Myles Harrison spent much of his career in traditional finance, using blockchain as a piece of technology within financial services, before moving deeper into DeFi and crypto. That path led him to Amina Bank, a crypto-native bank headquartered in Switzerland, where he now serves as Chief Product Officer.
Dayana Aleksandrova sat down with Myles at Money20/20 in Amsterdam for an episode of the Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show on the convergence of traditional and digital finance. Amina Bank is a regulated bank operating across multiple jurisdictions, including FINMA in Switzerland, ADGM in Abu Dhabi, and MiCA in the EU, giving Myles a cross-border view of how different regulatory regimes are shaping stablecoin adoption.
In this episode, Myles explains why user experience and liquidity are still the biggest barriers to everyday stablecoin use, why MiCA's token classification rules were the regulatory unlock the industry needed, why payroll and treasury management are bigger use cases than people realize, and why stablecoins are just the first step toward a much bigger shift: native on-chain tokenized assets.
Full Transcript
Dayana Aleksandrova: Welcome to the Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show where we talk everything payments, from traditional to digital to the convergence of the two. Today with us at Money20/20 Amsterdam, we have a very special guest, Myles Harrison, the Chief Product Officer of Amina Bank. Myles, welcome to the show. So, in a brief sentence, tell our audience: what is Amina Bank, and where do you operate out of?
Myles Harrison: Thank you for having me. Yeah, so Amina is a crypto-native bank headquartered in Switzerland, operating globally. We support our clients with access to a range of products and services across both traditional finance as well as stablecoins and crypto.
Dayana Aleksandrova: And before you joined Amina, what were you doing?
Myles Harrison: So I spent a lot of my career in TradFi, really using blockchain as a piece of technology within financial services, and then I started to get a little bit deeper into DeFi and into crypto, and that's led me on to where I am today.
Dayana Aleksandrova: Love to hear that. Now let's talk about stablecoins. Everyone here at Money20/20 is talking about stablecoins, agentic payments. But if we look at stablecoins today, a lot of people still haven't used them. What does it take for stablecoins to become the de facto everyday payment system rather than fiat? Can we do that?
Myles Harrison: Yeah, absolutely, and I think we're on that trajectory right now. Adoption is growing faster and faster. I think there's a few things from our perspective. One, which is a friction we've known exists in crypto for the last few years, is the user experience — making it as seamless as possible.
At Amina, we try to abstract those complexities for clients who maybe have never dealt with stablecoins or blockchain-based currencies before. Another one is liquidity — we need to make sure there's deep liquidity, particularly when we're thinking about moving money cross-border.
And then regulatory clarity. We now have that. We have MiCA, obviously, here in the European Union. Switzerland, we're very fortunate, was an early adopter, so we've had the legislation for many years. We see the UK making moves as well, along with GENIUS and CLARITY in the US. So regulatory clarity enables innovation, and we're excited to see what's going to come in the next few months.
Dayana Aleksandrova: Absolutely, and this segues into my next question. If you looked at all the regulatory frameworks that have come out in the last two years, what would you say is the one key piece of legislation that's been the most impactful, if you could only pick one?
Myles Harrison: That's a tough question. If I could only pick one, I would say the classification rules around the different token types under MiCA. That, for the first time as an industry, converging between TradFi, CeFi, and DeFi, gives us a clear set of guidelines on how we must treat each different token type, whether it's an electronic money token or an asset-referenced token.
That really gives us the guardrails, and we're able to then bring products to market that can solve problems for customers — whether that's individual clients looking to move between CeFi and DeFi, or corporate treasurers looking for smart, programmable payments to reduce costs within their organization. So that piece of legislation within MiCA really helps us solve for that.
Dayana Aleksandrova: If you look at the payment rails of today, what would you say is the major point of rupture, if you could identify one? And how can we improve that?
