Banks Ditch the Trading Desk for Stablecoin Plumbing at MERGE Madrid

Banks are done just letting clients trade crypto. At MERGE Madrid, held Oct. 27–29, the talk on stage was all about plumbing: stablecoin rails, tokenized deposits and settlement systems built behind the scenes. The event opened at Bolsa de Madrid — the city's stock exchange — before the main program shifted to Palacio de Cibeles, with BeInCrypto's Luís De Magalhães and Martin Coxall representing the outlet. Executives from Commerzbank, N26 and Applied Blockchain described banks sliding into the role of infrastructure that lets customers use stablecoins rather than hoarding them.

Chainalysis global policy lead Jordan Wain put hard numbers on the shift. Crypto's economic activity hit roughly $9.4 trillion between June 2025 and June 2026, down 1.6% year over year, while cross-border stablecoin transfers jumped 80% over the same stretch. His read: digital assets are moving real money even when prices sag. Visa's Alexandra Soroko pointed to stablecoin card settlement as a system that lets institutions clear obligations seven days a week, naming cross-border business payments and corporate treasury as the next growth spots.

The money question got a blunt answer. Stijn Vander Straeten, CEO of Crypto Finance Group, part of Deutsche Börse, said banks still earn from the crypto offerings they sell clients, but behind the curtain they're funding staking, tokenized deposits and new settlement rails. Bank Frick's Mirko Pfiffner pushed back on the idea that crypto firms have outgrown banks, noting exchanges and liquidity providers are heavy in fiat and still need banking. He expects banks to splinter into specialties over five to ten years — payment rails here, custody there, trading somewhere else. Bison Bank CEO António Henriques, whose firm calls itself Portugal's first CASP inside a licensed bank, said it sits right in the middle, serving crypto-native customers and traditional ones alike.

Marie Winter, managing director of OSL EU, said the company holds a MiCA license in Austria granted at the start of July and is now applying for payment institution and EMI licenses, targeting third-party payment, exchange services and on- and off-ramps. Fireblocks' Shrutisagar Chandrasekaran argued the bottleneck isn't tech: it's operating models, people, process and governance. Santander CIB's Luis Nacarino wants digital money systems that actually talk to each other, while Iberpay's Alberto Carlos Alonso Temprado said Europe's payment rails already work and blockchain should build on them instead of reinventing the wheel. Regulators and supervisors from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Cyprus and Luxembourg closed out the final day.

Western Union's dollar-backed token, issued by Anchorage and launched on Solana in May, got stage time as a settlement tool rather than a consumer product. It kicked off in Bolivia and the Philippines, two remittance-heavy markets, with Western Union pitching it as a replacement for the rails it uses to square up with agents. Anchorage's goal is to swap pre-funded correspondent accounts for stablecoin balances, shrinking settlement from days to minutes. Meanwhile, an Amsterdam-based consortium has ballooned from nine founding banks to 37 institutions across 15 countries, planning to operate under MiCA with Dutch central bank supervision on public Ethereum. The gap it's chasing: euro stablecoins sit under $1 billion in market cap, while dollar-backed tokens top $300 billion.

AI agents that pay on behalf of people and businesses drew Mastercard, Tether and the Cardano Foundation into the same conversation, with clear permissions and digital identities framed as must-haves. BitGo's Luis Ayala described agentic wallets as AI agents with the power to make payments for a real person, predicting the behavior will climb from households to institutions. TRM Labs' Guillaume Rodenas told BeInCrypto that KYC for those agents has to start by verifying the human or company pulling the strings. Bit2Me CSO Abel Peña said the company won authorization to launch STX, a security token offering for tokenizing shares and bonds aimed first at mid-sized companies — though BBVA and Bullish cautioned on the same panel that tokenization only works when investors can actually trade, volatile markets included.