Is Europe’s Banking System Ready For Stablecoins? I Went To Barcelona To Find Out
In Brief
At EBC Barcelona, banks said euro stablecoins await custody and capital rules — while payment firms and consultants, facing €1m MiCA compliance, moved ahead.
On Sept. 17, five people on the main stage of the Palau de Congressos de Catalunya discussed how banks will issue a euro stablecoin. One floor down, around a dozen booths, people discussed how to get a bank account. I came to the European Blockchain Convention to test one hypothesis and found two different conferences.
The hypothesis went like this: a stablecoin integrates faster than any other financial instrument: the token is global from the moment it is minted and does not care where the border is. The banking system is built differently. It is institutional and slow. The regulation between the two is not stitched together: MiCA is solid, the U.S. has its own regime, and the rest of the world is at various stages. So European banks are not ready for stablecoins, and the main brake is international regulation and institutional inertia.
Judging by the announcements, EBC in Barcelona was the right place to test that. The organizer billed it as Europe’s first major event after MiCA came fully into force, promised 80 of the continent’s top 100 banks, and listed speakers from BlackRock, Swift, Citi and Deutsche Bank. CASP licensing, stablecoin issuance and CBDCs were on the agenda.
Ten booths and a full hall
The 12th EBC ran Sept. 16-17 and was noticeably smaller than I expected, and smaller than colleagues who attended last year had described. About 10 booths, a networking area in the middle, and that was where most things happened. The main stage, meanwhile, was full both days. Some attendees said last year was bigger. Others said the smaller format made meetings easier.
There were bankers on the floor, but fewer than the announcements had led me to expect. What I did notice was something I had not seen at European events a year or two ago: a lot of consultants. AML, custody, VASP licensing, compliance in general. Of roughly 100 contacts my colleagues and I collected over two days, banks made up no more than 10% to 15%. Payment providers, card solutions and off-ramps accounted for about a quarter, AML, KYC and security firms for another 15 or so. In my view, the rise of the consultant is a direct consequence of regulation that does not line up across borders: where the rules are not stitched together, people appear who help you walk between them. The sample is skewed. These are media contacts, not a census of the room. But it describes who in Barcelona was looking to talk.
The stablecoin panel: five people on stage
The panel “Stablecoins and FX Automation for a Multi-Currency World” on Sept. 17 had five participants. Moderator Aaron Sanchez of the MiCA Crypto Alliance, an industry group focused on European regulation. Gabriel Lera Campo of BBVA and Immo Garlichs of Deutsche Bank. Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of Qivalis, the euro stablecoin being built by a consortium of 12 European banks that includes BBVA and Deutsche Bank. And Sudeep Mehta, chief operating officer of STBL, a tokenized-assets platform, the only person on stage from outside banking.
For the first 20 minutes I listened and mentally checked boxes. My hypothesis was being stated from the stage almost word for word.
“Stablecoins, like almost any blockchain-based process, are by definition global, straight out of the box,” Sell said. The long-term goal, he said, “has to be some kind of equivalence mechanism” between jurisdictions, and he admitted he did not know what that would look like. “The legislation has to kind of keep up somehow, because the tokens will move and the tokens will be available.”
Sanchez framed the same problem from the regulator’s side: how to let stablecoins from other jurisdictions circulate “without importing unacceptable risk or fragmenting global liquidity.” Lera Campo, a digital assets specialist at BBVA, said he saw two separate problems. For countries with weak currencies, a dollar token can crowd out the local one. For the EU, the issue is the same token being issued by different entities in different countries, “with different regulations and different levels of consumer protection,” which leaves it unclear how well the collateral is protected.
I could have stopped there and declared myself right. But the same panel then took apart the second half of my hypothesis, the part where banks are slow because they are banks.
Not slow. Not built.
Institutional process, committees, years of sign-offs: that was how I explained banks’ caution to myself. The panel described the brake differently. The infrastructure simply is not there yet.
Garlichs, a product manager for digital assets at Deutsche Bank, reduced the banking position to one word: custody. In his telling, custody is the foundation, and only on top of it can a bank add tokenized deposits and stablecoins over time, in whatever mix fits the client. Without the foundation, everything else is an add-on.
Lera Campo named three barriers, none of them about speed. The first is regulatory: how stablecoins count against a bank’s capital, and how differently that is handled from country to country. The second is infrastructure. The third is how much clients actually understand. He also said something banks rarely say out loud: “We are the entities that create credit for everyone, both people and companies, and we are the entities that move money around.” Giving up either function, he added, would be a problem for the financial system.
Mehta added a layer the banks had not touched: what sits underneath the token. “Yield is a function of risk,” he said. Regulators are right to be wary of yield-bearing stablecoins, but he does not see a ban as the answer. “Everybody should be technically entitled to take the risk that they are willing to take, but segregate their yield elements separately.” Treasuries, money market funds and private credit carry different levels of risk under the same dollar on the screen.
The difference between “slow” and “not built” matters. Slowness is cured by time. Missing custody and unclear capital treatment are cured by money, licenses and decisions that have not been made yet. That left the third part of my hypothesis: if banks are not ready, the market waits. For the answer, I went downstairs.
