Stablecoins are designed to maintain a stable value, typically pegged (linked) to fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar.
The GENIUS Act provides a regulatory framework for stablecoins including requirements for reserve management, redemption rights and operational reporting.
Partners in Motion: Managing Vendor Exposure
Stablecoins are increasingly embedded in the operational infrastructure of vendors including payment processors, fintech platforms, payroll providers and digital marketplaces.
This is where vendor risk management adds value. By understanding how partners handle stablecoins, organizations can manage exposure intentionally rather than avoiding these assets entirely. Oversight ensures partners maintain institutional-grade custody and security, have insurance covering custody, cyber, crime and smart contract risks and clearly define liability and flow-of-funds responsibilities in contracts. Verification of regulatory alignment adds another layer of assurance.
Considerations for building strong vendor oversight:
- Institutional-grade custody and security measures
- Insurance covering custody, cyber, crime and smart contract risks
- Clear contractual liability and flow-of-funds responsibilities
- Regulatory and compliance alignment including GENIUS Act provisions
Organizations are increasingly approaching this space within broader digital asset risk frameworks, with additional perspectives on how these exposures are being assessed and managed across operations.
Payments in Play: Understanding Customer Impact
Stablecoins can affect organizations through customer payments, even if conversion to fiat occurs upstream.
The opportunity lies in clarifying responsibility and controls across the payment chain. If third parties handle custody, conversion and settlement, organizations can focus on monitoring partner capabilities, verifying contractual safeguards and ensuring residual exposure is intentional and managed, including robust AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) controls.
Considerations for customer-related stablecoin flows:
- Identify where payments touch stablecoins directly or through partners
- Confirm third parties have institutional-grade custody, security and insurance
- Ensure contracts define liability, refund and dispute processes
- Verify AML/KYC processes scale appropriately for transaction types and volumes
Treasury in Motion: Optimizing Liquidity and Controls
Stablecoins are sometimes used as bridge assets to accelerate settlement, reduce friction in cross-border payments or improve cash efficiency. While these benefits can unlock faster liquidity, they introduce assumptions about timing, access to funds and counterparty reliability.
Early examples in insurance and financial services highlight how stablecoins can support more efficient fund flows in practice, including recent proof-of-concept premium payments.
Treasury teams may rely on network availability, issuer stability, transaction volumes and redemption terms, which can be tested quickly in stress scenarios such as a stablecoin losing its peg.
The key is mapping exposures, restoring visibility and maintaining proactive oversight. Mapping where stablecoins touch treasury processes, understanding dependencies and aligning with counterparties ensures digital assets support efficiency rather than creating gaps.
Key treasury considerations:
- Monitor intraday flows: stablecoin legs settle 24/7 but fiat on- and off-ramps follow traditional banking cutoffs
- Manage prefunding or overcollateralization requirements that lock cash outside traditional liquidity pools
- Track liquidity across multiple custodians, exchanges and wallets to avoid fragmentation
- Ensure finality versus reversibility risks are understood as operational, contractual or regulatory issues can delay access
Counterparty Risk: Know Who You Rely On
Stablecoin issuers and intermediaries function as financial counterparties. Their legal structures, reserve practices and governance models can vary, creating differences in reliability and recovery expectations.
Mapping these dependencies alongside treasury and operational processes ensures that stablecoin activity enhances efficiency without introducing unexpected risk.
Counterparty considerations:
- Verify partner financial health, operational practices and insurance coverage
- Align KYC and AML policies with organizational risk standards
- Review contractual safeguards including liability and flow-of-funds definitions
- Monitor concentration risk across issuers, intermediaries and networks
Operational Risk: Planning for Disruptions
Stablecoin infrastructure can introduce operational risk beyond internal systems. Payment delays, vendor outages, custody errors or policy changes at third-party providers can cascade through treasury, finance and customer processes.
Proactive planning helps organizations manage these risks without overreacting or avoiding stablecoins entirely.
Operational risk considerations:
- Identify dependencies across internal teams and third-party providers
- Update incident response plans to include blockchain or stablecoin disruptions
- Leverage existing vendor and treasury oversight to monitor custody, security and flow-of-funds responsibility
- Test scenarios for settlement delays or system disruptions to ensure rapid recovery
Turning Insight into Action
To manage stablecoin-related risks and apply established risk frameworks, organizations can:
- Identifying indirect digital asset exposure across vendors, payments and customers
- Testing liquidity and settlement assumptions tied to those exposures
- Clarifying ownership and escalation paths between risk, finance and treasury
- Reviewing whether contractual and insurance arrangements reflect actual dependencies
- Integrating findings into operational and incident response playbooks
This enables organizations to re-establish visibility and control over exposures that already exist within their operational and financial systems control, while unlocking the efficiency potential of stablecoins.
Aon’s stablecoin podcast offers a deeper discussion on how stablecoins are shaping treasury, risk and operational decisions.
