Banks Are Waking Up to the Stablecoin Threat

**Sandy Kaul** (0:00)
We run our entire infrastructure, not just on one cloud-based provider, but we have multiple redundancies. We are actually constantly running three real-time copies of our records at all times, second to second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So we're really keeping three completely separate operating environments in sync and running them constantly. So it's a big technical challenge when you're really trying to do this at an enterprise scale.

**Simon Taylor** (0:39)
Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of Tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I am your host for today, author of Fintech Brain Food and head of Market Dev over at Tempo. And joining me once again back from a good holiday break is the one and only Cuy Sheffield. How are you doing, my friend? Are you feeling refreshed and ready to go?

**Cuy Sheffield** (0:59)
It's great to be back. It was a great break, but I am excited for 2026 It is going to be a fun and fascinating year. We've got amazing guests to kick off the year, so let's get into it.

**Simon Taylor** (1:09)
You're exactly right, Cuy, and to kick off 2026, we are joined by an incredible guest, Sandy Kaul, who is EVP and Head of Innovation at Franklin Templeton. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

**Sandy Kaul** (1:21)
Thank you guys so much for having me. Excited to be here today and kick off the year with you.

**Simon Taylor** (1:26)
Let's kick it off right. And just as we always do, I need to remind everybody that views and opinions of contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of the companies they represent.
And please always, always do you on research. Don't take anything we say as tax legal or financial advice. All right, the first story, Cuy, I don't know if you saw this one. I couldn't escape it. The fintech company OnePay, who is backed by Walmart, have gone live with crypto. So you don't pay for your groceries with Bitcoin with this. It's a Neobank like app with about 5 million users. You can buy crypto in the app. You can sell it. And those proceeds when you sell them hit your OnePay cash balance, which you then can spend as dollars at the register. The point of sale never sees crypto, it sees USD. So this is really quite an interesting move here, both with my fintech hat on and with my sort of institutional adoption of crypto hat on. But Cuy, was there anything that you saw from this contextually that you thought was interesting when you saw the story?

**Cuy Sheffield** (2:33)
Not at all surprising. I think this is a trend that we're seeing of more neobanks that are looking to become financial super apps, and crypto trading by sell and hold is one of those features and capabilities that fits as part of the broader strategy. I think one of the biggest takeaways I see is you can have an announcement like this lead to a headline of Walmart enabling crypto payments and then you peel it back. You're like, wait a minute, okay, so OnePay, which is an existing super app that Walmart is kind of associated with, is doing by sell and hold, but there's no notion of actually paying directly because that doesn't really solve a real problem for them. And so as much as people are excited about Bitcoin and have talked about the Lightning Network, if you would have told them, oh, Walmart's interacting with Bitcoin and Lightning, there were people who thought that that would be from a payment standpoint, but it seems more and more that what the market is telling us is that Bitcoin is an asset that apps are integrating to buy, sell and hold, and they're not necessarily looking to enable it to be spent. I would say Cash App and Block is the exception. They're going full steam ahead trying to enable Bitcoin to be spent at the point of sale. I think they're one of the only data points that we've seen of a very legitimate payment company that's really, really pushing for that. Everyone else is focusing on the buy, sell and hold. So that was my biggest takeaway.

**Simon Taylor** (3:55)
Yeah, and Cash App as well have announced support for stablecoins, and they're going to launch their own as well. So even there, it's showing some flexibility. Sandy, your thoughts with headlines like this and kind of bigger institutions adopting Bitcoin and crypto, and it's something that Franklin Templeton has been really a bit of a pioneer in.

**Sandy Kaul** (4:12)