Lesley Chavkin

Stablecoins are emerging as a serious contender for cross-border transactions, offering faster settlement, lower costs, and reduced reliance on traditional banking rails. Recent developments signal that major payment service providers (PSPs) are beginning to explore stablecoins as part of their core infrastructure, while other incumbents have maintained their commitment to fiat-based transactions.

Herein also lies the question of fungibility. Are all stablecoins truly exchangeable across networks, jurisdictions and use cases, or do regulatory and operational constraints create fragmentation risks? If stablecoins are to become a mainstay in global payments, PSPs must navigate liquidity, compliance and interoperability challenges that could either accelerate adoption or hinder scalability.

Discussion themes:

1. The growing role of stablecoins in cross-border payments - Are lower costs, instant settlement, and financial inclusion advantages enough to drive broader PSP adoption?
2. Strategic moves in the payments industry – What does the acquisition of a stablecoin platform signal about the future of PSP-stablecoin integration, and will it force competitors to reconsider their stance on stablecoins?
3. The fungibility challenge - How do differences in issuance models, reserve structures, and regulatory classifications affect stablecoins' usability across different payment rails and jurisdictions?
4. Regulatory and market barriers – What are key regulatory, liquidity, and operational challenges preventing PSPs from fully embedding stablecoin-powered payments into their infrastructure? What's needed to bridge the gap between stablecoins and traditional finance?

This session is held in collaboration with the Ripple Policy Summit.

Legislators and regulators are currently considering how to support and oversee financial market infrastructure that leverages DLT technology. This requires changes to the trading and post-trading infrastructure as well as targeted regulatory changes.

One of the key questions is what form of digital money will be used to settle transactions, i.e., what tokenized instruments will be allowed and fit for purpose? EU regulators seem to prefer wholesale CBDC over stablecoins. This coincides with the additional momentum for wholesale CBDC in the EU and synthetic CBDCs in the UK. However, CBDCs are not the only option – stablecoins and even tokenized money market funds (MMFs) may have a role to play. The emerging US approach will also shape market preferences and is likely to spill over into European policy discussion.

In this regard, this roundtable will bring together policymakers, technologists and financial sector experts to tackle the following main questions:

• What are the lessons learned from recent tokenization trials when it comes to the digital money used for settlement? What are the next steps in Europe and in the UK on developing the payment and settlement layer for tokenization?
• Can stablecoins play a role? What about other versions, like synthetic stablecoins, or tokenized MMFs?
• Are there fragmentation or liquidity risks if the UK or EU are out of step with other jurisdictions?
• How should regulators approach this?