Australia’s first stablecoin licences have opened the door. Will customers walk through?

The authors wish to thank PwC Australia subject matter experts Laura Box, Partner, Risk Consulting, and Nicola Costello, Partner, Digital and AI Trust Leader, for their contributions to this perspective.

Australia’s first financial services licences for stablecoin issuers have been granted, with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) giving its support for intermediaries to distribute the licensed stablecoins. As the door to the nation’s payments space swings open, the financial services sector stands at the threshold of a decade that could add US$17.04 trillion to global GDP. PwC’s new Value in Motion research shows global industry reconfiguration, shaped by megatrends including AI and climate change, is creating ‘domains of growth’— how we move, how we fuel and power things, how we feed ourselves. Underpinning these ‘human needs-centred’ domains is the way we fund and insure everything. This open-door moment demands a question: will the vital ecosystem of customers, banks, financial services organisations, merchants and payments providers seize this sliding-door opportunity?

This isn’t theoretical. 

Picture this: you plan a holiday to a new destination using ChatGPT. The model recommends accommodation options based on your preferences and budget, then plans a schedule of activities. Once you approve the plans, including a full budget breakdown and funding suggestions (such as a new credit card with bonus points), an agent undertakes all bookings and payments on your behalf, and all from within the ChatGPT interface. With stablecoins, your GPT agent executes instant cross-border payments with transparent foreign currency exchanges and lower fees. Bookings are confirmed faster and refunds arrive immediately. By leveraging stablecoins’ open networks, you limit your agent’s access to vulnerable areas such as your bank account or credit cards, mitigating agentic risks.

Or this: you visit an online mass retailer (like Amazon) for a routine purchase. The retailer’s purchasing agent searches the web beyond their own marketplace for the best deal. You transact from your loyalty account in the retailer’s native stablecoin, a cash equivalent within a vast retail network providing built-in discounts and offers. The retailer holds the customer relationship and knows your buying patterns. They have an instant-settlement payment method that avoids the intermediaries and associated fees of traditional payment rails, providing savings they can pass on to customers. 

These aren’t future concepts—the technologies to make these happen are possible now. The future of payments is already reshaping Australia’s financial services sector. Fundamental reconfiguration is underway. 

New technologies and new players are rapidly reshaping the payments landscape. Stablecoins have entered mainstream payments globally. Agentic (AI-driven) payments are rising. This convergence creates an explosion of opportunity in the financial services sector, with leaders increasingly voicing expectations of a digital revolution in payments. Bill Winters, CEO of UK bank Standard Chartered, encapsulates this sentiment: “Our belief is that pretty much all transactions will settle on blockchains eventually, and that all money will be digital. Think about what that means: a complete rewiring of the financial system.¹

Despite so much change, one thing remains the same: the customer is always right. 

Our research shows the financial services sector is reorganising at pace around evolving customer needs. Any change to payments will succeed only if it delivers clear, tangible benefits for users (payers and payees). This includes building trust and proactively reducing the risk of exploitation by bad actors. Financial institutions have a vital role in providing payment solutions to meet customer demand for more efficient, safe and innovative financial products.

Banks have the most to gain—and to lose

Payments are the most frequent touchpoint for banks and their customers, and where tolerance for failure is zero. Every failed or delayed transaction erodes trust. If customers move to non-bank payment alternatives, banks don’t just lose transaction revenue; they lose a key reason customers keep coming back. 

For the past 20 years, banks have encouraged customers into digital channels, reducing branches and limiting human interaction in call centres. As human connections have declined, customers’ primary experience with their bank is making and receiving payments—a multiple-times-a-day opportunity to meet expectations (successful transaction) or disappoint a customer (failed transaction). Payment innovation has rarely exceeded customers’ baseline expectations for convenience and availability. Despite a simpler addressing method in PayID for the New Payments Platform (NPP), adoption hasn’t exploded, as evidenced by the mandated ‘confirmation of payee’ capability now enabled on the legacy BSB and account number addressing method. The biggest innovation from a customer perspective is the phone-native wallet, brought by technology giants who charge card issuers a high toll, a toll banks pay because customers demanded the experience.

Wealth of opportunity–or hidden cost?

Stablecoins threaten banks’ avenues for customer engagement, jeopardising their relevance in payments and transaction accounts. They have the potential to shift customer funds into digital token payment rails that move instantly and cost-efficiently outside of the banks’ scope. Yet banks could issue their own stablecoins and tokenised deposits, adding system resilience as an additional fast payment rail and opening the door to innovations such as faster currency exchange for customers. 

Stablecoin adoption carries a hidden challenge: liquidity risk. As transaction volume shifts to stablecoins, there is a tipping point at which traditional liquidity management may break down.² Banks and regulators must ask themselves: Are we prepared for a moment when our conventional liquidity management strategies become less effective in preventing financial contagion? What’s our strategy when customer deposits migrate to stablecoins? How do we protect against systemic risks while managing our own exposure? What potential regulatory responses are emerging on the horizon? 

AI agents present a similar challenge. Banks must provide trusted digital identity, secure payment rails, run on interoperable protocols—or risk eroding customer relationships. Agentic commerce gives banks the chance to maintain their role as trusted gatekeepers for identity, security and settlement, placing them at the heart of customer relationships.

Payments remain the cornerstone of customer experience in financial services. Australia’s payment system processes around AU$300 billion in non-cash payments daily.³ That’s equivalent to Australia’s annual GDP flowing through the payments system every 10 days. The composition of this AU$300 billion is changing as unprecedented disruption reshapes the payments landscape.

