John Adams

Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 11:30 AM5 min read

The advancement of the GENIUS Act has thrust stablecoins into the spotlight, with Fiserv being the latest firm to enter the market, hoping to reach a wide range of financial institutions that face pressure from fintechs and large banks.

Fiserv said it would launch a digital asset platform, including a stablecoin, FIUSD, that will be part of Fiserv's banking and payments menu by the end of 2025. Additionally, the bank technology company and PayPal plan to make their stablecoins, FIUSD and PYUSD, interoperable.

Both of these moves, announced Monday morning, would add drastic scale, opening stablecoins to thousands of financial institutions and PayPal's base of more than 430 million consumers and 36 million merchants. It also joins a fast-growing market of stablecoin issuers that includes a consortium of large banks, major retailers such as Amazon and Walmart and early mover banks such as Societe Generale and Vantage Bank.

"Not having a stablecoin is like not having a Rolex years back," Elias Ghanem, global head of Capgemini Research Institute for Financial Services, told American Banker. "Announcement doesn't mean adoption, but early adopters, early launchers, will have higher adoption."

With stablecoins, part of the battle is to quickly build a base of users to juice network externalities. Fiserv has more than 10,000 financial-institution clients, processes more than 90 billion transactions each year and has more than 6 million merchant locations.

Fiserv plans to make FIUSD available through its existing payment technology at no added cost. FIUSD will use stablecoin infrastructure from Paxos and Circle, and will make the stablecoin available on the Solana blockchain.

"Together with our other cloud-native banking and merchant platforms, we believe FIUSD will provide our clients with the efficiency and optionality they need to thrive in the evolving banking and payments ecosystem," Takis Georgakopoulos, chief operating officer of Fiserv, said in a release. Fiserv did not respond to a request for comment.
Nonbank issuers have dominated the stablecoin market, a trend threatening traditional bank deposits if the stablecoin market were to grow dramatically. The expectation that banks will need to respond provides a potential way for Fiserv to expand its client relationships by supporting banks' issuance of FIUSD and by enabling banks to use Fiserv's digital asset platform to issue their own branded stablecoins.

"After the GENIUS Act was passed last week, we expected to see a flurry of announcements," Gareth Lodge, an analyst at Celent, told American Banker, adding that integrating the stablecoin into Fiserv's existing offerings for banks and merchants is "a huge step forward and democratizes the opportunity."