Stable Talk, Deposits That Walk, What Revolut Should Hawk

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of What’s Going On in Banking. I’m Ron Shevlin, Cornerstone’s chief research officer, and with me, of course, is our co-host Stacey Bryant.

Stacey, how are you doing?

I’m doing great.

We’re recording this on a Friday, and I’ve been traveling, so it is always good to be home before the weekend.

Before we get there, though, I want to mention where I was this week: Roanoke, Virginia.

The New Yorker and Latina in me has to say that very slowly.

I was there for the Virginia and Maryland Bankers Association Connect and Protect Conference, which brings together people from operations, HR, technology, marketing, and other management functions.

And, surprise, a major topic was AI.

Thank you to the associations for having me keynote a session on how community banks are competing in the world of AI today.

I talked about some of the broader market forces, including Chime, SoFi, and the fact that only about 29% of respondents in the What’s Going On in Banking survey identified crypto providers as a threat.

I also brought up MrBeast and his acquisition of Step.

Here is someone without decades of banking experience who has entered financial services with an enormous audience and cultural reach.

The point was not only to scare people with competitive threats. It was to show that what got a community bank to 2026 will not automatically take it through the next several years.

We talked about fintech partnerships, organizational culture, and how banks need to define the problem before they start looking for an AI solution.

I also covered data strategy and practical onboarding use cases.

One thing struck me while I was updating the presentation.

Every time I speak about AI, I try to add new examples and make the deck feel current.

But I keep coming back to the same cultural problem.

A lot of community banks and credit unions are still asking the foundational questions: How do we apply this? Where do we begin? How do we get the organization comfortable with it?

So even as the technology changes quickly, the cultural barrier remains stubbornly familiar.

And then, Mr. Ron Shevlin, you came to my neck of the woods in New York City for American Banker’s On Chain conference near Grand Central.

You moderated a fireside chat with Artem Korniyenko from Citi’s digital-assets team.

It was great seeing you there.

How was the conference for you?

Artem was definitely the star of our session. He knows the digital-assets space inside and out.

I mainly wanted to attend the conference for my own education.

I managed to get myself a fireside-chat slot, which got me in the door, so thank you to American Banker for that.

But I really went because I felt like I needed a deeper understanding of the broader tokenization landscape.

People often reduce this conversation to stablecoins or tokenized deposits.

Those are important, but the institutional side is much bigger.

Trading, wealth management, securities, collateral, settlement, and other capital-markets use cases are all part of the story.

Several sessions dealt with areas far outside retail and commercial banking, and that was eye-opening.

The conference also reinforced something I was already thinking.

There are a lot of voices telling community banks, regional banks, and credit unions, “You don’t need to do anything about this right now. Sit it out for a year or two and see what happens.”

I think that advice is wrong.

I wrote about this recently in the FinTech Snark Tank.

If you work at a midsize bank, I agree that issuing your own stablecoin may make absolutely no sense today.

But the question is not only what your institution wants to offer.

It is what your customers are already doing.

If you have businesses operating across borders, dealing with complex treasury flows, or moving money through newer channels, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and broader tokenization can affect them whether or not the bank is enthusiastic about it.

So I’m increasingly frustrated with people saying, “There’s no use case for community banks.”

Sometimes they do not see the use case because they are looking only at the bank’s existing product menu instead of the customer’s changing financial activity.

I was thinking the same thing at the conference.

And when you put Ron Shevlin and Stacey Bryant in the same event, we basically create a private text-message version of What’s Going On in Banking all day.

I posted a recap on LinkedIn afterward, and one question kept coming up for me: where were the community bankers?

The conference app let us see who was attending.

Very generously, maybe 10% of the audience came from community banks or credit unions. I met only one credit-union attendee.

That worries me.

If stablecoins and tokenization now belong in strategic planning, community institutions need to be in the room while these ecosystems are forming.

Another question I kept asking was what happens when tokenization compresses long chains of fee income.

If a process that currently requires multiple intermediaries and fees collapses into one or two steps, what happens to the revenue those intermediaries currently earn?

That sounds a lot like the AI conversation.

The technology is one thing. The cultural mindset and education gap are another.

When executives do not understand the topic, it falls down the priority list.

That brings us to some very recent news: Mastercard announced it is acquiring BVNK, a stablecoin-infrastructure company, for roughly $1.8 billion.

