The blockchain-based fintech, Circle, is perhaps best known as the issuer of USDC (USD Coin) stablecoins, but the company is much broader than that. In the words of its leaders, Circle seeks to build a foundational economic operating system for an AI-driven digital economy running on a blockchain-based payments infrastructure. In this episode of Talking Banking Matters, Circle CFO Jeremy Fox-Geen speaks with McKinsey partner and payments industry expert Matt Higginson about the effect of the passage of 2025’s Genius Act on the future of stablecoin innovation, sources of future value, and how his background in philosophy informs his work and leadership style. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. For more discussion of the banking issues that matter, follow Talking Banking Matters on your preferred podcast platform.
Matt Higginson, McKinsey: Today we’re interrogating a paradox, which is, “Can money be both boring and revolutionary?” In particular, we’ll be looking at stablecoins and the promise that they will let us move money at internet speed but with the reliability of a bank ledger and the composability of code. At the center of this debate is the question, “What should a digital dollar actually be?”
To answer this and other questions, we’re talking with Jeremy Fox-Geen, chief financial officer of Circle Internet Group. Jeremy has been CFO at Circle for four and a half years, during which time he’s overseen the issuance of over $70 billion worth of USDC stablecoin, the creation of the Circle Payments Network, the launch of the Arc Public Testnet, and the company’s IPO in June, which was one of the biggest US fintech listings of the year.
At Circle, Jeremy oversees accounting, treasury, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), investor relations, and, crucially, the reserve and liquidity architecture behind the USDC stablecoin. His role sits right at the intersection of legacy finance, treasury mechanics, and this evolving digital payments and stablecoin landscape.
Jeremy, let’s start by having you describe Circle in your own words. Who are the customers, and how do you meet their needs?
Jeremy Fox-Geen, Circle: Circle is an internet platform company with a full stack of solutions in the financial infrastructure space, building at the heart of what we might call the new internet financial system. The internet financial system has three layers. The first is the operating system layer, which is characterized by blockchains that we think of as distributed data and compute. Then there’s the digital asset layer, which consists of digital assets built on top of those blockchains, and Bitcoin is the most famous of those.
And then there’s an application layer built on top of those fundamental layers to bring utility to businesses, consumers, and institutions around the world. Often those applications are characterized by the fact that they’re running natively in the internet on all those blockchain operating systems. So that’s the internet financial system. And Circle operates within each of those layers.
Matt Higginson: How does Circle’s Arc product fit into that?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: We recently launched our own blockchain called Arc, which is our layer one blockchain. In the digital asset layer, we are already a global leader in that space. We also issue USDC, which is the world’s leading regulated dollar stablecoin. We have approximately $75 billion of USDC in circulation today. And one USDC is effectively a database entry in one of those blockchain databases, giving a claim on Circle’s assets worth $1—the exact same structure as commercial bank money, which is most of money. It’s a database entry giving you a claim on an issuer’s balance sheet.
Then at the application layer, we recently launched the Circle Payments Network. The premise here is to bring internet-based architecture into the way payments work. Instead of payments being point-to-point, with contracted payments deliveries, and building networks around that, think of it as how the internet works natively, or how video distribution works—you no longer have to consume your television through a cable with a point-to-point distribution. Rather, money movement happens through a network-based architecture. That’s the full stack we have within the internet financial system.
Matt Higginson: Tell us what Circle’s overall value proposition or purpose is.
Jeremy Fox-Geen: We believe that bringing the internet into financial services is the biggest market the internet has yet to disrupt. The internet has brought tremendous efficiencies to all other forms of information exchange. And obviously money and value is just a form of information wrapped with regulation and trust in different ways; but ultimately it’s information exchange, and the information exchange capabilities of the internet have upgraded all of those systems in incredible ways.
