How banks can secure roles in the digital currency race

Finextra, in association with IT firm CGI, will host an online webinar that brings together payments leaders from Standard Chartered and HSBC to discuss how banks can operate with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins and tokenised deposits. The session will be moderated by Finextra contributing editor Scott Hamilton and will feature Sean Devaney of CGI, Naveen Mallela of Standard Chartered and Vincent Lau of HSBC.

The panel will compare the infrastructure and process differences across three forms of digital money. CBDCs typically require interaction between a central bank ledger and commercial bank systems, raising questions about how banks will integrate account management, customer access and reserve settlement. Stablecoins are issued by private entities and are often implemented as tokens on public or permissioned blockchains; they require secure minting and burning processes, reserve backing and client on‑ramps. Tokenised deposits place bank liabilities on distributed ledgers and require banks to synchronise ledger records with core accounting and risk systems.

Speakers will examine settlement and liquidity management challenges. Real‑time payments and tokenised rails can change intraday liquidity needs, create fragmentation of liquidity across platforms and alter settlement timing and finality. The discussion will cover the systems needed to mint and burn tokens, the capital and reserve implications of supporting stablecoin or tokenised deposit programmes and contingency arrangements banks must hold to manage liquidity stress when settlement moves off traditional clearing systems.

Control and governance will be covered, including which functions banks are likely to keep — customer onboarding, KYC/AML checks, custody and balance‑sheet provision — and which functions may sit outside bank control, such as transaction validation on third‑party distributed ledgers or smart‑contract execution. The panel will also consider how existing outsourcing arrangements map to digital currency services and whether supervisory expectations differ when critical infrastructure is operated by non‑bank providers.

The webinar will address cross‑border and compliance issues, including the design of internal governance, guardrails and reporting frameworks for organisations operating in multiple jurisdictions where regulatory requirements for digital currencies are still being developed. Panelists will discuss recent legislative developments, including the US GENIUS Act, and how they affect stablecoin policy and the tokenised finance market.

Speakers will identify operational and hidden costs that can be overlooked in planning, such as integrating distributed ledger platforms with legacy banking systems, extra capital and liquidity buffers, new custody and settlement arrangements and expanded transaction‑monitoring capabilities. The session aims to shift the conversation from theoretical use cases to specific implementation questions and to outline the technical and regulatory constraints banks will need to manage when offering digital money services.