By Raj Kamal
In Lagos, a small textile importer may wait four business days for a cross-border wire transfer to clear. The funds are sitting somewhere in a correspondent banking chain, invisible to everyone involved, while the supplier in Istanbul grows impatient and the importer loses her negotiating leverage. This has been the norm for quite some time before new financial instruments
This is what the stablecoin payments debate looks like when you strip away the conference panels and the whitepapers. It becomes a discussion about the actual utility of money, and increasingly, it is one playing out in markets where payment infrastructure has never been good enough to hide its own failures.
The Numbers Are Moving Fast
A McKinsey study last year estimated that business-to-business transactions now account for roughly 60 percent of global stablecoin payment volume, with B2B activity up 733 percent year-over-year in 2025. Stablecoin-linked card spending reached $4.5 billion over the same period. These numbers come from businesses, many of them in emerging markets, that found a practical reason to use a different rail.
These numbers also caught the attention of several financial institutions, curious to take a dip into the growing world. For instance, Mastercard agreed to buy BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, for up to $1.8 billion. Visa expanded its partnership with Bridge on stablecoin-linked cards. Pine Labs announced plans to launch a stablecoin-backed prepaid card across nine markets in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
As the numbers keep growing and traditional financial companies get involved, global regulators, too, have stopped watching from a distance and taken the necessary steps such as the US passing the GENIUS Act in July 2025.
Why Emerging Markets Are the Real Test
Of the roughly $290 billion in current global stablecoin supply, an estimated 66 percent is held by individuals in emerging markets; people drawn by necessity, using dollar-pegged tokens to protect savings from currency devaluation or to receive payments from abroad without going through a banking system that was never built for them.
What remains unsolved is how to connect these digital dollars to the financial rails people actually use: mobile money wallets, local bank accounts, cash pickup windows. A person in Lagos may not want to hold USDC; rather local currency in a mobile wallet, predictably and without a manual reconciliation the following morning.
The Financial Stability Board noted in its 2025 progress report that years of effort to improve cross-border payments had still not translated into tangible improvements for end users globally, and average costs remained stuck. Sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa still costs above 7 percent in many corridors, according to World Bank data, not because the transfer is technically expensive, but because the infrastructure for receiving and distributing that money locally is fragmented, compliance-heavy, and built corridor by corridor at high cost.
Better settlement rails alone cannot fix this. If the recipient still has to queue at a bureau de change, or if the payout network simply does not reach their town, the journey is only half complete.
What Actually Winning Looks Like
The companies making real progress are treating stablecoins as a practical funding rail that enhances existing payment infrastructure rather than replacing it. It involves local banking relationships, market-by-market regulatory approvals, and compliance overhead that do not feature prominently in fundraising decks. But it is the only version of this story that ends with the last mile actually working.
The gap of cross-border payment has narrowed, but closing it entirely requires the hard, local, quiet work that no amount of blockchain innovation can substitute for. That is where the real test is, and where the outcome of this experiment will ultimately be decided.
About the Author:
Raj Kamal is Founder and CEO of TransFi, a cross-border payments and stablecoin settlement infrastructure company that has processed over $1 billion in payment volume across Asia, MENA, Africa, and Latin America.