Matt Higginson: Who’s doing all the USDC transacting? What are the use cases for it?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: The way to think about this is that we’re building general-purpose architecture for value exchange, but let’s be very specific where we’re starting: general-purpose internet architecture for money. In the third quarter last year, there were $9.6 trillion of transactions involving USDC. The technology can improve all types of transactions, but the first use cases we’re working on are where the cost and the frictions are highest. The bootstrap use case for a stablecoin was the digital asset markets, where we invented a new form of market structure where six billion people with smartphones can buy and sell things 24/7, 365, and needed money 24/7, 365.
Roughly 60 percent of stablecoins today are grounded within that digital asset trading and settlement, and the super-apps and communities built around those.
The next biggest use case we see, and this is growing quickly, is what you could call “dollar-ization,” where you’re serving the desire of individuals all around the world to hold US dollars. There are myriad reasons why, but typically it’s because they’re in economies that are not as well managed, so their own currency is not so good to hold.
We believe that bringing the internet into financial services is the biggest market the internet has yet to disrupt.
Matt Higginson: What about cross-border money movement?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: Cross-border payments is another use case that’s growing very rapidly. Where we’re seeing the most growth is remittances. The average remittance transaction fee is 6 percent. But there’s no reason why a human can’t send their money anywhere in the world nearly instantly and nearly for free 24/7, 365, the way they’re accustomed to sending a text message or a photograph.
Then for larger companies, anything that has complex global payout structures or complex global supply chains is also an opportunity. You can draw direct lines of sight to every single money use case and talk about how they will be made more efficient and effective for their customers. And that’s before you get to programmability, which is where we will invent new things that we haven’t even done yet in the world of money movement and economic value exchange. That’s a bit further out. But we’re seeing people innovate in all of the other use cases. Think capital markets, and how to make collateral management more efficient.
Matt Higginson: It’s surprising how small the non-crypto use cases are today. I recognize it’s early days, but USDC payments were $9.6 trillion for the third quarter—do you have a sense of how much of that is truly cross-border payments?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: I would ground that question in the way money flows today in the traditional economy. Gross money movement, whether it’s for trading activity, ethics activity, or other forms of corporate activity, dwarfs payments by many, many orders of magnitude. That $9.6 trillion number needs to be seen in its proper economic context. You’re right that the usage is very small today, but what’s fascinating and important is it’s growing quickly.
And the economic rationale for that growth to continue is very clear. The benefits to businesses, consumers, and institutions of using these is so very clear. What the world isn’t quite ready for yet is that all of the necessary preconditions for widespread use of these technologies are not yet in place. For example, at the consumer level, you can really only access and benefit from these technologies today by going through the crypto companies. We’re not yet at a stage where every mainstream banking app allows you to send stablecoins around the world.
We know that’s going to happen, though. The easiest analogy is email. Back in the day, we were all on AOL, and it worked. But then all of a sudden there were so many email providers, and it didn’t matter what client you used, you could just communicate. We will see the same with stablecoins.
Matt Higginson: How is Circle working to bring that future into the present?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: We’re working with many leading banks, including several G-SIBs [global systemically important banks], to bring these technologies into their banking systems. And many of the banks and others are working on that as well. Recently Block and Cash App announced they were going to enable stablecoin payments within Cash App. That’s some 54 million users of a non-crypto money neobank that will now have stablecoin-enabled payments. And that’s not within the Cash App system—that’s to any digital wallet.
But at the same time, digital wallets and the addressing between them isn’t quite mature enough. People don’t want to deal with gas fees [transaction fees] to send money, or having to hold native blockchain operating tokens like SOL [Solana] or ETH [Ether] to enable stablecoin payments. And that goes right back to the need for better internet operating systems, better blockchain technology, and better optimization for financial services that I mentioned earlier.
Matt Higginson: To your point, while the utility for trading crypto as part of crypto pairs [buying and selling cryptocurrencies relative to other cryptocurrencies (not fiat) such as Bitcoin or Ether] dwarfs a lot of the other volume, the growth rate of applications in cross-border payments and the settling of tokenized financial assets outside of crypto is significantly greater. As you said, it’s early days and we’ll start to see the shift in balance and probably a blurring, too, between whether it’s crypto being traded or just tokenized public equities. That difference may start to dissolve.
