Two of the top three core banking providers announced major stablecoin initiatives at the height of the hype cycle surrounding the passage of the GENIUS Act, which established the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoin. But more than a year later, Fiserv has shifted gears and FIS is touting a new tokenized deposit platform.
Both providers in the summer of 2025 announced respective stablecoin initiatives in partnership with Circle Internet Group, a global fintech firm and stablecoin market leader. FIS publicized a plan to give its client financial institutions the ability to make domestic and cross-border payments using Circle USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin.
Fiserv planned to launch a digital asset platform, as well as its own stablecoin — FIUSD — for its client institutions to use by the end of 2025. The company said Circle would provide the underlying infrastructure for FIUSD. Fiserv also announced a partnership with Paxos Trust Company, the issuer of PayPal’s PYUSD coin, to enable stablecoin interoperability and programmable payments.
Sunil Sachdev, Fiserv head of embedded finance and digital assets, says a deeper look at the needs of their client institutions led them to eventually focus on providing a greater variety of payment options. “Since making that announcement on the heels of GENIUS, we’ve learned a lot in terms of the practical application of digital assets,” he says. “The Paxos and Circle teams have been great partners, but when we looked at what they offer, it was not exactly what we needed.”
It is unclear where FIS is on its plans for USDC. A Sept. 2 company blog post indicates USDC is now available for domestic and cross-border payments on FIS’ Payment Solutions – Enterprise Edition platform. But the webpage for the Enterprise Edition doesn’t mention that USDC functionality, and a link for further information goes to a fact sheet about a different platform.
David Trecker, the company’s head of strategy for digital assets, says plans to provide client institutions with payment solutions through USDC are still in development. He also acknowledges that many of the institutions FIS serves aren’t ready for stablecoin, because they are not even allowing customers to send instant payments on the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network or FedNow.
“The single best leading indicator of whether or not as a bank you’re prepared to engage with stablecoins and tokenized deposits — 24/7 instant settlement — is whether or not you’re sending [instant payments],” he says. “That is absolutely a step on that transformation journey.”
Tony DeSanctis, senior director with Cornerstone Advisors, expressed skepticism about the respective plans from Fiserv and FIS at the time they were announced. “This isn’t just a commentary on Fiserv and FIS,” he says. “This is a commentary on where we are with legacy fintech [saying], ‘We need to stay current, and so we need to have press releases that are relevant and current.’”
“A Very Hard Problem”
Of the three largest core providers, only Jack Henry & Associates shied away from announcing any major stablecoin initiatives in 2025. The company instead chose to allow third-party stablecoin providers to integrate with their core platforms so that client institutions could choose from a variety of stablecoin options.
Erica Pilon, vice president of corporate strategic planning and initiatives, says Jack Henry never liked the idea of providing a coin that could only be used in a closed loop network. “We want to have network effects for our customers, and so we weren’t going to build or issue our own coin in a silo, in a bubble and not have it interoperable with other coins,” she says. “And so, when we look at Tether and Circle, they’re like Visa and MasterCard, right? They have those network effects.” While Jack Henry offers accessibility to multiple stablecoins, Pilon says fewer than a dozen client institutions are utilizing that access.
Most banks don’t have a plan for stablecoin. According to Bank Director’s 2026 Technology Survey, only 10% of respondents said their bank has a formal stablecoin strategy.
Nick Elledge, co-founder and chief operating officer of Stablecore, one of the digital asset companies that integrates with Jack Henry, says low adoption rates are only part of the challenge for cores that want to provide their own stablecoin solutions. “In their defense, it is genuinely a very hard problem,” he says.
Stablecore provides an enterprise software platform that allows financial institutions to offer their customers stablecoin accounts and payments, along with other digital asset services. Elledge explains that stablecoin solutions are difficult to set up and manage for even the most nimble fintechs, because they touch a financial institution’s core, digital banking platform, money movement and even compliance. That means it must work with a variety of third-party vendors to ensure all stablecoin transactions are both seamless and compliant.
“The complexity of both the banking stack being pretty fragmented and then the digital asset provider stack being fragmented as well, just means that there is a ton of work to do to make it work seamlessly,” Elledge says.
A Shift in Plans
More than 15 months after announcing its initial plan, Fiserv is moving forward on stablecoin — but in a different direction.
The company on Oct. 1 announced its digital asset platform is live with the first use case being Roughrider Coin, a white-label version of FIUSD being launched by Bank of North Dakota. The $10.6 billion state-owned bank offers financial products and services to banks and credit unions within the state, including an interbank payments network that allows participating institutions to process transactions between one another. Those institutions can now access Roughrider Coin through Fiserv’s Commercial Center. Those that adopt the coin can use it to process digital transactions on the interbank network.
“The best part about this is that it’s not a vanity coin,” Sachdev explains. “It’s a coin that really does address a service, and we have an opportunity to displace or shift existing volume on TradFi rails to a digital asset rail. We want to create another rail. We want to modernize the rail to create efficient money movement and exchange of value, and this checked a lot of boxes for us.”
Whether FIS has formally launched its stablecoin initiative or not, Trecker says “we found a lot of the use cases that are closest to the hearts” of community and regional banks are related to tokenized deposits. FIS in April announced the creation of Project Keystone, a digital platform being piloted in partnership with six superregional banks: Citizens Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Huntington Bank, KeyBank and M&T Bank. Trecker says the company has big plans for the venture.
“What are community and regional banks and credit unions going to need in order to have a seat at that table and be meaningful in this next generation of financial infrastructure? And it occurred to us right away, it’s not just about technology, it’s about building a network around it,” he says. “I’m not talking about growing it small, where it’s one network of several. I’m talking about making it something as ubiquitous as a Visa or a MasterCard.”
Meanwhile, Jack Henry is moving forward with more integrations. The company launched a proof of concept that includes building a hybrid ledger into Circle to allow for direct integration with USDC. They are also working to implement an integration into OpenUSD, a stablecoin recently launched by Open Standard in cooperation with Visa and Mastercard. Jack Henry also expects to make an announcement soon about its own plans for a tokenized deposit initiative.
Previous