CFOs Are Using Stablecoins More Like ACH Than Digital Assets

Innovative technologies often rarely succeed in the way their earliest advocates predicted.

And findings in “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” the latest installment of the PYMNTS Intelligence exclusive series, The 2026 Certainty Project, reveal that stablecoins, once heralded as a bridge to a new, crypto-native monetary system, are increasingly finding a different role inside corporate finance departments.

According to the report data, 88% of firms that receive stablecoins convert them into U.S. dollars immediately. The implication is both subtle and profound, showing how for most chief financial officers, stablecoins are not being treated as a store of value, but as a faster, more efficient payment rail.

This distinction may help reframe stablecoins from a crypto-native asset class into a piece of financial infrastructure that is closer in spirit to Swift or ACH than to treasury holdings. And it may help explain why, despite years of hype and billions in market capitalization, stablecoin adoption among enterprises remains cautious, selective and highly pragmatic.

Certainty Over Innovation Defines the CFO’s Mandate

Unlike product or technology leaders, chief financial officers are not rewarded for experimentation. Their primary responsibility is to ensure financial stability, manage risk and maintain compliance within an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.

Stablecoins, despite their name, still carry perceived risks. Questions remain around regulatory clarity, issuer transparency, counterparty exposure, and systemic resilience. Even when those risks are manageable, they are rarely trivial.

In that context, holding stablecoins as reserves introduces unnecessary uncertainty. Converting them immediately into dollars neutralizes that uncertainty while preserving the transactional benefits. It is a classic CFO move: capture efficiency gains without expanding the risk surface.

This mindset also explains why adoption has been uneven across industries. Companies with high exposure to cross-border payments, supplier networks in emerging markets, or real-time payout needs are more likely to experiment with stablecoin rails. Others, particularly those with established banking relationships and predictable cash flows, see less urgency.

Read the report: Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins

Treating stablecoins as rails rather than reserves may also not be the end state for enterprises. It may instead be a stepping stone, a way for CFOs to familiarize themselves with the technology, build internal capabilities and assess its long-term potential.

After all, stablecoins offer a way to compress settlement times without overhauling existing financial systems. They can operate alongside traditional banking infrastructure, acting as a parallel channel for specific use cases where speed is paramount.

For CFOs, this creates a modular approach to innovation. Rather than committing to a wholesale transformation, they can deploy stablecoins tactically by using them where they add value and bypassing them where they do not.

The immediate conversion behavior reinforces this modularity. It allows firms to benefit from faster inbound or outbound payments while keeping their core accounting and treasury functions anchored in familiar currency frameworks.

Redefining Adoption Amid a Transitional Innovation Period

This pattern reflects a broader truth about enterprise technology adoption. Innovations rarely displace existing systems overnight. Instead, they coexist, complement and gradually reshape the landscape.

And while speed is often cited as the headline stablecoin benefit, cost remains an important part of the equation. Traditional cross-border payments are not only slow but often expensive, involving multiple intermediaries, foreign exchange spreads and opaque fee structures. Stablecoins have the potential to reduce some of these costs, particularly in corridors where banking infrastructure is fragmented or inefficient.

However, the savings are not always straightforward. Conversion costs, on- and off-ramp fees, and internal integration expenses can offset some of the gains. Still, the tendency to measure adoption in binary terms, either companies are “using” stablecoins or they are not, may miss the nuance of how they are being used.

The answer, increasingly, is as infrastructure. CFOs are integrating stablecoins into specific workflows where they deliver clear, measurable benefits, while avoiding broader commitments that introduce unnecessary risk.

Businesses are not embracing stablecoins as money. They are embracing them as movement.