I’d love to dig a little bit more into the business model for Circle and in particular into revenues. Early on, a lot of the revenues for Circle came from the reserving of the assets. Obviously, every dollar that’s minted needs to get put in reserve in equivalence. But I also know that your business model is diversifying away from that. Do you want to talk a little bit about the revenue model, both today and in the future, and how sensitive you are to interest rate changes?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: So our revenue today is overwhelmingly from reserve income on the cash-equivalent assets, which are typically US dollar treasuries and secured overnight repurchase agreements that we hold to back our stablecoin. We have a very straightforward liquid balance sheet, where the credit risk is 95 percent-plus that of the US government. We own the reserve income on those cash-equivalent assets, and then use that income to build distribution partnerships with category-defining companies to drive growth in our ecosystem.
But also think of neobanks and others around the world in banking and payments and other platform companies that are coming on stream. That’s the source of our income today, and that is obviously a rate-sensitive revenue stream. But where we are as an investment case is not as a rate-sensitive business, but one that is on the cusp of a major structural megatrend involving internet scale characteristics and potential.
There’s a long conversation about rate sensitivity, but the way we think about reserve income is this is a business with internet-scale characteristics and potential. And that has never existed in financial services. So the reserve-income model itself is a tremendous business to be in. We believe we’re at the earliest days of an exponential growth curve.
Matt Higginson: What about fee-based revenue streams?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: These fee-based revenue streams are nascent but scaling rapidly for us, and they arise naturally from the blockchain interoperability and liquidity services we offer. Financial services customers are typically willing to pay for speed and liquidity. The fees in an internet model are way less than in traditional models, but these are scale businesses, and so our fee income streams, which are small today, are also scaling rapidly. And they too have internet-scale potential—which is an ambitious set of statements to make but has never been possible before in financial services, given market structure constraints.
Matt Higginson: Is the growth all in cross-border transactions? What about capital market applications? Settling trades in capital markets carries fees, and that will be a boon to the whole industry.
Jeremy Fox-Geen: Our philosophy is to reduce costs and friction as much as possible, but it’s a classic innovator’s dilemma for the incumbents—if the basic cost of payments collapses, how do you take advantage of these new technologies if you make a lot of money off the old ways? The same is true for collateral, for settlement, and all of these use cases.
Matt Higginson: It’s been said that Circle and Tether make up about 85 percent of all stablecoins in circulation today. What impact will the Genius Act have on Circle, and how do you see that evolving over the next few years? Potentially it ushers in more competition. But that could lead to a more structured approach to stablecoins that might attract more users as well.
Jeremy Fox-Geen: We welcome the Genius Act, and Circle has always been a regulatory-first company. Our founder was actually in Congress’s first-ever hearing on digital assets about 11 years ago, calling for sound regulation of this sector when no one knew what he was talking about. That mindset is core to how we work. We built our company to be the platform that the world’s leading enterprises choose to build upon. Our view is that money will always be a regulated enterprise, so we welcome legislation like the Genius Act in the United States. It’s not the first territorial regulation of stablecoins, but stablecoins are really a dollar business, given they are one to one with US dollars.
Having federal clarity on the use of payment stablecoins is particularly important. There are many enterprises that weren’t willing to build on platforms like ours without US regulatory clarity, even though we had regulatory support in other geographies. It’s good for us, and it’s good for the stablecoin industry and the technology as a whole. It’s a signal of maturation, to a level where there are players that are well regulated, well scrutinized, transparent, and trusted, and whose technologies are enterprise-grade and internet-scale, with appropriate risk management and control infrastructure. That’s very important. We see it as an unlock, with more and more people building on these technologies, and that’s just a very powerful thing for us in the industry.