Key trends:

The future of payments is faster, smarter, programmable, and composable. Five vital implications for financial services leaders today:

1) Australia is uniquely placed to lead

Australia stands perfectly positioned to leverage our strengths and drive innovation in payments. We have a global reputation as a stable, trustworthy, well-regulated market. We’re highly capitalised. We’ve had one of the fastest adoption rates for contactless payments, and mobile wallet transactions continue to surge. We’re increasingly accommodative to digital assets like stablecoins and deposit tokens. 

When ASIC granted regulatory exemptions for certain stablecoin distributors with an Australian financial services licence¹⁰ they signalled Australia is becoming a destination for growth and innovation in digital assets and payments. This is opening up the potential for stablecoins to become an everyday payment option - simply another card in customers’ wallets.

2) Banks must own the trust layer to retain competitive advantage

Digital identity is the new currency of trust. With increased digital interactions, AI deepfakes and the risk of scams and fraud, secure digital identity solutions are non-negotiable, and identity frameworks must extend to both verification of humanity and delegation to an agent. Banks have a strong advantage here. Currently, banks provide the trust layer for payment transactions (and carry liability). Most major financial institutions (including the Big Four Banks) have adopted digital identity solutions like ConnectID, an Australian Payments Plus (AP+) initiative serving as a secure bridge between a customers bank and other businesses. Banks are employing cutting-edge thinking on digital identity solutions such as AMP’s use of best-in-class technology for fraud and identity theft protection, which includes Australia’s first numberless debit cards for small businesses and selfie-style video identity verification. 

Banks operate within a general environment of regulatory certainty, squarely within an existing regulatory mandate, whereas fintechs may face future regulatory disruption under the new payments licensing framework (including increased compliance costs, new operational and risk management standards and potentially broader consumer protection obligations).

Banks hold the keys to the ‘Know Your Customer’ due diligence process—the gold standard for authorising a transaction. This is a vital part of the anti-money laundering strategy to prevent fraud and other financial crimes. Banks retain this trust. Can banks extend their trust services to provide privacy-preserving digital identity both for humans (e.g. Worldcoin’s ‘proof of humanity’) and for the humans’ agents? 

With these advantages in mind, banks must maintain their close position with their consumer and merchant customers and cement their role as providers of the coming generation of secure infrastructure, settlement, and identity verification. Through open APIs, agentic transaction protocols and embedded finance models, banks can explore new revenue streams, enabling new options for real-time payments, risk management and compliance at scale. Banks can leverage this trust advantage by offering premium data, fraud protection, and regulatory confidence in a market where consumers and businesses value trust and security as much as speed.

The strategic imperative is clear: banks must invest to maintain their essential role as the trusted backbone of the new digital economy.

3) Success depends on a compelling use case—and adoption 

No matter how cutting-edge or fast-to-market, payment innovation only succeeds if all players in the ecosystem adopt it—especially customers. Payment innovation must solve a problem for users and enhance their experience. It must be what users really want. 

Sometimes this isn’t obvious. The benefits of stablecoins—simplified payment value chains, eliminated settlement risk, and reduced costs—aren’t immediately evident when buyers and sellers transact. Agentic commerce faces the same challenge: it needs to demonstrate clear advantages beyond a simplified search experience in order to fundamentally shift how transactions are initiated and executed.  

Australia’s financial services institutions must meet customers where they’re comfortable in the brave new world of payments. Savvy organisations don’t just launch innovations; they create compelling use cases for customers that drive advocacy and adoption. 

Consider Apple Pay. Apple Pay dominates point-of-sale digital wallets.¹¹ Apple’s success stems from high iPhone adoption rates, strong recognition as a trustworthy consumer brand, enhanced biometric authentication, and the simplicity of an integrated mobile wallet solution. The tech giant remains focused on payment security with its new digital ID features in iOS 26. 

The overall digital wallet market will continue to grow significantly in Australia. Financial services organisations must continue pushing for a bigger piece of a growing market by meeting, and where possible driving, consumer demand.

4) Ecosystem thinking is key

Ecosystems are the way forward in financial services. Financial services institutions need to partner—broadly and fast. PwC’s research found the Fund and Insure domain is ripe for cross-sector collaboration among non-traditional partners, providing new, more efficient models for capital allocation and financial services. Top-performing global companies embrace ecosystem strategies (PwC’s Accelerating Performance report).

Blockchain allows for complex transactions across multiple parties, setting the stage for partnerships. In Australia we have a proven track record of financial services partnerships: the NPP, BPAY, the RBA’s current joint initiative, Project Acacia, with a potential AU$13 billion in annualised savings on the table.¹²

Yet a paradigm shift is required. Genuine ecosystem-level collaboration is needed to achieve greater coordination between financial services organisations, fintechs, regulators, and other stakeholders. The goal: establish shared infrastructure and standards that promote payments innovation to address universal consumer challenges and needs.

5) Leaders must plan for a strategic transition—and act now

The overnight changes we’re witnessing in financial services have been decades in the making. Moore’s law says the pace is accelerating, its industry and societal impact magnified by convergence with disruptions in other fields, including financial services. Waiting on the sidelines is no longer an option. The pace of change and the scale of the opportunities demand action. Financial services organisations can’t afford to lag when it comes to reinvention. Technological disruption, regulatory acceptance and fast-evolving customer demands place the sector squarely at the centre of the AI storm now sweeping all markets.