How Regulated Stablecoins Are Improving B2B Treasury and Settlement
Teresa Cameron, CEO of Clear Junction
In cross-border business-to-business (B2B) payments, the same problems show up again and again. You often don’t know when a payment is actually complete. A transfer can look ‘sent’ in one system but still be sitting with a correspondent bank or be recalled hours later. Settlement follows local banking hours, and liquidity often sits in the wrong account when it is needed.
When that happens, finance teams spend their time chasing confirmations, fixing breaks and explaining delays to counterparties. They are judged on control and accuracy, not on how modern the rails are supposed to be. Much of this comes from infrastructure built around batch files and cut-off times, not continuous settlement under today’s level of regulatory scrutiny.
Against that backdrop, crypto is starting to be used in a small number of B2B payment and treasury flows. The activity is concentrated in settlement, liquidity management and treasury movements where round-the-clock availability and stronger settlement guarantees bring a clear operational benefit.
The focus is on fiat-backed stablecoins and tokenised bank money – digital representations of cash held with regulated institutions – not speculative assets. In this context, crypto is a way of moving value between supervised counterparties, not a way of taking directional risk. At Clear Junction, we see this most clearly with clients handling time-critical marketplace and payment service provider (PSP) flows, where payments and treasury movements cannot wait for local banking hours.
What matters is simple:
- Can the flow be supervised to the same standard as traditional payments?
- Can it be reconciled and audited cleanly by finance and operations teams?
- Does it reduce operational friction, rather than add a new layer of process?
If the answer is no, the fact that it happens ‘on-chain’ is largely irrelevant.
What’s actually being used
The part of the crypto market that is relevant to B2B finance is narrow. We see most activity today where stablecoins or tokenised fiat are used to settle obligations in corridors that are slow, expensive or awkward on traditional rails, or where payments need to move outside normal banking hours. The funds start as fiat and end as fiat; the chain is just a transport layer in the middle.
Typical patterns are weekend liquidity, end-of-day or intraday sweeps between entities and time-sensitive payouts that cannot wait for the next business day. For example, a payments business supporting a marketplace may have weekend payout obligations. Suppliers expect settlement on Saturday, but local rails are closed and prefunding multiple accounts ties up liquidity. The firm holds safeguarded funds with a regulated provider and uses a fiat-backed token to move value between entities in minutes, then brings the balance back into fiat when banking hours resume
A treasury team may hold safeguarded funds with a regulated provider and use a fiat-backed token to move value quickly between accounts, before bringing the balance back into fiat. Volatile assets do not enter the picture. They do not meet basic treasury requirements around capital preservation and risk.
For these flows to be taken seriously by institutions, two things have to be true. For institutions to treat these flows as ‘treasury-grade’, the instrument needs predictable redemption, clear governance, and disclosures that stand up to scrutiny.. And the way it is issued, moved and redeemed has to plug into existing banking, reconciliation and compliance processes, instead of running as a side experiment. If either of those pieces is missing, volumes stay small and use cases remain marginal.
Compliance as infrastructure
In a supervised environment, crypto flows are built around controls first. The same controls expected for existing account-to-account payments apply here, before and after execution, including:
- KYC and counterparty due diligence
- Sanctions screening
- Transaction monitoring
- Travel-rule data exchange
- Record-keeping and audit trails
In practice, that means counterparties and transactions are screened before funds move, and activity is monitored as it passes across the chain. With the right set-up, whitelists, limits and policy rules can be enforced at the workflow level, reducing reliance on manual review and preventing many non-permitted transactions from executing.. That reduces the dependence on manual review and brings digital asset settlement into line with what regulators already expect from licensed institutions.
Auditability is just as important. Operations and finance teams need to see each movement in a format they can match to their ledgers and reports without becoming blockchain experts. On the operations side, movements should feed into existing ledgers and reconciliation tools with clear exception handling, not separate side spreadsheets. They want clear timestamps, counterparties, values and references that their existing tools can handle. Supervisors will ask for the same information if something is investigated.
For B2B institutions, compliance is the starting point. If a flow cannot be supervised to the same standard as their traditional payments, they will not route meaningful volume through it.
Infrastructure gaps and design risks
Even where the model is sound, there are still gaps in the underlying infrastructure.
FX is the most obvious one. Stablecoins and tokenised fiat can move value, but they do not solve currency conversion. Institutions still need safeguarded fiat on both sides, agreed FX pricing and access to intraday liquidity if they are going to manage currency risk properly. In practice, the crypto rail has to sit on top of a familiar FX and liquidity framework, not try to replace it. Smart contracts can help automate instructions or settlement conditions, but they do not remove the need for a proper FX function or the regulatory framework that sits around it.
Custody, reconciliation and resilience are other pressure points. For a regulated institution, network problems are not just IT noise; they affect clients, cash positions and reporting. Firms want to know who stands behind uptime, how incidents are handled and what a realistic recovery timeline looks like when something breaks. Institutions expect clear SLAs, incident playbooks and realistic recovery times, as they would with any other critical payments infrastructure. Institutions will ask what happens if a counterparty fails mid-flow, if a chain stalls, or if redemption is delayed, and they will want documented playbooks. Chain selection is also a risk decision. On the finance side, most teams now expect on-chain movements to feed into their existing ledgers and reports with sensible exception handling, rather than being tracked inside spreadsheets and manual reconciliations. If those pieces are missing, any speed advantage disappears quickly.
Chain selection is also a risk decision. From an institutional point of view, service levels, governance, upgrade processes and the ability to show operational control matter more than brand or marketing, especially when supervisors ask how this behaves under stress. A chain that behaves unpredictably, or cannot provide a clear operational story, is unlikely to be used for important settlement flows.
Programmability and corridor rollout
Programmable finance becomes useful when it does simple, repeatable jobs well. In B2B payments, that usually means enforcing standard policies: escrow conditions, delivery-versus-payment, supplier or marketplace payouts with clear rules on when funds are released, and triggers for reconciliation or reporting. When set up properly, these patterns reduce manual work, disputes and reprocessing, and they clean up exception queues and lower cost to serve.
Rollout is happening corridor by corridor. For example, we see early adoption in payout-heavy corridors where local rails shut down over weekends and cut-offs, and where redemption back into fiat is operationally straightforward at both ends. The routes that move first usually have three things in place: regulatory clarity, participation from banks or payment institutions, and a business case that justifies the effort. Institutions look at cost to serve, error and dispute rates, and the ease of plugging programmable flows into their existing systems. They do not need every corridor to move to a crypto rail. They need a few corridors to become easier to run, with fewer breaks and fewer surprises.
Where programmable settlement leads to fewer exceptions and a cleaner operational picture, volume tends to grow. But the pace is deliberate. Institutions move only when they are comfortable with supervision, liquidity, unwind scenarios and client impact.
What makes it viable
For regulated institutions, crypto is a piece of infrastructure. Its job is to help settle fiat obligations with clearer rules and better availability, not to introduce new types of risk.
The test is simple: does it keep liquidity moving when banks are closed, does it reduce manual reconciliation work, and does it give a more reliable outcome in corridors where the existing rails are weak? If not, it will be ignored.
Viable set-ups start with safeguarded funds, predictable redemption and a clear regulatory framework. On top of that, they add real-time compliance, predictable settlement behaviour and reporting that finance teams and auditors can work with. If any of those are missing, large institutions will stay with the rails they already know, even if those rails are slower.
The institutions I speak to ask the same basic questions every time: who is responsible if something goes wrong, how is risk managed, and how will this behave under stress? Any crypto-based infrastructure that can answer those questions clearly has a chance to be useful. The rest is noise.