Matt Higginson: Perhaps the most robust competition today may be coming from the banks themselves starting to organize around creating consortia, where banks are essentially saying, for example, “We would rather be in closer control of issuance than relying on Circle to provide that stablecoin into the global money flow.” How does that impact you?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: We welcome the consortia, and we welcome the competition. The way we see it is that we’re doing something quite different to what they would be doing—we’re building a full stack of capabilities that allow world-leading enterprises and FIs [financial institutions] to build on these capabilities. We also think it’s very early days, and that our biggest competitors don’t all exist yet.
The way we see the market structure evolving is that these are internet market structures, not traditional financial market structures. And internet market structures typically have closed- and open-loop components, and in the open components, typically there are distributions of competitors that exist in parallel curves.
For example, there are lots of different smaller internal search platforms, but there’s one global search giant. And you see that repeated in different places, which is very different from the banking market structure, for example, or the capital market structure or the payment structures. We think the stablecoin market will have closed-loop stablecoins—think bank consortia—and then we think about the open-network players, which we’re very much a part of. We think we’ll be used to power several of the closed-loop ecosystems as well, and we’re very happy with that positioning, in part because the markets are so large. We’re starting from the very small place at the beginning of very meaningful growth trends and so have the opportunity for us as a business to build something very significant.
But when you look at the competition, it’s important to understand that the net value to the world of creating a new stablecoin is zero. The value of a stablecoin is in its connectivity and utility. So the point is it’s a network business. The value of the network increases with everyone who uses it, develops on it, and engages in all the other forms of connectivity, distribution, and infrastructure that support the network.
And that’s hard to replicate, whether it’s the partnerships, the distribution, or the primary issuance capabilities. These deep integrations with the banking system scale so customers can mint and redeem their stablecoins natively in the local faster-payment systems, and in a well-risk-managed manner at the scale of capital market institutional flow. These are interlocking and reinforcing competitive moats in a network business. Issuing a stablecoin is great—it doesn’t mean you can use it for anything.
Matt Higginson: This idea of a stable store of value in emerging economies is clearly attractive. But that’s just one of the really different and emerging use cases for digital money. What other cutting-edge use cases do you see, and where does the value come from for them?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: The use cases we’ve mentioned so far center on bringing efficiency to traditional flows and systems. But the real value is going to come from the things that haven’t been built yet. For example, by reducing cost, spending, and latency, we can open up streaming micropayments, which are something people have been thinking about for years but haven’t made work yet economically. And AI will intermediate more and more economic activity, as autonomous agents proliferate on the internet. They’re going to need internet-native money to exchange value, and smart contracts that are also internet-native. The AI economy is all going to be driven by stablecoins in the internet financial system. And then even going further, it’s just more efficient for this type of activity to be intermediated by code rather than by expensive lawyers and other people, and that’s going to need electronic money to intermediate those value exchanges. It’s a wide-open future economy of things that we don’t and can’t do today.
It’s similar to the time when everyone got connected to the internet, making it nearly free and instant to communicate, and we then invented all of these new things like ridesharing or social media, where people all over are connected to a global network. None of those things were conceivable 30 years ago. But we’re going to see the same for economic activity—not money, but economic activity writ large. Investors understand why there’s so much excitement about this space.
Matt Higginson: What is the potential for stablecoins in consumer domestic payments?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon. A lot has to happen first. You need to have distribution where everyone has easy, seamless access in their pockets just by downloading the thing. And you need to have widespread merchant acceptance, among many other factors. But we’re seeing those pieces being built now. Apps, super-apps, or, increasingly, bank apps have this. And I have never met a merchant who doesn’t want to lower their payments costs.
There’s a great pre-stablecoin example of this in the Starbucks mobile wallet app, where customers were incentivized to download a wallet and top it up with a single credit card payment of $50, versus buying ten cups of coffee. The company saved something like nine swipe fees with that.
Matt Higginson: You’ve now played the CFO role across multiple contexts. I’d love to hear some of the learnings from those years.
