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Banking Circle Receives CASP License and Launches Fiat–To-Stablecoin Settlement Service

On Monday, Banking Circle launched a fiat-stablecoin settlement service for its institutional clients, allowing them to send and receive stablecoins 24/7 through the bank’s existing infrastructure.

Stablecoin settlement, banked: On Monday, Banking Circle launched a fiat-stablecoin settlement service for its institutional clients, allowing them to send and receive stablecoins 24/7 through the bank’s existing infrastructure. The launch follows the Luxembourg-based bank’s CASP license from the CSSF, granted on April 15.

  • The second EU credit institution: Banking Circle is one of Europe’s leading payment infrastructure providers, moving €1.5 trillion in annual flows for over 700 institutional clients across cross-border and instant payments. With the launch, it now has become the second EU credit institution to offer a fiat-to-stablecoin settlement service, following Netherlands-based ClearBank, which announced its own MiCA-approved service supporting EURC and USDC on- and off-ramps three weeks earlier.

Why it matters: Most European banks today still cannot let their clients send or receive stablecoins inside a regulated environment. Two specialist credit institutions launching such a service within three weeks of each other is the first sign that this gap is starting to close at the payment-infrastructure layer of the banking sector, ahead of the larger retail and universal banks.

  • “In 2025, integrating stablecoins ranked among the top three strategic priorities for our clients. The interest in this service comes primarily from traditional fintechs rather than crypto-native players,” said Kirit Bhatia, Chief Digital Officer at Banking Circle, to Blockstories. “They want cross-border transfers settled in minutes, not days, and greater agility in their treasury management.”

Two kinds of clients: The demand identified by Banking Circle splits into two distinct groups. Both want what existing fiat rails cannot give them: settlement in minutes, inside a regulated environment.

  1. The first group is merchant acquirers, whose card-network funds enter transit on a Friday and do not arrive until Tuesday, leaving merchants waiting through the weekend on volumes they have already earned.

  2. The second group is the corporate treasurers running those payment companies, who face the same delays internally when moving liquidity between their own subsidiaries across jurisdictions.

The credit mechanic: For merchant acquirers, Banking Circle solves the weekend wait by minting a stablecoin and pushing it to the merchant in minutes, against either liquidity the merchant already holds with the bank or a credit line extended on the funds already in transit from the card network. The stablecoins themselves are sourced directly from issuers like Circle and Paxos or through market makers Banking Circle already works with. When the fiat finally arrives days later, it closes the position.

  • Benefits of being a bank: The mechanic only works because Banking Circle is a credit institution. It can lend against incoming receivables in a way a non-bank payments provider cannot, which is what makes minting against in-transit funds operationally viable.

The closed loop on the way back: A similar logic applies in the other direction, when a fintech wants to convert stablecoins back into fiat. The counterparty providing the fiat liquidity is typically a market maker or stablecoin issuer, and many of those firms already hold accounts at Banking Circle, which means the conversion often happens entirely within the bank’s books rather than across separate institutions.

  • T+0 in practice: The result is T+0 settlement: the cash is immediately available in the client's Banking Circle account and routable out via SWIFT, wire transfer, SEPA Instant, or Banking Circle's internal settlement network without leaving the platform.

End-to-end automation: What ties both flows together is that neither requires a human in the loop. The service is delivered through Banking Circle’s existing API, used today by all 700+ clients, with a handful of additional endpoints for stablecoin functionality.

Rollout plan: The first live transaction is targeted for the end of June 2026, with the service then rolled out progressively on a flow-by-flow basis: same-currency conversions first, followed by cross-currency conversions in Q3 and Q4. Banking Circle is also pursuing CASP-equivalent licenses in jurisdictions outside Europe to expand global access for its clients.

  • “Even with a modest conversion of the pipeline, within 9 to 12 months, we could be processing between $500 million and $1 billion in monthly inflows,” Bhatia said. “As of today, we support USDC from Circle and USDG from Paxos, as well as our euro stablecoin EURI. But the focus in the coming months will be on adding more regulated stablecoins to our offering, as well as expanding to other networks beyond Ethereum.”

Tony McLaughlin is the founder and CEO of Ubyx, a global acceptance network designed to make stablecoins as easy to receive and settle as traditional payment instruments.

Why should large banks integrate fiat-stablecoin settlement, and do current volumes already justify the investment?

The commercial case is simple: stablecoins create new fee and FX revenue from flows that currently bypass banks. For decades, banks earned FX spreads when they sold and cashed traveller's checks at the counter, and no one saw them as a threat. Stablecoins are the same instrument in a new form. Banks that capture and convert these flows will earn the FX; those that don't will lose that revenue to competitors.

Skeptics who point to today's volumes should remember the credit card market. In the late 1960s, BankAmericard had only just begun licensing beyond Bank of America, and the international rollout under different brand names — Barclaycard, Carte Bleue, Chargex, Sumitomo — was still in its infancy. Nobody imagined that around 14,500 financial institutions worldwide would one day issue Visa cards, fully interoperable across more than 200 countries and territories. We solved the many-to-many problem for checks, for ACH, for cards. We will solve it for tokenized money. Banks that position themselves now will not need to retrofit under pressure when that moment arrives.

More importantly, by offering wallets that allow customers to receive stablecoins and tokenized deposits, banks equip themselves with the infrastructure needed to support future digital asset use cases. Central banks will also favor this approach: if USD stablecoins are to circulate in Europe, regulators are likely to prefer that they sit within regulated financial institutions rather than in self-custody wallets.