Podcast: FV Bank CEO Miles Paschini on future of stablecoin

Whitney McDonald 12:29:04
Whitney, hello and welcome to The Buzz a bank automation news podcast. My name is Whitney McDonald and I’m the editor of bank automation News. Today is September 9, 2025 Joining me is miles paschini, CEO of FV bank. He’s here to discuss FV bank’s approach to emerging technology, including their ongoing stablecoin efforts. Thanks for joining us.Miles Paschini 12:29:24
Miles, yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. I really appreciate I know we’ve had a chance to speak off, off of a live discussion in the past. I usually like to start introducing FB bank. By the name a lot of people are. You know, what does FB stand for? And it stands for FinTech ventures. And that really helps tell the story about, you know, who we are and where we come from. When we started this out thinking that, you know, we’re going to start with a bank license. Most people don’t start a FinTech company with a bank license. And so our view is that let’s build a FinTech company that has all of the regulatory framework that’s necessary, you know, to do the the types of projects that we want to do. So first and foremost, we see ourselves as a FinTech company that operates with inside of a regular, regulated banking environment. You know, as for myself, I’ve been in the payments world pretty much my whole career. My last venture before this was in the card issuing space, where we were the first company to introduce crypto link debit cards back in 2013 approximately when it was way before anybody was thinking about this space where, how did you bridge digital assets to the real tradify world? Back in 2013 we were enabling people to swipe a Visa card and spend Bitcoin. So we’ve been in this mindset of, how do you bridge new technologies and payments to the existing world. And that’s really a lot of what FB bank is about is, when I if I have a chance to draw something to somebody, I’ll typically draw a circle that is the TRad fi. I draw another circle, which is, you know, the future blockchain, whatever you want to call it, and there’s a Venn diagram in the middle, and that’s where we see our sweet spot. How do we bridge traditional financial solutions with, you know, emerging or, you know, scaling like stable coin solutions. That’s really what we’re about and figuring out, you know, why? How do we find that sweet spot to bridge what I would consider more of like FinTech initiatives with traditional banking?

Whitney McDonald 12:31:22
I think that’s the perfect segue into the next question, which is exactly that, you know, marrying traditional banking with emerging technology. How do you approach emerging technology? I know that we’re going to talk here about stable coin a little bit more specifically, but maybe just on a broader scale. How do you ensure that you’re keeping up with the new trends? Investing in the right tech, maybe kind of from a from a broader scale. How are you monitoring the emerging technology landscape?

Speaker 1 12:31:51
Yeah, I like to think that we are forward thinking, just in our process, strategically as a as a company, when we wrote our business plan. And, you know, in 2018 2019 timeframe, it’s pretty much the same. And it was, you know, how do we take traditional banking services and combine them with digital assets. And so that business plan that we wrote described a future where the two interoperate with each other pretty seamlessly, and we’ve just been refining that. What does that actually mean? So at the highest level, you say, Hey, we’re going to run a banking service, but we’re also going to run digital asset services. And then, how do you actually commercialize that? How do people actually get benefit from that concept? And so that’s really what we’ve been doing, I think. To give an example, in November, it will be three years that we’ve integrated stable coins into Fe bank. And most you know the I would say the sensational concepts around stable coins have only really emerged in the market in the last year from a broader perspective. And so three years ago, we, I would say it’s more than three years ago, because it takes time to implement these strategies, but we had the idea that stable coins could play an important role in banking. So we integrated with USDC three years ago. And we, you know, we took kind of a novel approach, which was not just to say that will support stable coins, which is what I think a lot of people are looking at, but how do we integrate it? And so when someone opens an account at FV bank, you get a wallet address. So, you know, your typical account would come with a routing number and an account number, and for three years now, we’ve been providing people with wallet addresses, and cross chain wallet addresses at that. So you can, you know, you can get an ERC 20, a Tron, Solana and polygon address with your bank account. And so we’ve taken this approach that you don’t just support it, but you integrate it and you make it useful. And I think that’s really the strategy that we’ve had is, you know, how do we how do we not just say that we support digital assets, it sounds good on the headlines, but how do we actually make it useful for people, and then with that, you know, if you’re running a bank and you’re listening to this today, you’ll soon find out that the devil’s in the details, and that’s really where we. Excelled is figuring out, how do you make the transactionality work for everyone involved, for all the stakeholders, how do you make the compliance work? How do you facilitate treasury management in a world where they’re completely different? You know, Fiat treasury management versus digital asset treasury management are different worlds. And so I think that’s where we’ve done a really good job, is figuring out, how do you, you know, how do you not only embrace it, but how do you make it work, and how do you get the details right?

