By Rene Philippe Raymond Dubout · · Updated Stablecoins move money in minutes. But in a bank, the blockchain replaces only one step out of twenty.
Stablecoins were going to make payments simple. No more correspondent banks, no more cut-off times, no more three days to send money across a border. Money that moves like an email.
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This week I looked at a chart, shared on LinkedIn by Anup Panwar, showing how a bank actually handles stablecoin payments from start to finish. I counted the steps. There are about twenty. And that tells you more about stablecoins than most of the marketing you will read.
Twenty steps, from instruction to report
When a bank sends a stablecoin payment for a client, this is roughly what happens:
- Know your client. The bank checks who the client is and whether the payment fits the profile.
- Screen the address. The receiving wallet is checked: who is behind it, and has it touched anything dirty?
- Check sanctions. Sender, receiver and wallet are run against the sanctions lists.
- Check money laundering. Transaction monitoring looks for patterns that should not be there.
- Sign with secured keys. The payment is signed with keys held in secure, split-key systems, so no single person can move the money.
- Watch the peg. Someone, or something, makes sure the stablecoin is still worth what it should be.
- Send the Travel Rule data. The information on who sends and who receives travels with the payment, as it does for a wire transfer.
- Reconcile. The bank’s books are matched against what happened on the blockchain.
- Report. The regulator gets what it needs to see.
Out of all those steps, the blockchain replaces one: the moment the money actually moves.
That part is genuinely better. It goes through in minutes, across borders, without a chain of correspondent banks taking their time and their fees. That is real progress, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But every other step is still there. And now there are new steps on top: wallet screening, key management, peg monitoring. None of these existed in a traditional wire transfer.
But what about the weekend?
The big selling point of stablecoin payments is that they work 24/7. So the honest question is: who works on Sunday?
The machines do. Wallet screening, automatic sanctions checks, key signing and peg monitoring run day and night. A clean payment, from one stablecoin wallet to another with no alerts, really can go through on a Sunday.
Humans don’t. If the sanctions screening flags a possible match, or the anti-money laundering system raises an alert, the payment stops until a compliance officer clears it. At most banks, that is Monday morning.
Neither does real money. If the client pays in francs, or wants dollars at the other end, that part runs on ordinary banking rails, and many of them close at the weekend. Some instant payment systems now run around the clock, in Switzerland and in the euro area for example, but not everywhere and not for every amount.
And the books catch up later. Reconciliation and reporting are often done in batches on business days. They do not block the payment, but the bank only sees the full picture on Monday.
So 24/7 is real, but only for clean, automated payments that stay in stablecoins. As soon as a human has to look at it, or the money has to go through a bank system that closes at the weekend, you are back to office hours. The slow part has not disappeared. It has moved from the middle to the edges.
What this means if you are a bank or a fintech
None of this is a reason to ignore stablecoins. Settlement in minutes, across borders, is a real advantage, and the clients who need it will go wherever they can get it.
But it is a reason to stop believing stablecoins will make your compliance cost disappear. They will not. If anything, a bank or a fintech that adds stablecoin payments needs more controls, not fewer:
- New risks to cover: wallets, keys, blockchain analytics and the peg itself.
- New people or new providers: someone has to clear alerts, including at the weekend if you sell 24/7 to your clients.
- A fiat leg that still matters: your banking partners and their opening hours decide how fast the money really arrives.
- A regulator who expects all of it: the same anti-money laundering rules, plus the Travel Rule, plus whatever your licence adds.
The winners will not be the ones with the fastest blockchain. They will be the ones who build the boring parts properly: the onboarding, the screening, the escalation, the banking relationships at both ends.
If you are thinking of going one step further and issuing your own coin, read Is There Still a Point in Launching a Stablecoin in 2026?
Progress, yes. Simpler, not really.
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Rene-Philippe
