What does the digital assets market look like to someone who’s seen money move from within some of the world’s largest traditional financial institutions and from one of crypto’s most recognised infrastructure companies?

For Kirit Bhatia, Chief Digital Assets Officer at Banking Circle, this is the unique vantage point he brings into his role. Before joining Banking Circle in late 2025, Bhatia spent years across JPMorgan Chase, RBS, and Ripple, moving between the old and new worlds of financial infrastructure.

He’s now applying that experience at Banking Circle, a fully licensed bank with central bank clearing rails that processes EUR1+ trillion in annual payment volumes across 24 currencies.

Banking Circle already sits inside the institutional payments flow, serving 750+ financial institutions, payment companies and marketplaces that need money to move across borders quickly, reliably and under regulatory scrutiny.

That makes Bhatia’s role less about watching the digital asset market evolve from the sidelines, and more about asking how regulated institutions can bring digital asset solutions to market with the trust, security and regulatory layer of a bank.

For Bhatia, the digital assets question is tied to how regulated institutions can use new rails without sacrificing the trust, compliance, and operational discipline that banking depends on.

His background carries weight at a time when stablecoins and digital assets are being tested against a harder question. Can these rails operate inside regulated financial services, solve customer pain points and improve parts of the banking system that have remained slow, costly, and fragmented for years?

Bhatia’s seen where traditional banking is resilient, where it remains constrained, and where newer digital asset infrastructure may have a credible role to play.

“I end up in this unique position where I appreciate how traditional banking works and also how new technology works,” he said during an exclusive interview with Fintech News Network on the stablecoins in banking.

For Bhatia, the work begins by stepping back to look at the bigger picture.

“I have to start at the 30,000-foot level and think about where the landscape is. What technology innovations are happening in financial services? What’s the direction of travel? Where’s regulation at, and importantly, what are the pain points the customer and the market are feeling?”

Stablecoins Are Having Their Infrastructure Moment

Stablecoins have quickly moved from being discussed as a future disruption to entering a more crucial phase.

How will it be embedded into regulated financial services, with the controls, permissions, and operating standards institutions require?

“We’re living through the shaping of that reality right now,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to appreciate that when you’re in it and actually shaping it.”

Stablecoin’s trajectory is no longer a subject of dispute. Total stablecoin transaction volumes crossed US$33 trillion in 2025, and in February 2026, monthly stablecoin volumes overtook the Automated Clearing House network for the first time.

Yet volume is just one part of the story. Stablecoins are moving in the same conversation as banking rails, treasury flows, settlement infrastructure, and cross-border payments. The market is now seeking to know whether regulated institutions can use it reliably and at scale.

That is where Banking Circle’s position becomes relevant. Banking Circle, for one, operates an internal ledger on which client-to-client fiat transfers settle 24/7 instantly, removing some of the T+1 and T+2 lags that have traditionally defined correspondent banking.

Bhatia sees digital asset settlement as an extension of that infrastructure. In April 2026, Banking Circle launched stablecoin settlement services following its Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) licence approval, with direct integration between fiat currencies and USDC, USDG and EURI through its core platform.

The proposition is faster settlement inside a regulated banking environment.

“Whether it’s traditional fiat or digital assets, the compliance integrity is the foundation that a bank like us sits on. It’s a non-negotiable. It’s our permission to operate,” he said.

The principles, he shares, do not change between fiat and digital asset rails. The tooling does.

On-chain AML screening, travel rule compliance, custody technology, and the regulatory permissions themselves (e.g. CASP in Europe and the Digital Payment Token framework in Singapore) all require new systems and skill sets.

Banking Circle, he said, has spent the last couple of months embedding those capabilities into its core banking platform.

“At the Banking Circle, we’re fortunate that we’ve already built new tooling and new systems over the last 18 months, and embedded these key pieces of infrastructure into our core banking platform. We will continue to add more and more as we bring more solutions to the market.”

