Why Treasury Infrastructure Must Catch Up With Digital Asset Progress
Published: September 25, 2026
Digital assets are becoming part of the infrastructure businesses use to move and manage money globally. This creates an important question for corporate treasurers: what happens when the asset moves faster than the money behind it? Iana Dimitrova, CEO, OpenPayd, studies the options and outcomes.
A stablecoin can move around the clock, and a tokenised security can settle on-chain. But corporate liquidity still sits across bank accounts, currencies, payment schemes, and jurisdictions, each operating at different times. Unless these systems work together, adding new rails risks creating more fragmentation rather than less.
The next phase of payment innovation will therefore not only be about creating more rails, but also connecting existing systems with new infrastructure as it is being built.
Working together
Digital rails are not going to replace traditional banking infrastructure. Stablecoins are becoming an important settlement layer, while businesses continue to rely on commercial banks, domestic payment systems, and fiat currencies. What has changed is the level of regulatory attention given to connecting these worlds.
In Europe, Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) has established a framework for crypto assets and stablecoins. In the US, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act created a federal framework for payment stablecoins. In the UK, regulators are developing stablecoin and wider crypto asset rules, alongside initiatives such as the Digital Securities Sandbox.
These regimes are and will not be identical, but the direction of their travel is unified and clear: digital assets are being brought within the regulated financial infrastructure. Transparent rules around redemption, resilience, and safeguarding are essential for building the trust businesses need to adopt new infrastructure at scale.
Corporate treasurers are not being asked to choose one system over another. The opportunity is in combining the capabilities of traditional finance and digital assets, so businesses can use both as part of the same payment journey.
Components of a solution
Take a business moving money across several markets, for instance. A stablecoin enables value to move between parties in seconds, but the treasury operation around that transaction is more complex.
A business may receive USD but require GBP for payroll, EUR for suppliers, and other local currencies for operating expenses. Liquidity may sit across several banks, with payments subject to different FX requirements, operating hours, and settlement processes.
Friction in cross-border payments is not simply a matter of moving money from A to B; it is about managing liquidity across markets. Stablecoins improve the payment speed and cost, but those benefits must connect with the currencies, liquidity, and infrastructure businesses actually use. Faster settlement that creates another disconnected liquidity pool solves only part of the problem.
Connecting the dots
The same challenge emerges as financial markets explore tokenisation. The UK's Digital Securities Sandbox enables firms to test DLT in security issuance, trading, and settlement within a regulated environment.
However, tokenising the asset side solves only half of the challenge. If an asset moves instantly on-chain, while the payment remains dependent on separate systems, currencies and operating hours, the underlying friction remains.
For tokenised commercial paper, bonds, and treasury assets to deliver meaningful efficiencies, the payment must move with comparable speed and certainty. That requires a connection between digital forms of money, established payment rails, and the systems treasury teams already use.
Without that connection, the asset moves faster, but the transaction itself does not.
Eliminating complexity
The answer is not simply found in giving treasury teams access to more payment rails, providers and networks. That alone risks creating new complexities that technology should be solving.
Indeed, different rails will continue to coexist because they solve different problems, depending on destination, currency, speed, cost, and local infrastructure. And the digital asset side adds another layer. Stablecoins such as USD Coin (USDC) can operate across networks including Ethereum and Solana, with varied technical standards, settlement characteristics, and liquidity considerations.
But treasury teams should not need to become experts in these underlying technologies. A business cares about reliability, speed, cost, and coverage. How payments move in the background should not add operational friction. Infrastructure should remove that complexity from the process.
But the challenge is not only technical. Where regulatory and technical regimes differ across the US, UK and Europe, financial infrastructure must bridge those differences rather than passing them on to businesses. Greater harmonisation will therefore help businesses operate across markets with more certainty. This is the real importance of interoperability: enabling businesses to use different currencies, payment rails, and digital networks without managing each as a separate financial system.
From managing payment rails to managing money
For corporate treasurers, the objective should not be deciding whether every transaction belongs on a traditional rail or a blockchain. A treasury team should determine where money needs to go, in which currency and when. The infrastructure should then support the optimal route, based on reliability, speed, cost, and availability. When it does, the benefit is greater flexibility over liquidity, unified visibility across currencies, and the ability to adopt new technology without introducing disconnected systems.
The aim is not for digital assets to replace traditional financial infrastructure but to combine the capabilities of both. As payment rails and digital asset networks become more connected, the underlying technology becomes secondary.
What matters is the aforementioned reliability, speed, cost, and coverage. That is when digital assets stop being another financial system to manage, and instead become part of the wider infrastructure businesses use to move and manage money globally.