Fintech Corner

Most stablecoin conversations start with a list of use cases. Cross-border payments, access to dollars, micropayments, and treasury. Walter Hessert's view is that a stablecoin's properties don't create adoption on their own. Someone has to understand the buyer. In this episode of the stablecoin series, Brett Turner, Founder and CEO of Trovata, and Paul Bances, who leads Trovata's stablecoin efforts, are joined by Walter Hessert, Head of Strategy at Paxos. Paxos issued its first stablecoin under prudential oversight in 2018 and now operates as an OCC-regulated national trust company. Walter and Paul first met at Money20/20 in 2019. Less than a year later, PayPal launched crypto with Paxos as its infrastructure provider. Walter's case is that the GENIUS Act gave the market a definition of a regulated stablecoin, and the infrastructure work it started has kept moving. Issuers can create supply. Demand has to come from applications built by people who understand the buyer's incentives and risks, and he points to treasury as one of the clearest examples. Highlights Paxos has operated under bank-level oversight for a decade. Walter sees that track record as what large, regulated firms look for in an infrastructure partner. GENIUS gave the market a working definition of a regulated stablecoin. The CLARITY Act failing its cloture vote hasn't changed the plans of the firms Paxos is building with. The reciprocity provision in GENIUS lets a single dollar stablecoin move across jurisdictions without a separate version for each market. Issuers create supply. Demand comes from applications that understand the buyer's incentives and risks.

Most of the conversation about banks and digital money assumes banks are on defense. Protecting deposits, watching issuers take share, and moving because they have to. BNY's account of how it got here is a different one. In episode four of the stablecoin series, Brett Turner, Founder and CEO of Trovata, and Paul Bances, who led the team at PayPal that architected PYUSD, are joined by Nader Souri, who leads corporate and digital banking at BNY. Nader was making the internal case for digital assets six or seven years ago, well before stablecoins became a mainstream topic for banks. Where he and Paul land is that regulation has stopped being the barrier for corporate treasury. Handing a treasurer a wallet solves nothing unless it connects to the systems already running the function. BNY built digital asset custody because institutional clients asked for it, not out of fear of being disintermediated. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and tokenized money market funds are legally and economically different instruments. They will coexist rather than compete. Regulation has stopped being the barrier to treasury adoption. Ubiquity and integration are what is left. A wallet on its own solves nothing without integration into the treasury management system, the ERP, and the investment policy.

Banks are worried about losing deposits to stablecoins. Ryan Zacharia thinks the fear is legitimate but the reasoning behind it is wrong. In episode 3 of the stablecoin series, Brett Turner and Paul Bances are joined by Ryan, a partner at FINTOP, which invests in companies serving financial institutions and counts roughly 100 regional and community banks among its strategic LPs. He was also a founding board member of the USDF Consortium. Ryan's argument is that deposit pricing was already under pressure from new charters and fintechs buying banks. Stablecoins are one more channel, not the root cause. The real corporate risk isn't deposits walking out the door, it's the bank losing its place in the settlement flow. He also thinks nobody has stress tested the economics of stablecoin issuance itself, and that banks have a better position than they realize. A stablecoin issuer can hold your dollar, but it can't extend your mortgage or your working capital line. Watch the full episode to hear what he tells banks to start doing.

Most of the stablecoin debate is about yield. Who earns it, whether banks lose deposits, and what the Clarity Act will finally allow. Corporate treasury teams are asking something else entirely. In part two of the stablecoin series, Brett Turner, Founder and CEO of Trovata, is joined again by Paul Bances, who helped build PayPal's digital currency business and the market for PYUSD. Together they get into why the corporate use case looks nothing like the consumer one. For a treasury team, availability and control of cash matter more than what that cash earns. Brett shares how Trovata got here, from pioneering bank APIs to walking into Paxos with a thesis he wasn't sure anyone would believe. He and Paul work through intercompany settlement as the first real use case, since it doesn't depend on a willing counterparty or a mature ecosystem. You are moving value between entities you already own. They also cover why governed access decides everything. Audit trails, controls, and remediation are what turn a promising rail into something a treasury team will actually touch. Eighty percent accuracy is fine for a consumer app. In the enterprise it gets someone fired. The conversation closes on tokenized assets, where AI and agents fit, and what both of them are watching next.

Stablecoins are all over the news. They still haven't shown up in the day-to-day work of corporate treasury and finance teams. In the first episode of our stablecoin series, Brett Turner, Founder and CEO of Trovata, is joined by Paul Bances, who helped build PayPal's digital currency business and the market for PYUSD. Brett opens with the question most treasury and fintech leaders are already asking. If this is as big and game-changing as everyone says, when does it actually arrive? Ten years out? Five? Or sooner than the market expects? Together they frame what mainstream adoption looks like in corporate finance and corporate treasury, and what needs to change before stablecoins become part of how companies move money.