Stablecoins, AI and real-time payments are converging. How should policymakers respond?

Evidence tier: A1 Evidence type: Auto-discovered official publication Source: Mastercard Newsroom Official publication date: 2026-07-06 Captured: 2026-07-15T01:13:52.944Z

Over the past decade, policymakers and regulators have addressed each wave of payments innovation in turn, relying on two durable principles. The first is a level playing field for all ecosystem participants, whether they are incumbents or newcomers. The second is the idea that activities with the same level of risk should lead to the same regulatory outcomes and therefore be governed by equivalent oversight regimes. Those principles remain the right starting point. Regulation should focus on a payment instrument’s function and its associated risks, regardless of the underlying technology. The challenge now is how to apply those principles across interacting systems, not just within them.

Digital assets and stablecoins offer an instructive recent case study in how to appropriately regulate a new technologically driven payments innovation. After considerable deliberation, authorities settled on bringing digital assets inside the regulatory perimeter to reduce regulatory arbitrage and ensure consumer protections. Effectively, regulators landed on extending established regulatory principles and practices to new payment system participants.

Where new technologies perform payment functions, they should be subject to the same expectations that protect users and preserve confidence in the broader ecosystem. The same logic should extend across the emerging payment stack as newer payment intermediaries, orchestration layers and AI-enabled actors that challenge and evolve established payments constructs become embedded in transaction flows.

The next phase of payments innovation, therefore, calls for a more integrated policy approach. Policymakers should strive to:

Stablecoins, AI-enabled payments, real-time rails and other newer models may improve cost, speed or efficiency, but they will scale together only if consumers, businesses, financial institutions and policymakers are confident that these systems are secure, resilient and governed by clear rules. In other words, adoption at scale will be determined not only by technical capability but by trust in the ecosystem as a whole.

For Mastercard, that challenge is not abstract. Every day, we help connect consumers, businesses, financial institutions and governments through a secure global network. Our role in a converging payments environment is to make trust tangible at scale — through security, standards, fraud prevention, identity capabilities and network governance that allow transactions to move safely across rails and technologies.

As new payment models emerge, our focus is not only on enabling more ways to pay, but on ensuring those experiences are supported by the protections, accountability and interoperability needed to earn confidence from all participants. In our view, trust is not a constraint on innovation; it is the condition that allows innovation to scale.

For policymakers, the task ahead is not to pick winners by favoring one rail, provider or technology over another. It is to create the conditions for a payments landscape in which multiple systems can coexist, compete and connect responsibly. And to that end, regulation should avoid distorting competition through overly prescriptive guidance, pricing requirements or favoring domestic players over international ones.

Mastercard believes the strongest payments ecosystems will be those that combine innovation with trust, openness with safeguards, and new capabilities with broad usability at scale. The payment stack is becoming more diverse, more intelligent and more interconnected. Policy should evolve accordingly.