Five of the world's largest banks — Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and UBS — are quietly building a stablecoin company to compete with Circle, according to people familiar with the matter. The venture is aimed at the slow, clunky world of cross-border payments, where a transfer can still take days to clear.
The slow road from Singapore to São Paulo
Cross-border payments remain stubbornly slow. A payment from Singapore to São Paulo initiated late Friday may not settle until Wednesday — up to five business days. That's the reality the banks want to change. The new stablecoin company would offer a faster alternative, though details on the token and network are still thin.
BIS: stablecoins aren't one thing
The Bank for International Settlements, in its Annual Economic Report published June 23, 2026, flagged a core problem: stablecoins are not uniform across networks. The same stablecoin on different blockchains exists on separate ledgers, and bridging between them introduces costs, settlement delays and operational exposure. That fragmentation is exactly what the banks' venture will have to solve if it wants to win over institutional clients.
Custody and settlement become the bottleneck
The operational bottleneck for institutional adoption of digital assets has shifted. It's no longer about how many transactions a protocol can process per second. The real constraint is custody and settlement plumbing. Integrated platforms like SCRYPT, which combine execution, segregated custody and multi-currency settlement, are trying to reduce internal hand-offs and counterparty exposure. The banks' stablecoin effort will likely follow a similar playbook.
When machines outpace the banking day
There's also a structural mismatch. Software agents operate at machine speed, but financial infrastructure still keeps banking hours. A payment initiated by an algorithm on a Friday evening sits idle until Monday. The banks' stablecoin company, if it can bridge that gap, would give institutional players a way to move money around the clock.
The venture is still in its early stages, and the banks haven't said when the stablecoin will launch. What's clear is that the pressure to fix cross-border payments isn't going away — and Circle now has some serious competition in the works.