To me, the old payments highway just bought a lane into a new form of transportation because it knows traffic is about to change.

I boiled the deal down into a few implications for banks and credit unions.

First, stablecoins are moving into the infrastructure layer of mainstream payments. They are no longer merely a crypto side project.

If your strategy slide still says, “We are monitoring stablecoin developments,” the acquisition itself is one of those developments.

Second, a major payments partner is wiring on-chain capabilities into its network while some institutions are still debating incremental changes to existing payment limits.

Third, BVNK gives Mastercard more ability to move value across fiat currencies, stablecoins, blockchains, and countries.

If a bank does not understand how that could affect wires, foreign exchange, and commercial payments, it may be volunteering future fee income.

And finally, Mastercard’s message to financial institutions may effectively become, “Don’t worry. We will handle the difficult stablecoin infrastructure for you.”

That can be useful, but if a bank accepts that without developing a strategy of its own, it risks outsourcing the future of its payments plumbing.

If an examiner, client, or board asks, “What is your stablecoin and tokenized-deposit strategy?” and the answer is “Mastercard has us covered,” that sounds less like a strategy and more like a confession.

There is a lot there.

Let me look at it through the eyes of a community financial institution.

I see at least three perspectives.

The optimistic view is that Mastercard is building the rails for smaller institutions, so they do not have to build the infrastructure themselves.

That is potentially positive.

There may also be a competitive angle between Mastercard and Visa. If Mastercard can offer capabilities Visa does not yet match, it could use stablecoin infrastructure to win more issuing relationships.

The realistic view is that integration will take time.

Mastercard is not going to acquire BVNK and have a seamless stablecoin platform embedded across thousands of bank relationships next quarter.

This could take two, three, or four years.

So a bank cannot say, “We’ll simply wait for Mastercard.”

Even if the long-term answer is to use Mastercard’s infrastructure, the institution still needs a near-term strategy, education plan, customer analysis, and capability roadmap.

Then there is the pessimistic view.

Mastercard is not building only for community banks.

BVNK also serves or could serve fintechs, merchants, crypto platforms, and companies competing directly with traditional financial institutions.

So the same acquisition that gives banks new capabilities also strengthens the infrastructure available to their competitors.

If you are Mastercard, who gets the development priority: a giant fintech or a very small community bank?

That is worth thinking about.

There is one encouraging point in the announcement.

Mastercard’s leadership has said it expects most financial institutions, over time, to offer some form of digital-currency services.

That tells me Mastercard itself expects this to reach well beyond the largest banks.

Then there is a fourth perspective.

Around the same time, Mastercard announced it was unwinding a previous acquisition of Nets, which it had bought years earlier for significantly more than BVNK.

So I have questions.

Is Mastercard exiting that business because it believes the future is more on-chain?

Was the integration difficult? Did the economics disappoint?

Could the same thing happen with BVNK three or four years from now if adoption is slower than expected or integration proves more difficult?

And remember the old Visa-Plaid situation, when one theory was that a network could neutralize a threat by acquiring it.

I do not claim to know the answer. I just think there are several strategic possibilities underneath a simple acquisition headline.

I like that last point.

Maybe Mastercard is saying, “If we cannot ignore this new rail, we should own part of it early.”

And from BVNK’s perspective, there is another question.

If they believed they could become as large as Mastercard or Visa independently, why sell for $1.8 billion now?

Maybe the answer is that selling now is the strategically rational outcome.

Investors want a return. Founders may prefer a very large exit today to a much riskier path toward becoming a $50 billion or $75 billion standalone company.

Exactly.

So I do not necessarily see it as “if you can’t beat them, join them” from either side.

Mastercard may be buying capability and optionality.

BVNK may be taking an attractive exit and gaining distribution.

And because banking is highly regulated, I also want to retire the word “dabble.”

Banks cannot casually dabble in money movement or digital-asset infrastructure.

They can experiment, build controlled pilots, and educate themselves, but they have to do it deliberately.

Fair enough. No more dabbling. We’ll call it stablecoin exploration.

Stable talk.

Stable talk. I like it.

Have we beaten this topic to death?

I think so. We have time for one more.

Another major foreign fintech is trying to enter the U.S.: Revolut.

