Nearly three-quarters of surveyed payments professionals (72%) say their bank is actively planning, building, piloting or operating capabilities to issue its own payment stablecoin, but only one in ten say those capabilities are live in production, according to .
The report, “Are banks actually ready for digital money?”, surveyed 300 senior payments professionals across Europe, the UK and the US, and was published on 16 September 2026. the same figures the same day.
The figures are self-reported: they reflect what surveyed professionals say is true of their own institution, not an independent audit of which banks actually have stablecoin products live. RedCompass Labs has not disclosed how respondents were recruited, and as a vendor selling payments modernisation services, its client and contact base plausibly skews towards banks already engaged with digital-asset infrastructure work rather than a random cross-section of the industry.
The infrastructure gap behind the headline number
More than half of respondents (57%) expect their organisation to build new infrastructure or materially upgrade existing systems to support stablecoins or tokenised deposits. Most banks (80%) plan to use AI agents to analyse, develop and test those system changes, rather than run the work entirely through traditional development teams.
Santhosh Kumar, partner and head of payments at RedCompass Labs, said:
“Banks clearly believe stablecoins are moving into the mainstream, but most are still some distance from being ready to support them at scale. Moving to live payments means reworking the infrastructure, controls, and operations behind the transaction.” He added that AI agents “can accelerate the necessary system changes, but banks still need to decide where they want to compete and what they are willing to outsource.”
What banks stand to gain, and risk, moving flows
Banks in the survey expect the shift to have real commercial consequences on both sides of their balance sheet. Some 72% expect an average of 8% of their existing payment flows to move onto digital-asset rails, a proportion that would represent a meaningful share of a cross-border payments market .
At the same time, 40% of banks expect stablecoins to cause deposit outflows over the next three to five years, though only 5% expect that impact to be significant to their business. Asked what worries them most about failing to support stablecoins or tokenised deposits within three years, banks cited the cost of running parallel legacy and digital systems (26%), deposit outflows to digital-money alternatives (21%), dependence on third-party infrastructure (18%), and losing corporate payments clients, volumes or revenue (17% each).
Where banks expect to start, and what is holding them back
Nearly a third of respondents (31%) expect cross-border settlement to be their institution’s first real interaction with stablecoins, ahead of domestic payments use cases. Regulatory uncertainty is the leading obstacle to adoption or scale, cited by 35% of respondents, followed by integration complexity (32%) and reserve and liquidity concerns (31%).
Beyond issuing stablecoins directly, 60% of banks are building or already offer treasury, foreign exchange and liquidity services for digital assets, and more than half are developing distribution, embedded payments, on and off ramps, or custody and reserve management services around them.
The UK’s head start
UK respondents reported markedly faster progress than the global average: 20% have their own stablecoin capabilities live in production and 22% are live using third-party stablecoins, roughly double the rates reported across the full survey sample.
Why it matters
RedCompass Labs sells payments modernisation and infrastructure services to banks, giving it a direct commercial interest in banks concluding they need outside help to close the readiness gap this survey describes. That is a relevant detail for readers weighing how much weight to put on the report’s framing.
What’s next
Whether the 10% of banks already live in production pull further ahead of the 62% still only planning or piloting, rather than the group converging, is the detail worth watching over the next year.
