Image courtesy of Cregis
Across Europe, some of the earliest enterprise adopters of digital-asset infrastructure are not exchanges or trading firms. They are foreign-exchange brokers and cross-border payment companies looking for faster settlement, better treasury control, and more efficient cross-border operations. Banks are beginning to follow, but much of today’s demand is being driven by these cross-border businesses.
Founded in 2017, Cregis develops digital-asset infrastructure that enables institutions to hold, move, and govern digital assets while retaining full control of their assets. The company says it now serves more than 4,000 enterprise clients across more than 50 countries and has secured over $300 billion in transaction volume.
That shift is now shaping Cregis’ European strategy. Much of its early momentum has come from FX brokers and payment companies already using its infrastructure in the Middle East as they expand into Europe. The company says the region has already delivered double-digit business growth, prompting it to increase its investment and local presence.
Why FX and Payments Firms Move First
For an FX broker running client money across several jurisdictions, the appeal of stablecoin settlement is practical, not ideological. Bank rails close on weekends; blockchain settlement does not. Many of these firms already operate across multiple legal entities, banking partners, and jurisdictions, which makes treasury management steadily more complex, and stablecoins cut both settlement time and the friction between those entities. Cregis already serves this buyer outside Europe, counting forex names such as GTCFX, ATFX, and VPFX among its clients, with a foothold across Dubai, Cyprus, and Spain.
That is why Cregis spent recent months in front of the European version of that audience rather than launching. It appeared at Paris Blockchain Week in April, Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam in June, and iFX Expo International in Cyprus, the last of which sits squarely inside the brokerage community. Across all three events, conversations quickly shifted away from blockchain itself and toward operational questions: treasury control, governance, approval workflows, and how digital assets fit into existing financial systems.
Founder and chief executive officer of Cregis, Shawn Yan, sees that as evidence of a broader shift. As digital assets move from innovation projects into day-to-day operations, buying decisions are increasingly made by finance, compliance, and risk teams rather than product teams. “These are infrastructure questions, not crypto questions,” he says.
Why Existing Infrastructure Is Fragmented
Those conversations often reveal the same challenge: most institutions still rely on separate providers for wallets, payments, and custody, creating unnecessary operational complexity. Most institutions stitch together a separate wallet provider, payment system, and custody platform, resulting in fragmented operations, duplicated compliance work, and approval workflows that do not connect.
Cregis was built around that operational gap. Many infrastructure providers began with a single capability, whether wallets, payments, or custody. Cregis instead combines these operational layers into one platform. Its Wallet-as-a-Service(WaaS) layer handles self-custodial MPC wallets, where the client keeps control of the keys. Cregis Rails layer, anchored by a payment engine, automates collections, payouts, and settlement across wallets and entities. Its custody layer adds regulated governance for institutions that need it.
The platform evolved alongside enterprise customers rather than from a predefined product roadmap. Yan says the capabilities enterprises rely on, multi-entity approval workflows, treasury controls, and fund-routing logic, were not invented in a strategy session. “They emerged from working directly with customers operating at scale,” he says. Over time, customers consistently asked for fewer disconnected systems and a more unified way to manage digital asset operations.
For many European buyers, operating history often matters more than feature lists. Cregis points to nine years of operation, more than 4,000 enterprise clients, and certifications including SOC 2 Type I, SOC 2 Type II, and ISO 27001 as indicators of operational maturity.
Why Europe Demands More Than Speed
Europe is often more cautious in adopting new financial infrastructure, particularly where governance and compliance are involved. Yan frames the regional difference plainly. “In Asia, conversations often begin with speed and scalability, while Europe tends to emphasize governance, auditability, and institutional accountability.”
In practice, a European compliance officer treats a wallet system like any other financial control: who can approve a transaction, how permissions are enforced, and whether an auditor can reconstruct every decision. As Europe’s regulatory framework keeps maturing, those expectations are getting clearer rather than looser, which favors providers that can show audit-ready records, not just secure keys.
The longer-term shift Cregis is betting on is convergence, and Yan ties it to plain economics. Assembling one provider for wallets, another for custody, a third for payments, and a fourth for compliance was tolerable while digital assets were experimental, but it grows inefficient as volume rises. “I expect institutions to buy outcomes rather than individual products,” he says, a single operating layer that holds, moves, and governs assets rather than three tools bought separately. Institutions are starting to judge digital-asset infrastructure the way they judge banking infrastructure, not by individual features but by how well it ties treasury, compliance, operations, and governance together. For Europe’s FX and payments firms, that turns infrastructure from a technology project into an operations decision.
For Cregis, Europe is less about entering another market than about responding to a broader shift in institutional demand. As digital assets become part of mainstream financial operations, the conversation is moving beyond blockchain itself toward governance, operational resilience, and long-term reliability. Cregis’ view is that infrastructure providers able to demonstrate those qualities will be best positioned for the next stage of enterprise adoption.
“No CFO wakes up looking for blockchain. They are looking for better control, faster settlement, and lower operational risk. Blockchain is simply the infrastructure that delivers those outcomes.”
