At the same time, traditional finance is undergoing a technological transformation for which it is ill-prepared. Advances that were formerly spear-tip, such as instant payments and tokenized assets, are no longer fringe innovations. They are increasingly becoming expectations.
Nowhere is this truer than with stablecoin payments. But will the reality of digital asset innovation ever be able to match its long-standing hype?
“Innovation must solve a problem, not just be a whiz-bang technology,” Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS and an expert in payments innovation and the connected economy, said in a discussion with Konstantin Anissimov, newly appointed CEO at Currency.com.
Webster’s words set the tone for a conversation that veered beyond typical FinTech rhetoric and into the foundational strategies needed to make decentralized finance both scalable and secure.
“There’s been a big shift in terms of adoption of stablecoin payments that is being driven by uncertainty in geopolitics,” Anissimov said. “I am personally seeing a big increase of small to medium enterprises utilizing stablecoin payments because banking rails are harder and harder to use.”
Digital assets are no longer a speculative play for those who embrace risk, but a necessary tool for navigating a fragmented financial world, he said.
“If the payment gets there quicker, faster, in a more definitive way, then a lot of these businesses are limited less in their working capital requirements,” Anissimov said. “The faster the payment, the more goods they can buy.”
Seamless, Secure and Invisible
The appeal of digital assets such as stablecoin payments is simple in theory. Traditional financial rails are slow, opaque and costly. By contrast, blockchain-based platforms offer real-time settlement, automated compliance checks and programmable financial logic — all within a single digital ecosystem.
Yet challenges remain. Regulatory clarity is still lacking in key jurisdictions, and concerns over cybersecurity and systemic risk persist.
Webster said trust is important.
“Consumers don’t want to know how the car is built,” she said. “They just want to drive it and have a great experience. They have to trust it, but they don’t need to understand it.”
Trust is non-negotiable, especially when people’s money is at stake, Anissimov agreed.
“The pace at which blockchain technology is advancing is immense… it’s one of those industries where the technology is advancing faster than the bad actors trying to break it,” he said.
“We have 30 money transmitter licenses,” he added. “These are deep audits. The regulators know how to distinguish the good from the bad. The danger is regulatory arbitrage, where companies pretend to be one thing but are really doing another. But that’s much less common after FTX.”
As traditional finance and global trade continue to face pressure from macroeconomic forces and technological disruption, the convergence around digital infrastructure may not just be inevitable. Per the industry’s proponents, it may be the safest path forward.
Standards, White Glove Service and the Road Ahead
When economic certainty is hard to come by, digital asset platforms become less of a gamble and more of a foundation. Anissimov said he sees Currency.com as a complement to traditional banks rather than a competitor.
“Without banks, none of this works,” he said. “We need their stability. They may want to leverage our tech; we want to leverage their soundness and access to capital.”
Webster agreed while also highlighting the inherent friction in expecting traditional banks — governed by regulators and built for resilience — to “move fast and break things.”
At the same time, with more than 70% of high-net-worth individuals reportedly allocating at least some wealth to digital assets, the race is on to cater to their unique expectations. For its part, Currency.com is betting on a new kind of offering, a white-glove service tailored for affluent investors in the $2 million to $20 million range — those too large for retail solutions but too small for institutional platforms.
“These clients are underserved,” Anissimov said. “Retail platforms are tailored toward a small check retail customer base. The private sector [for high-net-worth clients] is more of a bolt-on.”
What Currency.com offers instead is a dedicated platform with personalized account management, 24/7 support, and a service design philosophy more akin to private banking than to a cryptocurrency exchange. This isn’t just customer service; it’s infrastructure-level differentiation.
“Because each client can bring more revenue, more lifetime value, we can also spend more time with them to study them better, to understand their needs,” Anissimov said.
While the white-glove service might be the first visible step, Anissimov said he has set his sights further.
“The longer-term vision is actually to build a platform that’s a whole ecosystem of products — banking, finance and investing,” he said. “We believe that the digitization of the financial sector is inevitable.”
A key ingredient? Artificial intelligence.
“I am a big proponent of no-code or low-code solutions for safety-critical applications,” Anissimov said. “If you can deliver products 50 times faster than your competitors, it doesn’t matter how big they are.”
This velocity will transform compliance, too, he said.
“At some point, we’ll be able to automate regulatory flows,” he said. “The moment a non-compliance happens, it gets identified. AI proposes a remediation plan. It might sound farfetched, but at the pace things are going, it could happen in five years.”
The goal is payments that just need biometric data, with no phones or cards required.
“We think we’re living in the future using Apple Pay, but you still need your phone,” he said. “What if you don’t? We’re building for that world.”
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