Three months ago, big banks looked like they saw stablecoins as a threat: Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan were pushing tokenized deposits as the safer alternative. Now the same crowd is doing a full turnaround.
On September 1, 21 financial institutions — including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Santander, MUFG Bank and asset manager Fidelity Investments — announced plans to set up a joint company to issue their own stablecoin. The group spans North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
The plan reads simple on paper and gets messier in practice. First up is a dollar-pegged stablecoin, targeted for launch in the first half of 2027. The operating company itself is expected to be formally registered before the end of this year. Euro and other G7 currencies are next in line, as the group tries to replicate the dollar playbook in every major economy.
The idea grew out of an initiative ten banks first floated back in October, when the conversation was limited to exploring a 1:1 reserve-backed digital asset on public blockchains. In ten months, the group has more than doubled.
Members say the stablecoin is meant to complement tokenized deposits, not compete with them. Deposits stay inside the banking system and preserve customer relationships, while the stablecoin moves onto public blockchains for cross-border payments and digital-asset settlement, retail users included.
On paper, the venture is designed to comply with both the US GENIUS Act and the EU's MiCA framework, letting it operate on both sides of the Atlantic without jurisdictional conflicts. That's the tidy version. Getting 21 institutions with different regulators and competing commercial interests to actually pull together is a different order of problem — the real test won't be the technology but the governance: who decides what once members' interests start to diverge. The timing isn't accidental, either: a 2025 Fireblocks survey found 90% of 295 finance executives polled were already using stablecoins or planning to.
