Dee Choubey says there are trillions of dollars sitting on small and mid-cap balance sheets that no lender will touch — money locked in escrow accounts, lock boxes and restricted cash.
A bank asks for your file once, underwrites it, and the answer holds until the next review. Choubey's pitch is a bank that reads a company's accounts-receivable data continuously, with permission, and lends against it at any hour of any day.
"So if you give me permission as a bank to underwrite your accounts receivables data that may be sitting in your AWS account, all of a sudden as a bank, I can continuously underwrite you 24 over seven and give you access to capital against that AR, against that trapped balance sheet inventory that you may have."
Choubey founded OpenReserve, which cleared a major regulatory hurdle a week before this interview and is a step away from opening a full-service national bank built to lend around the clock.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 4 insights that matter.
👤 Guest: Dee Choubey, Founder and CEO of OpenReserve, a blockchain-native national bank in organization
🎙️ Host: Melissa Lee, anchor of CNBC's Fast Money
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on CNBC's Fast Money
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 5 min
Key Takeaways
Last year's stablecoin law is what makes a 24/7 bank possible, not the technology
Choubey says it pulled stablecoins and programmable money inside bank regulation and away from offshore issuers
The product a CFO actually buys is settlement that does not stop at 5 p.m. on a Friday
Choubey expects stablecoins in circulation to go from "3 to $400 billion" this year to "just over 2 trillion by 2028"
The real asset a bank underwrites in this model is a company's live data, not its file
Snowflake, Databricks and ERP systems, read with permission, against trapped receivables
The reason to build a new bank rather than upgrade one is the innovator's dilemma
The other 4,200 US banks have the same technology and existing loan books in the way
1. What a Continuous Lender Is
Melissa Lee introduced the segment off the back of Bitcoin retaking "the $80,000 level" ahead of the next day's Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, which she said "would provide a new regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies." She then turned to OpenReserve, a step closer to opening its full-service national bank and "Designed as blockchain native lenders that can operate around the clock." Her first question was what "continuous lender" actually means.
Choubey started with the law rather than the product. He said Congress passed the GENIUS Act last year in a bipartisan way, "which opened up the regulatory perimeter for the United States, really to bring in stablecoins and programmable money into bank regulation frameworks instead of just being unregulated, instead of having really issuers offshore."
The consequence is a clock change: "Now, banks can really integrate and interact with stablecoins." And then, "So once you have stablecoins that are on chain, you open up 24 over seven capital markets."
He said OpenReserve received its conditional approval about a week before the interview to operate a national bank, with FDIC insurance proposed.
That lets the bank issue two instruments rather than one: "So we will have a stablecoin that we will issue GENIUS Act compliant. We will also have a tokenized deposit." On the CLARITY Act he noted "There's a lot of brouhaha about yield," and argued that a bank issuing both instruments gets interoperability between them.
What that interoperability buys, in his framing, is "superpowers for American treasurers and CFOs to get cheaper cost of capital to get settlement. That doesn't stop at 5 p.m. On a Friday. So you're not having to bridge the weekend."
He tied it back to the country rather than the company: "And for capital markets, for American capital markets, which, from my opinion, is one of the most important exports that we as a society have become even more powerful."
2. Why the Rails Are Ready
Lee pushed back with the obvious objection — that banks built on blockchain rails have been promised for about a decade, citing a former panelist she called "our friend bk" — and asked whether lending is a natural route into tokenized capital markets. She added a joke about what round-the-clock trading would do to the show: "We're going to have to do this show for hours at a time if they're just going to trade 24 over seven."
Choubey's answer was that several things matured at once: "Yeah, look, I think it's structural forces combining. You've got the maturation of these blockchain infrastructures. These L1s are now really hardened over the last 15 years. So they're institutional grade ready."
The second force is volume. "The adoption of stablecoins is increasing, right? I think we're about 3 to $400 billion of stablecoins in circulation this year, going to just over 2 trillion by 2028."
He noted the knock-on effect for government debt: "So it creates this demand for Treasury."
But he was clear that the rails are not the use case. What matters for a treasurer or a CFO, he said, is data.
3. Underwriting Your Data
The core of Choubey's argument is a change in what a bank looks at, and how often.
"The bank of the past would be, you give me your data, you give me your underwriting file," he said.
"The bank of the future is you're continuously underwriting data sets like your Snowflake, like your Databricks, like your ERP systems with permissions."
His analogy for why companies will grant that permission came from his own morning. He described being on Codex for ChatGPT when a pop-up asked to install a browser extension and to reach all the voice and sound on his computer: "And I was saying, yes, allow, allow, allow, because it was giving me back so much, so much value."
The reason it matters: "But for the American treasurer and the CFO, there's trillions of dollars in America in the Russell 2000 that are locked, locked, trapped capital in escrow accounts and lock boxes and restricted cash that sits on balance sheets."
The mechanism he proposes is permissioned, continuous underwriting of receivables — "So if you give me permission as a bank to underwrite your accounts receivables data that may be sitting in your AWS account, all of a sudden as a bank, I can continuously underwrite you 24 over seven and give you access to capital against that AR, against that trapped balance sheet inventory that you may have."
He did not claim it arrives quickly. "So again, it's not going to happen overnight, but we understand that. But the technology for that has to be built today."
4. The Innovator's Dilemma
Lee summarized the pitch back to him — "So it's giving it's giving CEOs and treasurers a lot more flexibility with their balance sheet and as you say, will lower the cost of capital" — noted that "everything you're talking about is wildly bullish," and asked for the biggest misperception between the legacy players and the upstarts. Her own framing was that "people are of the assumption that the legacy banks don't want this. Meanwhile, they've been building behind the scenes forever."
Choubey's first point was about how to read blockchain prices at all: "I think you're seeing a bifurcation in the value of these blockchains from just a usefulness perspective and the token value." He pointed to the Bitcoin price the desk had mentioned as one element of that.
His answer to why a new bank is needed is not that incumbents lack the technology: "The other one is the reason to build it from scratch is innovator's dilemma."
"So it's not that the other 4200 banks in America don't have technologists or they don't have access to the same technologies. It's that they have large portfolios of loans or mortgage loans or existing business processes," he said.
Bonus Insights
The segment ran against a live legislative calendar. Lee framed it around a Senate vote on the CLARITY Act scheduled for the following day, which she said would set a new regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies — so the interview covered a law already passed, the GENIUS Act, and one still in front of the Senate.
Lee's skepticism was the sharpest thing said on air from the desk's side: she has been hearing about banks on blockchain rails "for, I feel like ten years," and asked directly whether tokenized securities and lending were the thing that finally opens it up.
Choubey's one concession on timing was unprompted — the model does not arrive overnight — paired with the claim that the build has to start now anyway.
Choubey's bottom line is that the interesting part of blockchain banking is not the token, it is that a bank with round-the-clock settlement and permissioned access to a company's live data can lend against working capital that is currently stranded on the balance sheet.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
OpenReserve (Choubey's bank in organization: a GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoin plus a tokenized deposit, with FDIC insurance proposed, built to underwrite and lend 24/7)
Snowflake, Databricks and AWS (Named as the places a company's data already sits, which a bank of the future would read with permission instead of asking for an underwriting file)
ChatGPT (His own example of granting sweeping permissions to software because the value returned was worth it — the behavior he expects from CFOs)
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