Clear Junction’s Teresa Cameron: Why Stablecoins and Agentic AI Unlock Each Other

For three days at Money 20/20 Europe, two words were on every banner, often separately: stablecoins and agentic AI. Teresa Cameron’s contribution was to explain why they belong in the same sentence. The Group CEO of Clear Junction spoke on a panel arguing that these are not two parallel trends but two technologies that unlock each other, and once she laid it out, it was hard to unsee.

The logic is mechanical. An AI agent that can transact is only useful if the money can move at the speed the agent thinks, in seconds, around the clock, without stopping to wait for a human to approve each payment. Stablecoins provide exactly that: programmable settlement governed by code, not office hours. The proof landed at this very show, where Worldline, ING and Mastercard completed Europe’s first live agentic payment. Clear Junction’s job is to make that bridge between fiat and stablecoin rails safe enough for the institutions that actually move the money.

“The only person you need to impress is yourself”

Before the technology, the leadership, because it explains the steadiness of everything that followed. Cameron stepped into the CEO role in October 2025 after five years as Clear Junction’s CFO, working closely with founder Dima Kats, now chairman. She described the handover with unusual candour: a founder stepping back and trusting someone else to run the company he built is, she said, like asking someone to look after your child, and you are even more careful with someone else’s. When she raised that with Kats, his answer became a line she clearly carries with her.

“He said to me: the only person you need to impress is yourself.”

Her background is treasury, and she still lights up talking about it, which fits a business she calls “a whole big treasury project.” Clear Junction provides payment and treasury services exclusively to financial institutions, who in turn use its rails to serve their customers. It processes billions in transactional value across both fiat and stablecoins, and the interoperability between those two worlds is the entire point.

A decade of banking what banks wouldn’t

What makes Clear Junction’s stablecoin pivot credible is that it is not a pivot at all. Cameron pointed out that the firm, which marks its tenth anniversary this year, started a decade ago by doing the unfashionable thing: providing fiat banking services to digital-asset businesses that couldn’t get near tier-1 banks. It still does. What is new is the direction of travel.

Today, the company is running that relationship in reverse, offering stablecoin and digital-asset services to fiat-native businesses that want to experiment with the new rails but are not about to do it recklessly. The pitch is that they get to try stablecoins with a provider that has applied the same compliance discipline to crypto for ten years, rather than a crypto-native shop learning regulation on the fly. Clear Junction did not wait for the trend either; Cameron noted it began building stablecoin products two years ago, before MiCA and before the US GENIUS Act gave the space its current clarity.

New rails, new risks

Where Cameron got most animated was the unglamorous part of the agentic-AI story that the hype skips: risk. The fiat world has spent decades learning how to manage fraud and mitigate risk. Move the same value onto digital-asset rails driven by autonomous agents, and the playbook has to change.

“Those two technologies unlock each other. But what we really need to help with now is the risk management of those tools. Everybody understands how to manage fraud in the fiat world. You have to take a slightly different approach with digital assets.”

Cybersecurity, the genuine fear factor around AI, the new failure modes that appear when code authorises payments instead of people: these are the problems Clear Junction is trying to make tractable. Her method is almost engineering-like, and she applies it identically to new technology and new regulation. Break the thing into components, identify each risk, work out how to measure and mitigate it, then educate clients so they understand how the management works. It is the opposite of the move-fast ethos, and in infrastructure that carries other people’s money, that is the point.

Building the European hub, in the gray area

That same discipline shapes how Clear Junction approaches the regulatory thicket. The firm is UK-licensed but building out an office in the Amsterdam area, with applications underway for both a MiCA licence (converting an earlier crypto registration) and an EMI licence, aiming to make the Netherlands its European hub. Cameron was refreshingly honest that this work happens in a gray area: when the company started building stablecoin products two years ago, the rulebook barely existed.

Her answer is to engineer for the regulator before the regulator arrives. Map the transactions, anticipate what supervisors will worry about, put guardrails in place, and then, when the formal rules land, it is fine-tuning rather than a rebuild. “These are the assumptions we made, these are the guardrails we put in place” is, she said, how every conversation with a regulator should start. It is a measured, almost patient way to run a company in a market that prizes speed, and listening to her lay it out, the founder’s decision to hand over the keys made complete sense. Her summary of how Clear Junction gets where it is going was the quiet kind of ambition that actually tends to arrive: take small steps every day, don’t stop, and the big progress takes care of itself.

This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more on the convergence reshaping payments, watch the full Cryptofocus series, including our interview with Midnight’s Fahmi Syed on the privacy layer these rails still need.