At any given moment, almost every company has money that is unaccounted for. It isn’t missing and it isn’t stolen; it’s sitting somewhere in transit, stuck between two accounts. Large companies employ whole teams whose job is to track where the money is and help move it.
The people who deal with this sit in the treasury department, and they’re not fixing a bug in payments. They’re dealing with the cost of an architecture that was never designed to let two parties read from the same ledger.
I spent years in treasury on the settlements team at one of the world’s largest payment networks, where money moves between thousands of banks every day, and a single settlement run is measured in billions. At any scale though, treasury largely comes down to answering one seemingly simple question, “did the money move correctly?” To ensure it does, treasury has three jobs: instruct and execute payments, keep counterparties’ bank details current so payments are routed to the right place, and reconcile payments to ensure the money moved.
These jobs may sound trivial, just check the account! But sophisticated money movement happens across many different systems, rails, and counterparties. From my experience: daily settlement required coordination across thousands of banks, over 100 countries, all with different ledgers, systems, and information silos. There are infinite edge cases where things can fail.
Take execution. Some payments are still entered manually, typed by hand into a payment execution system. A request to collect $10 million could get keyed incorrectly, as a credit instead of a debit, and the money leaves a bank account instead of arriving in it. Now someone in treasury is on the phone or emailing a chain of banks to try and claw it back.
Sometimes the money simply doesn’t show up. A client confirms a payment and can share the proof of a debit on their own statement. But the recipient sees nothing in their account. This opens a two-week investigation, you to your bank, you to the client, your bank to the client’s bank, until someone finds the money sitting at a correspondent bank in between. It may have gotten stuck there for any number of reasons: compliance, human error, legal.
And even when all three jobs go right, the payment can still be undone. Backvalue changes the date of a completed payment after the fact, and reversals pull money that’s already in your account back out. This happens all the time with ACH, and even with wires, which are supposed to carry finality.
The problems with payments are not unique to my experience or to giant companies. A small business waiting weeks on an overseas invoice hits many of the same pain points, with fewer people to solve the problem.
Companies like (aptly named) Modern Treasury are building large businesses solving many of these problems. But they are often forced to put a fresh coat of paint on an old system.
The old systems are built around humans.
When sending money, the instruction to pay and the money itself often move entirely separately. SWIFT is a messaging layer that provides instructions to send money between international banks, but SWIFT never holds or moves a dollar. Roughly $5 trillion daily is processed via SWIFT, but not as a payment rail. The money settles across a network of correspondent banks, each institution reading SWIFT messages and managing its own ledger.
Historically, this made sense. Correspondent banking started when banks still kept paper books and in that world, each bank maintained its own ledger and met its counterparties periodically to reconcile. That paper became software, but the fragmented architecture remained. A payment still passes through the sender’s bank, an intermediary or two, and then the receiver’s bank, each with its own ledger, schedule, and cut-offs. Even the most modern bank only controls its own link in that chain and its payments have to wait when a counterparty batches overnight or closes for a holiday. Standards help, but don’t fix the fragmentation.
It’s tempting to think AI can solve all these issues. It can definitely be helpful. It can do more sophisticated alerting, automate certain reconciliation processes, even reach out to counterparties. But we are very far from AI being a panacea. Practically, no bank is going to let an autonomous agent loose inside its core systems; the counterparty on the other end of a stuck payment still expects a person to call rather than a bot, and treasury is a game of edge cases, a strange rule in a single country, and edge cases are where models are weakest. And even if you cleared all of that, an agent working faster is still doing the same work, because the payment still crosses institutions whose ledgers don’t agree.
What would solve these treasury problems? A shared truth.
Stablecoins (and blockchains) provide exactly that. The money is sent with the message on an immutable (often public) ledger.
Let’s run through the earlier examples of the problems in a treasury department using stablecoins.
The $10 million mispayment happened because a person typed an instruction into one system among many, and no system caught the error until the money was gone. Stablecoins don’t fix a typo, but it’s easier to build safeguards, like transfer validation or conditional releases, and to automate stablecoin transactions within treasury software. A stablecoin payment is executed by software against a balance, which a smart contract can check, so the transfer is validated before it’s sent, and the payment itself can carry conditions that release the money only when terms are met. The error gets caught before the money moves rather than clawed back after.
In reconciliation, the two-week investigation happened because you and your client each saw only your own bank’s records. On a shared ledger there is one record. The payment either settled or it did not, and both parties have visibility. There is nothing to chase, and no intermediary bank where the money can sit unnoticed.
Treasury runs on people because closed systems can’t share one truth, so people have to stand between them, rekeying instructions, chasing missing payments, proving the money moved. But that was never supposed to be the job. Treasury decides where a company's money sits, what it earns, and how it reaches a new market or funds a new product. When a company wants to expand somewhere new, it’s treasury that works out whether the money can even get there, through which banks, and at what cost. That is the work that grows a business, and today it gets buried under the operational friction of moving money.
Stablecoins upgrade money so treasury people like me can stop chasing lost payments and get back to building a better business.
