CFOs Eye Stablecoins as Capital Tool, Not a Crypto Bet

Are crypto questions for CFOs becoming less about crypto, and more about capital-efficiency?

The jury might still be out, but if they are, it’s likely due to the emerging impact of stablecoins. What distinguishes today’s stablecoin conversation from earlier digital-payment innovations is their growing reach into corporate treasury. Unlike card networks or real-time payment schemes, stablecoins can function as both a transfer mechanism and a store of value that moves across platforms without reconciliation friction.

This means that stablecoins promise what treasurers call continuous liquidity, or the ability to reposition cash instantly, even outside banking hours. For organizations managing large working-capital cycles or operating in markets with underdeveloped payment rails, that capability can help reduce the need for short-term borrowing and improve visibility into global cash positions.

But using stablecoins at scale introduces a strategic fork in the road. Should an institution issue its own token and control the rails? Should it rely on an external issuer while embedding functionality into existing workflows? Or should it license infrastructure in a white-label model that splits the difference?

For veteran finance leaders, the question of whether to buy, build or partner is a familiar one. But stablecoins throw a wrench into that calculation. Each area where stablecoins interact with workflows, including treasury, cross-border settlement, payroll, procurement and other payouts, each creates a different answer to the buy-build-partner decision that may potentially result in mosaic, not monolithic, strategies across stablecoin issuance, integration and custody.

See also: Why Banks Want to Issue Stablecoins

Use-Case Strategies, Not Single Bets

Despite early narratives framing stablecoins as disruptive challengers to traditional finance, the market is trending toward convergence, with a result that may not look like a wholesale replacement of existing systems but rather an additional settlement layer that operates alongside them.

“Two years ago, you had to re-explain what a stablecoin is,” Nassim Eddequiouaq, CEO at Bastion, told PYMNTS in an interview this month. “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.”

Stablecoins, in this view, are not a new asset class to manage but a new financial primitive that changes how value moves through the enterprise. The CFO’s task is to decide where that primitive should be harnessed, and where it should remain safely abstracted behind trusted intermediaries.

“We don’t start with the asset,” Biswarup Chatterjee, global head of partnerships and innovation, Citi Services at Citi, told PYMNTS. “We typically start with our client need, and then we look at the pros and cons of each type of asset or financing instrument.”

After all, areas such as treasury optimization, cross-border efficiency, payroll modernization, and supply chain automation have traditionally each mapped to different tolerances for ownership and integration.

Issuing a new stablecoin today can take minutes through white-label providers. Banks and specialized financial firms may naturally pursue issuance as an extension of their existing roles. Stablecoin firms may even pursue bank charters. And technology providers may supply the infrastructure.

Global businesses, by contrast, may adopt stablecoins instrumentally, applying them where they solve defined problems and avoiding responsibilities that exceed their remit.

See also: Stablecoin Fragmentation Creates New Risks for Businesses

Tech Is Modularizing the Decision

One reason CFOs can tailor their approach by use case is the growing modularity of stablecoin infrastructure. APIs allow companies to plug stablecoin settlement into specific workflows without redesigning their entire financial stack. That flexibility enables a selective strategy: partner for payroll, embed for cross-border, experiment with programmable payments in procurement.

At the same time, CFOs are acutely aware that financial-reporting ambiguity can offset any operational gains. Accounting determinism is foundational to any go-forward digital asset strategy, as treasury teams require clear treatment of digital assets, auditable reserve backing, and reconciliation processes that withstand scrutiny from auditors and regulators.

This modularity mirrors earlier cloud transformations, where enterprises no longer had to choose between full in-house development and complete outsourcing. Instead, they assembled capabilities from interoperable components.

Stablecoins are following a similar trajectory, making the buy-build-partner decision less binary and more contextual.

Still, for jurisdictionally sensitive use cases like payroll and cross-border payments, this can require partners to be institutional-grade at minimum.

The PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi report “Chain Reaction: Regulatory Clarity as the Catalyst for Blockchain Adoption” found that blockchain’s next leap will be shaped by regulation; that evolving guidance is beginning to create the foundations for safe, scalable blockchain adoption; while at the same time, implementation challenges continue to complicate progress.