Stablecoins have spent most of their existence as trading instruments. As they move into supplier payments, treasury and cross-border settlement, the questions that follow are less about the technology and more about the disciplines that sit around any payment: who authorised it, how it is valued, how it reconciles to the ledger, and what the auditor will want to see. In the Gulf, where regulators in the UAE and Bahrain have moved early on payment tokens, those questions are arriving at finance teams sooner than in many other markets.
Kush Ahuja is head of Eurasia and Middle East at ACCA, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. The Fintech Times put seven written questions to him for its September focus on digital assets, on what changes for a business the day it starts settling real transactions in stablecoins, where the
Middle East sits against global peers, and whether finance skills are keeping pace. This article draws on his written answers.
For Ahuja the change happens at the moment of the first real transaction. “The moment a stablecoin is used to settle a real transaction, it stops being an abstract conversation about digital assets and becomes a finance issue,”he says. “For the CFO, the questions are immediately practical. How is the asset classified and valued? Who has authority to initiate a transaction? Who controls access to the wallet? How is that transaction reconciled against the ledger? What evidence will the auditor need? And what happens if a payment is sent to the wrong address or the stablecoin loses its peg?”
Near-instant settlement, he argues, does not remove the need for the familiar controls. “If anything, it makes them more important.” Businesses need board approval, segregation of duties, robust custody arrangements, counterparty due diligence and a complete audit trail. He also separates price stability from risk: a stablecoin may be designed to hold its value against a fiat currency, but the business still needs to understand the issuer, the reserves behind it, redemption rights and the regulatory environment it operates in. “Stablecoins may change how money moves but they do not change the CFO’s responsibility for trust and
control.”
Where the Middle East stands
Ahuja describes a region in which, in some markets, “the conversation has progressed beyond whether digital assets should be accommodated towards how they can be incorporated safely into the financial system”. He points to regulatory development in the UAE and Bahrain as creating a clearer environment for businesses exploring digital assets and new forms of payment, and says that direction matters because businesses are far more likely to consider adoption when they understand the framework they are operating in.
The commercial drivers are strong too. The GCC is exceptionally international, with businesses routinely managing suppliers, customers and investments across multiple jurisdictions, so faster settlement, round-the-clock availability and less friction in some cross-border transactions have obvious appeal. He is careful, though, to “distinguish between an enabling environment and mainstream corporate adoption”. The question finance leaders should be asking, in his words, is “where do they solve a genuine business problem, and can
we capture that benefit without introducing disproportionate risk?”
Where the gaps appear
The most common failure Ahuja sees when finance teams first handle digital assets is treating them primarily as a technology project. ACCA’s research into digital transformation shows why that is becoming outdated: recent work with CA ANZ found almost 60 per cent of finance professionals now report close collaboration with data and IT teams. That relationship matters more with digital assets, he says, because the technology team may understand the infrastructure but accounting treatment, financial controls, tax, audit evidence, treasury policy and regulatory compliance need finance involved from the outset.
Custody is the other critical area. Businesses “need to be absolutely clear about who can initiate transactions, how wallet access and private keys are protected, what role third-party custodians play and what happens if credentials are compromised”. And he warns against a specific assumption: that because a blockchain records a transaction, the control problem is solved. It is not, in his account. The transaction still has to be authorised, classified, valued and reconciled within the company’s own financial systems. “Innovation should not mean lowering the control environment. Finance’s role is to bring the same rigour it applies elsewhere into a new technological setting.”
On valuation, reconciliation and audit, his starting point is substance over label. “CFOs should begin with the economic substance of the asset and transaction rather than assuming that every digital asset should be treated in the same way,” he says. That matters particularly with stablecoins, where the label can imply simplicity but different tokens carry different structures, reserve arrangements, redemption rights and risks. Reconciliation needs a reliable link between wallet activity, blockchain records, invoices, counterparties and the general ledger. He places that inside a wider shift towards real-time finance: ACCA and CA ANZ’s 2026 research found more than 60 per cent of finance teams had increased their use of real-time operational data over the previous two years, while 42 per cent still identified data quality as a significant challenge. Auditors, he says, need evidence not simply that an asset exists on a blockchain, “but that the organisation controls it, has appropriately valued and classified it and has correctly recorded the related transactions”.
Skills, regulation and the test of success
Asked whether finance skills are keeping pace, Ahuja says there is appetite and there is a gap. ACCA research involving more than 4,000 accountancy and finance professionals found that 89 per cent regarded digital skills as necessary or very necessary to their industry, yet only 63 per cent felt they had the right level for their roles. For emerging technologies such as blockchain, reported capability was around 20 per cent. “That does not mean every accountant needs to become a blockchain developer,” he says. What they need is enough digital literacy to understand the technology they are asked to govern and to ask the right questions: how distributed ledgers and wallets operate, custody and cybersecurity risks, token structures, accounting and valuation considerations, anti-money laundering requirements, and how transactions can be verified and reconciled.
He puts professional judgement alongside technical knowledge. “Ethics, scepticism and the ability to assess risk become more valuable, not less, when technology moves faster than established practice.” The opportunity, as he sees it, is “to occupy the space between technological capability and financial trust, translating innovation into processes that businesses, regulators, auditors and investors can have confidence in”.
What still has to be resolved before stablecoins can be part of mainstream financial infrastructure is, in his view, consistency and interoperability. “Stablecoins are inherently capable of moving across borders, while regulation remains largely jurisdictional,” he says. A single transaction can involve an issuer in one market, an exchange or custodian in another and businesses in several more, so questions of regulatory responsibility, anti-money laundering requirements, redemption rights, reserve standards and corporate protection become complicated quickly. Accounting and reporting clarity is the other half of the picture, with regulators needing to address reserve transparency, redemption, operational resilience and what happens when an issuer or intermediary fails. “The goal should not be regulation for its own sake, it should be sufficient certainty that businesses can innovate responsibly.” The jurisdictions that strike that balance, he says, are likely to attract the next wave of financial development.
His test for whether digital assets have moved from experiment to everyday finance is a quiet one. “The clearest sign will be when businesses stop talking about the technology,” he says. When a company pays a cross-border supplier in a stablecoin because it is simply the fastest or most appropriate method, and the finance team processes, reconciles and reports it without treating it as an exception, the market will have changed. He expects deeper integration with treasury and ERP systems, more participation from banks and established payment providers, clearer accounting and regulatory frameworks, and digital-asset controls
becoming part of standard finance policy rather than separate innovation programmes. The measure should not be the value in circulation or the number of businesses experimenting, but whether the assets solve genuine economic problems. “In many ways, success will make digital assets less visible, not more.”
ACCA’s research on digital skills is published as The Digital Accountant: Digital skills in a transformed world, and the joint ACCA and CA ANZ report on real-time data, Enabling finance insight: Data and digital technologies, was published in July 2026.