We talked recently about Nubank from Brazil seeking a U.S. charter, and now Revolut has announced record earnings and strong international growth while pursuing a U.S. banking charter.

I have a lot of thoughts, but I want you to go first.

My first reaction is that Revolut risks trying to be everything to everyone.

In Europe, it is essentially a financial super app.

There are so many products and features that I think of it as the Cheesecake Factory menu of banking.

Too many choices.

I prefer In-N-Out Burger or Hillstone. Give me a smaller menu where I know what you do and you do it consistently well.

That is how I think about successful community institutions too.

Citizens Bank of Edmond under Jill Castilla has created very specific products for defined groups, including military recruits.

Chime has a clear target segment and a model designed around it.

So when I looked at Revolut’s U.S. plans, my main question was: who exactly is the segment?

Yes, they have a super app. But what are they doubling down on?

First, I hope Hillstone is paying us for this level of promotion.

Second, you have done nothing to prove me wrong. You just repeated the central point I made in my article.

For Revolut to succeed in the U.S., it needs to own a segment.

Today it already has close to a million U.S. customers, many using it for international payments and related services.

But if it wants to reach Chime-level scale, cross-border remittances alone are probably not enough.

A bank charter could give Revolut a major advantage over Chime in one area: lending.

It could identify a niche, fund loans directly, and build more of the economics inside the bank.

The fintech world is already overflowing with people saying, “Revolut is coming. Traditional banks are doomed.”

We have heard that story too many times.

N26 and Monzo both came to the U.S. with similar optimism.

Years ago, I interviewed their U.S. leaders separately and asked the same question: what is fundamentally wrong with U.S. banking that you are going to fix?

Both answers were some version of, “The U.S. digital-banking experience is terrible, and ours is better.”

That was not a strong enough thesis.

There are plenty of excellent digital-banking experiences in the U.S.

A better mobile interface alone is not enough to win massive market share.

Revolut is different because it has enormous global scale, funding, and a strong product set.

But Americans do not care that it has tens of millions of customers somewhere else. That does not automatically create a reason to switch.

Maybe the next generation changes that.

Millennials, Gen X, and baby boomers may prefer using multiple specialized apps and institutions.

Gen Z may eventually say, “I want one super app.”

If so, Revolut could be well positioned.

But that would be a long-term play.

And customer service matters.

Revolut has faced criticism in other markets for service quality. U.S. consumers are not going to tolerate a weak support experience simply because the app is slick.

So I am not writing them off. I am saying the challenge is real.

I tried to prove you wrong by looking at the roughly 900,000 U.S. accounts and figuring out exactly who those customers are, but I could not find a clean segmentation.

A few episodes ago we talked about Revolut testing in-person acquisition in New York City subway stations with free transit rides.

I would love to know how that campaign actually performed.

There are huge numbers of commuters across socioeconomic groups using the subway, so perhaps it taught Revolut something useful about the U.S. audience.

I also think about Nubank and how these companies are testing their way into the market.

And then there is another generational question.

Some Gen Z consumers I know use Wealthfront because they want a single view of checking, savings, investments, retirement, and other accounts.

That is not exactly a super app, but it reflects the desire to see everything in one place.

I am an elder millennial. I was raised to shop around. Buy one thing at Costco, another at the supermarket, another somewhere else because the price is better.

The next generation may value convenience more than optimization and prefer one provider or one interface even if it costs a little more.

I’m older than an elder millennial, and I’ll make an even more radical prediction.

Five or 10 years from now, maybe there is no application.

The app itself could become a foreign concept.

I could simply ask Claude, “Show me all my accounts. Pull everything together. Tell me what I have.”

I do not necessarily need Wealthfront or Revolut to be my super app because the AI model becomes the interface.

Then, when I want something done, I tell my AI agent to move money, open something, or make a payment.

The agent executes across the underlying providers.

Maybe the super-app concept itself is eventually disrupted by AI.

That is you, though. We cannot assume the whole world behaves like Ron Shevlin.

Fair.

The important thing is to keep watching consumer behavior. Mastercard, Visa, fintechs, banks, and everyone else are studying these patterns and building around them.

We will see whether the younger generation revolts with Revolut.

I think we have stretched this one long enough.

Stacey, thanks for your perspective on everything today.

And thanks to everybody listening. We hope to see you on another episode of What’s Going On in Banking.

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