- Key insights: Citizens is one of nearly a dozen banks in the U.S. that has signed on to Open Standard's Open USD stablecoin consortium.
- What's at stake: For banks, getting ahead in the digital asset race may be less about picking a winner and more about playing the field.
- Expert quote: "This industry is going to evolve, and we need to make sure that we've got some skin in the game as a function of picking the right partners and the right kinds of outcomes." – Paul Busby, head of commercial bank strategy, Citizens.
Since the
"Banks are trying to understand which [consortiums] stick," Michael Levens, vice president, financial services payments lead at Capgemini, told American Banker. "I'd be surprised if you got a bank saying, 'This is the one we're hedging our bets on,' because they don't know."
A new stablecoin
Open Standard's
And that does not include the banks and payments companies such as
For Citizens — which is one of nearly a dozen banks in the U.S. that have signed on as a partner to Open Standard's stablecoin — the idea is to cast a wide net, according to Paul Busby, head of commercial bank strategy at the $233-billion-asset bank.
"We don't have all the answers; I don't think anybody does," Busby told American Banker. "This industry is going to evolve, and we need to make sure that we've got some skin in the game as a function of picking the right partners and the right kinds of outcomes."
Casting a wide net
Open USD is one of multiple digital asset initiatives that the bank is pursuing, in addition to the
"We're looking at some of the biggest components of the market as we see it going forward, and making sure that we're staying in lockstep with the momentum across the market — effectively not wanting to be left behind — but also making sure we're staying in pace with the market as it evolves," Busby said. "There's a burgeoning footprint of future partners that we can start to navigate our way through, and they all bring different infrastructure to play."
Citizens' involvement with Open USD is part of an overall digital asset strategy that began almost a year ago that spanned the bank's compliance, legal, technology, capital markets, treasury and payments teams.
"The impact of digital assets is a function of when, not if," Busby said.
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Citizens this year is working to build out its infrastructure and products before it begins rolling out products to corporate clients in 2027, Busby said, noting that cross-border payments and money movement, especially in emerging market corridors, are the first promising use case the bank is exploring.
Other potential use cases also include stablecoin payouts and digital wallets to facilitate those payments; and the bank is also exploring how to make legacy systems interoperable with new on-chain infrastructure.
"The concept of TradFi versus DeFi, they are very quickly going to converge to just financial services, and that will happen in short order," Busby said.
And that interoperability across different payment schemes is paramount for banks to get right, Capgemini's Levens said.
"A bank might do a cross-border payment across a traditional Swift network, then then they might pay out a dispute or a return by stablecoin," Levens said. "There has to be what I'll call an 'intelligent orchestration layer' that can actually provide that."
