Citi, JPMorgan Tell Investors Stablecoins Core to Future Payments Strategy

During their quarterly reports, top executives from Citi and JPMorgan placed stablecoin infrastructure at the center of their long-term strategy for cross-border payments, corporate treasury modernization and competitive differentiation.

The comments were not speculative side notes. Instead, they were positioned as core components of the future financial stack, with the CEO commentary from Citi’s Jane Fraser and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon potentially signaling a broader evolution in how traditional banks are integrating blockchain-powered payments and money movement.

“We’ve been already moving billions in transaction volume this year on Citi Token Services (CTS)…,” Fraser said during a second-quarter earnings call Tuesday (July 15). “We’re just going to keep building these capabilities out into the payments, financing, liquidity and other spaces.”

“What do clients want?” she added. “They want multi-asset, multi-bank, cross-border, always-on solutions in payments, financing and liquidity. We shall do that… And we’ll absorb all of those complexities of compliance, reporting, accounts, AML for the client.”

Meanwhile, JPMorgan is doubling down on its own blockchain-based financial infrastructure.

“We’re going to be involved in both JPMorgan deposit coin and stablecoins,” Dimon said during a second-quarter earnings call Tuesday.

He said the bank would have to get involved more fully in the stablecoin industry as FinTechs make headwind in the space.

Read also: 4 Questions CFOs Need to Ask as Wall Street Embraces Stablecoins

Tokenization Moves From Curiosity to Strategy for Banks

Citigroup, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are exploring a collaborative effort on stablecoins. Ostensibly, the coin would be jointly issued and operated.

“Everybody’s jumping into stablecoins right now,” Brett McLain, head of payments and blockchain at Kraken, told PYMNTS last month. “All the big banks, they’re talking about creating their own; others want to leverage existing ones.”

But why now? One of the biggest reasons is the change in regulatory posture in the United States with the GENIUS Act, which would regulate stablecoins and require full asset backing, slated for a vote this week. Fraser and Dimon stressed to their respective investors that the GENIUS Act is key to their blockchain plans.

“CLARITY and GENIUS create the new playbook for payments and treasury management, Borderless.xyz CEO Kevin Lehtiniitty told PYMNTS in an interview. “CLARITY decides which tokens sit on balance sheets as commodities, and GENIUS turns stablecoins into 24/7 global payment rails. For treasurers, that promises intra-day collateral sweeps and automated reconciliation that could shrink back-office costs by billions” of dollars.

As for the utility of tokenized money movement ecosystems, per the executive earnings commentary, cross-border remittances, supply chain payments and corporate treasury management are early target corridors. Corporations can use stablecoins to minimize foreign exchange (FX) friction, automate invoice reconciliation and optimize treasury liquidity with tokenized cash.

With tokenized cash, for example, businesses can sweep funds globally in real time and reduce capital trapped in inefficient accounts.

See also: Are Closed-Loop Financial Instruments the Future of Institutional Stablecoins?

The Difference Between Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits

While executives can often mention stablecoins and tokenized assets in the same breath, the distinction is critical.

Unlike stablecoins, which are often tailored for retail or cryptocurrency-native users, deposit tokens such as those being explored by Citi and JPMorgan are expressly designed to accommodate the requirements of institutional counterparties.

Rohit Chopra, who was the third director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a previous member of the Federal Trade Commission, advocated for tokenized bank deposits of U.S. fiat to form the backing of a U.S. stablecoin at a May stablecoin conference.

Stablecoins are typically issued by nonbank entities (like Circle or Paxos), pegged to the U.S. dollar, and backed by short-term Treasury instruments and cash reserves. They’re designed for general-purpose use across decentralized networks and FinTech.

Tokenized deposits, by contrast, are digital representations of actual bank deposits, often issued on private permissioned ledgers. They’re programmable, real-time and interoperable within bank-specific ecosystems — but don’t circulate broadly like stablecoins.

Tokenized deposits serve high-trust, closed-loop use cases — like corporate treasuries and interbank settlement — while stablecoins are suited for open-loop, consumer-facing or B2B platforms where interoperability and composability are key.

Citi’s Fraser on Tuesday, for example, described her firm’s stack — Citi Token Services, Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) and a growing network of programmable payment rails — as a “killer app” for liquidity.