Roland Berger Tells Korean Banks: Distribution, Not Issuance, Decides Won Stablecoins

Roland Berger, the global management consulting firm, has told South Korean financial institutions that the decisive factor in the won stablecoin business is not issuance but the scale of actual circulation — and it has identified the world's largest offshore won derivatives market as the most credible source of demand.

Kim Eun-young, a partner at Roland Berger, delivered the assessment on Nov. 11 at a seminar in Yeouido Post Tower titled "The Stablecoin Era and the Future of Cross-Border Payments in South Korea." His core message was blunt: the key in the stablecoin market is not issuance itself, but how much actual circulation and use can be expanded.

The firm brings relevant credentials. Roland Berger has advised on central bank digital currency projects in Europe and on stablecoin businesses in the Middle East.

What does the report change for Korean institutions?

Kim outlined four business opportunities in the digital-asset market for South Korea's financial industry:

• Digital cash for cross-border payments
• New stablecoin use cases such as business-to-business transactions
• Payments executed by artificial intelligence agents
• Platforms for tokenizing real-world assets, or RWAs

"Stablecoins can improve the high transaction costs and complex settlement procedures in the existing financial system," Kim said, singling out cross-border payments as the segment where costs could fall most sharply.

He positioned AI-agent payments as a fast-growing category. Agents making direct stablecoin payments will scale quickly, he argued, but two preconditions must be met: the identity and payment authority of AI agents must be verifiable, and merchants need infrastructure able to accept stablecoin settlements. For card networks and payment processors, that requirement reads as a build-out mandate rather than a forecast.

On RWA tokenization, Kim said stablecoins will take a larger role in trading and settlement as tokenization of financial assets expands. He tied the opportunity directly to regulation: if rules become clearer, South Korean financial institutions could secure new business lines.

Where the revenue sits across the value chain

Kim argued stablecoins can function across the full financial stack — issuance, reserve-asset management, distribution, infrastructure, settlement, trading, payments and treasury management. Concrete revenue streams he cited include:

• Interest income from managing reserve assets
• Fee income from conversions between fiat currencies and stablecoins
• Revenue from providing infrastructure

That breadth means the opportunity extends beyond banks, card companies and securities firms to technology and platform operators — a distribution question, again, before an issuance question.

The $68 billion demand thesis

Kim's most distinctive claim addresses the persistent concern that won stablecoins may struggle to attract demand. He pointed to the offshore non-deliverable forward market for the won, the largest of its kind globally.

"The won has the world's largest NDF market, with about $68 billion traded on average each day," Kim said. "If that trading shifts to an on-chain model, it could create a substantial opportunity for stablecoin distribution."

To put that figure in frame: $68 billion per day across roughly 250 trading days implies an annual notional turnover on the order of $17 trillion — a volume that would dwarf any domestic retail payment corridor. If foreign-exchange activity now centered on NDFs migrates toward won-based on-chain transactions, Kim said, both financial institutions and platform operators could enter an entirely new market. He called on the foreign-exchange market to lay the groundwork for on-chain trading now.

The closing test

Drawing on Roland Berger's Middle East stablecoin engagements, Kim closed with the point he opened on. Regulatory approval and anti-money-laundering systems matter, he said, but the ultimate determinant of success is the scale of actual circulation and the quality of the user experience. His prescription for Korean institutions: work with a range of businesses to broaden stablecoin use cases before competitors claim the distribution layer.