*By Ng Yingzhong, Chief Product Officer, UR *

The latter half of 2025 has seen fintech majors throw down the gauntlet in neobanking, especially focused on digital assets and stablecoins. Yet, beneath the promotional churn, sleek interfaces and metal cards, most inherently compete over traditional payment rails, while the real transformation takes place one layer deeper: at the balance sheet itself.

The irony is stark; platforms marketing themselves as “crypto neobanks” while largely offering rebranded versions of the same infrastructure that’s been around for decades. Strip off the UI, and you’ll find white-label services and card networks processing transactions through multiple intermediaries. Should any single layer in the chain falter, say, a custodian freezes funds, a processor experiences downtime, or a correspondent bank imposes a new restriction, users face the equivalent service disruptions that prompted them to seek new-age alternatives in the first place.

When the primary differentiation is which third-party processor powers a white-labeled card program or money flows, it’s a repackaging of the present, not building the future of finance.

The Infrastructure That Actually Matters

While consumer fintechs wage cashback and interest rate wars, a quieter revolution has been taking shape at the plumbing level. Stablecoin transaction volumes exceeded US$27 trillion in the past year, evidence of a maturing decentralized financial system comprising real economic activity with a unique settlement logic. Driving this growth is infrastructure that treats fiat and digital assets as equals, processing them with the same efficiency and speed. When we see that stablecoins capture 23% of global remittance flows, up 16% from 2022, what we’re actually witnessing is a structural shift in how value moves on-chain.

For businesses operating in this evolving financial environment, the central question that emerges is how we integrate digital asset capabilities without introducing new points of failure or regulatory uncertainty. The answer lies in building native onchain banking infrastructure that provides bank-grade reliability with trustless blockchain efficiency, where UR fits in.

Serving Real Business Needs, Not Yield Chasers

The typical neobank playbook of high yields and flashy incentives garners loyalty that is rented, not earned. This attracts what might generously be called “mercenary capital”, or users who chase yield across platforms. Real, sustainable demand is driven by businesses and individuals with actual cash-flow problems: e-commerce platforms that want to reduce processing fees and expand market reach; companies paying teams scattered across borders; freelancers receiving salaries in stablecoins; treasury managers seeking asset efficiency sans speculation.

Supported by the data, the strongest year-over-year growth in stablecoin usage is in low and lower-middle-income countries, where savings and remittances reign over trading. These users need stability, speed, and the ability to treat onchain balances as primary accounts that can pay suppliers, salaries, and operating expenses.

Consider the e-commerce business owner looking to accept digital asset payments for efficient settlement, lower processing fees, and improved cash flow. The reality of accepting crypto while operating on traditional rails creates unforeseen operational complexity: managing volatility, coordinating between custodians and service providers, and reconciling across systems. The value proposition isn’t just accepting USDC; it’s having infrastructure that allows any digital asset to move with the same flexibility as EUR in your account.

Vertical Integration and the Walled Garden Problem

The recent emergence of proprietary stablecoins, from Sony for PlayStation to Walmart for retail, presents a viable path to displace payment network dominance. The corporate imperative is simple: vertical integration captures processing fees, reduces external dependencies, and creates network effects that benefit from interoperability within a walled garden.

Such tectonic shifts in the payments landscape underscore why businesses need composable banking infrastructure. Just as SWIFT succeeded by enabling seamless transactions regardless of buyer, seller, or currency, as its abbreviation implies, the next generation of financial infrastructure must support multiple asset types and settlement methods without forcing businesses to rebuild their entire financial stack for each bolt-on feature.

In essence, it’s about streamlining the assembly of numerous vendors to handle contractor accounts, fiat to crypto conversions, and foreign exchange across siloed workstreams. The onboarding of UR condenses the industry-standard 9-18 month integration timeline into mere weeks via an API-first infrastructure, allowing businesses to compose customized banking solutions on a needs basis – spanning named Swiss IBANs, Mastercard issuance, crypto-fiat settlement capabilities – while maintaining full control over the user experience.

What Composable Banking Really Means

Now, the term “composable” gets thrown around loosely, but in practice, it means infrastructure that provides primitives, including IBANS, payment rails, compliance-as-code, and custody, that businesses can assemble according to their specific needs. Rather than a one-size-fits-all, composable banking is about the building blocks that adapt to different business models and regulatory requirements.

For a web3 protocol, it might look like off-ramping protocol revenue to a named IBAN for operational expenses. For a marketplace, maybe it’s issuing named accounts to each contractor and enabling bulk payouts while remaining fully compliant. For a wallet provider, it could be adding bank account functionality and cards without necessarily becoming a bank. The unifying thread in these use cases is that businesses maintain control over their user experience, while relying on battle-tested, institutionally ready infrastructure. Settlement happens onchain where appropriate, on traditional rails where needed, with the orchestration layer handling navigational complexity seamlessly between them.

Looking Ahead: Infrastructure Over Features

Cards are commodity interfaces – necessary, but hardly a differentiation. With millions of neobank users globally, virtually every fintech company can issue a card, but the platforms that cut through the noise will be those merging the fundamentals of TradFi and DeFi; using the former’s compliance and legacy frameworks while leveraging the latter’s transparency and agility.

Traditional banks and fintechs are beginning their migration to stablecoin rails for the same reason the internet displaced previous communication protocols. Better technology eventually wins, but the transition happens gradually, then all at once. The question for businesses building financial products today is whether their infrastructure is ready for that transition, or whether they’re building on the right rails. At the surface level, rewards programs and card designs are battling it out, but the real transformation is taking place in the balance sheet, where the fundamental architecture of financial services is being rewritten.