Key Takeaways:
A quarter of the world's payment volume is not the threshold that matters here — 4% is. Capgemini Research Institute's World Payments Report 2027 forecasts that stablecoins, tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies will carry that share of global payments by 2030, pulling roughly $230 billion of revenue out of bank payment books. The Paris-based firm surveyed 1,110 corporates with revenue above $1 billion and 300 banking executives across nine markets between May and June 2026 for the 22nd edition of the report.
"The payments industry is entering its most significant period of disruption since the emergence of digital banking," Jeroen Hölscher, Global Head of Payment Services at Capgemini, said. "We are moving past the intelligent money hype cycle into a period where the economics and transaction volumes make it impossible for banks to remain on the sidelines."
The revenue at risk sits in the highest-margin corners of the payments book: foreign exchange spreads, correspondent banking, float income and transaction processing fees. Corporates already report that 36% of their business-to-business payment volume flows through non-banks, and 74% describe cross-border payments as slow, costly and unpredictable. A typical cross-border B2B payment takes about 3.5 days end to end and costs the payer the equivalent of 2% of transaction value, while 57% of respondents say they lack live payment status, cash positions or transparent pricing during the process.
The prize for fixing that friction is large. Capgemini estimates that widespread use of these instruments could free as much as $4 trillion currently trapped in settlement and liquidity accounts — capital that earns little and cannot be deployed into lending or investment. Banks still hold the inside track on capturing it: 71% of corporates say they would choose a bank over a fintech for tokenized payments at equivalent cost and quality. That preference is conditional. Nearly 60% would source stablecoin services from a non-bank provider if their banking partner falls behind.
Bank executives surveyed by Capgemini name tokenized deposits — conventional deposits reissued as digital tokens on a blockchain — as their top near-term priority, because the money stays on the balance sheet and the structure fits existing regulation. Execution is thin. Only 21% of banks are actively scaling at least one of these instruments; the other 79% are still piloting, evaluating or ignoring them.
The gap shows up in the revenue math. Banks Capgemini classifies as leaders are three times more likely than mainstream peers to identify new revenue streams, and expect to offset declining transaction revenue within 15 months, against 25 months for the rest of the industry. Leaders also outpace mainstream banks 1.5 times on cross-network transaction monitoring and are 1.2 times more likely to run AI-driven wallet surveillance alongside real-time anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer checks inside the transaction flow — a requirement that follows from settlement being irrevocable once executed.
Talent is the binding constraint even at the top. Just over half of leaders, 56%, say they have the skills to build and maintain digital assets, tokenization, smart contracts and interoperability across financial networks.
For a bank, the $230 billion figure is not a volume problem but a take-rate problem. Tokenized settlement compresses the spread a bank earns on moving a corporate's money and removes the float it earns while the money is in transit. Card networks and correspondent banks that charge per-message fees face the same arithmetic, which is why the report's 4% volume share matters more than it looks: the instruments concentrate in exactly the cross-border, high-value corridors where fee density is highest.
The competitive set is already visible. Tron has become the settlement rail for a large share of global USDT, processing roughly $150 billion to $190 billion of stablecoin transfers a week, with average on-chain transaction fees near seven cents, according to the network's blockchain explorer. That is the cost benchmark banks are being measured against, and it is a fraction of the 2% of transaction value corporates currently absorb. Google and Apple have separately posted job listings seeking stablecoin and tokenized-deposit expertise, per CoinDesk reporting, while the GENIUS Act enacted in July 2025 set a federal framework for payment stablecoins covering permitted issuers, reserve requirements and supervision.
Capgemini's own framing puts the decision on a clock. The 21% of banks already scaling are writing the standards and governance rules that the remaining 79% will have to adopt or route around, and the 15-month versus 25-month offset gap is the measurable cost of waiting. The next read on whether that gap narrows comes with the 2027 edition of the survey, which will capture whether the leader cohort has grown past a fifth of the industry.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
