European banks with large corporate cash management franchises, led by HSBC and Deutsche Bank, sit at the top of the risk list if companies begin parking and moving treasury cash in stablecoins and other forms of digital money, RBC Capital Markets analysts said in a client note published Wednesday.
As reported by Reuters, the analysts warned that banks which fail to get a proper handle on digital assets could see margins squeezed and clients walk, even as the same shift opens up new revenue streams for lenders willing to build the plumbing for on-chain payments.
What the RBC note actually says
RBC Capital Markets polled 18 European banks for the report, and the signals from the ground were striking:
- 72% of the banks surveyed flagged cross-border payments as the main near-term use case for digital money.
- Corporate payments was described as the use case for digital money that is “nearest to market,” meaning adoption here is expected to move faster than in trading, custody or tokenised securities.
- Banks most exposed to this shift could lose up to 7% of revenue, depending on how quickly digital money scales. The key risks flagged by the analysts are rising funding costs as deposits move into stablecoin reserves, and falling fee income as cross-border payment volumes migrate to on-chain rails.
- HSBC and Deutsche Bank were singled out as the most exposed, with corporate payments contributing 10% or more of each group’s revenues.
- BNP Paribas was also flagged as having a large corporate payments business, although it is less material as a share of total group revenue.
Despite the flagged risks, bank executives surveyed by RBC are clearly not panicking just yet. 83% of respondents said they do not see digital assets as a core offering or a substitute for services they already provide, while 67% said demand for stablecoins today is limited. Every single bank polled said stablecoins currently have a “negligible” impact on their liquidity and treasury management.
At the same time, the industry is quietly building its own answer. Lenders including Deutsche Bank, Barclays and BNP Paribas are already participating in bank-led stablecoin groups, alongside separate European initiatives aimed at a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin.
Why corporate payments are the real pressure point
For years the conversation around banks and crypto has been dominated by trading desks, custody and tokenised securities. The RBC note shifts the focus sharply toward something far more boring and far more lucrative: the daily grind of moving corporate money across borders.
B2B cross-border flows are one of the largest and stickiest profit pools in global banking, handled largely by a small group of tier-one lenders. A report by FXC Intelligence highlighted HSBC, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Citi, JPMorgan, Barclays, and Standard Chartered among the handful of banks that dominate the world’s corporate cross-border payments flows, which is precisely the segment RBC now says is most at risk from digital money.
The economics are simple. If a corporate treasurer can hold working capital in a regulated euro or dollar stablecoin and move it 24/7 across borders at near-zero cost, two things happen to the incumbent bank. The deposit base shrinks, which pushes up funding costs. And the fat fees banks charge for correspondent banking and FX on those payments come under pressure.
A recent EY-Parthenon survey of 350 corporates and financial institutions found that 54% of non-users expect to start using stablecoins within the next 6 to 12 months, with cross-border supplier payments the single biggest use case. That is the exact revenue pool HSBC and Deutsche Bank sit on.
Recent developments: The banks are already hedging
The RBC warning lands in the middle of a flurry of activity showing that Europe’s biggest lenders are not sitting on their hands.
In October 2025, a group of 10 global systemically important banks, including Deutsche Bank, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Banco Santander, Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, MUFG, TD Bank and UBS, announced they were jointly exploring the issuance of a 1:1 reserve-backed form of digital money pegged to G7 currencies. The initiative is framed as a direct response to the growth of privately issued dollar stablecoins dominated by Tether and Circle.
Separately, a consortium of European banks, originally nine and now expanded to as many as 12 institutions, has pushed ahead with Qivalis, a euro-pegged stablecoin targeting a launch in the second half of 2026 under a MiCA licence obtained via a Netherlands-based entity. CaixaBank, ING, UniCredit, BBVA, Danske Bank, DZ Bank, SEB, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, DekaBank and Banca Sella are among the members.
HSBC, for its part, has gone heavy on tokenization rather than a public stablecoin. Its HSBC Orion platform has now enabled over $3.5 billion in digitally native bonds across sovereign, supranational and corporate issuers. The bank has also been granted one of Hong Kong’s first stablecoin issuer licences alongside Anchorpoint Financial under the city’s new Stablecoins Ordinance, as The Crypto Times reported earlier this month.
Barclays has taken a different route, picking up a stake in Ubyx and exploring a blockchain-based platform that would support both stablecoins and tokenised deposits within the regulatory perimeter.
In the United States, the fight over stablecoin yield is heating up at the legislative level, with Senator Thom Tillis pushing a draft proposal to clarify whether stablecoins can legally pay interest, an issue where banks and crypto firms have sharply opposing views. The Crypto Times covered that stablecoin yield dispute here.
The bigger picture for bank deposits
RBC is not alone in flagging the risk. Earlier this year, S&P Global Ratings projected that the euro-pegged stablecoin market could grow from around €650 million at year-end 2025 to between €25 billion and €1.1 trillion by 2030, equivalent to between 0.1% and 4.2% of eurozone banks’ overnight deposits. Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick has gone further, estimating that stablecoins could pull as much as $500 billion in deposits out of banks in industrialized nations by the end of 2028.
The RBC note essentially tells investors which European names to watch most closely if those forecasts start coming true. HSBC and Deutsche Bank, with 10% or more of group revenues riding on corporate payments, carry the biggest slice of that deposit and fee income pool. BNP Paribas is in the mix but with more diversified earnings.
The clients RBC polled are telling them demand today is limited and stablecoins are “negligible” in treasury operations. That is likely true. The analysts’ point is simply that “nearest to market” use cases tend to arrive faster than banks forecast, and when they do, the top of the corporate payments league table is where the hit lands first.
Also Read: ABA Says White House Stablecoin Yield Study Misses Community Bank Risk
