4 min read

By Alain Acha, strategy and transformation leader with eight years of experience working across some of the world's largest asset managers and wealth managers in the US and UK.

The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.

Marcos runs a small coffee export business in Bogotá. Every month he pays logistics partners in the United States, transfers profits to a savings account in Spain, and sends money to his daughter studying in London.

Three transactions. Three different banks. Three sets of fees. Three different exchange rates, none of them the one he saw on Google. One transfer that arrived two days late because it got caught in a correspondent banking chain over a public holiday. And at the end of it all, somewhere between 5% and 8% of his money quietly disappeared into the system.

Marcos isn't the exception. He's the norm.

The World Bank estimates the global average cost of sending money across borders is still around 6.4%.¹ That's not a fintech statistic. That's a tax on anyone whose life, business, or family doesn't sit neatly inside one country. And it's been that way for decades.

The system wasn't built for Marcos. It was built for a world where capital moved slowly, borders mattered more, and banks sat at the centre of every transaction. That world is gone. That infrastructure is still here.

A new set of rails is emerging

In the last two years, a quiet but significant shift has been underway. Stablecoins, digital tokens pegged 1:1 to a currency like the US dollar (USD) and backed by cash or government bonds, have moved from a niche corner of the crypto world into something that looks increasingly like real financial infrastructure.

The numbers tell the story. According to Bessemer Venture Partners, real-world stablecoin payment volumes doubled in 2025 to \(400 billion.² Reported gross transaction volumes across the stablecoin ecosystem hit \)28 trillion, a number that includes trading, DeFi activity, and collateral movement alongside real payments, which means it isn't directly comparable to consumer payment volumes. But it does signal the scale and resilience of the underlying settlement infrastructure now operating on these rails.³ In Latin America, where the broken payments problem is most acute, a majority of surveyed internationally active or crypto-enabled businesses are already using stablecoins for cross-border payments.⁴

For Marcos, the difference is stark. A stablecoin transfer from Bogotá to London settles in seconds, costs well under 1% end-to-end in well-supported corridors, and works on a Sunday night with no correspondent banks in the middle.⁵ Even after accounting for on and off ramp costs, it's a fraction of the 6.4% the traditional system extracts.

That's not a marginal improvement. It's a meaningfully better version of the existing system, and for the most underserved corridors, the gap is transformative.

From crypto plumbing to financial infrastructure

Two years ago, stablecoins were still widely dismissed as crypto plumbing. Useful inside the ecosystem, irrelevant outside it. The regulatory picture was murky, the institutional interest cautious, and the sceptics had reasonable arguments.

That changed quickly.

In mid-2025, the US passed the GENIUS Act, the first federal framework defining stablecoins as payment instruments rather than securities.⁶ The EU's MiCA regulation had already done the same in Europe. The guardrails are emerging. How stablecoins integrate into the core banking system is still being worked through, but the years of operating in a legal grey area are starting to move behind us.

JPMorgan, Citi, and BNY Mellon all moved from watching to building.⁷ Visa expanded stablecoin settlement across its network. Stripe acquired Bridge for over $1 billion to get stablecoin infrastructure. Interactive Brokers started letting clients fund brokerage accounts directly in USDC.⁸

It's worth noting that traditional rails haven't stood still either. Domestic instant payment systems like Colombia's Transfiya, SEPA Instant in Europe, and Faster Payments in the UK have meaningfully reduced friction within their own borders. The stablecoin opportunity is sharpest where those systems don't reach, across borders, across currencies, outside banking hours, in corridors where the infrastructure was never built in the first place.

Reported market cap crossed $317 billion by early 2026, up more than 50% in a single year.⁸ The window between "experimental" and "infrastructure" was shorter than almost anyone predicted.

Where this is already changing real-world behaviour

The mainstream stablecoin conversation still tends to focus on institutional adoption in the US and Europe. And that matters. But the more immediate and more human story is elsewhere.

It's in the entrepreneur in Lagos holding dollar-pegged stablecoins to protect against Nigerian naira (NGN) volatility. The family in Caracas receiving remittances that actually arrive, at a cost their relatives can afford.

Stablecoins are also programmable, which opens up possibilities that go well beyond cheaper transfers. Capital can move automatically when predefined conditions are met, no batch processing, no banker's hours. JPMorgan already uses this for Siemens' internal treasury via JPM Coin.⁹ The same logic applies to payroll across multiple countries, supplier payments tied to delivery confirmation, or family remittances that trigger automatically each month.

Underneath this shift is a change in how companies think about liquidity itself. Less as balances sitting in accounts, and more as capital that needs to move instantly across markets. Stablecoins are the infrastructure that makes that possible.