Whitney McDonald 12:34:34
Now, we kind of talked about betting on emerging technology, and what you mentioned here is that you’ve implemented, you know, stable coins. Three years ago, you were, you know, ahead of the game on this front and now you’re seeing it in the headlines. And, you know, you kind of can’t get away from the stable coin. Maybe talk us through, like, why? Three years ago, this was something to bet on. What were you watching for? What are you seeing now with the adoption that we’re kind of on the other side of it, where it is, you know, all over the news,

Speaker 1 12:35:04
yeah, so our first approach was that stable coins were another payment rail. So we thought of it like, you know, you have Ach, you have fed wire, you have swift you have local payment solutions like Faster Payments and sepa, and you know, that are country specific or region specific. And we looked at stable coins as kind of like a global payment rail, so it’s not tied to any particular country, or, by that point, any particular fiat currency. It was a way to move value from one point to another, and so we wanted to embrace that, and that was really the plumbing level. So how do I enable a customer from anywhere in the world to transfer value from where they are to Fe bank? Or how do I enable a customer that has dollars at FB bank to send value to anywhere in the world in nearly instant transaction? And it was less about stable coins than it was about the payment rail as a means of transferring value over the internet. And so I think that that’s what really got us interested. First, it was a competitive product to Swift and fed wire, if you will, in the concept of transferring value. And then most companies, even today, in spite of the euphoria of stable coins, don’t want to hold on to stable coins. You know, they have, they have Treasury needs in fiat currency, and specifically in dollars. And so that original vision that we had with which was, this was a transport protocol for value. It’s playing out. And I think today, you know, if we, if I go a little deeper, we have generally two types of customers. We have customers who use stable coins for receiving value into the bank. So they’re, they’re receiving stable coins, but converting it to dollars, so they can use those dollars for, you know, Fiat based payments, but we have customers that are the that are the other direction. They’re receiving dollars into the bank, and they’re aggregating those dollars, and they’re sending out stable coins and so complete two completely different use cases, but they’re utilizing the same underlying technology, which is the transportation of value over the internet.

Whitney McDonald 12:37:08
Now maybe we can talk a little bit on the innovation front. You guys have a new, recently launched product, the virtual account identifier.

Speaker 1 12:37:16
Yeah. So interestingly enough, this is one of those needs that was born out of something you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t think is the first driver, which is compliance. We, you know, we have customers who have a need for virtual accounts that you know, the basic function of a virtual account is reconciliation and tracking of value. So if I’m a marketplace and I have 10,000 customers, and I want those 10,000 customers to be able to make payments to my marketplace, how do I make each one of those relationships unique from a payment perspective? How do I reconcile transactions against those 10,000 people and virtual accounts allow you to do that. Allows you to, you know, segregate data by a unique number that’s tied to, let’s say, an individual or a person, but that ultimately is getting aggregated into a bank account, and so it allows very low level and detailed reconciliation of data. That’s the that’s one of the drivers. But for us, the driver was compliance and understanding. How do we embrace this world where there’s a lot of virtualization of financial services, but at the same time, increase our compliance capability? And so for our customer, they see a benefit in reconciliation uniqueness. We see it as a enhancement in compliance. And what this allows us to do is to know our customers. Customer, which is a key emerging requirement for banking as a service providers. It used to be that, you know, the regulatory burden was I need to know my customer. I need to know my customers business, and I need to monitor my customers activity that is now changing in that I not only do I need to know my customer, but I need to know my customers customers, and that that is at the the data level. So you know, who is this person? What kind. Are they from? You know, what is their date of birth? Like PII, about that person I need to know. And I need to know that because we have increasingly more challenging compliance requirements across a global landscape. And so for us, we offered our customers the ability to have a new feature, which really helps their business, but that feature actually helps us to become better at compliance, and that was the real driver for us, is, how do we scale this business in a compliant way while offering our customer more features?

