How FIS is responding to the stablecoin wave

Bank technology giant Fiserv jumped on the stablecoin train quickly, announcing plans to issue its own coin before the enabling Genius Act was signed into law. While rival FIS has not yet gone that far, it is also betting that thousands of banks will want to tap stablecoins.

"Stablecoins are having their time in the sun now, and that's a good thing" Himal Makwana, global head of corporate strategy at FIS, told American Banker.FIS has partnered with Circle to enable banks to transact in USDC, Circle's stablecoin, part of a mult-pronged strategy to support stablecoins while enabling interoperability among digital assets and traditional currencies and payment types.

"We feel that the best use case and benefit right now for stablecoins is in 'send and receive,'" Makwana said. "We have ACH, wires, FedNow and RTP, so why not provide another medium that they can access through our existing platform,"

Circling stablecoins

Banks can use FIS and Circle to make domestic and global stablecoin payments in USDC. FIS' Circle collaboration follows FIS' May launch of its Money Movement Hub, which enables financial firms to connect to multiple payment networks covering different payment types.

FIS has combined its real-time payments and fraud detection with Circle's blockchain technology. Banks can use this to adopt digital assets like stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies. These institutions can also use the technology to support their own stablecoins and interoperability with other digital assets. FIS, which has spent the past two years refocusing on bank technology, after divesting a large stake in Worldpay in 2023, is enabling banks to support multiple digital asset and payment types, according to Makwana.

"With thousands of banks globally, everything we do has to be scalable," Makwana said. "So if a bank wants us to issue a stablecoin, we would have to make sure it has usability, scalability and reusability."

FIS's most direct competitor, Fiserv, recently announced plans to launch a digital asset platform, including a stablecoin, FIUSD, that will be part of Fiserv's banking and payments menu by the end of 2025. Fiserv plans to make FIUSD available through its existing payment technology at no added cost. FIUSD will use stablecoin infrastructure from Paxos and Circle, and will make the stablecoin available on the Solana blockchain.

Read more about stablecoins. (Stablecoin | American Banker)

"Fiserv's FIUSD announcement sits at one end of the spectrum," James Wester, a research director at Javelin Strategy & Research, told American Banker. "It's a more vertically integrated, proprietary stablecoin model."

Story ContinuesFIS, through its Circle partnership, is on the other end, using an existing issuer and leaning into its Money Movement Hub as a distribution and orchestration layer, Wester said.

"That's a meaningful distinction, because it's focused on enabling compliant access to a widely used stablecoin like USDC, rather than issuing one directly," Wester said.

FIS is not ready to issue its own coin, at least not yet."Many others have said something [about issuance]. Our stance is we will evaluate if it's the right time for us to issue our own coin," Madwana said. "We're not convinced of the business case to jump right out of the gate but we are continuously evaluating our options."

More stablecoin tech

The race to sell stablecoin technology is also attracting financial technology sellers from outside traditional banking.

For example, Alchemy, a blockchain technology firm, recently launched Cortex, a system designed to scale real-time transaction settlement for stablecoins and other digital assets. Alchemy's users include Circle, PayPal, Paxos and Anchorage.

"The big banks see all sorts of possibilities in stablecoins, and rightly so. Which creates a top down pressure on regional banks, and a fear of missing out for smaller banks." Gareth Lodge, a senior analyst at Celent, told American Banker. "Many banks think they need to have them, so it creates a large opportunity for FIS and others to meet that need."

As banking has shifted from brick-and-mortar branches to digital-first platforms, stablecoins are starting to disrupt "traditional" payment rails, according to Guillaume Poncin, chief technology officer of Alchemy.

"The race to build reliable, scalable stablecoin infra is critical because the future of finance demands systems that can handle massive, real-time transaction volumes without delays," Poncin told American Banker in an email. "Major players like Circle, PayPal, Stripe and JPMorganChase are already integrating stablecoin infrastructure, delivering faster access to liquidity worldwide. This shift isn't just about technology, it's about meeting the demands of institutional clients and consumers who all want real-time, global financial access."

Adoption will ultimately still depend on client demand, the maturity of use cases, and a deeper understanding of how to build and launch stablecoin-enabled products, Wester said. "There's still a lot of education to be done before that happens. But the direction is clear: stablecoins are moving from 'wait and see' to "let's get going.'"

While dozens of banks, technology firms and retailers consider their own stablecoins, Makwana is less concerned about a bubble than cohesion.

"There is always a danger of too many flavors of payments, but the interoperability of them is the challenge," Makwana said. If the largest 20 banks and merchants all issued their own stablecoins, the question would be how easy is it to "off ramp" or "on ramp" the different coins, Makwana said. "If the answer is 'yes, it is easy,' then you can have as many as you want."

View Comments