Crypto executives say digital native generations may never need a bank account

Adrian Cachinero believes his 18-month-old daughter may grow up thinking about money and bank accounts differently than previous generations.

“My daughter, she’s one and a half years old, and I think she might never need to open a bank account in her life,” the Steakhouse Financial co-founder said in an interview with CoinDesk in London. “We’re building products for that generation.”

That belief is shaping Steakhouse Financial, a decentralized finance (DeFi) firm that manages more than $4 billion in blockchain-based vaults. The vaults are smart contracts that let users deposit stablecoins, earn yield and retain control of their assets rather than placing them with a bank or other intermediary.

Cachinero clarified he isn’t saying banks will disappear. Instead, he believes people who grow up in a digital-first world will expect payments, savings and other financial services to work online.

“I might be the last generation that remembers life before the internet,” he said. “For the generations that followed, the internet is just a fact of life.”

Evidence of that shift is growing. Visa’s stablecoin tracker recorded $6.6 billion in volume across 132.4 million retail-sized transactions (those worth less than $250) during the latest 30-day period. Standard Chartered expects stablecoin circulation to increase about sevenfold to roughly $2 trillion by 2028, while agent-led purchases could rise from 1% of e-commerce in 2025 to 12% in 2029. Neobanks capture nearly 40% of new banking accounts globally, boasting over 1.4 billion users.

Naveen Mallela, Standard Chartered’s global head of payments, also expects the traditional account-based model to change. He believes people will eventually use a wallet tied to their identity instead of separate bank and brokerage accounts.

“Rather than having bank accounts with individual banks or having separate brokerage accounts, you would have a wallet where you’ll have cash, tokenized deposits of some sort issued by different banks, stablecoins, tokenized money market funds, crypto and funds, all of that in one app, one wallet,” he said, clarifying that this was his personal opinion, not a formal Standard Chartered position.

His forecast does not remove banks from the system. The wallet he described could hold deposits and tokens issued by several banks, which would continue providing much of the money, infrastructure and controls behind the services.

Mallela expects stablecoins and bank-issued tokenized deposits to serve different markets. He said stablecoins may handle more retail payments and remittances, while tokenized deposits could account for more of the value in wholesale and institutional payments.

Most cross-border payments still move from one bank account to another. Stablecoins can transfer value between wallets around the clock, Mallela said, but users can face delays when money must reach a bank account.

Binance is seeing part of that shift among its customers, although the exchange said it did not have data showing whether its average user is getting younger. “I think a lot of our users are younger,” Shunyet Jan, Binance’s head of exchange and trading, said. “Especially in emerging markets, they definitely are younger.”