Capital Can Now Move as Fast as Global Business Does

The gap between how fast business moves and how fast capital follows is finally closing. Stablecoins and other digital rails now let treasury access and redeploy cash in near real-time, twenty-four hours a day, regardless of banking hours or time zone.

That capability matters because the infrastructure most cross-border transactions still run on has not kept pace. Typical cross-border payments take one to five business days to settle, and only 40% of international business-to-business transactions settle within one working day. The result is capital sitting idle exactly when a business needs it most.

This tension sits at the centre of treasury priorities right now. KPMG’s 2025 Global Treasury Survey found cash management and liquidity planning to be a top concern for treasury departments, with “optimising working capital management” named as a measure currently being taken to improve performance.

Treasury teams are responding by looking at how digital rails can support those priorities. Stablecoins, for example, enable near real-time settlement and 24/7 trading hours, letting treasury access and redeploy cash near-instantly. That reduces the capital tied up in transit and supports stronger liquidity management.

The growing gap between commerce and capital movement

Global finance has undergone real change in recent years, with the CLARITY and GENIUS Acts signalling greater confidence in digital assets like stablecoins. DTCC’s recent real-world trial of tokenised securities settlement points in the same direction, testing what digital rails could mean for moving and clearing capital.

Adoption of the infrastructure behind digital asset operations has not kept pace with that confidence. 48% of firms cite the ability to move capital quickly as one of the most important components of liquidity management, and the gap between business activity and capital movement is becoming harder to ignore.

Most global enterprises still rely on SWIFT and correspondent banking networks to move funds across borders. Those networks were not built for a business that trades and settles at digital speed, and the gap shows: capital can sit in transit for days after a deal is agreed, lodged across multiple accounts while currency conversion, AML and KYC checks run their course. That is capital a treasury team cannot deploy exactly when it is needed.

“Those networks were not built for a business that trades and settles at digital speed, and the gap shows: capital can sit in transit for days after a deal is agreed”

From trapped capital to real-time liquidity

Liquidity management is about more than speed. It is also about location: capital spread across banks, currencies and jurisdictions is hard to redeploy on demand, which leaves firms holding excess liquidity in one market while another market needs it.

As organisations scale, fragmented liquidity becomes a bigger constraint on capital and operational efficiency, and stablecoins address that directly. Operating around the clock and giving treasury a clear, real-time record of where assets are, they make it far easier to access and deploy capital wherever it is needed.

The next phase of treasury management

Treasury teams are now expected to do more than safeguard cash. They are expected to access, deploy, and account for capital across global operations, and digital payments infrastructure is becoming a key part of how that gets done. That has always meant balancing safeguarding capital with putting it to work; digital rails simply make that trade-off less binary than it used to be.

Compliance uncertainty remains a real barrier: 77% of US CFOs cite it as a reason they have not yet adopted stablecoins for treasury functions. That concern is easing as frameworks such as MiCA and the GENIUS Act mature, and as infrastructure providers build compliance tooling that supports, rather than replaces, a business’s own regulatory obligations. It is a barrier worth working through, not one that has disappeared.

The gap between how fast business moves and how fast capital follows is only becoming more expensive to ignore. Treasury teams that close it first will spend less time waiting on funds and more time deploying them where the business actually needs them.