Jeremy Fox-Geen: Well, I’ve faced crypto booms and busts over those years, along with the other crises we’ve faced. What carries me through is stoic philosophy—the idea that we can live a virtuous and maximally impactful life by focusing on the things we can control and not getting waylaid by the things we can’t. It also leads to an incredible sense of optimism. I think, “I know what I can do. I know who I am. I believe in the essential goodness of people. But every time I get knocked down, I recognize it’s not always my fault. When it is, work and build and grow. And when it isn’t, don’t get disheartened. Pick yourself back up again and then work with the people around you to lift yourself up.
I was once told by a McKinsey senior partner that the difficult decisions in life can’t be analyzed, and that’s why they’re the difficult decisions. Action gives you more information, so don’t hesitate to act when you can’t analyze your way out of a situation. I like that idea.
Matt Higginson: How has your role changed since Circle went public? Have you had to change your leadership style?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: I spend more time with investors, more time externally, and more time on quarterly SEC reporting than before. But broadly my role hasn’t changed. I’m a very strategic and business-forward CFO, so my role on our leadership team is to not just be the steward of the public market’s voice and the steward of financial control, but also to bring deep finance system understanding to a technology company that’s a crypto company and a fintech and an internet company all at once.
One thing that is different for me is the fact that more and more people listen to every word, and they watch every nuance and every twitch. So being very thoughtful about all of those little pieces only becomes more important. It’s too easy to be excited by a new idea and then unintentionally spin hundreds if not thousands of people in a direction that you were only temporarily excited by. And it’s far too easy to be a little too heavy-handed when you don’t mean it. That’s something I am relearning. It’s much more important as a public company.
Matt Higginson: Do you find yourself modulating the way you express your emotions around things like a new use case you’re excited about, so that you aren’t misunderstood?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: What’s great about the culture of Circle is that we are very partnership oriented, open, and rationally focused, but also willing to have at it with one another. Within the leadership team, we can be very vocal. But the learning piece for me is again that what I say in larger groups can be magnified out in a way I don’t intend, and so it’s important to speak more moderately in more public settings.
Matt Higginson: Blockchain potentially brings a lot of transparency, and for cross-border payments, that could actually give confidence to the sender, the receiver, the manufacturer, and the buyer. But for other use cases, it creates some challenges around whether people want all that transparency. Do we want to be able to see all transactions? How do we bring the necessary transparency to improve confidence while preserving the confidence of the individual transactors?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: With the current blockchain infrastructure, the record of transactions is fully visible to the world, but the identity of the wallet addresses is not. And that’s created rich debate. Our view is that financial and economic activity requires privacy, but also that regulators need to be able to oversee, and companies need to be able to see. One of the reasons we’re building Arc is because privacy doesn’t work in today’s blockchain for economic activity at global scale. So Arc is being built with privacy but, at the same time, with the ability to sample and oversee and have regulators and auditors do their jobs properly.
Matt Higginson: What will be the biggest drivers of growth over the next ten years? And what things need to happen to make this truly a global macroeconomic phenomenon? What will keep growth going?
Jeremy Fox-Geen: The growth comes from the fact that the cost and efficiencies and benefits are just so great, and players will layer on even more things. What needs to happen for widespread adoption is the maturation of all of the underlying pieces of the technologies and the distribution. We’ll need wallets that have easy-to-use interfaces, unlike crypto wallets of yesteryear, so that you don’t have to use multidigit hexadecimal addresses in order to send money. We’ll need blockchain where you don’t have to hold native tokens to send money, where the fees to send money or conduct economic activity are known in advance and are reasonable. And we’ll need to have widespread points of interaction with the existing systems, enabled by many of the traditional financial services companies who are the people who actually touch customers.
This will all begin to explode because the benefits are very real, although they may not be obvious to a lot of folks. You’ll just be able to do new cool things you couldn’t do before, and it will be a little bit cheaper than it was. But at a societal scale that’s huge.
Matt Higginson: Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. This has been truly fascinating.
Jeremy Fox-Geen: Matt, thank you.