Whitney McDonald 12:39:37
How’s it being adopted? You know, any numbers to share here?

Speaker 1 12:39:43
Yeah, so I just want to mention that we took it kind of a step further where, I mean, we’re not the first company to introduce virtual accounts, but we took it a step further in that we incorporated stable coins into our virtual account scheme. And that is that if you’re a customer of ours and you want to leverage our virtual account capability, not only can you get virtual accounts which are tied to traditional bank account, but you can also get virtual accounts that are tied to stable points. So for example, if I were to create an account, if you were my customer, and I created an account for you, and I give you a routing and a unique account number. The unique account number is your virtual account. But I can also give you, let’s say, an ERC 20 wallet address, which is uniquely tied to you, so that when you as a customer interact with our with the banking system, we can uniquely identify those transactions for you as an individual, whether it’s banking or stable coin. So we took it a step further, and we extended that capability to stable coin transactions, not just banking. And the use cases are kind of similar to what I gave. The example of just use a marketplace in general, if you were on something like Etsy, and Etsy wanted to enable all of their merchants to be able to accept payments in stable coin or to accept payments via ACH or wire transfer. This is a product that they would use, they would create virtual account scenarios for each one of their marketplace customers, and then each one of those marketplace customers would be able to accept payments via direct bank transfers or via stable coins. So that would be a simple example. Another example would be in the in the cryptocurrency space. So if you’re a crypto exchange, and you want to enable your customers to on ramp via stable coins or via bank transfers. You would provide each one of your customers one of these virtual accounts, and then you could uniquely track their transactions. You can register that user inside of our system and and you can not only offer them banking transactions, but also stable coin off ramps. It’s also used in scenarios like brokerage accounts or what we call over the counter trading, so where you have contract based transactions. So this is common in institutional level trading, where you have a liquidity provider or an OTC desk that’s doing block trades of transactions with customers. So an example would be, I’m buying or selling a million dollars worth of bitcoin. When there’s a buyer or seller in that transaction, someone has to pay in Fiat, typically, to acquire the Bitcoin. So how do you uniquely track that transaction in your in your brokerage, let’s say, and the way you do that is by providing with in this example, you provide the buyer a virtual account. So we see that a lot where our clients will create a virtual account. They’re doing what we call contract transactions. So contract transaction is a very specific invoice or or defined transaction. I’m buying $1 million with the Bitcoin, for example, and when you combine virtual accounts with that, the our customer is able to automate and integrate those transactions because, especially in that example, they need low cost, high efficiency. It’s typically like a high frequency trading. There’s not a lot of margin. They need efficiency. And so imagine that if the buyer sends in his funds, my client will get a web hook. Because we’re API integrated solution, they’ll know that that customer has paid. They can trigger off then, let’s say, the confirmation of that trade transaction, and they can deliver the Bitcoin to the buyer. So not only does it allow them to reconcile and track transactions, but it also allows them to integrate data through APIs and essentially create automations in their workflows.

Whitney McDonald 12:43:35
Thank you for those examples and kind of you know, putting it into real life use cases now, in terms of those stable enabling stable coin transactions via this rail. Are you seeing those transactions take place with stable coin? Absolutely.

Speaker 1 12:43:52
It’s the fastest growing segment of our business. From a volume perspective, we’re processing, you know, in the billions of dollars per month. So it’s not insignificant total volume that we’re probably. Processing, and it’s growing. The use cases are growing. We’re seeing different variations of the use cases emerging. A lot of, I would say, kind of the early adopters were the institutional, digital asset native companies. Those are the early adopters of the solutions. A lot of those customers were trying to hedge FX, for example. So we saw clients that were working in Latin America, where there’s a lot of volatility in inflation of their currency, and they’re using stable coins to help stabilize that. Those are kind of the early adopters. Now we’re seeing more transactional customers that are fulfilling, you know, invoice level transactions by either paying or being paid or being or paying in stable coin. We’re also seeing our early days were more weighted by stable coin redemptions, which is our customers receiving stable coin and converting it to dollars. Now we’re seeing a more balanced two way activity, which is, instead of just redemption, we’re seeing customers that have dollars with us, and they’re paying their obligations in stable coins. So the early market was really this one sided redemption. Now it’s changing to a more balanced, two sided type of transactionality, where people are identifying use cases, not to just received stable coins as payment, but also to make payments in stable coin, which means that, you know, when I have a customer that is comfortable and habitually making payments in stable coins, that means that there’s a beneficiary of that payment who’s gotten comfortable with it, right? That means there’s a new party on the other side of the transaction. So that’s where I see the growth is that it’s not just the early adopters anymore. It is other businesses that are seeing the benefit of receiving stable coins and having confidence in the receipt of those stable coins. That’s equal to fiat currency. Yeah.

