Mega payments processor Fiserv had planned to launch a stablecoin by the end of last year, but then plans changed.

In June 2025, Fiserv said it would launch the FIUSD coin for use by its clients by the end of the year, along with a digital asset platform for hosting stablecoins.

Now, Fiserv isn’t saying exactly when it will launch its own stablecoin. It’s still committed to FIUSD, but the rest of the details are evolving, according to Sunil Sachdev, Fiserv’s head of embedded finance. In the meantime, Fiserv said last week that its digital asset system is up and running, now hosting the Bank of North Dakota’s stablecoin, called Roughrider.

In an interview Friday, Sachdev talked about the company’s pivot on FIUSD, acknowledging the course change, but explaining how it will eventually be a smart move for the Milwaukee-based processor at some point, given its broad ecosystem of clients, including financial institutions and merchants. Pursuing FIUSD is still “the right decision for us, even as we launch Roughrider,” he said. 

“We have over 300 million bank accounts on our core banking systems; we have over five to six million merchants globally, so when you talk to anybody that's looking and operating in the digital asset space, they talk about how many endpoints or how many nodes are on that network,” he said. “The more nodes you have, the more efficient or proficient you can be in developing new areas or ways to exchange value on that network.” 

Sachdev’s acknowledgment of the FIUSD pivot came just days after Fiserv announced that it had launched the Bank of North Dakota’s Roughrider last week on its new digital asset platform. That was an accomplishment with a long-time bank partner that Sachdev said is an initial proof point for the processor that it’s capable of hosting stablecoins.

Fiserv’s platform makes the Bank of North Dakota stablecoin available to some 90 banks and credit unions in that state, according to an Oct. 2 report from the analysts at the investment firm Robert W. Baird.

It’s not surprising, in some ways, to see Fiserv taking new directions. When the company first announced FIUSD last year Mike Lyons was the company’s chief executive officer, but a year later, in June of this year, he exited, and handed the CEO title to Takis Georgakopoulos.

Another change for the company is the increased pressure from an activist Fiserv shareholder, Jana Partners, seeking to force Fiserv to further reduce costs and to turn to the technology company Palantir for modernizing the company’s processes, the Baird analysts noted in their report.

Fiserv and other companies are racing to offer stablecoin services after President Donald Trump in July 2025 signed the Genius Act, initiating a regulatory framework for the digital assets. Stablecoins are designed to be less volatile than other cryptocurrencies by being pegged to a fiat currency, typically the U.S. dollar.

The Bank of North Dakota, the only state in the U.S. to have its own bank, is a frontrunner in seeking to create a stablecoin for use within its interbank system.

“Roughrider checked a lot of boxes,” Sachdev said. “We, as a financial infrastructure provider for the last four decades, always build systems and capabilities that will help our financial institution clients and our merchant clients exchange value in a very efficient way and provide choice to their customers, whether they be retail customers or commercial customers.”

Sachdev didn’t point to the CEO switch as playing any role in Fiserv’s changed strategy. Instead, he explained how the work with the Bank of North Dakota and Fiserv’s purchase of StoneCastle Cash Management last year influenced the FIUSD strategy. 

When North Dakota approached Fiserv last year, the company realized that the state had a “specific pain point” that could be addressed with a stablecoin, Sachdev said. 

“When Bank of North Dakota approached us soon after the announcement on FIUSD, we looked at the problem statement and realized this would be a great way to show how our digital asset platform could deliver efficiency at a lower cost for money movement in an interbank network that was well established in the state,” Sachdev explained.

With the StoneCastle acquisition, Fiserv gained the ability to provide banks with liquidity management services that offered a new avenue for advancing FIUSD. Georgakopoulos, who was chief operating officer at the time, had said StoneCastle would allow Fiserv’s stablecoin strategy to enable banks to custody cash supporting FIUSD holdings.

At the same time, Fiserv had decided to move away from working with Paxos and Circle Internet Group as partners in creating its stablecoin infrastructure, Sachdev said, without describing how that break unfolded.

“We pivoted from our original announcement where we said we were working with Paxos and Circle,” Sachdev said, “to create more of a proprietary coin internally within Pfizer.” 

Ultimately, Fiserv’s stablecoin will allow for transfers among its millions of clients within its closed loop FIUSD system, but it will also be interoperable with other digital wallets, the Fiserv executive said. 

Fiserv hasn’t disclosed working with any specific digital wallet providers, but the company aims to have something to say on that front before the end of the year, Sachdev said.

Generally, stablecoins will provide benefits across Fiserv’s business, touching everything from its banking services to its Clover merchant services, Sachdev said.

“All of these areas give us surface area where people then can engage with stablecoins in different ways,” he said.

Fiserv also signed up to work on the Open USD stablecoin effort last month, along with other payments industry giants, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Klarna Group and American Express. Notably, Paxos and Circle Internet Group were not a part of the cohort.

When Fiserv disclosed the start of its platform last week with the launch of Roughrider, it said it was now working with the digital platform firm Fireblocks to provide its digital asset infrastructure, and with the blockchain Solana to carry the transactions. 

“The ecosystem has matured, and what our institutions are asking for has also, kind of, matured as well since Genius Act was passed last year, and I would say that I think everybody's kind of finding their place in that ecosystem now,” Sachdev said.