Mastercard has extended its global network to operate around the clock, every day of the year, with settlement in regulated stablecoins. It is a change to the network rather than to the businesses using it, and the question for corporate treasury teams is what, in practice, it alters and what it leaves exactly where it was.
Nigel Brook-Walters, chief revenue officer at CoinPayments, a payments infrastructure business that lets merchants accept more than 40 digital assets across more than 180 countries, answered seven written questions from The Fintech Times. The questions asked him to set out where the gains actually land, with numbers, and where the argument fails.
His first distinction is between optionality and activity. “What changes is optionality, not activity. A treasurer can now move funds outside the Fedwire/CHAPS/SWIFT cut-off window, whether that be Saturday afternoon or Sunday night, rather than parking the decision until Monday.” That is real, he said, for anyone managing intraday liquidity across time zones, particularly around month-end or quarter-end sweeps. What does not change is everything above the rail: the FX decision, the credit approval and the treasury policy that governs whether liquidity should move at all. The rail has got faster, in his account, and the decision-making above it has not moved.
The 60 per cent figure, examined
The pitch that brought this interview to The Fintech Times cited 60 per cent of B2B cross-border payments settling in more than a day. Asked for the source, Brook-Walters said the figure is drawn from ECB research on international B2B settlement times that analysed business-to-business and business-to-person cross-border payments worth 20,000 US dollars sent from countries in Europe and Central Asia to the rest of the world. It found that only around 40 per cent of international B2B transactions settled within one working day. He was direct about its limits: it is a settlement-time statistic, not a breakdown of rail delay against compliance delay, and the ECB does not decompose it that way.
In CoinPayments’ own experience the causes are case-specific. For a known counterparty with robust know-your-customer checks, the rails themselves, meaning correspondent banking hops and batch cut-offs, are often the larger share of the delay. For a new beneficiary or a higher-risk corridor, sanctions screening and compliance checks can dominate. “There is no universal breakdown for where delays occur as it varies by corridor, by bank and by the nature of the customer relationship.”
Technology is no longer the blocker
The hardest objection put to him was that idle capital has a measurable cost, treasurers are paid to find it, and if the return on faster settlement were as large as the sector claims they would already have moved. “This is the right challenge, and the honest answer is that technology is no longer what is holding progress back. Treasurers who want faster settlement can largely get it today through the right infrastructure partner.”
What is stopping wider adoption, in his account, is a mix of accounting treatment, counterparty risk and internal policy. Stablecoin balances often still sit awkwardly on a balance sheet, and whether they are classified at fair value or as held for use is not settled practice everywhere. Counterparty risk raises its own questions: which issuer, which reserve attestation, which redemption guarantee. And treasury investment policies “were written for a world of bank deposits and money market funds and rewriting them takes a board cycle, not a product launch.” Technology cleared the bar some time ago, he said; governance has not caught up, and that gap is why adoption looks like a slow S-curve rather than a switch being flipped.
Where liquidity sits, and what a stablecoin leg leaves alone
For most multinationals, he said, liquidity is trapped in fragments: operating balances at regional banks that do not net against each other, currency buckets that cannot be pooled across borders without triggering FX and tax friction, and cash idle in subsidiaries because moving it up to a central treasury account is slow or costly enough that nobody bothers weekly. A 24/7 stablecoin leg fixes the timing problem, letting value move between those pools outside banking hours, “which matters when a shortfall in one jurisdiction coincides with a surplus in another and the clock is against you.”
What it leaves untouched is the structural fragmentation: local regulatory restrictions on cross-border cash pooling, withholding tax on intercompany loans, and the fact that some subsidiaries are not permitted to hold stablecoin balances under local law. Faster rails do not remove regulatory borders, he said. They mean treasurers spend less time waiting and more time on the problems that actually need solving.
Sunday, and the last mile
The 24/7 promise meets its limit at the fiat off-ramp. “This is the honest weak point in the ’24/7′ pitch, and readers should hear it stated plainly: the stablecoin leg can move 24/7, however, the fiat off-ramp on the receiving end is only as available as the local banking infrastructure allows. If the beneficiary market’s banks are closed, the stablecoin sits as stablecoin until Monday morning local time.”
Who absorbs that gap depends on the commercial arrangement. In practice, he said, it is usually the payments infrastructure provider or the receiving payment service provider that carries the settlement risk over that window, which is why due diligence on whoever provides the off-ramp matters as much as the rail itself. “The promise of the technology and the reality of banking hours in the destination market are two different things, and anyone selling pure 24/7/365 without qualifying that is overselling it.”
Why pilots stall at quarter-end
The clearest failure pattern he has seen is treasury teams treating stablecoin adoption as a payments project rather than a liquidity management and compliance project. Implementations have stalled or been unwound where the technical integration was solid but nobody had mapped the accounting treatment, obtained sign-off from the auditor or worked out how the balance would be reported. “Basically the pilot worked, but then hit a wall at quarter-end reporting.” The remedy, and something CoinPayments says it now does, is to bring the auditor and the accounting policy owner into the pilot at the design stage rather than after go-live. “The reporting question needs to be treated as a launch requirement, not a follow-up task.”
The specific change
Asked to name the specific change, rather than the general direction, that would let a mainstream corporate treasury hold a stablecoin balance as routine, he pointed to accounting guidance rather than regulation in the abstract. “We need clarity from bodies like the FASB and IASB on how a regulated, fully-reserved stablecoin balance should be classified and measured. That would enable CFOs to hold stablecoin the way they hold a money market fund position, rather than treating it as a disclosure headache.”
Alongside that, custody and audit infrastructure in the banking sector need to mature to the point where a Big Four auditor will sign off on stablecoin reserves in an annual audit without a qualification. “Once those two things are routine rather than novel, holding stablecoin balances stops being a treasury experiment and becomes a line item.”
CoinPayments has spent more than a decade building infrastructure for businesses to accept digital assets, including the major stablecoins. Neither the FASB nor the IASB has yet issued the classification guidance Brook-Walters describes as the specific change he is waiting for.
The post What Mastercard’s 24/7 Settlement Changes for Treasury Teams appeared first on The Fintech Times.
