Navigating Digital Assets on Banking : What institutional adoption looks like in 2026

On March 26, STORM Partners and the Crypto Valley Association brought together senior decision-makers from banking, infrastructure, compliance, and international organizations for a private roundtable at Decentral House, Geneva 🇨🇭

The room included representatives from private banking, infrastructure, compliance, and multilateral organizations. Not a panel. Not a keynote. A working session, where the people responsible for these decisions in 2026 compared notes directly.

What follows is a synthesis of where the conversation actually went: the tensions that surfaced, the assumptions that were challenged, and the conclusions that held up under pressure.

The legitimacy debate is over. The sophistication race has begun.

Banks that entered the space early now report digital assets as a material part of their revenue, and the hesitant boards that needed convincing were won over by commercial logic, not ideology.

The holdouts are running out of arguments. At this point, there is no reasonable case for a bank of sufficient size to stay on the sidelines.

According to the Digital Asset Banking Report presented at the event, 28% of retail banks have already integrated crypto. A senior figure at one of Europe's first banks to offer retail crypto services put the trajectory plainly: that number is expected to reach 90%+ within three to five years.

The frontier has already moved on. Basic custody is commoditizing. The competition now sits in what you build on top: yield products, lending, structured offerings. The institutions that entered early are already asking those next questions. The ones still deliberating are starting from behind.

The infrastructure is maturing. The architecture is changing with it.

A point that often gets lost in the adoption narrative came from one of the Swiss-based custodians in the room.

For most of crypto's history, exchanges doubled as custodians. You traded where your assets sat. The consequences of that model are well documented.

What is emerging now mirrors how traditional finance already works: custody and execution separated, with clear duties on each side. Off-exchange settlement, independent custodians, prime brokerage-style infrastructure. The same structure institutional investors have demanded in every other asset class.

This is not just a risk management improvement. It is a signal that the industry is building for the type of client that actually moves markets. Institutions do not consolidate counterparty risk by default. They require separation as a precondition.

The plumbing is catching up to the ambition.

Compliance is the bottleneck. AI is beginning to break it open.

A compliance director at a leading regulated digital asset exchange raised something that landed hard in the room.

Blockchain analytics now offers more transparency into customer behavior than most traditional payment rails. And yet the instinct from banks is still: digital asset, therefore high risk. The knowledge gap is the real problem, not the technology.

To illustrate how deep that gap runs, the team ran a controlled test on a real regulatory inquiry from a major Asian financial regulator. Two responses were prepared in parallel: one by an experienced human compliance team, one by an AI model trained on regulatory frameworks. The human team spent five days crafting their response. The regulator rejected it and asked for something else entirely. Everything they wanted had been in the AI-generated answer from the start.

As compliance headcount and licensing costs get repriced by agentic AI, the cost structure of running a digital asset business shifts significantly. The teams spending weeks on licensing responses and regulatory exams are the next thing to get leaner.

Web3 environments are not inherently harder to run compliantly. In many cases they offer more auditability than traditional rails. The gap is in knowing how to leverage that, and how to build AI into the compliance layer before it becomes a cost crisis.

The payments layer is where institutional disruption actually starts.

Demand for tokenization has been overwhelming since regulatory clarity arrived in the US. But the more irreversible shift is happening at the payments layer.

Cross-border operators are running hundreds of people on reconciliation workflows that stablecoin settlement could colcould collapse due to stablecoin settlement lapse. One of the top three global remittance companies loses an estimated 18 to 20 million every quarter in idle cash and reconciliation failures alone. A major global banking group puts its annual reconciliation cost at around 200 million, spread across dozens of country integrations and core banking systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

Once corporate treasurers do that math, the shift stops being a product decision and becomes a competitive necessity.

And stablecoins may not even be the end state. Tokenized money market funds offer the same NAV stability with better auditing and actual yield. The settlement layer is still being decided.

The use case that rarely makes it into these conversations.

A perspective that reframed the room came from a corporate treasurer managing flows for a major international humanitarian organization.

Three years ago, their organization began delivering USDC directly to displaced people in Ukraine. Skeptics asked why, but the efficiency argument settled those questions fast. The savings compared to traditional cash aid logistics were overwhelming.

Since then it has scaled. Latin America, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan. In each case, the wallet provided is not just a one-time aid mechanism. It becomes a de facto bank account. People run businesses on the back of it. Financial and digital literacy training comes alongside every deployment, because the technology is only useful if people can use it.

They manage 4 to 6 billion in annual flows across 130 jurisdictions, from Geneva. On-chain treasury is the next frontier: tokenized money market funds to make idle capital work around the clock, not just during banking hours.

The real-world case for on-chain finance is not a pilot. It is operational, and it started with the people most overlooked in this industry's conversations.

Closing thoughts

What came through across every conversation was that the infrastructure is no longer the limiting factor. The tools exist. The regulatory direction is clearer than it has been in years. What is lagging is organizational readiness: the compliance frameworks, the internal knowledge, the willingness to build beyond the basics.

Two things will accelerate the timeline faster than most expect. AI is beginning to reprice the cost of compliance at scale, turning what were five-day regulatory responses into minutes. And stablecoins, long assumed to be the default settlement layer, are facing a structural challenge from tokenized money market funds: same NAV stability, better auditing, and actual yield. The rails are being rebuilt underneath the industry while most organizations are still debating whether to board the train.

The institutions that close the readiness gap in the next 24 months will not be catching up. They will be setting the pace.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Decentral House, to Jérôme Bailly and the Crypto Valley Association for co-hosting, and to all the speakers who brought genuine candor to a private setting.

⚡️STORM Partners advises institutions navigating exactly these transitions. If these questions are live in your organization, we would be glad to think through them with you.