Stablecoins & Tokenisation in Corporate Treasury, Explained

Tokenisation appears more and more often in treasury conversations, but the terminology is still used loosely. This handbook answers the questions that actually matter to a corporate treasurer: what is the instrument, who is the counterparty, how does settlement work, and where could it improve an existing process?

Scale is given context rather than hype. Of roughly $35 trillion in reported annual stablecoin volume, McKinsey and Artemis identify about $390 billion as genuine payment activity — of which $226 billion is B2B, growing 733% year on year. In parallel, J.P. Morgan's Kinexys settles more than $5bn of bank money daily, tokenised money market funds have passed $11bn, and DTCC processed its first live tokenised-collateral trades in July 2026. Figures are dated and sourced, and the banking examples are a snapshot of the market as at August 2026.

• A taxonomy of digital money, and the distinctions that matter in treasury: stablecoins versus bank-issued tokenised money, deposit tokens and tokenised MMFs
• How a stablecoin payment, a tokenised deposit and a tokenised MMF each actually work, step by step
• Versus today's treasury rails — correspondent, batch, instant and tokenised compared on settlement, availability, all-in cost, transparency, programmability and reach — plus what tokenised rails do not fix
• Treasury use cases and programmable treasury operations
• Infrastructure and custody, risks and controls, and the regulatory landscape as at August 2026
• Accounting and tax treatment
• A phased adoption path, what treasurers should do next, a one-page decision path, a readiness assessment and a glossary