FV Bank CEO Miles Paschini on crypto banking, stablecoins, and the future of digital asset payments

As stablecoins and digital assets move from experimentation towards real-world deployment in payments and treasury management, FV Bank CEO Miles Paschini shares the latest trends, use cases, and lessons shaping the future of regulated digital asset banking.

For businesses, stablecoins are increasingly being used to move money across borders, manage treasury operations, and connect digital assets with traditional payment rails. At the same time, building regulated infrastructure for these use cases requires banks to bring together technology, compliance, licensing, and business strategy from the outset.

In the latest Industry Digest Talks, The Paypers spoke with Miles about the lessons behind building a bank at the intersection of traditional finance, payments and digital assets, where adoption is gaining traction, and what companies should consider before entering regulated digital asset banking.

From a crypto payment card to FV Bank

The story of FV Bank begins with Miles's earlier experience in payments. Before FV Bank, he co-founded a company that initially focused on enterprise payment solutions for telecom companies. The business later pivoted towards digital assets and launched a crypto-linked debit card around the end of 2012.

The product connected Bitcoin wallets to Visa debit cards, allowing customers to spend their digital assets through traditional payment infrastructure. It gained significant traction, eventually reaching more than one million customers across more than 70 countries.

But the experience also exposed a fundamental problem. Regulators, banks, and compliance teams did not yet share a common understanding of how digital assets worked, while the technology connecting wallets, custody, trading, and fiat payments remained fragmented.

Those lessons became the foundation for FV Bank. As Miles explained, the idea was to build a regulated banking infrastructure that could address the regulatory, compliance, risk, and technology challenges involved in bringing digital assets and traditional finance together. The objective was not simply to create another crypto company, but to provide the infrastructure that other fintech companies could build on.

Stablecoins are becoming a business payments tool

While consumer crypto payments remain an important use case, Miles sees the strongest growth in stablecoins coming from businesses and institutions. At FV Bank, he said that roughly 40% of deposits are derived from stablecoin deposits, with approximately 99% of that activity coming from B2B customers. For international businesses, the attraction is straightforward: stablecoin transactions can provide a faster way to send and receive value across borders.

FV Bank is seeing two particularly distinct models.

In the first, businesses receive stablecoins into their FV Bank accounts, which are converted into dollars that can then be used for conventional expenses such as salaries, rent, and professional services. In the second, businesses receive traditional fiat payments and use the funds to mint stablecoins, which can then be used for payments or treasury movements.

For these businesses, stablecoins are therefore less about replacing traditional money and more about improving how money moves between different parts of the financial system. Miles sees this distinction becoming increasingly important. Stablecoins can function as payment instruments as well as treasury management tools, with their programmability and 24/7 availability providing capabilities that traditional banking products do not always offer.

Different digital assets will serve different purposes

Miles does not view the digital asset market as a single category. In his view, stablecoins have a particularly strong future in payments and treasury management. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is more likely to develop as an investment and long-term asset rather than as a mainstream payment instrument. He expects Bitcoin to increasingly be used as collateral, allowing holders to borrow against the asset.

He also points to tokenized money market funds and tokenized equities as another area with significant potential. Tokenized yield-bearing assets can provide businesses with more programmable and continuous ways to manage treasury assets.

For regulated institutions, however, the distinction between different digital assets matters. FV Bank is currently focused on centrally issued tokenized products rather than DeFi products, reflecting the requirements of operating within a regulated banking environment.

The licence is only the starting point

One of Miles's clearest messages for companies considering regulated digital asset banking is that obtaining a licence is not the hardest part. For a de novo institution, he argues that a strong business plan, sufficient capital, and good legal representation can provide the foundation for obtaining a licence. The real complexity begins afterwards.

Banks entering this market need different technology, compliance tools, policies, procedures, vendors, and operational models. They also need to understand that digital asset deposits can behave differently from traditional bank deposits because customers can move value around the clock. Stablecoin infrastructure introduces additional considerations around liquidity management, minting, and burning, while compliance requirements can become more complex because the institution is operating across traditional and digital asset environments.

This is why Miles emphasises that regulation, compliance, technology, and business economics cannot be treated as separate workstreams. They have to be designed together.

Turning hard-earned experience into infrastructure

FV Bank's own evolution reflects this approach. Miles says the bank has taken the work it has built since 2020 and turned it into banking infrastructure that other fintech companies can use. That includes banking, digital assets, stablecoins, and card issuing, alongside the regulatory and licensing infrastructure required to operate these services. The broader lesson from FV Bank's journey is that digital asset adoption does not necessarily mean abandoning traditional financial infrastructure. Instead, the opportunity increasingly lies in connecting the two.

To hear more about FV Bank’s journey, the role of stablecoins in business payments, and what it takes to build and operate a regulated digital asset bank, watch the full interview with Miles below. We also invite you to share your thoughts and feedback on the conversation.

About author

Miles Paschini is CEO and co-founder of FV Bank, a regulated digital bank providing integrated banking, payments, and digital-asset custody. An entrepreneur and payments executive with nearly 30 years’ experience, he has built businesses spanning prepaid services, card issuing, electronic money, and transaction processing. He founded EWI Holdings, which Blackhawk acquired in 2006, holds seven issued payment-processing patents, and helped develop internationally recognised debit-card products used by e-wallet and settlement operators in more than 70 countries.