Should Banks Fear Stablecoins, Or Fear Standing Still?

If stablecoins are settling into the centre of wholesale payments, the next question is what that means for the banks they touch.

In the 2026 Global Outlook for Banking and Financial Markets IBM report, a survey of 500 financial services executives sketched out the risks plainly.

According to IBM, if major corporations respond by issuing their own stablecoins, a scenario 42% of executives see as likely, banks could see transaction fees evaporate, deposits bases shrink, and customer data slip away. To stay in the game, banks might need to evolve into full-service providers for tokenized operations. 63% of corporate banking executives see the provision of tokenised services as their primary role in the future.

Bhatia does not dismiss any of this, but is certainly wary of letting fear set the frame.

“Fear-based framings are never helpful,” he said. “Big technology breakthroughs have always generated healthy doses of fear of bad outcomes.”

He draws the parallel with the early internet, when most of the disruption anxieties were genuine, but never the full picture. The internet did displace old models, yes. It also built new economies, new jobs, and new opportunities on top of them.

Stablecoins and digital assets sit in similar territory for him. The lesson to learn here is that no financial institution can afford to stand still.

“Whether you’re a bank or any type of business, constant adoption, adaptation and evolving is just a requirement. You can’t stand still.”

Bhatia said that the industry still has work to do alongside regulators on managing the unintended consequences of digital asset adoption. But the direction of travel, according to him, is settled. Any technology that lowers cost, supports 24/7 global settlement, removes cut-off times, and makes commerce more efficient deserves a serious look.

For Banking Circle, that vision lands on a hybrid model.

“We see the future of banking as hybrid and interoperable, where our customers have the option to transact on the best rail that is available in the market,” he said. “Whether that’s traditional fiat or whether that’s tokenised fiat, that’s okay.”

Who’s Accountable When Agents Start Paying with Stablecoins?

The next frontier for stablecoins may involve autonomous systems.

According to the Cambridge Tokenized Money Report, AI integration is an emerging but largely underdeveloped area in the intersection of tokenized money with AI and autonomous systems. Early indicators include Google’s announcement of Agent to Payment (A2P) capabilities supporting stablecoins for autonomous agent transactions.

This raises the bigger question for the industry: what happens when bots, agents or autonomous systems begin initiating payments?

Bhatia sees this space as important in growth, but it is still nascent.

“Agents and payments are obviously a hot topic right now,” he said. “Everyone’s jumping on it.”

Still, he is careful not to describe it as a near-term unlock. To him, agentic payments today resembles where crypto was almost a decade ago: full of experimentation, attention, and possibilities, but still far from the point where market demand, regulation, infrastructure and operating models have properly converged.

“It feels very much like eight years ago, where crypto was,” he said. “It was an innovation. Lots of people were talking about it, but to actually bring it to life, to where we are today, it has taken almost a decade.”

At a practical level, Bhatia said Banking Circle is not yet seeing direct customer demand for bot-initiated payments.

“We don’t have any customers asking us to process payments for their bots.”

The second issue he points out is more fundamental: what is the legal and regulatory status of the agent itself? If an autonomous system initiates, routes or executes a stablecoin payment, the industry still needs to determine who is responsible for the action.

Bhatia compares it to autonomous taxis. Experimentation is useful, and the technology may be promising, but the real test comes when something goes wrong. In payments, these could range from an erroneous transaction to a fraud event or a dispute over authorisation.

“Ultimately, when things go wrong, who is accountable?”

That may be the biggest hurdle for agentic payments. It needs an accountability model that regulators, banks, payment firms and customers can trust.

Until then, autonomous stablecoin payments will remain an intriguing frontier.

Kirit Bhatia is scheduled to speak at Money20/20 Europe 2026 on two topics: “How Far Will Stablecoins Go on Public Blockchains?” and “Part 1: The Future of Global Money Movement.”

Featured image edited by Fintech News Singapore based on image by mrsiraphol on Magnific