Full name: Lamine Brahimi
Job title & company: Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Taurus SA
Finalist: Crypto Banking Innovation of the Year / Partnership of the Year
How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Capital Pioneer Awards 2026?
It is a real honour for the team. We have spent the past six years building infrastructure that banks and financial institutions can use in the real world. Our view has always been that digital assets should not sit outside the financial system. The real opportunity is to help institutions adopt them safely, at scale, and on their own terms. Being shortlisted in two categories is a strong recognition of that work.
What does this recognition mean to your organisation?
The ClearBank deployment is a very important milestone for us. ClearBank is one of the UK’s leading clearing banks. Its decision to select Taurus infrastructure to support stablecoin services, integrated with Circle Mint for MiCAR-compliant USDC and EURC, is a strong validation of what we have built. That partnership, alongside the launch of Taurus-NETWORK with more than 40 institutions across 12 countries, represents exactly the kind of institutional adoption we set out to enable.
What part of your work/campaign are you most proud of?
Probably the bravery to do something different, and then the hard work to back that up properly. It’s one thing to have a fresh idea, but another to do the research, education and detailed work needed to turn it into something clients can genuinely trust and act on
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge was always bridging two very different worlds. Banks have strict processes, regulatory obligations, and very high standards for resilience, security and control. Digital assets move fast and require flexibility. Our role is to bring those two worlds together without asking institutions to compromise.
Building infrastructure that satisfies both, production-grade security and compliance alongside the flexibility to support stablecoins, tokenised assets, and blockchain-based settlement, required us to meet banks on their terms. ClearBank needed to accelerate time to market for stablecoin services while reducing operational complexity. That meant our infrastructure had to integrate cleanly with their existing stack, not require them to rebuild around us.
How do you see the industry evolving in the next few years?
Digital assets are moving inside the banking stack, not sitting beside it. Our clients, including Deutsche Bank, State Street, ClearBank, KBC, are some of the world’s most stringent financial institutions and they are not building separate digital asset divisions. They are embedding custody, tokenization, and settlement into their core platforms. MiCA has been a genuine accelerant in Europe, collapsing a patchwork of national regimes into a single framework.
In the US, increased regulatory clarity is opening the market further. Stablecoins will play a much larger role in institutional payments and treasury management. And the infrastructure providers that have already proven they can operate at banking grade will be the ones institutions turn to as this accelerates.
If you could give one piece of advice to others entering these awards in the future, what would it be?
Let the work speak. The strongest submissions are built on what has actually been delivered: the client, the use case, the deployment, the integration and the result. That is what matters.
The Capital Pioneer Community
Want to join the Capital Pioneer community? Check out our Digital asset summit headlined by Nethermind taking place on 21 September, Hilton Bankside.
