Stablecoins are already lowering costs, raising transaction speeds, and extending available windows to complete payment transactions to 24/7. They’re doing this for larger retail
banking and corporate financial institution customers, and it’s likely that banks will be offering stablecoin payment and receivables options to more clients in the coming years. But these new crypto alternatives to traditional transactions still must
prove their worth over time before they make a demonstrable dent in global payments statistics.
Though banks and their customers are becoming more bullish on stablecoins’ potential, they have not yet passed the low single digits in terms of their
percentage of global transaction values. To achieve greater acceptance in the payments marketplace, technical, operational, and foreign exchange pricing hurdles must still be overcome.
Attitudes and appetites surrounding stablecoins and their benefits must evolve further toward acceptance, active promotion, and consistent use by the
financial services industry and its customers.
Businesses seek simple, effective financial solutions and prove they work
One of the principal lessons I’ve learned throughout my career is just because something is a ‘hot’ product for one sector doesn’t mean it’s widely applicable or will gain market share value quickly. This is the case with financial innovations like real-time
payments, which make sense for numerous use cases but are taking time to get traction with corporate clients. It will likely be a similar journey for stablecoins to gain broad acceptance - at least within typical businesses handling transactions– into the
near future.
The reason for this is simple: doing smart business repetitively requires the processes involved to be logical, consistent, secure, and easily replicated for frequent transactions and repeat buyers. Yet, any process that requires multiple steps is complex.
Stablecoins should in theory offer simpler and cheaper paths for many transactions, but all the pieces are not yet in place to allow these digital alternatives to replace more than a figurative handful of traditional payment transactions, even in the cross-border
banking marketplace.
As of the end of 2024, stablecoins
drove more transfers annually ($18.4 billion) than Visa or Mastercard, and one source projects stablecoins will power
12% of global cross-border payment volumes by 2030. But that’s five years away, and meanwhile banks and business customers are still ‘kicking the tires’ to find their own more productive, profitable paths using stablecoins in their daily activities.
Tokenisation enables all sorts of ‘stuff’ to travel with stablecoin payment transactions
We spoke to Paul Brody, EY’s global head of blockchain, who views stablecoins as just one part of how people will buy and sell “stuff” of all kinds more efficiently and securely in the future. He reminds us that we can’t forget the blockchain security part
of the “payments + stuff” combined stablecoin package. Tokenisation – or secure representation on the blockchain of all sorts of that “stuff”, he explains, is useful for confirming warranty eligibility, product traceability, business agreements, and - specifically
for may enterprise-level users - supply chain management documents and other critical commerce and trade details.
Brody says the beauty of encrypted blockchain commerce is putting elements of payments and supply chain networks together. “Payment chains are missing the whole rest of the picture,” he emphasises, and “might get a lot of traction in the short run, but I
think they're an incomplete solution. And they are yesterday's port of approach into tomorrow's technology.”
With all the advances in payment systems and increased speed of transactions both locally and internationally over the past few years, not even instant payments – available in many regions around the globe – have yet come into their own.
Indeed, the ‘holy grail’ of true efficiency for corporate commerce has always been to find a way to consistently transport invoice information and other related details via the same channel at the same time as the payment itself to ease the reconciliation
and remittance accounting processes involved. Better yet – to do this just as smoothly for international transactions, especially those involving different currencies on each end.
Early adherents saving money, prefer routing stablecoin business through trusted partners
A recent EY/Parthenon
survey of 250 corporates and 100 financial institutions on stablecoin adoption within financial services said: “41% of organisations that have used stablecoins reported cost savings of 10%+, primarily driven by efficiencies in cross-border payments.” Diving
deeper into the survey results, corporates also responded that they strongly prefer to use stablecoin services provided by their existing bank partners - only 26% of them would be willing to accept stablecoins for payments right now.
This is a clear example of how financial innovations may offer cost-saving or efficiency-boosting opportunities over a wide range of potential participants and use cases. However, in light of other pressing issues or limiting factors, ‘new ways to do things’
are often overlooked, cautiously explored, or simply ignored during the early stages of typical industry ‘hype cycles’. Bank clients, especially corporate-level and smaller enterprises, often look first to valued relationship partners before making major changes
in financial arrangements and practises affecting their vital operations.
Seasoned industry observers know that for many larger and smaller bank-financed organisations, treasury management and payments relationships – with the consistent fee-revenue they provide to their providers - are often allocated by business customers to
specific financial institutions based on committed access to credit and liquidity facilities. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, as transactional and other fees help offset the costs of providing the lines of credit from the banks’ balance sheets,
especially when those credit facilities remain untapped for months or years, essentially as funding ‘insurance pools’ only, and generate few if any usage fees on their own for the providers.
Political action joins consumer and business sentiment to drive stablecoin momentum
“Consumers have overwhelmingly voted with their feet,” Brody contends, that they want public blockchains and stablecoins that are driving the market forward. What's changed most dramatically in recent months, he says, is “regulators have given into reality.
