The Digital Sovereignty Alliance took part in Nacha's Payments Innovation Alliance Fall Meeting this week, where the two organizations formally kicked off a new Next-Gen Currency Project Team. The meeting ran October 14-16 at the InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile in Chicago. DSA Senior Policy Advisor Molly Woodman facilitated discussions on the newly launched team, which Nacha and DSA co-lead.
What the project team is actually building
The Next-Gen Currency Project Team is focused on how digital assets — stablecoins and tokenized deposits among them — get used for money movement globally. Its work runs along four tracks: developing tools to bridge digital assets and traditional payment systems, tracking regulatory developments, identifying operational implications, and putting together educational resources. That's a broad mandate, and the team is new. The Chicago meeting was where much of the scoping got hammered out.
Agentic payments and the KYA question
Participants spent time on challenges facing financial institutions that don't have clean answers yet. Agentic payments were on the list — software that initiates or routes payments on a user's behalf. So was the reliability of multifactor authentication, a topic that keeps surfacing as more payment flows move through automated agents. And Know Your Agent frameworks drew attention as a possible counterpart to traditional KYC. None of these are settled. The meeting was about getting stakeholders in a room to compare notes on what's actually breaking and what might work.
The regulation gap, in Woodman's words
Woodman framed the exercise around the space where rules haven't caught up to practice. "It's been encouraging to watch financial institutions brainstorm together on how to build some continuity in areas where regulation hasn't caught up yet," she said. That's the working premise: figure out operational continuity first, and let policy follow. The DSA describes itself as a nonprofit social welfare organization that advocates for public policies supporting ethical innovation in decentralized technologies, blockchain, cryptocurrency, Web3, and artificial intelligence.
Who was in the room
The Fall Meeting brought together stakeholders from across financial services and payments — banks, payment processors, and the usual mix of industry groups. Discussions covered evolving payment technologies, regulatory considerations, and practical approaches to navigating the current financial landscape. The Next-Gen Currency Project Team is the concrete output of that conversation, and it now has a co-leadership structure and a set of work streams attached to it.
What comes next
The team's first deliverables — the bridging tools and educational materials — haven't been dated publicly. What's clear is that the working group is now staffed and operating under Nacha and DSA co-leadership, with Woodman facilitating. Whether the KYA and agentic-payments threads turn into formal recommendations or stay as discussion topics is the open question coming out of Chicago.
