Programmable money and artificial intelligence (AI) are fundamentally transforming the global financial system, and incumbent banks must rapidly develop digital-asset strategies or risk losing touch with younger, technology-oriented customers, Randall Baran-Chong, Vice President at Mastercard, said at the Portfolio Future of Finance conference.
What has changed?
The idea of digital money for the internet age began with Bitcoin’s 2008 white paper and was followed five years later by Vitalik Buterin’s study on Ethereum, which introduced the concept of money operating as software through smart contracts. As a result, transactions that once depended on banking hours and correspondent banking processes can now settle on-chain in seconds, 24/7.
Programmable money enables automated execution of payments and rapid responses to market changes using instruments such as stablecoins, tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Christine Lagarde has also advocated for a digital euro as part of this shift.
Concrete figures and deployments
- The stablecoin market saw explosive growth: by June 2026 transaction volume reached $700 billion, representing a 733% increase.
- Practical example: SoFi Bank announced it will settle $25 billion of card transactions with Mastercard using stablecoins.
- BMW used JPMorgan’s Kinesis blockchain to optimize intra-group cross-border settlements and conditional payments.
Baran-Chong argued that money will become more than a static unit of account: it will act as intelligent software capable of autonomous decisions that optimize liquidity according to clients’ real intentions. Estimates suggest around $30 trillion of assets could be tokenized by 2030, effectively turning money into a kind of financial operating system.
AI agents and technical challenges
The emergence of AI agents creates a new operational environment: Elon Musk has predicted that by 2030 there will be more AI agents in the world than humans. Cloudflare data indicates that a large portion of internet traffic is already generated by bots and AI agents; Cloudflare introduced the HTTP 402 (X402) protocol to enable these agents to perform micropayments.
Because AI operates probabilistically while smart contracts are deterministic, combining the two requires careful design to ensure secure autonomous money flows. Mastercard is developing its own machine-to-machine platform in this area.
Risk and opportunity for traditional banks
Baran-Chong emphasized that banks should not fear the new technologies themselves, but rather the failure to leverage their primary advantage: existing customer trust. Surveys show younger, crypto-native cohorts already use crypto assets in some regions at rates above 50%, and these groups are set to inherit more than $100 trillion in global wealth over coming years.
A survey of 200 U.S., German and French banking executives found that more than 90% plan to introduce digital assets within the next three years, yet 57% remain in the strategy-development phase. At the same time, global players such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, Citibank and Standard Chartered are already building tokenized deposit and stablecoin systems.
Three implementation models
Baran-Chong outlined three models banks can adopt to deploy digital asset capabilities:
- Rent: use third-party infrastructure — for example, services from BVNK, acquired by Mastercard, which provide stablecoin infrastructure.
- Partner: join consortia — for example, the Kivalis consortium working on stablecoin issuance in the European Union.
- Build: run a proprietary system — for example, JPMorgan’s in-house technology underpinning a 17-institution settlement consortium.
He urged traditional institutions to combine their established customer trust with offerings tailored to crypto-native customers, otherwise those clients may migrate to fintech firms and neobanks.
Lead image: Randall Baran-Chong, Vice President, Mastercard
Note: An AI assistant contributed to preparing this article; the final content was edited and verified by our journalists.
