Federal Reserve’s Waller embraces AI, stablecoins, and tokenization as future of payments

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller stood before a crowd of global bankers in Frankfurt and told them, essentially, to stop worrying and learn to love the machines. Speaking at Sibos 2025 on September 29, Waller laid out a vision for payments innovation that leans heavily on artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technology, tokenized assets, smart contracts, and stablecoins. What Waller actually said The speech, titled “The Next Frontier of Payments Innovation,” centered on how emerging technologies can solve longstanding problems in cross-border payments. Waller argued that AI, particularly what he called “agentic AI,” can automate compliance processes that currently create bottlenecks in international transfers. Agentic AI refers to systems capable of autonomous task execution, handling things like sanctions screening, fraud detection, and regulatory checks without a human manually reviewing every transaction. Beyond AI, Waller praised the potential of distributed ledger technology and tokenization to make payment rails faster and more transparent. Smart contracts, self-executing code that triggers actions when conditions are met, could eliminate much of the manual ...