Bastion CEO Says Stablecoin Adoption Depends on Enterprise-Grade Financial Infrastructure

Watch more: The Digital Shift With Bastion’s Nassim Eddequiouaq

Beneath the buzzy headlines around stablecoins’ capabilities for moving money at internet speed lies an intricate mess of plumbing.

As stablecoins move deeper into the mainstream of global commerce, the question is no longer whether the technology works as a value transfer mechanism, but whether it can support the complexity, compliance and scale demanded by large, highly regulated enterprises.

“Now is time for the space to have access to a partner that has the technology, the compliance and financial operations, the banking connectivity, and the licenses,” Nassim Eddequiouaq, CEO at Bastion, told PYMNTS.

Bastion’s bet is that as stablecoins go mainstream, enterprises will come to need an invisible financial substrate that allows them to issue their own branded stablecoins without have to build custody, reserve management, liquidity, regulatory licensing and compliance programs from the ground up.

After all, it’s hard enough running the day-to-day operations of most global businesses without asking them to become a bank on top of that. That particular insight came from Eddequiouaq’s career spent watching and helping giants like Meta, Apple and others burn time and capital rebuilding banking capabilities just to ship new monetary products.

“We call it neobank 2.0,” he said. “Instead of moving money from bank A to bank B and taking a cut, companies can bring those balances on-platform using stablecoins. Money movement becomes free and global.”

Regulation, Accounting and the Unsexy Work of Stablecoins

What differentiates enterprise stablecoins from traditional payments is not the speed they offer but their control. Enterprises must understand how stablecoin transactions are classified, taxed and reconciled across legacy systems that may have been built decades ago.

“Accounting treatment is absolutely critical,” Eddequiouaq said. “And because stablecoins are global, it’s not just about how the U.S. treats them. It’s about Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, every jurisdiction.”

Today’s enterprise stablecoin wish list also requires custody systems that are always on, highly secure and deeply embedded into application workflows. Enterprises are in the market for stablecoins that behave like money: fast, reliable and invisible to the end user. They want payments to settle instantly, subscriptions to renew automatically, and cross-border transfers to occur without operational friction.

“Before 2020, or even up until 2022, the world around wallets and custody was split,” Eddequiouaq said. “You either had cold storage held in a bunker somewhere in Switzerland, or hot wallets where the keys are ready for attackers to steal. That doesn’t scale.”

Against that backdrop, one of the most consequential shifts in the stablecoin landscape has been the evolution of custody and key management.

“Google and AWS and others have been hard at work building infrastructure that allows custodians to manage keys securely at scale,” Eddequiouaq noted, “so we can enable billions of transactions per day and keep those assets safe.”

See also: Sony Bank Plans to Launch Stablecoin in US

Enterprise Sophistication Arrives as Blockchain Meets Corporate Reality

Bastion’s own partnership with Sony Bank highlights how much enterprise understanding of stablecoins has matured. Conversations that once required basic education now resemble detailed product planning sessions grounded in regulatory and operational reality.

“Two years ago, you had to re-explain what a stablecoin is,” Eddequiouaq said. “Now companies come with hard data. They know when they want to launch, where the stablecoin will be used, which corridors matter for treasury flows, and which jurisdictions they can’t accept microtransactions from.”

By layering stablecoin rails on top of existing banking infrastructure, businesses can enter new markets without rebuilding financial stacks country by country. Geographically, Bastion is seeing strong demand from Latin America and Asia-Pacific. In emerging markets, the motivation may be currency stability and access to dollars. In countries like Japan and South Korea, the driver can often be growth.

“In some economies, the local population is shrinking. To keep growing, companies either have to sell more financial services to existing users or expand internationally. Stablecoins in that sense can be a weapon of mass expansion,” Eddequiouaq explained.

Across its client base, Bastion sees roughly equal demand from two enterprise archetypes.

The first centers on internal treasury operations for large multinationals that often manage hundreds of legal entities, each with its own banking relationships and liquidity constraints.

For these firms, the true value of stablecoins lies in faster settlement. Traditional financial systems separate money movement from workflow, forcing approvals, reconciliations and controls into manual processes layered on top of slow rails. Stablecoins collapse those layers.

The second use case is more outward-facing: enterprises that want to become the financial hub for their users without formally becoming banks. Stablecoins allow companies to hold balances on-platform, capture the economics of those balances, and move money globally at near-zero marginal cost.

This approach may also help accelerate product launches, as cards, lending and trading products can be deployed comparatively faster on stablecoin rails than through traditional banking integrations.

What Comes Next for Global Commerce

As more enterprises issue stablecoins, interoperability is likely to become among the landscape’s defining challenges.

For its own part, Bastion enables interoperability behind the scenes through shared banking rails and is exploring models involving tokenized money market funds and wrapped stablecoins that act as liquidity bridges.

“There won’t be one answer,” Eddequiouaq said. “We’re working closely with clients to build the right bridges.”

What emerges is not a single global currency, but a layer of enterprise-issued money; one that may remain ultimately largely unseen but will be densely packed with benefits around programmability and compliance.