Evidence of that shift is growing. Visa’s stablecoin tracker recorded $6.6 billion in volume across 132.4 million retail-sized transactions (those worth less than $250) during the latest 30-day period. Standard Chartered expects stablecoin circulation to increase about sevenfold to roughly $2 trillion by 2028, while agent-led purchases could rise from 1% of e-commerce in 2025 to 12% in 2029. Neobanks capture nearly 40% of new banking accounts globally, boasting over 1.4 billion users.
A step further
Naveen Mallela, Standard Chartered’s global head of payments, also expects the traditional account-based model to change. He believes people will eventually use a wallet tied to their identity instead of separate bank and brokerage accounts.
“Rather than having bank accounts with individual banks or having separate brokerage accounts, you would have a wallet where you’ll have cash, tokenized deposits of some sort issued by different banks, stablecoins, tokenized money market funds, crypto and funds, all of that in one app, one wallet,” he said, clarifying that this was his personal opinion, not a formal Standard Chartered position.
His forecast does not remove banks from the system. The wallet he described could hold deposits and tokens issued by several banks, which would continue providing much of the money, infrastructure and controls behind the services.