The market is not waiting
While banks build custody, the market around them is already reorganizing. I ran into Lex Karushin, partnerships director at Finsh Trade, in Barcelona. His company runs an OTC desk and trading infrastructure for payment companies and neobanks that need to convert between fiat and crypto. It is hard to imagine a better vantage point for the question of whether the market waits for banks: his clients are the ones who need banking rails, and he lives between those rails and crypto.
What changed in the year since MiCA? “Previously, most payment companies we worked with were registered as VASPs. We mainly handled EUR, USD and GBP flows,” Karushin said. “After MiCA, many companies started moving parts of their operations to other jurisdictions: for example, MSBs in Canada, SRO members in Switzerland, AUSTRAC-registered businesses in Australia, and so on. At the same time, many companies started looking more closely at emerging markets outside the EU. We’ve seen growing demand for African currencies, LATAM currencies, and AED.” To handle that, he said, the company launched what it calls a “stablecoin sandwich”: fiat to stablecoin to fiat.
What is the hardest part of a large fiat-to-crypto trade: liquidity, the bank or compliance? “The most challenging part is compliance,” Karushin said. “With tighter regulation across the market, this part of the business — compliance and AML — has only become more complex.”
The shift is visible from the card side as well. Vladislav Kuznetsov, chief product officer at card provider BananaTech, said most of his clients are still wallets, exchange services and exchanges, but it is clear where they are heading. “Almost all of them are building towards neobanking: account, card, exchange and payments in one app, rather than a card as an add-on to trading.” The second shift, he said, is the banks themselves. “Traditional banks are entering the space. They’re not after a specific region; they want to cover several jurisdictions with one setup: different markets, different requirements, one contract. A year ago we saw far fewer of those requests.”
With Sergiu Frasineanu, co-founder and CEO of compliance platform Detelio, I talked about the thing that had struck me on the floor: where all the consultants came from.
Is demand for compliance work up since MiCA? “Yes, demand is higher, even though relatively few licences have been granted,” Frasineanu said. “MiCA caught a lot of players off guard. Many thought they’d get licensed with a few months of work, without digging into what it requires or what it costs. Now that licences are being issued, it’s obvious regulators are dead serious. To operate in Europe you need everything in place, including DORA and the ICT requirements, which are hard.” Many, he said, assumed a chatbot would write their compliance framework. “It can draft templates. The implementation and the nuance are much harder and usually need outside help. So the consultants on the floor are there for a reason.”
What does it cost a mid-sized VASP? “It’s expensive to get and even more expensive to keep,” he said. By his estimate, a CASP handling about 100,000 transactions a year spends roughly 310,000 to 530,000 euros a year on tooling and compliance staff alone, before the regulator’s annual fee and reporting costs. Getting the license costs about the same again. “All in, you’re looking at close to €1m as a minimum.” How many can afford it? “Fewer than applied. I’d expect consolidation, with smaller players selling or merging into licensed entities rather than carrying this alone.”
Would a bank-run euro stablecoin like Qivalis make banking access easier? “Not really. In the euro market, SEPA is already cheap and fast and covers most fiat needs. Stablecoins are mainly used for cross-border payments, trading, moving money quickly, and increasingly agent payments. That’s why the dollar coins dominate. Euro stablecoins are a fraction of a percent of the market. Retail demand in Europe is low, and Tether choosing not to go MiCA-compliant says a lot.” The part that mattered most for my question came at the end: “It’s bank-issued and distributed through the banks’ own partners, so the compliance gate doesn’t disappear. It stays with the banks. A CASP still has to pass their onboarding to be part of it.”
Not ready, but for a different reason
International regulation is not stitched together, and the banks themselves admit it. There is no equivalence mechanism, and no one on stage volunteered to describe one. On that, I was right.
The brake, though, is not institutional inertia. Banks are missing specific things, custody above all, and clear capital treatment. That is a construction problem, not a timing problem. On that, I was wrong.
And the market is not waiting. While banks pour the foundation, some of their would-be clients have already moved operations to Canada and Switzerland, and those who stayed are paying close to a million euros to get in and up to half a million a year to stay. The compliance MiCA was supposed to simplify has become an industry of its own. That, I did not expect.
So is Europe’s banking system ready for stablecoins? Not quite. But what holds it back is not slowness, as I assumed on the flight to Barcelona, but an unfinished foundation. And that changes the forecast: time alone will not fix this. Money, licenses and the people who did not wait will.
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About The Author
Anatoliy is a Web3 and fintech professional with a background in marketing, business development, and strategic partnerships. As a former CMO and media contributor, he focuses on blockchain, digital finance, and emerging technologies, covering major industry events and sharing insights from the global Web3 ecosystem.
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Anatoliy is a Web3 and fintech professional with a background in marketing, business development, and strategic partnerships. As a former CMO and media contributor, he focuses on blockchain, digital finance, and emerging technologies, covering major industry events and sharing insights from the global Web3 ecosystem.
