Treasury at the Edge: Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits, and the New Liquidity Frontier
By Jéremie Feuillette
The Quiet Shift Reshaping Money
Something subtle has changed in the way money moves. Over the past eighteen months, blockchain-based assets have slipped quietly from the margins into the machinery of real settlement.
Visa now conducts weekend settlement pilots using USDC. J.P. Morgan’s Onyx platform processes more than a billion dollars a day in tokenised deposits. Companies such as PayPal, Stripe, and Uber settle cross-border flows using stablecoins at any hour.
The shift has been incremental enough to miss yet significant enough to reshape liquidity management.
Digital money is no longer speculative. It is operational. And treasury teams are being pulled into this world not out of curiosity, but because their clients increasingly expect money to move at the speed and with the availability of data.
This creates a challenge that is both simple and uncomfortable: liquidity is no longer contained within a single system. It is fragmenting across rails that operate on incompatible rules. Treasury functions built around predictable cut-offs now oversee liquidity that never sleeps.
Why Definitions Matter Again
As digital settlement increases, terminology around it has become muddled. “Stablecoin”, “tokenised deposit”, and “CBDC” are often used interchangeably, even though they behave very differently.
These distinctions matter: they determine where liquidity sits, how it moves, and what risks treasurers must manage.
Open Stablecoins: Claims Outside the Banking System: Open-exchange stablecoins, such as USDC or USDT, are claims on non-bank private issuers operating on public blockchains that run continuously. They are typically backed by government debt or other high-quality liquid assets. Two moments define their liquidity profile.
On-ramping is the process of converting fiat into stablecoins. This is an immediate liquidity outflow for the banking system: a bank loses a deposit instantly, and value reappears as a claim on an external issuer. Operationally, it behaves like an FX conversion inside the fiat ecosystem.
Redemption moves in the opposite direction, but rarely in real time. Redemption cycles are often T+1, and weekend flows accumulate until fiat rails reopen. During this period, funds appear available on-chain yet cannot support payroll, RTGS settlement, CLS, or margin calls.
Liquidity leaves instantly and returns only when fiat systems allow it. This timing asymmetry is the fundamental risk for treasury and risk teams.
The situation is compounded by operational fragility. Stablecoins rely on external infrastructures: public blockchains, smart contracts, issuer redemption processes, exchange intermediaries, and wallet providers. Any disruption, network congestion, or delayed burning directly affects liquidity availability.
Stablecoin activity also carries behavioural volatility: high velocity, clustered flows, and patterns driven by markets rather than payment calendars. A sudden $300m burn on Saturday evening can materially change a bank’s Monday liquidity posture. Together, these create a new category of risk: liquidity-on-the-wrong-rail, where value exists but is unusable by treasury when it matters.
Closed-Circuit Bank Tokens: Claims That Never Leave the Bank
A tokenised deposit, such as HSBC or JPMorgan’s deposit tokens, behaves differently in every meaningful way.
It is commercial-bank money expressed on a permissioned, closed-circuit ledger. Only existing clients (external and internal) can hold or transfer it, so all movements remain within the bank’s balance sheet. These deposit tokens can pay interest, potentially making them more attractive to corporate and institutional clients.
There is no on-ramping liquidity loss. Minting and burning are internal ledger transitions. Redemption is simply reposting the deposit to the core ledger. The liability never leaves the bank.
Liquidity becomes relevant only when a client pushes the underlying fiat out of the bank via Fedwire, CHIPS, or other RTGS rails. The risks here are operational and synchronisation-based, not systemic. Tokenised deposits preserve the deposit base and avoid Silvergate-style timing gaps.
Wholesale CBDCs: The Finality Rail
Wholesale CBDCs behave differently again. They are central-bank liabilities offering the settlement finality of high-value payment systems. Their importance is intraday. They strengthen rather than loosen liquidity discipline by enforcing real-time settlement windows.
These distinctions are not academic. They shape liquidity availability, timing mismatches, and the nature of intraday risk across the institution.
The Real Disruption: A Multi-Rail Liquidity World
Digital settlement does not replace existing systems. It layers on top of them. Banks now operate across at least five liquidity environments:
RTGS systems
Instant-payment networks
Internal ledgers
Tokenised-deposit platforms
Public blockchains
Each rail runs on its own timetable. Each provides different visibility. Each generates its own pressure points.
A bank may appear fully funded on its RTGS dashboard while simultaneously being exposed to a stablecoin redemption queue or continuous settlement activity on a tokenised-deposit rail long after traditional cut-offs. What once functioned as a single liquidity ecosystem is transitioning into a multi-pronged system with more limited fungibility.