Whitney McDonald 12:46:01
I mean, there’s two sides of it, right? Someone has to be receiving it. Someone has to be sending it if you’re seeing that that growth there like it takes two to tango, right? Exactly.

Speaker 1 12:46:12
And so I think you know, we’re seeing that growth in more customers, or more of our customers, customers or beneficiaries, are getting comfortable receiving stable coins, if you think about it, from just a basic commerce perspective. Let’s say that you’re selling, you know, widgets in China, and I want to buy your widgets, I need to send you a million dollars to buy widgets. If I do that through traditional way, I’m going to send you a bank wire, and it’s going to be, you know, between one to three days for that payment to settle. It will pass through one or more intermediary banks that may not have, may or may not have compliance holds different things that will happen. So that’s what, that’s where you get the t1 to t3, kind of settlement period. If I take that same transaction and I need to pay you a million dollars for widgets, and you’re in China, I can pay you from Fe bank via stable coin, and you’ll have the funds in 20 minutes, right? So that, what does that mean? That means that maybe you ship my order today, right? And depending on the day of the week, maybe I get it shipped, you know, today, instead of getting it shipped in five days, because maybe it settles, maybe my payment settles to you on a Friday, you can’t ship it until the next Monday, right? Right? And so you’re talking about speeding up the whole economy, which is a huge you know, imagine if you’re a vendor in America and you’re out of widgets, and you need them, right? You want them on the next FedEx flight to the United States. And so, so will people say, Well, you know, Swift is fast, and fed wire is fast. That’s true, but stable coins are faster, and stable coins don’t have some of the features that traditional payments have. Now, in particular, stable coins are generally not reversible, right? I mean, and so bank wires can be recalled, so you can see that as a positive or a negative, depending on your use case.

Whitney McDonald 12:48:10
Now, you mentioned already how you’ve seen changing use cases, emerging use cases, who are the early adopters versus who’s using it? Now, I know it’s hard to predict the future, but maybe just give us a little bit of insight into what you pay attention to, in terms of, you know, I guess, predicting or what’s coming next, or staying ahead of what’s in store for digital assets.

Speaker 1 12:48:38
I’ll take that in two parts, because digital assets is kind of a broader statement. I think for stable coins, I think we’re going to see continued and accelerated adoption. I think that the passing of the genius act is going to help. You’re going to see a lot of competition in stable coins. There’ll be a lot of new stable coins come to market. Not all of them will be successful. I’ll kind of liken it to the early internet days where, you know, there’ll be 1000s of stable coins come to market, but only. Maybe, you know, handfuls of them will survive and thrive. I think those that find that have good distribution have credibility in the marketplace. Those are the ones that will survive. There’ll be a lot that don’t survive. And so I think we’re going to see where stable coins will become woven into many of the applications that we use on a day to day basis. So going grocery shopping, I’m assuming you’re going to be able to be able to pay with stable coins in the near future, buying online. I think that with stripes, acquisition of bridge, for example, that at checkout online, you’ll have the option to pay in stable coins almost everywhere. Give it a couple of years, and as a merchant selling goods online, you’ll be able to get paid in stable coins almost everywhere. So I think you’ll see that kind of seamless integration across the board. It’ll become a very fluid market, and we’ll see lots and lots more competition in stable coin arena.

Whitney McDonald 12:50:03
On the innovation front anything in the pipeline at FB bank that you’re willing to share?