For wealth management specifically, the implications are operational but significant. A client moving $1 million from US dollars (USD) into Japanese yen (JPY) to settle a property purchase faces a spread of 0.5 to 1%, intermediary fees, and a settlement window of one to three business days through traditional FX and SWIFT.⁹ Through stablecoin rails, converting USDC to Japan's newly regulated yen stablecoin JPYC,¹⁰ the currency conversion completes in under a minute, at a fraction of the cost, and works on a Sunday night.⁵ Final settlement still depends on local legal and banking infrastructure. But the FX leg, historically one of the most expensive and opaque parts of the journey, changes materially.

(Comparison table with full example)

The saving on a single \(1M transfer sits between \)4,000 and $8,000. For a wealth manager running fifty clients with regular cross-border transactions, that adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in savings that currently go to banks. Whether those savings ultimately accrue to end users or are partially reabsorbed by new intermediaries remains an open question, but the direction compresses costs across the chain.

The frictions that haven't gone away

None of this means the transition is without risk. Not all stablecoins are equal. Tether's reserve transparency remains a legitimate concern, especially compared to the audited clarity of USDC.¹¹ Regulatory frameworks in parts of Asia are still catching up, with 81% of firms in the region citing uncertainty as a major barrier.¹² A growing class of yield-bearing stablecoins, now a $3.7 billion subsector, introduces credit risk that deserves genuine scrutiny before anyone gets near them.³

There is also a practical reality worth acknowledging. For most users, the journey still starts and ends in fiat currency. Converting Colombian pesos (COP) into USDC and back out into pound sterling (GBP) at the other end involves on and off ramps that often run through traditional financial institutions, with their own KYC checks, delays, and costs. Stablecoins dramatically reduce friction in the middle. The last mile is still a work in progress.

The important distinction: stablecoins are a settlement and liquidity tool. Not an investment. Any firm or product positioning them as a return-generating asset is getting it wrong.

But the direction of travel is becoming clearer. The infrastructure is being built by institutions that aren't going away. The regulatory frameworks are taking shape in the world's two largest financial markets. And the use cases, cheaper, faster, always-on movement of money across borders, address a problem that is both enormous and genuinely underserved.

Why this matters in practice

Marcos doesn't care about blockchain. He doesn't follow crypto markets or read about the GENIUS Act. He just wants his money to arrive, intact, without losing a week of margin in the process.

That's the promise stablecoins are beginning to deliver on. Not for a niche. For anyone whose money needs to move across a border.

The system was built for a different world. It's now being upgraded for the world we actually live in.

What's your take? Are you already seeing stablecoins come up in your work, or does this still feel like a future problem?

Alain Acha is a strategy and transformation leader with eight years of experience working across some of the world's largest asset managers and wealth managers in the US and UK. He focuses on the intersection of financial services, technology, and emerging infrastructure. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent the views of his employer.

Sources

1. World Bank — Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025: https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/2026-04/RPW_main_report_and_annex_Q325.pdf

2. Bessemer Venture Partners — Stablecoins: From DeFi Primitive to Global Financial Infrastructure: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/stablecoins-from-defi-primitive-to-global-financial-infrastructure

3. KuCoin — Stablecoin Supply Reaches $315B in Q1 2026: https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/stablecoin-supply-reaches-315b-in-q1-2026-as-usdc-surpasses-usdt-in-growth

4. CoinLaw — Stablecoin Market Share by Chain Statistics 2026: https://coinlaw.io/stablecoin-market-share-by-chain-statistics/

5. Quppy — Stablecoins or FX Transfers: Which Is Cheaper in 2025: https://quppy.com/blog/stablecoins-vs-traditional-fx-transfers/

6. FinTech Weekly — Why 2026 Could Be the Year Stablecoins Go Mainstream: https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/stablecoins-mainstream-payments-genius-act-2026

7. CoinChange — Stablecoins for Banks: The Strategic Solution for Financial Institutions (2025): https://www.coinchange.io/blog/stablecoins-for-banks-the-strategic-solution-for-financial-institutions-in-2025

8. Federal Reserve — Stablecoins in 2025: Developments and Financial Stability Implications (April 2026): https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/stablecoins-in-2025-developments-and-financial-stability-implications-20260408.html

9. TreasuryUp — Stablecoins for Banks in 2025: The Strategic Playbook: https://treasurup.com/stablecoins-strategic-playbook-banks-2025/

10. CoinDesk — Japan's New Yen-Pegged Stablecoin Is Asia's Only Truly Global Token (October 2025): https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/10/27/japan-s-new-yen-pegged-stablecoin-is-asia-s-only-truly-global-token

11. Coinmonks / Medium — Should You Treat Stablecoins Like Investments in 2026?: https://medium.com/coinmonks/should-you-treat-stablecoins-like-investments-in-2026-92c9508e20ae

12. EY-Parthenon — Stablecoins in Focus: Navigating the New Digital Financial Landscape (2025): https://www.ey.com/content/dam/ey-unified-site/ey-com/en-us/insights/financial-services/documents/cs-eyp-stablecoin-survey.pdf