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What changed this year at the Web3 Banking Symposium, taking place on March 2, 2026, in Zurich? The room was full of bankers. Nobody found that unusual. That alone says something about where crypto stands today in traditional finance.
Below you will find the key insights from the Web3 Banking Symposium 2026, shared by Yulia Murat, Head of Regulatory Affairs at Global Ledger, and Hanna Khrystianovych, Head of Operations at Global Ledger, on the current stage of crypto across the financial sector.
Regulation and Structure Shaping Crypto Adoption by Banks
Yulia Murat, Head of Regulatory Affairs at Global Ledger, focused on the structural questions shaping institutional adoption — from cross-border payment infrastructure to the evolving role of stablecoins and wholesale CBDCs. Here are the main observations.
Cross-Border Payments Still Rely on Domestic Infrastructure
A fundamental challenge in cross-border payments is that existing financial infrastructure was designed primarily for domestic settlement, not international transfers. As a result, many cross-border payments rely on coordination between domestic systems rather than true cross-border asset movement.
What’s more, tokenised payment systems still often depend on existing central bank settlement infrastructure, particularly for the final cash leg of transactions. This highlights ongoing structural questions around how digital money integrates with existing financial market infrastructure.
However, changes in this direction are already underway: emerging initiatives are exploring ways to improve efficiency while maintaining central bank sovereignty, jurisdictional control, and data privacy.
The Industry Is Shifting from Interoperability to Composability
The industry is increasingly discussing composability rather than interoperability. The focus is shifting toward building systems that can natively integrate and interact with multiple networks, ledgers, and financial infrastructures.
This layered architecture may enable financial institutions to connect multiple payment and settlement systems more seamlessly.
Legal Finality and Fragmentation Create Structural Challenges
Legal finality of transactions remains a central concern for banks adopting blockchain-based financial infrastructure. At the same time, reliability and predictable settlement outcomes remain critical requirements for financial institutions and payment service providers.
Meanwhile, multiple initiatives are emerging simultaneously across the financial ecosystem — bank-led, infrastructure-led, and central bank initiatives. This raises questions about how different infrastructures will connect and operate together, and highlights the importance of designing systems with composability in mind from the outset.
Banks Face Obstacles in Digital Asset Adoption
Many financial institutions are increasingly moving beyond the question of whether digital assets are relevant, toward considering how they should participate in the ecosystem. For banks, one practical requirement is secure access to public blockchain infrastructure, rather than speculative exposure to crypto assets.
Against this backdrop, several entry points into blockchain-based financial infrastructure are being explored, each at a different stage of maturity:
Programmable Money Enables New Payment Models
Blockchain infrastructure enables programmable forms of money, which could support new financial services and more automated payment processes. This shifts how payments are designed — from static transactions to logic-driven flows embedded directly into financial operations.
One emerging area of interest is machine-to-machine payments, where systems execute transactions without direct human involvement. As these use cases develop, they point toward a more automated financial environment where payments can be executed and settled as part of broader system interactions.
Regulation Shapes the Path of Digital Money Adoption
As adoption of digital assets grows, regulatory questions are becoming central to how this market develops:
Within this environment, banks are expected to play a key role in enabling large-scale adoption of tokenised financial infrastructure.
“Institutions that explore digital financial technologies early may be better positioned as new market structures develop.”
From Acceptance to Infrastructure: Crypto's Place in Traditional Finance
Hanna Khristianovich, Head of Operations at Global Ledger, shared her perspective on the adoption of crypto within the traditional financial sector. Her observations below include adoption signals, regulatory direction, and the broader shift around crypto in banking.
Crypto Regulatory Map Is Diverging
Regulatory direction differs by region. The US and UK are moving toward regulatory simplification, while Europe remains more complex, with Switzerland positioned somewhere in between. Switzerland maintains a broadly pro-crypto regulatory environment, although stablecoin regulation is still evolving.
Switzerland is one of the leaders in crypto-enabled banking
Crypto Reached the Acceptance Stage
Just a few years ago it was unusual to see banks at crypto events, or to organise crypto discussions specifically for a traditional financial audience. That has changed. Crypto appears to have reached the “Acceptance stage” on the innovation curve.
The discussion around crypto in traditional finance has also changed. It is shifting away from the “asset class debate” toward viewing it as financial infrastructure.
“This is not an asset class debate, this is the rewrite of infrastructure.”
Scalability Shifts Beyond Technology
Scalability in crypto is increasingly seen as a business model challenge rather than a purely technical one. As infrastructure matures, the real pressure shifts to whether business models, workflows, processes, and financial systems can keep pace. This is already visible in how traditional players like SWIFT approach the topic.
SWIFT positions itself as a financial messaging provider, with about 50% of messages related to financial statements and settlement processes. Today, around 75% of SWIFT messages reach the recipient within about 10 minutes.
At the same time, SWIFT is exploring blockchain-based ledger infrastructure, aiming to introduce new blockchain rails that remain interoperable with existing payment rails. The first target use case is wholesale cross-border payments, where institutional adoption has already begun. The goal is not just speed, but always-on availability — described at the event as a shift “from email-style messaging to WhatsApp-like messaging”.
“Blockchain is not a product, but an operating system.”
Conclusion
The Web3 Banking Symposium 2026 showed a clear shift in how traditional finance sees blockchain. The question is no longer whether it matters, but how to work with it in practice.
For financial institutions, this means making decisions earlier — around infrastructure, compliance, and how to operate in a regulatory environment that is still evolving. These are no longer future questions, but part of today’s operational reality.
To support this shift toward safer crypto in traditional finance, Global Ledger helps financial institutions understand risk, assess counterparties, and navigate blockchain-based transactions with more confidence — from cross-border payments to new forms of digital assets.
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