They have accepted that public chains are going to be the system. Standard tokens are going to be the system. That's really what the
GENIUS Act and the
market structure bills are doing […] they are basically giving official support to what has become a global standard.”
Hybrid solution offers ISO details with payments in one stablecoin transaction
For businesses, transactions that flow between buyers and sellers
across countries and currencies are where stablecoin use is expected to really shine. Proponents point to stablecoins’ greater efficiency and lower costs provided via their settlement “directly on chain” in a transparent and secure manner without need for
traditional banking intermediaries.
Utilising virtual accounts exchanged over blockchain networks, with most
fully collateralised by major fiat currency reserves or short-term financial instruments, stablecoins offer both remitters and receivers highly secure, extremely fraud resistant, more directly and quickly delivered, and usually dramatically lower cost transactions.
In some countries with unstable currencies or undeveloped local networks, they can fulfil long unmet needs for a common, reliable, and repeatable medium of exchange for participants.
But back to that “package” EY’s Brody mentioned: the greatest value will come through putting both payments and the details associated with them together in one place, in one transaction flow. That is where emerging frameworks beyond those just enabling
blockchain payments come in. That’s where stablecoins offer an even greater platform for a ‘hybrid’ approach in combination with other industry-led innovations to improve payments flows
and lower costs for all parties and supply chain partners involved.
ISO 20022 is now coming online worldwide, and ISO character sets provide much more depth and scope for payments details and associated information to corporate accounting and ERP systems than original Swift messaging types invented almost 50 years ago. The
new Swift standard’s syntax and processes make payments and receivables less complex from a consistent ‘language’ and translation/execution point of view, while blockchain technology, with its encryption standards and public, transparent structure, simplifies
payment delivery processes.
Volume/share still small - more than half of banks surveyed exploring stablecoin potential
The numbers for stablecoin issuers in the banking world at this point are still relatively small compared to global payment transaction volumes, though EY’s mid-June 2025 survey does note that 15% of financial institutions already offered stablecoin services
and more than half of the rest (57%) were planning to explore new offerings within one year. Further, EY’s study shows that financial institutions expect stablecoins to comprise from 5-10% of global payment volumes, “representing $2.1 trillion to $4.2 trillion
of value” by 2030.
Domestic payments and receipts have been simplified over the past three decades, within not only single countries and currencies like the US, Canada, and UK, and many others across the globe, but notably in special regions like the European Union’s Single
Euro Payments Area (SEPA). The challenges begin when those payments and receivables need to travel across currencies, because an individual buying something in USD in England, for example, must first convert GBP into USD, or use an equivalent rate to determine
what to pay in the US currency for their purchase. That’s where foreign exchange begins, and in some even more complex cases, where payments in certain currencies are routed through multiple intermediary banks to be processed. This is only one step in what
can be a very expensive and lengthy process for both buyers and sellers with foreign currency bank accounts.
Biggest bang for the buck, growing list of use cases for stablecoins cross-border
The good news for customers, whether retail or business, is that stablecoin transactions can substantially simplify these international payment processes and decrease costs in most cases. That’s because typical stablecoin transactions, regardless of value,
are most often completed between two parties using typical exchange platforms for only pennies or less.
Stablecoins clear right on a secure, public blockchain almost instantly and know no time constraints or national borders and are therefore available for use in a growing number of countries to change expectations on how money should move across borders.
But, as momentum builds for wider use of stablecoins, questions are arising about what banks will do to replace their current typical $5-30 corporate cross-border wire transfer fees and even $0.20-$1 or more internationally routed ACH per-transaction fees
charged to all but their largest customers.
Will banks take hit for decreased transaction fees and FX revenues in future?
Beyond these per-item fee hits, one of the major sticking points slowing wider, immediate stablecoin expansion on the international front is how much banks and fintechs will be willing – or forced, by competitive or client demand - to give up of the typical
1-3% of cross-currency transaction value they presently charge as additional fees for foreign exchange payments. That’s because the only portions of cross-currency transactions that typically still fall outside of on-chain stablecoin exchange between providers
on each end are what are called ‘onramps and offramps.’
International transactions would still, in most cases, involve FX fees as noted above. Thus an onramp converts fiat currency of one customer from a local country account or card source to stablecoin upon entry to the system. Offramps move money from stablecoin
to fiat currency in some form of payment for the transaction recipient. This conversion might occur immediately at the transaction’s closure, or perhaps to instantly or periodically consolidate a number of stablecoin transactions or balances back to local
currency accounts.
Depending on how many layers and types of current fees are reduced or removed from international transactions stablecoins may grow to make even more financial sense for retail clients - and especially internationally focused corporate customers than they
do now. But the first step is proving that these new digital payment methods can consistently deliver the security, cost savings, speed of execution, and added value they promise and don’t complicate businesses’ payments and receivables activities in the process.
Time will tell if five years from today we’re speaking about truly ‘free’ financial transactions both within and across borders - what EY’s Brody calls “streaming money.” Perhaps instead we’ll be discussing the new and different avenues banks have found
to extract value from their credit and transaction services in-country and across international and currency markets. Either way, stablecoins seem to be here to stay.