A dozen major European banks have joined forces to offer a euro stablecoin to clients by the end of this year. “We have a better chance of creating a broadly supported stablecoin than fintechs,” said Floris Lugt, CFO of Qivalis, the joint venture that will issue the crypto payment instrument.
The coin does not yet have a name, and it is not yet known which banks will offer it to their clients this year, but that it is coming—a broadly supported euro stablecoin—is now all but certain. At least according to Qivalis, the company founded earlier this year by a dozen of Europe’s largest banks (including KBC, ING, BNP Paribas, and Unicredit). 
The joint venture has a twofold objective, as CFO Floris Lugt explained in an interview with Investment Officer: “We are making agreements on the technological standards we will use and enabling banks to offer this payment instrument before the end of the year.” The biggest challenge? “Organizing the cooperation between all those parties. Technology is not the problem; the focus is on building the organization.”
Once the coin is launched, Qivalis will remain in the background, Lugt explained: “Qivalis will be the engine that issues the payment instrument, the banks will distribute it and are responsible for client contact. Future users of the stablecoin will not deal with us directly; we only have the banks as clients.”
More efficient transactions
Initially, banks will focus on internationally active companies. “Stablecoins are primarily a way to make transactions more efficient—that is, faster and cheaper,” Lugt said. This mainly concerns payments between Europe and other parts of the world. “There are still inefficiencies there, and that makes it expensive.” The CFO gives the example of a travel organization that continuously transacts with more or less the same international parties. “However, they all have their own databases and ledgers, and there are discrepancies between them. Errors occur, corrections must be made, and disputes arise. All inefficiency. If you can program those transactions—so the system checks whether all conditions are met before moving to the next step in the chain—it becomes transparent and efficient.”
A second application is settlement in capital markets. “Processing international transactions in certain types of bonds can take two days, for example. To mitigate settlement risk during that time, investors rely on multiple intermediaries. With stablecoins, you do not have those costs. Transactions can be settled in seconds.”
Tokenized investments
This mainly concerns the settlement of transactions in assets that are also “onchain”: tokenized investments. That market is growing exponentially, with examples such as tokenized money market funds, ETFs, and precious metals, but it still carries relatively little weight. Even so, it is an interesting market for banks, Lugt said. He would know, having spent twenty years at ING before joining Qivalis on January 1 of this year. Treasury and financial risk were his areas of expertise.
From 2016 onward, Lugt was responsible at ING for tracking new technologies relevant to the treasury function, which is how he became familiar with blockchain technology, now often referred to as DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). Later, he even became responsible for the bank’s overall strategy on digital assets. “For large banks, digitalization is relevant in two ways: what capabilities they want to offer clients and what risks these technologies pose to the balance sheet.”
A sign of the times
Fintechs have traditionally led the way in DLT, and the applications they built were often described as threats to traditional institutions. But now banks are competing with innovators to develop a standard for European stablecoins. A sign of the times? “In my view, you need banks for scaling these applications,” Lugt said. “Executing payments is at the core of their business model, and DLT applications all revolve around transactions. The issue is that on blockchain, you still lack a payment instrument with the reliability and broad support of the ‘real’ euro. The stablecoin market currently consists for 99 percent of dollar-denominated variants.”
Banks’ distribution networks are another advantage Qivalis has over fintechs, Lugt argued. “Tether and Circle, the two major issuers of dollar stablecoins, had to build their own distribution networks to connect directly with users. The banks participating in Qivalis can immediately leverage their existing distribution power.”
Finally, Qivalis’s stablecoin has a greater chance of becoming a standard due to the broad support of at least twelve banks. “The likelihood that one of the many options fintechs are currently offering will become the standard is very small.”
Swiss banks want a CHF stablecoin
Six Swiss banks will jointly test use cases for a stablecoin linked to the Swiss franc, they announced last week. Swiss Stablecoin AG, a company that has been advocating for a digital Swiss currency for several years, will provide the technical infrastructure for issuing the coin. Initially, this will involve a secure digital test environment—a sandbox—that is expected to become operational in the second half of 2026. The participating banks—Raiffeisen, UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, ZKB, and BCV—said in a press release that they aim to support the development of a Swiss ecosystem for digital money, focusing on making transactions more efficient.
So is “transaction history” being written at Qivalis right now? “It remains exciting to see how this will unfold,” Lugt responded. He declined to comment on the expected growth pace. “At the moment, the application process for the required electronic money license with DNB is ongoing. That requires us to meet strict conditions. For example, every issued stablecoin must be fully backed by liquid reserves. Once we receive the license, we will issue the coin and hope to grow. If the balance sheet exceeds 5 billion euro, you become ‘significant’ in supervisory terms, and additional requirements apply. Of course, we aim to become ‘significant’ within a reasonable timeframe, but a large balance sheet is not an end in itself. The main goal is to develop a market standard.”
Four digital payment instruments
Whether that succeeds will also depend on variables beyond Qivalis’s control. Lugt: “The market is being flooded with initiatives and experiments in the digitalization and tokenization of assets. Ultimately, we see four digital payment instruments coexisting. On the central bank side, there will be the digital euro and a wholesale version of that digital euro. On the private side, there will be the stablecoin and tokenized deposits. Only the digital euro, a retail currency, will not be onchain; the other forms will be. But what the dynamics will be in the development of all these digital payment instruments is difficult to say, and those dynamics will certainly affect the outcome of our work. So yes, it remains exciting.”
Founding shareholders
Nine European banks established a joint venture in September 2025 to issue a stablecoin by the end of 2026 that complies with MiCAR, the European regulation for markets in crypto-assets. Banca Sella, CaixaBank, Danske Bank, DekaBank, ING, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB, and Unicredit were the founding shareholders of Qivalis. On January 1, the board took office, and BNP Paribas and DZ Bank joined the shareholder group. In February, the Spanish giant BBVA also joined. Floris Lugt: “We are continuously in discussions with more banks—either banks that want to become shareholders or banks that want to act as distributors.” Qivalis’s CEO is Jan-Oliver Sell, who previously led crypto exchange Coinbase in Germany for four years. The company is based in Amsterdam and has more than twenty employees. That number is expected to more than double by the end of the year.