From the Wide Open Ventures insights desk
Summary: The most common reason credit union leaders give for not prioritizing stablecoins is that their members aren’t asking about them. That’s a reasonable observation and a misleading one. The risk Filene Research Institute’s recent piece identifies, co-authored by Dr. Lamont Black and Dr. Henry Kim, is that member behavior shifts gradually through platforms they’re already using, long before anyone inside the credit union notices. By the time the question shows up at the teller line or in a member survey, the shift has already happened. The institutions that are positioned well won’t be the ones that waited for demand. They’ll be the ones that understood the infrastructure change while there was still time to engage with it.
The Demand Argument Misses the Mechanism
Filene published a piece earlier this year framing five strategic questions credit union leaders should be debating around stablecoins. One of the most useful tensions in the piece, laid out by Dr. Lamont Black and Dr. Henry Kim, is the question of whether stablecoin adoption becomes a consumer story or stays a back-end settlement story. The full piece is here: Stablecoins and Credit Unions: Five Strategic Questions Leaders Should Be Debating Now.
The critical point is that the consumer path, if it happens, doesn’t look like members walking in and asking to open a stablecoin account. It looks like members using PayPal, Venmo, or some other embedded wallet more frequently for payments and P2P transfers, holding balances there because it’s convenient, and gradually moving less through their credit union relationship without making any conscious decision to do so. The credit union doesn’t lose the member. It loses the transaction flow, and eventually the deposit balance, incrementally and without a clear moment when it happened.
That’s a different kind of risk than the ones credit unions are used to managing. It doesn’t show up in exit surveys. It shows up in interchange revenue trends and average deposit balance data, often quarters after the behavioral shift began.
The Payments Revenue Piece Gets Overlooked
Dr. Black makes a point in the Filene piece that doesn’t get enough attention in most stablecoin conversations: deposits and payments revenue are linked, and the risk runs through both. If members shift to stablecoin-based payment flows, even partially, the interchange revenue impact compounds the balance impact. For credit unions that depend on card-based interchange as a meaningful revenue line, that’s a more near-term concern than wholesale deposit migration, which most institutions assume won’t happen to them.
The numbers vary by institution, but interchange income as a share of non-interest income has grown steadily across the credit union industry over the past decade. A structural shift in how members move money, even a modest one, hits that line before it hits the balance sheet. It’s worth knowing where your institution stands on that exposure before the conversation becomes urgent.
What “Waiting for Member Demand” Actually Looks Like in Practice
A credit union that waits for member demand before engaging seriously with stablecoins is essentially making a bet that the behavioral shift will be visible and slow enough to respond to in real time. That’s possible. It’s also the same bet that was made about mobile banking adoption, about P2P payments, and about the gradual migration of member engagement from branches to digital channels, each of which moved faster and more quietly than most institutions expected.
The more defensible posture isn’t to launch a stablecoin program tomorrow. It’s to have a leadership team that understands the instruments in market, the regulatory landscape, the specific ways stablecoins could touch deposits and payments, and what a reasonable institutional response looks like at this stage. That’s a knowledge and governance question, not a product question, and it’s one that can be addressed now without committing to anything operationally.
Wide Open Ventures runs a structured Stablecoin Cohort for credit union executives who want to build that foundation. Cohort 1 sold out. Cohort 2 is filling. More at wideopenventures.com. You can also read more on how we’re thinking about the stablecoin landscape on our insights page.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stablecoins and Credit Union Member Behavior
Do credit union members actually use stablecoins today?
Most don’t knowingly. But a meaningful portion of credit union members are already PayPal and Venmo users, and PYUSD is available and in circulation across both platforms. The behavioral exposure exists even where member awareness doesn’t.
If interchange revenue is at risk, how significant is that exposure for a typical credit union?
It varies considerably by institution size and member demographics, but interchange income has grown as a share of non-interest revenue across the industry over the past decade. The institutions most exposed are those with higher debit and credit card transaction volumes and members with significant fintech wallet usage. A reasonable starting point is understanding what percentage of your non-interest income currently comes from interchange before assessing the exposure.
Isn’t this still early enough that credit unions have time to wait and see?
That depends on what “waiting” costs. Staying out of an early product conversation is reasonable. Staying out of the knowledge and governance conversation is a different choice with different consequences. The institutions that responded well to prior digital disruptions generally weren’t the first movers on product. They were the ones that had leadership alignment and institutional understanding before the pressure arrived.
What is the Wide Open Ventures Stablecoin Cohort?
A structured, virtual program for credit union executives covering stablecoins, payments infrastructure, regulatory considerations, and the institutional implications of digital asset adoption. Built for leaders who need practical, decision-relevant understanding rather than a general introduction to crypto. Details at wideopenventures.com.
