The Bank for International Settlements' 2025 Triennial Survey, published in September, revealed that global FX trading hit a record $9.6 trillion per day in April, a 28% increase from 2022. The headline is impressive. The operational reality for corporate treasurers is less so.
Much of FX trading is "invisible" to the market, since it takes place directly between customers and dealers, with dealers matching more than 80% of customer trades within their own internal liquidity pools via so-called "internalisation." For a treasury team running cross-border operations across multiple entities and banking relationships, this structure creates an attribution problem that no amount of process improvement can solve: you cannot measure liquidity quality when the execution model is designed to obscure it.
The challenge is not theoretical. Nine out of ten companies are overpaying for their foreign exchange transactions, according to analysis from Redbridge Debt & Treasury Advisory. The problem isn't awareness, it's information asymmetry. Many companies unknowingly overpay for foreign exchange services simply because they don't have full visibility into what they're being charged. Banks typically provide an 'all-in' price that blends the actual exchange rate with their markup.
For multi-entity treasuries, this opacity compounds at every node. Each subsidiary may transact through different banks, in different jurisdictions, with different fee structures that are themselves bundled and obscured. Tackling multicurrency intercompany transactions continues to challenge many firms due to significant system, integration and operational complexities. The efficient management of multicurrency intercompany transactions in firms that operate across multiple jurisdictions isn't easy. In some cases, up to 30% of a firm's transactional activity could be between related parties, who are often on different accounting platforms that are not integrated.
The result is that treasury teams end up optimising blind. Without the ability to attribute specific costs to specific banking relationships or transactions, measuring whether you're getting competitive pricing, or whether a particular bank is extracting disproportionate margin, becomes guesswork. Without clear visibility into true costs, treasury managers cannot effectively negotiate with their banks. This information asymmetry fundamentally shifts negotiating power away from corporate clients.
Regulatory and industry efforts have attempted to address this. The Global Foreign Exchange Committee updated its FX Global Code in December 2024, strengthening the Code's guidance on FX Settlement Risk, as well as increasing transparency around certain types of FX transactions and the use of client-generated data on electronic trading platforms. The GFXC has also developed Disclosure Cover Sheets designed to improve clarity around pricing and execution practices. But these frameworks are voluntary, and they address disclosure at the market participant level, they don't solve the operational problem of attributing costs across a fragmented banking architecture.
Banks often present fees differently. Some provide itemized detail, others bury charges in broad categories. Formats range from PDFs to CSVs to proprietary bank statement standards. Without a universal benchmark for services like wires, lockbox, or FX, it's difficult to compare costs across banks. What one institution labels 'cash management services,' another may split into four subcategories with different pricing structures. This makes apples-to-apples comparisons nearly impossible without manual reclassification.
This is where the structural case for stablecoin rails becomes relevant, not as a replacement for traditional FX, but as a pricing layer that can be measured. Stablecoins eliminate those middle layers. Businesses can send and receive value globally 24/7, with full transparency and lower fees, resulting in faster settlements and greater control over international liquidity.
The transparency argument is not marketing. Stablecoins and digital assets are often referred to as the most trackable form of value transfer in existence. This offers excellent visibility into payment status and supports payment reconciliation, financial record-keeping, and analysis. Combined with blockchain analytics tools, distributed ledgers provide powerful capabilities for tracking fund origins and detecting suspicious payment activity.
The BIS itself has examined this potential. In its 2023 report on stablecoin arrangements for cross-border payments, it noted that stablecoin arrangements could help to reduce the frictions in cross-border payments in terms of costs, transparency, speed and access. The use of stablecoins in cross-border payments could help to reduce costs if DLT increases the quality, frequency, transparency and availability of data, as this would help to promote better integration and connectivity with other technologies and infrastructures. DLT underpinning stablecoin arrangements could also help to improve data availability, particularly if the stablecoin were used end-to-end for cross-border payments.
For treasury teams, the operational implication is specific: stablecoin rails provide deterministic pricing. The cost of a transaction is visible, attributable, and comparable. When you move liquidity between entities on blockchain infrastructure, you can measure precisely what you paid and to whom, a capability that traditional FX execution models, by design, do not offer.
Moving money across borders remains a major pain point for global CFOs, as traditional payment rails and infrastructure can be slow, costly, and opaque. Stablecoins, digital tokens typically backed by currency reserves, offer near-instant transactions, lower costs, and the ability to bypass legacy financial infrastructure. According to a Bain survey of CFOs in October 2025, in 2024, stablecoins were used to process more than $2 trillion in international transactions.
This is not a call to abandon banking relationships. Multi-entity treasuries will continue to rely on traditional FX markets for the bulk of their currency conversion needs. But for treasury teams grappling with the measurement problem, unable to attribute costs, unable to benchmark performance, unable to hold banking partners accountable for execution quality, stablecoin infrastructure offers something that traditional rails cannot: a pricing layer where the numbers are verifiable.
The question for treasury teams is not whether stablecoin rails will replace FX markets. It's whether the inability to measure what you're paying for cross-border liquidity is a problem worth solving, and whether the infrastructure that can solve it is now mature enough to consider.
References
[1] Bank for International Settlements, OTC foreign exchange turnover in April 2025
