PwC announced over the weekend that it is expanding its digital asset practice. Banks and FinTechs are increasingly eyeing blockchain-native instruments for stablecoin-based payments, treasury operations and on-chain finance. For chief financial officers and treasury leaders, the question around stablecoins is becoming rooted in their real-world utility, not just their feasibility within finance stacks and treasury dashboards. The challenge facing enterprise finance teams is that the market has evolved faster than most enterprise frameworks.
Issuing a new stablecoin today can take minutes through white-label providers. Wallet vendors proliferate and blockchain networks compete on fees, speed and compliance posture. Yet, the efficiency gains CFOs care about, such as faster settlement, lower cross-border costs and greater visibility, do not come intrinsically from the token itself. They come from the wallet infrastructure that holds, moves, governs and integrates that token into enterprise operations.
The shift toward enterprise digital wallet use is happening across broader corporate payments as well. In early 2025, PYMNTS reporting began to reflect a subtle but important change in how executives talked about digital wallets. The conversation moved away from replacing cards and toward improving access to existing rails. Wallets were beginning to do the same for money.
Early corporate discussions around stablecoins traditionally focused on questions like which stablecoin was safest, whether it was fully reserved, who the issuer was and what chain it lived on. However, as stablecoins proliferate, differentiation at the token layer is compressing. Dollar-backed coins increasingly look alike from a risk and liquidity perspective, especially as regulators and auditors push issuers toward higher transparency standards. What does not commoditize as easily is the infrastructure that manages those assets.
A stablecoin held in a consumer-grade wallet behaves differently from one embedded in an enterprise-grade treasury system. The difference shows up in auditability, internal controls, error rates, fraud exposure and ultimately the CFO’s ability to rest soundly at night. Many digital asset wallet tools in the market evolved from crypto-native use cases, like individual traders, decentralized finance participants or early startups. These wallets prioritize speed to market, flexibility and user sovereignty.
Enterprises, by contrast, care about predictability, segregation of duties, and control. That framing crystallized in PYMNTS’ April analysis describing digital wallets as the “SMS of global money movement.” Custody infrastructure is coming into the spotlight, particularly with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Dec. 12 having conditionally approved applications for new national bank trust charters to five applicants from the digital asset and blockchain finance space, charters that could see them launch their own privately-owned on-chain financial infrastructure related to stablecoin custody and issuance. In that sense, stablecoins are following a familiar enterprise arc.
The headline innovation captures attention. The real value accrues to those who master the plumbing. Stablecoins are becoming corporate enough to demand corporate-grade infrastructure.
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