Your cash in a weak currency is quietly losing value. Here is what finance teams are doing

A distributor in Buenos Aires, a software agency in Lagos, an exporter in Istanbul and a logistics firm in Cairo have a problem in common that never appears on an invoice: the cash in their operating account is a melting asset. Hold three months of working capital in a currency losing 20 to 40 percent a year against the dollar, and the treasury function is not preserving value; it is timing losses.

The standard playbook is well known and increasingly rationed. Dollar bank accounts, where local rules permit them, come with caps, paperwork and sometimes forced-conversion risk. FX forwards exist for the largest corporates and price everyone else out. Moving money offshore runs into capital controls. So most mid-sized businesses in soft-currency markets simply hold the melting asset and accelerate spending, converting depreciation into inventory.

Over the past three years, quietly and without much announcement, a fourth option has moved from the informal economy into the treasury policies of real companies: holding part of working capital in dollar-pegged stablecoins.

What the instrument actually is

A payment stablecoin is a digital token issued against reserves, designed to be redeemable one-to-one for a dollar. The major dollar stablecoins are backed by cash and short-term US Treasuries, publish reserve attestations, and now operate under written law: the US GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, sets federal requirements for payment stablecoin issuers, and MiCA has regulated e-money tokens in the EU since 2024. Institutional custody has followed the regulation: BNY Mellon and State Street, banks whose entire brand is the safekeeping of other people's assets, now provide custody services connected to major stablecoin reserves.

Functionally, for a treasurer, a regulated dollar stablecoin behaves like a dollar demand balance that happens to live on a blockchain: transferable in minutes at any hour, divisible, and convertible to local currency through exchanges or payment providers when the business needs to pay a local bill.

What finance teams actually do with it

The pattern we see among businesses that have adopted this, stripped of vendor gloss, is narrow and disciplined. They do not "move treasury onto crypto". They do something closer to this:

• A defined slice, not the whole balance. A policy-capped share of working capital, often the portion earmarked for future dollar obligations such as imports, is converted to a regulated dollar stablecoin as revenue arrives, before the local currency has time to depreciate.
• Named issuers, boring choices. Treasury policy names one or two large, regulated, fully reserved issuers. Yield-bearing exotica and algorithmic designs are excluded by policy, not by vibes.
• Institutional custody or provider-held accounts. Nobody is keeping the company's cash on a phone wallet. Custody sits with a regulated custodian or a licensed payment provider with segregated client structures, with dual controls that mirror the company's existing bank mandate.
• Spend-down through the same rails. When the dollar obligation comes due, the supplier payment often goes out directly on stablecoin rails, which collapses the treasury tool and the payment rail into one system. That mechanic is covered in our piece on why overseas supplier payments take 3 days and cost $45.

The result, where it works, is that the company's real position changes from "long a depreciating currency, involuntarily" to "holding dollars against dollar obligations, deliberately", using an instrument that does not require a foreign bank's permission.

The risks, stated plainly

We are an advisory firm; our product is the unvarnished version. Four risks deserve board-level attention before a single unit of currency is converted:

1. Legal status in your country. This is the gating question. Some jurisdictions permit corporate stablecoin holdings, some restrict them, and some prohibit or simply have not decided. Capital-control regimes may treat conversion as an FX transaction requiring approval. This analysis, with local counsel, comes first; everything else in this article is conditional on it.
2. Issuer risk. A stablecoin is a claim on its issuer's reserves. Regulation has sharply improved reserve quality and disclosure among major issuers, but the claim is only as good as the issuer and the redemption mechanics. History includes brief de-pegs even for large issuers — USDC traded below its peg for a weekend in March 2023 when part of its reserves was caught in the Silicon Valley Bank failure, recovering fully once the deposits were guaranteed. Diversifying across two issuers and sizing the allocation to survive a bad week is basic hygiene.
3. Operational risk. Keys, custody, admin access and transaction approval need the same controls as bank mandates: dual authorisation, defined signatories, recovery procedures. Most corporate losses in this area have been process failures, not technology failures.
4. Accounting and tax treatment. Local GAAP treatment of stablecoin holdings varies, and conversion gains measured in a depreciating local currency can create taxable FX gains on paper. Your auditor should be in the conversation before adoption, not after.

A note on what this is not

This is not an investment strategy, and any provider pitching treasury stablecoins primarily on yield is selling you a different, riskier product with the same vocabulary. The use case described here is defensive: shortening the time your working capital spends in a currency that is losing value, using an instrument redeemable for dollars. Treat anything promising more than that with the scepticism it deserves.

Where to start

The sequence that works: first, quantify the bleed, by taking last year's average local-currency cash balance and multiplying by the currency's depreciation against the dollar over the same period; that number is your annual cost of doing nothing. Second, get the legal read for your jurisdiction. Third, if both of those support acting, design the policy: allocation cap, approved issuers, custody arrangement, conversion triggers and controls.

The second and third steps are where independent advice earns its fee, because every issuer, exchange and custodian in this market will happily design your policy around their own product. We sell none of them, which is the point.

North Settlements provides business advisory services, not legal, tax, accounting or investment advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to hold any particular asset. Legality of corporate stablecoin holdings varies by jurisdiction; engage qualified local counsel. Figures are from public industry research as of August 2026; verify before relying on them.