The rise of both digital currencies and programmable payments are poised to redefine where and how money flows. Banks will need to move from reacting to these disruptions to actively shaping how they work.
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Since the House of Medici days, money has done one thing: Move from account to account, passively, reactively, waiting for human instruction. From shells and coins to gold, paper, and now digital entries, the logic behind how money is stored and moved has barely changed.
When today’s banks built their early technology stacks, they inherited this same mindset: move value from bank A to bank B and keep civilization running for another day.
But the rise of both digital currencies and programmable payments are poised to redefine where and how money flows.
Putting aside the hype, these shifts represent both a risk and an opportunity for banks. The risk of being bypassed in the future of payments, but the opportunity to make payments smarter and have money work for customers in real-time. To come out ahead, banks will need to move from reacting to these disruptions to actively shaping how they work.
Digital Currencies Go Mainstream
The undeniable uptick in use and interest in digital currencies is a bellwether for how the nature of money is changing. With the passage of the GENIUS Act in the U.S., stablecoins are now front and center.
The numbers show why. The total transaction volume of stablecoins reached $51 trillion over the last year, and while trading drove the vast majority of that, $10.7 trillion was tied to payments. Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, is now the eighteenth-largest holder of US Treasuries, surpassing major economies like Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.
Based on Accenture’s analysis, if digital currencies continue to gain traction, up to $13 trillion in transaction value could shift to alternative payment methods by 2030, putting billions in traditional payment fees at risk for banks if they stay flat-footed.
From Programmable Payments to Agentic
Meanwhile, programmable money is already reshaping treasury functions. Instead of waiting for approval, payments are executed automatically when conditions are met. For example, Siemens Treasury partnered with J.P. Morgan Payments to automate liquidity transfers using virtual accounts, APIs and programmable rules, achieving fewer bank accounts, less manual work, and millions in savings.
Agentic represents the next stage for money. Intelligent agents can act on behalf of users, predicting needs and optimizing flows across borders, currencies and suppliers. For corporates, this means the ability to attach rules to money and enable the money itself to schedule payments, optimize FX timing, and capture early payment discounts. For consumers, it means smart shopping assistants that search, compare, and buy at the best price, around the clock.
Accenture’s recent Future of Money research shows that 57% of corporates believe agentic payments will become mainstream within three years, and, concerningly for banks, these corporates trust big tech firms (64%) almost as much as banks (67%) to deliver secure agentic payments.
And big techs, along with fintechs, are moving at full speed.
PayPal has launched a stablecoin and is experimenting with agentic purchasing. Amazon is testing “Buy for Me” agents that can shop on third-party sites without leaving its app. Circle is partnering with Arf to provide real-time liquidity for cross-border payments using USDC, without prefunding. In these models, banks may never touch the transaction.
The Banker’s Dilemma
The strategic question for banks is whether they will sit at the center of this new world or be reduced to utilities that process payments while others capture the relationship and the value (running the pipes while others own the taps).
Seven in ten banks surveyed in the Future of Money research see offering digital currencies as a moderate to high challenge, yet the demand is already here: 69% of corporate clients want digital currency wallets.
The leaders will be those who move now – experimenting and learning in real-time while the industry writes the rules. Here’s what banks should do:
- First, define a digital currency strategy. Banks can be issuers, custodians or facilitators, but they don’t need to be all three. For example, Western Union recently announced plans to create its own stablecoin to stay competitive in cross-border payments.
- Second, start building the supporting tech now. It’s difficult to run smart money on brittle legacy systems or batch-based architectures. Banks will need to develop the capability to connect to distributed ledgers and resilient APIs that orchestrate money across multiple networks.
- Third, tune in to customer needs. Banks can build wallets, tokenized savings and programmable products, then adjust based on what customers actually use.
- Fourth, prepare for agentic payments. Banks should invest in identity, fraud detection and intent verification as intelligent routing, timing optimization and real-time decision-making become table stakes. With money moving autonomously, trust becomes the differentiator and one of the few structural advantages banks still hold.
It’s still early, but this topic belongs on every bank board’s agenda. Smart money will change how value is stored, how it moves, and who controls that movement. For centuries, money has waited for us. Soon, it won’t. The question is whether banks will shape that future or watch it happen from the sidelines.
