Inside Stripe's Open Standard

Welcome back to Fintech Takes. I'm Alex Johnson, joined again by James Wester (co-head of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research), who I’ve come to think of as our resident stablecoin correspondent to make sense of the biggest stablecoin news of the summer. In July, Stripe organized a consortium called Open Standard, backed by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Coinbase, among others, to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin called OUSD. Within days, some of the smaller companies on that list said they hadn't agreed to what was being described. There's still no white paper, nor clarity on governance. So, what’s the Open Standard consortium building? We dig into: What's confirmed about Open Standard and OUSD, and what's still guesswork Why this fight is about platform ambition as opposed to stablecoin tech (Circle's site hails itself as "the tech stack for the agentic economy" without mentioning stablecoin; that platform ambition may be why the rest of the payments industry is organizing against it) Why payments consortiums almost always fail, and what Zelle (one of the rare successes) had that Open Standard currently doesn't Why nobody's panicking about OUSD the way central bankers panicked over Facebook's Libra in 2019, and what that reveals about stablecoin regulation  Tune in for James's read on whether Open Standard becomes infrastructure or the next entry in the consortium graveyard. --- This episode is brought to you by Ocrolus.  Better lending starts with better intelligence. A borrower's cash flow only tells half the story, so Ocrolus fills in the rest with behavior signals and industry benchmarking. Visit https://www.ocrolus.com/ for more.  --- Sign up for Alex’s Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don’t forget to check out my YouTube page. --- Follow Alex:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson Follow James: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswester/ X: https://x.com/jameswester