(28 August 2025 – Global) What emerging trends are East’s global analyst team examining across global commercial banking markets?
East’s robust research methodology delves deeply into business’ banking relationships globally, generating powerful, accurate, verifiable intelligence relied upon by the group’s financial services clients globally.
What “Can’t” Stablecoins Do?
It is impossible to ignore the hype and excitement building towards stablecoin applications for alleviating ingrained pain points across banking for cross border payments, internal treasury operations and tokenized asset settlements.
Standard Chartered refer to stablecoins as the first “killer app” enhancing cross border payments with real time settlement, holding the potential to transform the future of finance.
While there are hundreds of different Stablecoins now including fiat-backed, crypto-collaterised, commodity-backed and non-collateralised/algorithmic with a market cap of US$265 billion, the first Stablecoin BitUSD was launched in 2014. Tether (USDT) was launched shortly after and is now one of the most popular stablecoins in the market, aiming to keep the USDT price stabilised at approximately US$1 with each USDT token exchanged for one US dollar locked in the reserve.
Citi forecasts that the total outstanding supply of stablecoins could expand from US$230 billion to as much as US$3.7 trillion by 2030. USD Coin (USDC) launched in September 2018 by Circle following by PayPal’s own entry into the market (PYUSD) alongside Binance (BUSD), Ripple and many others such as Remitly. The market is recovering credibility following the damaging collapse of UST Terra/Luna in 2022 that erased US$500 billion in value after de-pegging and contributing to significant market instability, signifying the importance of enhanced regulation, transparency and oversight at a time when the GENIUS act has attracted significant attention in the market. Market developments have highlighted the risks stablecoins can pose to investors, particularly if they are not fully backed by high-quality liquid assets the RBA reports.
The changing regulatory landscape being driven by US President Trump could see 2025 being blockchain’s ‘ChatGPT’ moment and also drive huge growth in stablecoins, according to research from Citi.
AI Enters New Phase
As Meta scales down its AI division and CBA admits it cannot rely solely on agentic AI for customer service, what will the next phase of AI adoption hold for global corporates and their financial services providers alike. Key challenges to AI adoption include data privacy and security, integration with legacy systems, a lack of skilled talent, regulatory and ethical concerns, high development costs and cybersecurity threats before even quantum computing enters the fray. Ultimately capital expenditure is coalescing around data centre construction to drive the AI revolution, incredibly set to surpass new office tower construction in the next year.
M&A Plans Take Back Seat as Corporates Digest Tariff Uncertainty
Sharemarkets might be at record highs, but the unpredictability of President Donald Trump’s second term is denting confidence inside Australia’s biggest boardrooms as large companies freeze. East & Partners exclusive research with Capital Brief shows one in ten large corporates were discouraged to engage due to concerns over Trump-related volatility. Around one in five of Australia’s largest corporates are pausing M&A due to Trump related uncertainty while fewer than one in ten are actively hunting acquisition targets.
What proportion of total business growth is forecast to be generated by acquisitions over organic growth in the next 12 months? Will lower interest rates provide enough of a boost to stimulate deal flow and where does Private Equity and Private Credit fit in the equation?
July Analyst Meeting Insights
The July 2025 analyst meeting insights highlighted CFO performance is increasingly determined by risk management capability across FS risk, Interest risk, liquidity management and ESG, Insight Out reporting on CTO gaming habits and East’s robust research methodology framework.
Top Into the Voice of the Treasurer – East on Demand
All of these complex, difficult to quantify questions are accessible from the East on Demand platform.
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East analysts compile a quarterly list of questions inspired by our unique understanding of the market, driven by client conversations, corporate interviews and market movements. Get in touch to find out what we would ask if we were in your shoes.