Speaker 1 12:50:10
Yes, certainly. So we continue to believe that digital assets convergence with traditional banking is going to be a key driver. I think there’s a lot of interesting developments in our wa real world asset tokenization, especially around financial products. So we are already, we’re already supporting tokenized money market funds. So we’re working with BlackRock and securitize with their Biddle tokenized money market fund. And I see this as a this is going to be a very interesting development in the market where the ability for a an account holder to move in and out of interest bearing products at a tokenized level is going to become a kind of the speed of the Internet. And so the way that treasury management is managed today, where if I want to, if I want to invest in a money market, I’ve got to send a wire to the fund. The funds got to create my position, and that position will start earning me interest. Let’s say the next business day, I’ll start earning interest on that money market position. From a treasury management perspective, with tokenized money market funds, I think that you’ll be able to enter a position into a money market and begin earning interest on the next block confirmation. So as soon as my funds enter the tokenized fund, my my Fiat, let’s say, enters the tokenized fund into it, into a tokenized money market on the next block confirmation. Instead of most money markets, have a cut off of 3pm Eastern, for example, I think that’s going to change. You’ll have 24 by seven entrance and exit of funds, and I think you’ll start realizing interest earned on balances based on the next block confirmation. That will change the way that Treasury works, because it’ll become a much more fluid 24 by seven market. And we’re looking forward to that. We are we are going to be coming out releasing our announcement of support for Biddle, and we’re going to be treating it a lot like we do other stable coins, which is creating an on ramp and off ramp to a tokenized money market fund. You know, I think the big announcement that’s coming for us, and my caveat, is subject to lots of conditions, including regulatory approval, but we are working on secure, collateralized lending, in particular, looking at loan products that are based around things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We believe that the movement that’s happening, you know, in at the macro level, in government, where you’re looking at the clarity Act, which is likely to or hopefully to become law later this year, with the passing of the genius act, we think more and more companies are going to be investing in digital assets as a hedge to fiat or just purely as an investment vehicle, like they would choose other investments. And I think that you’re going to see increasingly that companies who take positions in Bitcoin are not going to want to sell those positions. They’re going to only want to hold them for the long term. And that that’s going to create probably one of the largest lending markets in the world where people are going to want to borrow against their Bitcoin. And we think that we’re extremely well positioned as a company. We have full banking license. We are we have a digital asset trust division, and, you know, we’re properly licensed to provide lending products. And so we think that this is going to be an unlock like we’ve never seen before, where people start unlocking the equity they have or the upside they have in their Bitcoin, and they’re going to borrow against that, just like they would borrow against a piece of real estate.

Whitney McDonald 12:53:46
Real estate for financial institutions that are entering the stable coin market, what takeaways or lessons learned would you share with them?

Speaker 1 12:53:55
I would say that you know, one of the most important things, like, if there’s companies that are looking to lean into this, is that supporting stable coins. Can seem quite easy, like a couple lines of code and you can start, you know, potentially supporting this. But the reality is, is it’s a very compliance intensive project. We have, you know, tried and tested and extensive rules around anti money laundering, terrorist financing, etc, in the banking world, there are, they’re just well documented requirements from a regulatory perspective, the requirements that you have as a financial institution to start dealing with digital assets is not insignificant, and so I would say that you know, any financial institution that’s looking to get involved, they should look into it, because we want more and more financial institutions to do what we’re doing, but take a serious look at your compliance obligations and understand. How do you integrate compliance controls of digital asset world to a Fiat world? And that’s one of the areas where we spent a lot of time. And we think that more responsible market entrance is what we need. We don’t need, we don’t need irresponsible entrance into the market. We think stable coins are going to grow, and the numbers are going to amaze people, the volume that gets transacted in stable coins, but I firmly believe that the dollar is still going to rule, and that one of the most important roles that we play is a bridge between Fiat and digital assets in particular with stable coins, because there’s always going to be a need for companies to go back into dollars, especially if you look at stable coins now, it’s, it’s unclear where gap rules are going to go. How do you treat stable coins on your balance sheet? Right? Right? I mean, there’s, you can take a position as to how you should treat them on your balance sheet, but until you have really clear International and GAAP rules around stable coins in your balance sheet, it’s going to continue to be a challenge. So it’s it is as easy as couple lines of code, but it’s also very complex. At the same time,

Whitney McDonald 12:56:04
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai