The dollar is staying. Dollar clearing has to catch up

The dollar will not be replaced by gold or stablecoins within any treasurer's planning horizon. It remains the backbone of global trade and financing, so institutions outside the US need dollar clearing, custody and treasury at the volume of dollar business they already have.

De-dollarisation dominated 2025

For most of 2025, no treasury conversation was complete without it. Political pressure on the Federal Reserve's independence shook confidence in US institutions, and the argument that the dollar was losing its privileged status as the world's de facto currency went mainstream.

Central banks diversified reserves faster than in previous decades, gold purchases were widely read as a hedge against dollar dependency, and the gold price set successive records through the year.

Positioning followed sentiment. Bank of America's June 2025 fund manager survey found investors the most underweight the dollar in two decades, a level last seen in January 2005. For a global treasurer, that reading reshaped hedging and reserve allocation for the year ahead.

The evidence moved the other way

By 2026 the headlines had moved on. The dollar firmed, and Kevin Warsh's arrival as Federal Reserve chair in May 2026 proved less radical than some had feared. The underlying doubt, that the dollar's role at the centre of global finance is eroding, settled into the background of treasury thinking without being tested against the data.

The data do not support it. According to the BIS Triennial Survey, the US dollar appeared on one side of 89% of global FX trades in April 2025, up from 88% in April 2022. Institutions were moving more dollars through the system at the height of the scare than three years earlier.

In August 2026, Bank of America re-examined the dollar's more recent softness and reached a different conclusion from the debasement story of 2025. The weakness, its strategists wrote, can almost entirely be attributed to front-end rate differentials. That is a currency market behaving as expected, with the dollar's path resting on US data rather than on institutional credibility.

That leaves treasuries outside the US with one question: is their institution equipped to clear, hold and manage the dollars already moving through it, at the volume the market is actually generating?

The real dollar problem is access

The dollar is staying, but getting it delivered and moved is harder every year, because dollar correspondent solutions are in retreat outside the United States.

"I think the world still moves money in dollars and dollars remain really, really difficult to access in Europe," said George Davis, Lorum's CEO and co-founder, speaking to FF News at Money20/20 Europe 2026. The number of banks willing to provide dollar correspondent banking in Europe keeps declining, because the economics of serving smaller and mid-market institutions no longer make sense inside a bank built to lend.

CPMI data, published by the BIS, show active correspondent banking relationships fell by roughly 30% between 2011 and 2022. The decline is structural, and it concentrates in the corridors and client tiers that generate the least balance-sheet upside for a lending-first bank.

A mid-market European institution offering dollar clearing to its own clients therefore finds fewer correspondent partners every year. The work was never designed to be profitable for institutions optimising for something else.

Stablecoins solve a different problem

The case against the dollar runs deeper than the Fed and US politics. The dollar clearing system itself has given impetus to the call for alternatives, and that case deserves to be taken seriously, starting with the alternative most often raised.

Stablecoins are the fix most commonly proposed. As George Davis noted in the same conversation, they function as a hedge for emerging markets where correspondent banking is largely absent, a different problem from dollar access in the G7 or G20.

The friction facing treasurers who move and hold dollars sits inside the correspondent chain itself: who holds the funds, when they choose to release them, and what their own balance-sheet priorities dictate in the meantime.

A parallel settlement rail sits on top of that chain rather than inside it. A European institution routing dollar payments through a shrinking pool of correspondents feels the underlying delay regardless of what settles the message.

What being plugged in properly looks like

European payment sovereignty is a live and legitimate debate, with new domestic schemes and a stronger push to settle in euros. It runs alongside a separate, practical reality for any institution still serving clients who trade, invoice and settle in dollars: the institution has to clear, hold and move dollars as efficiently as its existing dollar business demands.

That task sits apart from currency politics. The answer is infrastructure that moves dollars on a non-lending model, where clearing sits at the centre of the business instead of competing with a lending book for the same balance sheet. Three functions sit underneath it:

• Clearing. Global clearing gives institutions direct access to local rails, the dollar included, through one API and ledger, bypassing the correspondent chains that add delay.
• Named custody. Named custody holds client funds in named, segregated accounts, so ownership is clear instead of sitting inside someone else's balance sheet.
• Treasury. Treasury gives institutions consolidated, multi-currency liquidity infrastructure across the corridors they actually operate in.

That is the distinction between a bank that happens to offer correspondent services and an institution built around them, which is the infrastructure thesis in one line.

The infrastructure decision

De-dollarisation was worth taking seriously in 2025, and the evidence since has moved firmly against it. The dollar's share of global FX trading grew over the exact period the scare was loudest, and the constraint that remains is access to dollar clearing, not demand for the dollar.

For treasuries outside the US, the useful response is confidence paired with a concrete step: making sure the institution is plugged into dollar correspondent infrastructure built for the volume of dollars already in motion, and the volume still coming. For banks and fintechs and PSPs, that is a decision about who holds the dollar, and on what balance sheet, before it is a decision about rails.

Lorum is the correspondent institution for banks and fintechs. It provides programmable access to global clearing, named custody, and treasury, on a non-lending, 100% reserve model.

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