Samer Choucair: Stablecoins Have Not Eliminated Banks But They Have Taken Away Their Privilege of Being Slow
Investment leader Samer Choucair said stablecoins are driving an accelerating transformation in the structure of the global financial system in 2026, after their market value surpassed $300 billion and their role expanded from a core instrument within digital-asset markets into a settlement and payments mechanism capable of competing with some traditional banking functions.
According to Samer Choucair, the importance of this shift does not lie in stablecoins simply as digital tokens. The more important development is the redistribution of financial-intermediation functions among banks, stablecoin issuers, payment companies, and providers of digital financial infrastructure.
“Institutional capital is looking for who controls issuance, reserves, the customer relationship, and settlement,” Choucair said. “The token itself is replaceable. The real franchise lies in the regulated rails and the balance sheet standing behind redemption.”
Choucair said the new U.S. regulatory framework has helped push stablecoins toward a more institutional phase by emphasizing high-quality reserves that fully match the value of coins in circulation, with a particular focus on cash and short-dated U.S. Treasury bills.
He believes these requirements create an increasingly direct relationship between stablecoin growth and demand for short-term government debt.
That development has implications across several asset classes at the same time.
In fixed income, expanding stablecoin adoption could create additional structural demand for short-term Treasury bills. In banking, some institutions could face pressure on deposits if households and companies shift part of their balances into redeemable digital instruments. In equities, opportunities could emerge for companies involved in custody, settlement, payments, compliance, and digital financial infrastructure.
Samer Choucair said institutional investors are therefore becoming less focused on the headline market capitalization of a stablecoin and more interested in the economics underneath it: settlement fees, reserve quality, regulated transaction flows, liquidity management, and the issuer’s ability to process redemptions under stress.
“The institutional investor is not buying speed alone,” Choucair said. “They are buying an enforceable redemption right, transparent reserves, and legal separation between customer assets and the operator’s own balance sheet. Any project that confuses marketing with licensing can be repriced violently during the first real tightening cycle.”
From Tokens to Financial Infrastructure
For Choucair, stablecoins increasingly need to be understood as infrastructure rather than simply another segment of the cryptocurrency market.
Their economic significance grows when they reduce settlement friction, lower transaction costs, allow funds to move outside traditional banking hours, and integrate into financial systems through programmable interfaces.
That means the long-term investment opportunity may be less concentrated in the token itself and more heavily weighted toward the institutions controlling custody, compliance, reserve management, transaction processing, cybersecurity, and redemption.
The strongest businesses in this ecosystem, Choucair argued, are likely to be those able to combine technology with regulatory credibility.
Speed may attract users, but trust determines whether institutional capital remains.
The Banking Model Comes Under Pressure
Stablecoins do not necessarily remove banks from the financial system, but they may weaken one of the advantages banks have historically enjoyed: control over the timing and infrastructure of settlement.
When customers can hold digital claims that move nearly instantly and can be redeemed against high-quality reserves, traditional banking deposits face a new form of competition.
Choucair cautioned that a meaningful migration of deposits toward stablecoins could increase funding costs for some banks and, in certain circumstances, affect their capacity to extend credit.
This is particularly relevant for banking models that depend heavily on low-cost deposits as a source of funding.
The transition therefore creates a strategic challenge.
Banks can either treat stablecoins and tokenized settlement systems as competitors, or they can integrate similar technologies into their own payment, treasury-management, and settlement offerings.
For Samer Choucair, the institutions best positioned to adapt will be those that preserve the advantages of regulated banking while removing unnecessary friction from the customer experience.
A Strategic Opportunity for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
Choucair said Saudi Arabia and other Gulf economies have an opportunity to build more efficient digital financial infrastructure by combining the region’s rapid adoption of electronic payments with digital banking, fintech investment, and ongoing experimentation around central-bank digital currencies.
The competitive advantage, however, would not come from issuing another token simply to follow a global trend.
The more important opportunity is to connect trade, tourism, contracting, debt markets, and investment flows to settlement networks that are faster, regulated, auditable, and capable of operating at institutional scale.
“Vision 2030 needs capital to move at the same speed as the projects it is financing,” Choucair said. “If international transfers remain trapped in traditional settlement cycles lasting several days, investors pay an uncertainty premium. Regulated instant-payment rails reduce that premium, and that is itself a strategic asset.”
This could become particularly important as Saudi Arabia continues to attract international investment and deepen its capital markets.
Faster settlement can improve working-capital efficiency, reduce counterparty uncertainty, and make cross-border transactions more attractive to investors operating across multiple jurisdictions.
Stablecoins Meet Artificial Intelligence
Samer Choucair said stablecoins could become even more significant as artificial intelligence and autonomous software agents become increasingly capable of initiating purchases, managing subscriptions, executing transactions, and settling payments without direct human intervention.
That creates demand for programmable money.
Traditional payment systems were largely designed around human-initiated transactions and fixed banking processes. AI-driven economic activity could require systems that are accessible through application programming interfaces, capable of instant settlement, and supported by real-time risk management.
In that environment, stablecoins and tokenized payment systems could become part of the infrastructure supporting machine-to-machine commerce.
Choucair said this introduces another potential investment layer across APIs, identity verification, compliance automation, treasury management, fraud detection, and real-time transaction monitoring.
The winners may not necessarily be the companies issuing the most widely discussed tokens.
They could instead be the businesses building the financial operating system around them.
Redemption Risk Remains the Critical Test
Choucair nevertheless warned that stablecoins introduce significant risks involving liquidity, redemption, regulation, and the underlying quality of reserves.
A stablecoin is only as credible as the assets backing it and the legal structure governing the holder’s claim.
If a large number of users attempt to redeem simultaneously, issuers must be capable of converting reserves into cash quickly enough to meet demand without destabilizing the system.
That is why institutional investors increasingly focus on reserve composition, asset segregation, liquidity, transparency, and governance.
A period of market stress could expose the difference between stablecoins backed by genuinely liquid, high-quality assets and those supported by weaker structures or less transparent reserves.
At the same time, large-scale movement of deposits out of the banking system and into digital instruments could have second-order consequences for credit creation and bank funding.
The technology may therefore improve settlement efficiency while simultaneously creating new questions around financial stability.
The Investment Thesis Is in the Rails
For Samer Choucair, the long-term investment thesis is not primarily about betting on which stablecoin becomes the largest.
It is about identifying who owns the infrastructure, the customer relationships, the legal rights, the reserves, and the regulated access points connecting digital money to the broader financial system.
“Stablecoins have not eliminated the bank,” Samer Choucair said. “But they have taken away the bank’s privilege of being slow.”
The investment implication, he added, is that capital should increasingly be allocated toward the infrastructure, enforceable rights, reserve architecture, compliance systems, and settlement networks supporting the transition rather than toward the noise surrounding individual tokens.
As digital finance becomes more institutional, the winners are likely to be the companies that can combine speed with regulation, liquidity with transparency, and programmable settlement with credible redemption.
That is where the durable value is likely to accumulate.