In the last eighteen months it has become possible to run a meaningful part of an institutional treasury function on stablecoin rails: compliantly, auditably, and without the volatility risk that defined the earlier era of corporate digital asset adoption.
Nobody announced the shift, and there was no single moment when stablecoins crossed from speculative instrument to treasury tool. It happened by accumulation: regulated issuers operating under clear legal frameworks, custody arrangements that satisfy audit committees, on-ramp and off-ramp facilities connected to major banking networks, and enough case law and regulatory guidance to bring compliance uncertainty down to something manageable.
The practical consequence is that treasury teams and their advisors have stopped asking whether stablecoin settlement makes sense and started asking where: which corridors, which transaction types, and under which compliance conditions it is the better choice.
What changed
The first generation of corporate digital asset adoption, roughly 2019 through 2022, was speculative balance-sheet positions and operational experiments that ran well ahead of the regulatory and custodial infrastructure needed to support them responsibly. Between the volatility of the assets, the regulatory ambiguity and the absence of institutional-grade custody, serious treasury teams stayed at the perimeter, and they were right to.
Stablecoins are a different proposition: denominated in fiat currency, backed by reserves held in regulated institutions, stable by design. The regulatory frameworks in Switzerland, and increasingly across the EU and UK, are becoming explicit. Custody has matured. The networks these assets move over are now deep enough to carry institutional volumes.
The use case drawing the most serious institutional attention is cross-border settlement in corridors where traditional banking is slow, expensive or unreliable. There are more such corridors than most Western treasurers appreciate. In them, stablecoin rails settle in minutes rather than days, at a cost well below the correspondent banking alternative, with full traceability and compliance logic embedded in the transaction itself.
How it gets accounted for
The first question most treasury teams reach is some version of: how do we book this, how do we audit it, and what will our regulator say?
The answer is much clearer than it was, though it is still not one-size-fits-all. Under IFRS the treatment depends on how the instrument is structured. A stablecoin carrying a contractual right to redeem for cash from the issuer may qualify as a financial asset under IAS 32; others fall under IAS 38 as intangible assets or IAS 2 as inventory. Swiss GAAP FER and the accounting articles of the Swiss Code of Obligations follow similar principles, and the classification should be confirmed with audit counsel rather than assumed. Valuation is straightforward for as long as the peg holds.
What compliance actually requires
AML and KYC obligations apply at every VASP touchpoint: on-ramp, off-ramp, and above threshold on transfers between institutional wallets where a regulated intermediary sits on either side. The Swiss Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (AMLO) and FATF Recommendation 16, the Travel Rule, require originator and beneficiary information to travel with virtual-asset transfers. For a treasury team running intra-group flows, that means institutional-grade rails arrive with institutional-grade data obligations. They are manageable. They are never absent.
Swiss regulators have been among the more thoughtful globally about distinguishing between asset classes and setting out clear compliance paths for institutional use. The DLT Act, in force since 2021, gives digital assets a legal framework that is both explicit and workable. On balance Switzerland is one of the more supportive environments in the world for institutional stablecoin use, on the condition that the operating model is designed to meet it rather than retrofitted afterwards.
The compliance path is now mapped. What still takes work is the infrastructure question: who holds the custody relationship, who runs the on-ramp, and how the settlement flow gets audited.
Three use cases in active deployment
- Emerging market settlement. Where correspondent banking is thin, expensive or slow, in parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoin settlement is materially better on speed, cost and predictability. The stablecoin leg is usually USD- or EUR-denominated, with a local off-ramp converting to local currency at the destination.
- Intra-group treasury flows. For any business with multiple legal entities, moving liquidity between subsidiaries is a permanent source of friction. On stablecoin rails those transfers settle in minutes rather than days, with an audit trail that satisfies internal treasury controls and external auditors alike.
- Supplier settlement for digital-native counterparties. A growing share of global suppliers, particularly in technology, media and professional services, hold digital asset wallets and will accept stablecoin settlement. For the buyer that removes the correspondent chain from the transaction entirely.
What you need underneath it
Running stablecoins in treasury takes a specific stack: a regulated custody partner, a compliant on-ramp and off-ramp facility, integration with the treasury management systems you already run, and an audit-ready transaction trail. None of that is trivial to assemble.
The businesses moving fastest are the ones who found a single institution coordinating all of it instead of assembling it from separate providers. The integration problem is real, and the compliance fragmentation that comes out of multi-provider digital asset infrastructure can end up worse than the problem it was meant to solve.
This is where the Swiss framework earns its place. An institution operating under Swiss financial market law, working with Swiss-regulated custodians and on-ramp providers, can give a treasury team one relationship across the whole stack, from fiat on-ramp through stablecoin movement to fiat off-ramp, inside a legal framework that is explicit and defensible.
For most treasury teams the open question is no longer whether this belongs in the toolkit, but which corridors and transaction types to start with, and who to do it with.
Rédaction SQF · Actifs numériques & Trésorerie