The financial establishment is running out of reasons to dismiss stablecoins as a fringe crypto gimmick. Bain & Company's recent analysis—highlighting a near-certain surge in stablecoin adoption across global payment rails—marks an inflection point in how institutional finance must reckon with blockchain-based settlement infrastructure. The implication is stark: the winners in the next decade of fintech will be those who integrate stablecoin rails into their core offerings, not those who treat them as an optional experimental sidecar.

What makes Bain's framing significant is not the optimism itself—venture capitalists have been bullish on crypto for years—but the specificity of the institutional pathway. The consultancy's reasoning centres on a simple economic reality: stablecoins eliminate currency conversion friction and settlement delay in cross-border transactions. For a European fintech operator or a European Central Bank-regulated payment service provider, this represents a direct competitive threat to the existing SEPA infrastructure. Unlike SEPA Instant, which offers settlement in under ten seconds but remains locked within the eurozone and dependent on legacy banking rails, stablecoins operate on permissionless blockchains and enable settlement between any two parties in seconds, globally, at near-zero marginal cost.

The timing is critical. The past eighteen months have seen PayPal's explicit pivot toward cryptocurrency operations—the company has restructured its business unit to house a dedicated crypto division, signalling that stablecoins are no longer a speculative bet but a core strategic asset. Simultaneously, traditional wealth and asset managers have begun allocating to on-chain settlement infrastructure. This convergence of legacy finance and blockchain mechanics is no longer theoretical. The European Banking Authority and national regulators across the EU are acutely aware that without a coherent regulatory framework for stablecoin issuance and operation, European fintechs risk becoming passive consumers of dollar-denominated stablecoin infrastructure rather than architects of their own payment networks.

The Ebury funding announcement—the London-based fintech raising £550 million with Santander increasing its stake to 55 percent—also signals a recalibration. Ebury's core strength lies in cross-border SME payments, a market segment that stablecoins threaten to disintermediate entirely. By accepting Santander's deeper investment, Ebury gains access to the bank's rails and regulatory approvals, but it also signals that pure-play fintech operators can no longer outrun the legacy system; they must integrate with it or be acquired by it. For operators building on top of Codego's Banking-as-a-Service platform, the lesson is equally stark: the ability to offer embedded stablecoin settlement—whether via USDC, EURC, or emerging central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure—is rapidly transitioning from a differentiator to a table-stake feature.

Where does regulatory clarity land in this picture? The EBA's 2023 recommendations on crypto-asset regulation have set a framework for stablecoin issuance under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), but execution has lagged. The result: European stablecoin issuers remain capital-constrained and operationally fragmented, while offshore alternatives (primarily Circle's USDC and Tether's USDT) have consolidated liquidity and network effects. A European CBDC, anchored in ECB infrastructure, could theoretically level the field, but pilot-stage timelines suggest that regulatory-grade digital euro settlement is still two to three years away from production.

For payment service providers and Banking-as-a-Service operators, the strategic move is to begin architecting multi-rail settlement architectures now. This means building operational readiness for stablecoin on-ramp/off-ramp infrastructure, establishing liquidity pools, and—critically—securing the correct licensing and capital treatment under evolving MiCA and banking regulations. Wise has already begun this journey; Revolut has been licensed as a stablecoin issuer in the UK. The gap between market-ready and market-leading is narrowing rapidly, and firms caught in the middle—neither fully integrated into legacy rails nor native to blockchain infrastructure—will face margin compression.

Bain's analysis arrives at a moment when board-level decisions made now will determine whether European fintechs remain competitive infrastructure operators or become utilities within larger global networks. The stablecoin surge is not a prediction. It is a force already reshaping liquidity flows, and the fintech firms that treated the warning signals as noise rather than direction are the ones most at risk.

Written by the Codego Press editor — independent banking and fintech journalism powered by Codego, European banking infrastructure provider since 2012.

Sources: The Finanser (Chris Skinner) · 1 May 2026