In corridors worldwide, stablecoins are completely rewriting the rules of money.
Supply has soared over 7% to $288bn in just over a month. Europe’s first frameworks are live. Japan is on the cusp of launching its first Yen-backed version and Wall Street is embracing stablecoins with gusto, spurred on by the President’s personal endorsement of crypto and his landmark GENIUS Act. Even Stripe now has its own blockchain.

And what is the UK doing? Seemingly resting on its laurels—sitting on the sidelines, watching others pull ahead. Our politicians talk a good game, but the gap between rhetoric and reality is widening. Largely because the UK still acts as if it’s the default capital of global finance. It isn’t.

While others have forged forward with clear, business-friendly frameworks designed to attract the next generation of financial services, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) remains one of the most restrictive crypto regulators in the world. Licensing requires an entire senior leadership team before operations can even start. In other regions, registration is as simple as a notice of intent.

We treat crypto as a potential risk rather than a strategic opportunity, with rules that lump programmable money in with online gambling. From our front-row seat as London-based fintech founders, it’s impossible to ignore the contrast. While the world rewrites the rules of money, the UK is stuck managing risks instead of building growth.

A skewed system towards incumbents

This stems from a system skewed towards incumbents. Rules are often written in ways that make compliance straightforward for institutions with deep pockets, but cripplingly expensive and slow for high-growth challengers. Even Revolut, despite defining the last wave of British fintech, continues to struggle to secure a banking license and has higher capital requirements at home than abroad. The message is clear: Even if you succeed globally, the UK will still treat you as a risk to be managed rather than an asset to be nurtured.

The FCA’s recent consultation on a UK stablecoin regime could have been a turning point – a chance to set clear, workable rules and give credible issuers the certainty they’ve been asking for. Instead, the proposals read more like a defensive moat: issuers must back stablecoins 100% with high-quality liquid assets, keep reserves in statutory trusts, reconcile daily, and pay no interest to holders. Pushing huge amounts of capital into low-yield assets in this way removes almost every lever to make issuance commercially viable.

That’s not to say we’re anti-regulation. Clear rules give companies confidence to invest, hire, and launch without worrying about shifting goalposts or arbitrary decisions. The UK’s early lead in open banking came from a mix of strong protections with enough flexibility to let new players in. The same logic can apply to stablecoins.

The tools already exist: KYC and AML systems, robust reserve requirements, independent audits, and enforceable redemption rights. These make stablecoins one of the most traceable forms of money movement—something that should make it more appealing, not less.

We want to scale from the UK. We know the market, and our talent is world-class. The boom that produced Monzo, Revolut et al. came from the unique alignment of talent, capital, and regulatory pragmatism. We strongly believe those ingredients still exist, but the window to act is closing.

The stakes go far beyond innovation. This is about GDP, jobs, and the UK’s ability to capture the value it’s creating. When high-growth fintechs build here, they create jobs across engineering, compliance, customer support, operations and more. Tax revenues rise. They attract global investment.

If tech companies choose not to build here, that value flows elsewhere – perhaps to Singapore, Abu Dhabi, New York, or other more supportive markets. The UK will be left a customer of technologies it could have been exporting.

There are steps that would show operators like us the UK is serious about competing. One is a staged licensing process, granting provisional licences to issuers that can demonstrate audited reserves and core operational systems, with a fixed window to meet full requirements. This would allow credible players to operate under supervision while working toward full compliance, rather than being locked out until every box is ticked.

Another is setting clear service-level agreements for regulatory approvals, committing the FCA to fixed timelines for reviewing applications. Because certainty and speed are as important as the rules themselves. We can still turn this around. But we must act now, or the companies building the future of money will leave the UK in the past.