69% of Banks Plan Stablecoins: Only 18% See Wide Demand
Key Takeaways
- 69% of surveyed institutions offer or plan services.
- Just 18% see broad client interest.
- Differentiation, not revenue, is driving bank interest.
- Citi’s live flows run on tokenized deposits.
The figures come from EY-Parthenon’s October blockchain-payments survey of 383 corporations and 138 financial institutions familiar with blockchain payments, carried out in July and August.
69% building, 18% asked
69%
of institutions offer stablecoin services or plan to within two years
vs
18%
see interest from more than a quarter of their clients
Among the financial institutions surveyed, 18% already offer stablecoin services and another 51% plan to launch within two years. But 82% said interest in stablecoins and tokenized deposits came from a quarter of their customers or fewer. On the corporate side, 18% of respondents have blockchain payments live in production.
Those interest figures count how many clients have asked, not how much money they move. They also cover only organizations already familiar with blockchain payments, so they describe an engaged slice of the market rather than every bank and business.
Why build ahead of demand
EY’s own analysis of the results offers the reason: among financial institutions, competitive differentiation ranked above revenue generation as a driver of interest. Banks are building to avoid being left behind, and a separate profit line can come later.
Narrow demand can still be good business. A handful of multinationals or payment platforms can move large volumes, so a service used by a small share of clients is not necessarily a small service. What matters is whether those clients keep using it, and EY’s analysis points to the condition for that: the service has to fit into the workflows companies already run.
What the live products actually show
✓ USDC minting and redemption for eligible institutions via DIFC, launched in July
? No active-client count, volume or revenue disclosed
✓ Stablecoin acceptance with fiat settlement, announced in September, US first
? How widely available it is, and how often merchants use it
✓ Hundreds of clients moving close to $1 billion a day in tokenized deposits
? Revenue; transfer value is not income
✓ Live transactions with FAB and OCBC in a July–December proof of concept
? Whether it becomes a commercial service after the pilot
The only one of the four with disclosed, recurring volume, Citi Token Services, does not use public stablecoins at all. Tokenized deposits are ordinary commercial-bank money on a blockchain, held inside existing account relationships. Citi chief executive Jane Fraser said on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call that deposit tokenization was growing faster than stablecoin activity among its clients, a split Coindoo examined in Citi’s approach to the two. Standard Chartered’s USDC minting service is the clearest bank route into the stablecoin itself, but it has published no usage numbers yet.
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Built so the merchant never holds a token
Spring by Citi shows how banks are bridging the gap. The stablecoin exists only at the start of the payment:
● Buyer pays in stablecoins
→
◐ Coinbase converts to fiat
→
● Citi settles dollars to the merchant
The merchant gains customers who want to pay with stablecoins without ever holding one, and its receipts arrive in the bank account it already uses. Taken with Citi’s deposit-token volumes, it suggests an answer to the headline’s question: many banks are designing their products on the assumption that most business customers are not ready to hold stablecoins themselves.
The cost test
Take a company paying an overseas supplier after its bank’s normal cutoff. A faster transfer helps only if the supplier gets spendable money sooner. It helps less if either side needs extra manual approvals, a separate currency conversion, or banking access at the other end that is closed. A fair comparison sets the stablecoin route against the best conventional option for the same corridor, including instant-payment services where they exist.
Can add cost
− Payment and conversion fees
− Foreign-exchange spreads
− Compliance and custody
− Integration and reconciliation work
Can save
+ Settlement outside banking hours
+ Less cash parked in prefunded accounts
+ Fewer intermediaries on the route
The prefunding saving is easy to overstate. Freeing up cash improves liquidity, but the freed balance is not profit; the gain is what that cash costs to fund. With hypothetical numbers:
$10M released 2 days sooner × 5% annual funding cost ≈ $2,740
That is real money at scale, but it is a funding saving measured in thousands per transfer, not a share of the transfer value.
The public disclosures don’t give comparable costs or revenue for any of the four services. The figures that would show whether customers are ready are the ones not yet published: how many eligible clients use a service again after the first month, what share of their cross-border volume moves through it, and the all-in cost per payment against the bank route it replaced.
This story was originally published by Coindoo. Read the original article.
