Ask any corporate treasurer how many usable dollars their company has right now across every account in the country.
You’ll often get a pause, not because the money isn’t there, but because nobody can see all of it at once.
Global companies run through dozens of legal entities, each with its own bank accounts, payroll, taxes, suppliers and regulators holding them accountable. Add it all up, and the company looks flush. Look closer, and there’s no clean, real-time picture of how much spendable dollar liquidity is within reach.
Consider the company making the argument.
Nium itself maintains hundreds of bank accounts across roughly 65 to 70 countries. Its founder and CEO, Prajit Nanu, said that even a global payments business built for exactly this problem doesn’t always have a continuous dollar view of its own cash. If Nium can’t see all its dollars, most multinationals have no chance.
“It’s trapped dollars,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster said in her “Summer School” session with Nanu.
Money gets positioned days ahead of when it’s needed because the treasurer can’t be sure when it will land or how far the exchange rate will drift while everyone waits. That idle, waiting cash is a tax almost nobody puts on the books.
The Use Case That Isn’t on the Marketing Slides
This is the problem Nanu thinks stablecoins were built to solve. And it’s not the one they’re usually sold on.
For most of their short life, stablecoins have been pitched as cheaper remittance rails, faster payment instruments, a replacement for bank deposits, the plumbing for an entirely new financial system. It’s an impressive list. It’s also the problem. Sell something as the fix for everything, and it starts to sound like the fix for nothing.
“Today, stablecoins are like a drug trying to treat 20 different problems,” Nanu said.
The technology lands one, maybe two, real use cases. The one Nanu said he’s betting on isn’t consumer payments at all.
“Where we see a significant amount of opportunity is stablecoin not as a payments value, but as a settlement value,” Nanu said. “Where we think stablecoin has the biggest value as, is a treasury layer across all the entities, where I can move money instantly among my entities.”
In practice, that means borrowing the economic value of those trapped balances without pulling out the local currency each business needs to open its doors.
Picture it running overnight. Collect Brazilian reais during the day, park the value in a dollar-backed stablecoin after hours, and flip it back to reais before the shop reopens tomorrow. In that window, the company can earn a little, sidestep some of the downside of a sliding local currency and, maybe the biggest prize of all, according to Nanu, finally see and realize its dollar liquidity across every entity at once.
Selling Certainty to the One Person Paid to Kill Uncertainty
That’s where the catch comes in.
“The certainty that is promised has a lot of uncertainty associated with making that decision,” Webster said.
Nanu said that line is the whole ball game. Stablecoins are selling certainty to the very people whose job is to stamp out uncertainty. The product only wins if it removes more doubt than it creates.
That sets a high bar for what providers must build, Nanu said. The corporate customer should never have to choose a blockchain, babysit token balances, or work out the fee to shuttle a dollar from one entity to another. They should get a defined financial outcome. The provider absorbs the complexity underneath.
“The treasurers really care about: Is my money safe? Is this in a regulated setup? Is this fast? Is this low cost? What’s the yield?” Nanu said. “These are very simple questions.”
Start answering them with gas fees, competing chains, exotic tokens and transaction costs that move around, and the conversation is over.
“Boom, you’ve lost the treasurer,” Nanu said.
The stakes for that person are personal.
“The CFO or the treasurer is also at the risk of, ‘Will I be fired? What if something happens?’” Nanu said.
The paradox at the heart of his whole pitch is that stablecoins may only become useful to enterprises once they stop feeling like stablecoins at all.
Banks Still Own the Trust Layer
Squint, and the “treasury layer” idea looks a lot like multicurrency notional pooling, the service banks already use to help companies manage balances across accounts and currencies without physically moving every dollar. The catch is that pooling works in major currencies and mature markets. Step outside that comfort zone, and it gets hard, fast.
Big banks are excellent in dollars, euros and pounds. In emerging markets, the coverage turns patchy, Nanu said. Fewer branches, more reliance on correspondent banks, inherited systems that don’t always talk to the rest of the bank. So, companies do the only safe thing, which is pre-fund accounts and sit on bigger liquidity buffers than a truly real-time system would ever require. Trapped cash, again.
Nanu framed Nium not as the bank’s rival, but as its ally. The company is a partner that helps banks go toe-to-toe with FinTechs in cross-border payments and emerging-market currencies. Banks still hold the cards that matter most, including regulation, relationships, deposit funding and hard-won institutional trust. What infrastructure providers bring is the local connectivity, software and settlement muscle that would cost a fortune for every bank to build on its own.
Nanu said the real question isn’t whether banks show up. It’s how they choose to build.
“We are the FinTech that helps banks compete with FinTechs,” Nanu said.
Watch the full PYMNTS TV “Summer School” interview with Nium Founder and CEO Prajit Nanu to hear more about:
- Why stablecoins may be worth more as treasury infrastructure than as a consumer payment method. Nanu explained how companies could use them to consolidate liquidity, cut overnight currency exposure, and get a clearer dollar view of cash spread across global entities.
- How trapped liquidity turns stablecoin adoption into a bottom-line decision. The conversation dug into how pre-funded payroll, supplier and statutory-payment accounts leave capital sitting idle, as well as why faster settlement could keep that money working until the moment it’s needed.
- Why stablecoins must become invisible before CFOs will buy in. Nanu said treasurers care about safety, regulation, cost, speed and certainty, not chains, tokens or gas fees. Providers must absorb the technical complexity and the operational risk behind one predictable outcome.
