Fintech Q&A with Neil Staunton, CEO and co-founder of Superset
1. Where do you think AI will have the biggest impact in fintech in 2026?
The biggest shift will be in how quickly and accurately institutions can assess risk and move capital. Today, most liquidity and credit decisions are made using delayed data and fairly rigid models. AI changes that by making risk assessment continuous. It can constantly reassess counterparty risk, collateral quality, and market conditions as they’re evolving. What used to take teams of people hours to analyze can now happen in seconds!
2. Do you think 2026 will bring changes in how liquidity, pricing, and risk are coordinated across financial markets?
Absolutely. The biggest impact will be in how institutions understand risk and move capital in real time. Right now, most liquidity and credit decisions are made using outdated data and fairly static models. You’re always reacting to what has already happened. AI changes this dynamic by allowing risk to be evaluated continuously as conditions change.
In addition, the ability to see everything at once is a major unlock. AI can connect onchain activity, traditional market data, and internal operational signals into one coherent picture. This has the ability to transform traditional financial markets.
3. Fragmentation remains a persistent issue across fintech and blockchain systems. How can we meaningfully reduce this complexity?
Fragmentation is an incentive problem, rather than a technical one. Solving this issue requires infrastructure that makes coordination more profitable than isolation. For this, we need systems where liquidity providers earn more by participating in unified pools than by fragmenting across venues.
It also requires completely abstracting complexity away from end users. A corporate treasurer executing a cross-border payment shouldn’t need to know which chains are involved or how settlement is routed. The infrastructure should handle that invisibly, in the same way TCP/IP handles internet routing without users thinking about it.
4. Stablecoins are increasingly being discussed as core financial infrastructure rather than simply crypto-native tools. How do you see stablecoin markets becoming more scalable and efficient?
The main scalability issue for stablecoins is capital efficiency. Today, liquidity is fragmented across chains, so issuers and market participants have to pre-fund positions everywhere. That capital duplication drives up costs and limits how much the market can realistically scale.
What’s changing is how liquidity gets coordinated. Instead of sitting idle across dozens of isolated pools, liquidity can be shared and allocated dynamically based on real-time demand. That shift is what enables deeper markets, tighter pricing, and more reliable execution as stablecoins grow beyond crypto-native use cases.
As clearer regulatory frameworks like the GENIUS Act come into place, institutional participation is far more viable. At that point, the comparison is no longer with other crypto markets, but the $9.6 trillion daily FX market. Stablecoins won’t replace it overnight, but even capturing a small fraction will be transformative!
5. Many institutions are cautiously exploring onchain finance. What signals do you think will convince traditional financial players that blockchain-based infrastructure is ready for serious scale?
Institutions need operational evidence. The signals that matter are boring ones, such as consistent uptime (measured in years, not months), insurance and custody solutions that meet fiduciary standards, and regulatory frameworks that provide legal certainty. However, the most important signal is seeing their peers move. When a major prime broker or market-maker commits its real balance sheet to onchain operations, it creates a permission structure for others to follow. We’re approaching that threshold now. The institutions entering this space are building production infrastructure with committed liquidity. That’s a fundamentally different posture than what we saw in previous cycles.
6. What fintech trend do you think is being underestimated today, and why?
The convergence of stablecoin infrastructure with traditional FX and treasury operations is still underestimated. Most attention focuses on retail payments or crypto trading, but the larger opportunity is in institutional treasury use cases like corporate FX hedging, cross-border supplier payments, and working capital management.
These are huge markets that remain slow and expensive, largely because they rely on correspondent banking networks that add days of settlement delay and costs that can reach 3-6% in many corridors. Even at the wholesale level, the friction is meaningful. Stablecoin rails can compress that dramatically by enabling near-instant settlement, clearer pricing, and fewer intermediaries.
What’s underestimated is how quickly this matters once institutions start treating stablecoins as core infrastructure. The companies that build institutional-grade treasury systems, APIs, and liquidity networks, rather than consumer wallets, will end up capturing most of the value.
7. Looking ahead, what should fintech founders and leaders be prioritizing now if they want to build systems that still matter five years from now?
Build for institutions rather than speculation. The projects that survive will be those solving real operational problems for professional capital allocators, such as market-makers, payment processors, and corporate treasuries. That means focusing on reliability, compliance, and capital efficiency rather than token mechanics and yield farming. It also means building composable infrastructure that can integrate with existing financial systems, instead of requiring wholesale replacement.
The future isn’t TradFi versus DeFi. Rather, it’s a unified infrastructure that lets capital flow wherever it’s most productive, with the underlying rails becoming invisible to the end user.
About Neil Staunton
Neil Staunton is CEO and co-founder of Superset, the infrastructure for defragmenting stablecoin and FX liquidity across blockchains. Neil has spent his career working across crypto infrastructure and institutional finance, focused on scaling liquidity in multichain environments. Through this work, he saw how fragmented liquidity, inefficient capital deployment, and dependence on centralized market makers were holding back onchain finance. Now at Superset, he is building the Unified Stablecoin Execution (USE) layer, designed to unlock deep, efficient liquidity without duplicating capital or introducing opaque risk.