Myles Harrison: So, all the things we know — typically, moving money cross-border is slow, inefficient, and costly. Those are really the key pain points we see today. Blockchain is a piece of technology, and more importantly, stablecoins can really help us solve that. They're quicker, they're more efficient, and they can move cross-border in a more cost-efficient manner.
So they're cheaper for the end consumer. And what we're starting to see within the financial services fabric is financial services companies investing heavily in how money will move cross-border. We're seeing distribution at scale, something we've never seen before — the likes of Visa and Mastercard are also coming into this space, hot on the heels of investing in payments. And now we're starting to think about agentic payments, which is the next exciting topic.
Dayana Aleksandrova: And if we look at the major use cases for stablecoins, people always say cross-border payments — that's the one. But what is there that's still equally important that we're not talking about?
Myles Harrison: From our perspective, we're seeing a significant rise in things like payroll. We're seeing employees requesting to be paid in stablecoins. So while that's a slightly different use case from pure cross-border payments, we're seeing it gives employees greater control.
We're also seeing corporate treasurers starting to think from overnight liquidity to intraday, and I've even spoken to some corporate treasurers recently who are thinking in minutes — how can I maximize yield, how can I maximize my treasury pools across different entities or across the globe? Stablecoins are a great vehicle and mechanism to do that.
Dayana Aleksandrova: And if you could look at the world a year from now, two years from now — and I know it's hard to tell because you never know what's going to happen — where do you see the future of on-chain finance, and stablecoins specifically?
Myles Harrison: Yeah, we are at the forefront of this technological revolution happening right now within financial services. For us, we look at it from the perspective that stablecoins are really the first step. Then comes tokenization — you really need to have the stablecoin infrastructure to be able to enable tokenization and get the real benefits.
We also see a world where, from a tokenization perspective, at the moment these are kind of replicas of traditional instruments. We see a future where there will be native on-chain tokenized assets, and that's really where we will experience the true capabilities and power of blockchain.
Dayana Aleksandrova: That sounds so exciting — the true capabilities of blockchain, I'm excited for that. Amina is a regulated bank with operations across multiple jurisdictions — that's FINMA in Switzerland, ADGM in Abu Dhabi, MiCA in the EU. Which jurisdiction's approach to stablecoins do you think will prove the most influential globally?
Myles Harrison: From our perspective, we've seen regulators take slightly different approaches, and this is something we can expect and is normal when new legislation is appearing. We do expect to see greater harmonization. When we look at traditional finance, the rules, particularly for companies or institutions that have to move cross-border, have become more harmonized over many decades, so it's a natural progression that we'll see those start to become more aligned. In terms of what will be the winning approach — a question I'm often asked — I think it really depends on the use cases within a jurisdiction.
To give an example, if we look at SEPA, we haven't seen great adoption for stablecoins within the European landscape, because SEPA at the moment isn't fundamentally broken. It's not solving something the incumbent solution can't do — SEPA is quick, it's cheap, your money is going to move from A to B, and we have SEPA Instant as well. If we look at the US, they've taken a slightly different approach with their stablecoin legislation, or the draft versions, but moving money between different states is inherently costly — there's a lot of friction in the process and it can take a long time.
So we've seen a greater surge in adoption in the US for that particular use case. That just gives an example of where it makes sense to have slightly different approaches, and yeah, we believe that over time we'll see much more harmonization.
Dayana Aleksandrova: We'll see if there's one clear winner — we'll find out in the next couple of years. At Amina, you offer both traditional banking and stablecoin-native products under one umbrella — custody, lending, stablecoin reward accounts. What's driving your clients to use stablecoins versus traditional fiat banking products?
Myles Harrison: So for our clients, the benefit of working with Amina is that they can seamlessly move between the traditional world and also what we'd say is on-chain finance, if you want to put it eloquently. Is there a real benefit to having it? And sometimes the answer is no, and that's okay.
So that's what we really try to help our customers with — how they, and how we help them, look at it.
Dayana Aleksandrova: They're in good hands with you, Myles. Thank you so much for being a guest on Payments Pulse.