This fragmentation mirrors the conditions that led to Silvergate’s downfall. The bank did not fail because its assets were poor. It failed because its liabilities moved faster than it could raise liquidity. Outflows were real-time; inflows were not. Open stablecoins replicate this timing mismatch precisely. Tokenised deposits do not.
Operational and Liquidity Risk in Stablecoin Settlement
Stablecoin settlement introduces a suite of risks that treasurers must now integrate into intraday and weekend liquidity management.
Operational risk arises because stablecoins depend on external infrastructures that do not operate at RTGS-grade reliability: blockchain networks, smart contracts, issuer redemption processing, wallet infrastructure, and exchanges.
Liquidity timing risk emerges because minting removes deposits instantly, while redemption is delayed. Over weekends, a bank may hold a superficially strong liquidity position while hundreds of millions sit on-chain and are unusable.
Behavioural risk stems from the nature of on-chain flows: high velocity, clustered behaviour, whale-driven transfers, and flows responding to market sentiment rather than payment schedules.
Inter-rail dependency risk arises when delays or disruptions on one rail (such as stablecoin redemption queues) create funding needs on others (such as RTGS at open).
Usability risk surfaces when liquidity is held on the “wrong rail”, visible on-chain yet unavailable for regulatory buffers, settlement obligations, or margining.
Governance and integration risk persist because most treasury and ALM systems cannot ingest blockchain data or reconcile it in real time.
Together, these risks require a fundamentally different approach to liquidity monitoring, measurement and oversight.
Why Today’s Treasury Systems Can’t Keep Up
Most treasury systems were built for a world of batch payments and predictable settlement windows. They were not designed to monitor liquidity that moves continuously across incompatible rails. They cannot reconcile tokenised or public-chain activity with fiat positions. They cannot detect behavioural clusters or forecast timing mismatches.
This leaves treasurers with three critical blind spots:
Behavioural blind spots: Digital flows move according to market sentiment, not payment calendars.
Timing blind spots: Digital rails operate 24/7, while fiat rails remain constrained.
Propagation blind spots: A single event on one rail (“$500m minted at 23:40 Friday”) can cause immediate funding needs on another (“RTGS opening balance shortfall Monday at 07:00”).
Aggregating balances is no longer enough. Treasury requires intelligence: an understanding of why liquidity is moving, where gaps are forming, and how stress is likely to propagate.
The Intelligence Architecture for the Next Era
FNA’s Intelligent Liquidity Optimisation (ILO) framework was designed for this moment.
Using unstructured data and API capabilities, it delivers a unified, real-time view across RTGS, instant payments, tokenised deposits, and public blockchains—but its ultimate power lies in the interpretation of that data.
Using your existing data, even when the data is deemed incomplete or insufficient by other providers, ILO can start delivering benefits.
Using standard basic payment data, supplemented by API or public data (blockchain, SWIFT GPI), it identifies the structural drainers, behavioural clustering, related-party interactions, and emerging timing mismatches, on top of your standard cross-rail and cross-currency balance and flow views.
It models stress propagation across rails and simulates scenarios that legacy TMS systems cannot represent: delayed redemptions, impact of cyberattacks or blockchain outages, cross-rail liquidity surges, bank runs, or the impact of a Friday-night stablecoin forecast and minting on the weekend position.
ILO’sIts optimisation layer transforms insight into action: reducing buffers, minimising intraday credit usage, and sequencing payments more efficiently. Banks using ILO consistently report lower reserve holdings, fewer operational surprises, and earlier action on emerging risks.
In a world where value moves continuously, intelligence drives resilience.
The Strategic Choice Ahead
Stablecoins will not replace fiat. Tokenised deposits will not eliminate RTGS. CBDCs will not make commercial-bank money obsolete. These rails will coexist, and liquidity will flow between them according to incentives, behaviour, and timing.
The question is no longer whether digital settlement matters. It does. The real question is whether banks are equipped to manage liquidity across multiple rails that operate on incompatible timetables and with different rules.
Banks that move early will price liquidity more accurately, reduce buffers, and strengthen resilience. Those that wait will see risk migrate to the edges of visibility—precisely where legacy systems struggle.
As liquidity fragments across rails, intelligence—not basic visibility—becomes the differentiator. Multi-rail liquidity management will soon become a supervisory expectation. Platforms such as FNA’s ILO are becoming essential, not as replacements for existing systems but as the intelligence layer that makes multi-rail liquidity safe, predictable, and confidently deployed.
Learn more: Fna.fi/ILO
