk Next to a Regular One and Keeps the Receipts

CIMB Islamic Bank settled RM1.38 billion (about $342 million) of a RM1.68 billion issuance under its Senior Sukuk Wakalah Programme, which issues Sukuk, the Sharia-compliant equivalent of a bond. 12 institutional investors participated inside Bank Negara Malaysia's supervised Digital Asset Innovation Hub sandbox. It's officially a pilot, but real money moved between real counterparties, which is more than most tokenization announcements can say for themselves. Even so, this still qualifies as tokenization theater: investors used tokenized deposits at the bank to buy assets from the bank, fully a closed loop. The harder problem was never the initial purchase settlement - it's the ongoing transactional flow of servicing these instruments across a five-to-fifteen-year life, and that's exactly where the benefits remain to be proven as the sukuk mature. That's what makes this one worth watching: it's a live product that may actually show how on-chain finance fixes real problems. [Full Story]

Fasset Hits a Billion-Dollar Valuation, Then Bolts a Token to the Front Door

Fasset, a stablecoin neobanking platform operating in more than 125 countries with over 3 million wallets, raised a $68 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. The platform uses AI to route cross-border transactions across a mix of traditional payment rails and stablecoin settlement, choosing the cheapest path in real time. This is another data point for my stablecoin lego thesis, most recently covered in the June 23, 2026 edition - the idea that pulling on-ramp, off-ramp, and balances apart into separate composable pieces is precisely what lets international finance apps scale the way Fasset has. [Full Story]

Revolut Would Rather Own the Exit Ramp Than Mint the Coin

Revolut has begun distributing EURR, a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin issued through Stripe's Bridge, to roughly 2 million customers in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal, with a wider European rollout planned for later in 2026. The launch fills the vacuum left after Tether declined MiCA compliance and was pushed off regulated EU exchanges on July 1, leaving Circle's EURC as the main compliant euro option. This is a case in point for a position I keep coming back to: very few consumer brands with real distribution will bother to own their minting infrastructure. Revolut — valued around $115 billion and now holding an OCC conditional approval for a US bank charter — could have stood up its own stablecoin without breaking a sweat, and chose not to; my read is that Bridge offered a compelling share of reserve yield plus a tie-in to Stripe's broader stablecoin ecosystem, which includes OpenUSD and the Tempo blockchain. [Full Story]

Thanks for reading. If you don't hear from us for a bit, don't worry—we'll be back when there's something important to share.

Omnia is a provider of stablecoin infrastructure for banks that want to capture growing demand for stablecoins. If you're interested in learning more about us, please get in touch.

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