Stablecoins for B2B Payments: Faster Cross-Border Settlement

Cross-border B2B payments in 2026 still pose problems that everyone agrees on. Yet the day-to-day barely changes.

Cut-off times, intermediaries, manual reconciliation, surprise fees. It’s still all too common for a simple international transfer to turn into a days-long exercise in waiting, chasing, and explaining variance on the ledger.

As a matter of fact, the ECB has pointed out that in 2024, one-third of retail cross-border payments took more than one business day to settle, and for nearly one-quarter of global corridors, costs exceeded 3%. 

Even the G20 roadmap telegraphs how big the gap is. By end-2027, the target is for 75% of cross-border wholesale payments to be credited within one hour. That’s the ambition.

This is part of the reason stablecoins keep coming back into the conversation. Settlement in seconds, 24/7/365, anywhere in the world, and fees you won’t even notice. Let’s dive deeper.

It’s Time for Programmable Money

Stablecoins make the most sense when you think about them in the context of payments, instead of crypto. In a B2B context, they function like digital cash. Always-on settlement, global reach, and the ability to plug straight into workflows via APIs.

Where it gets interesting is that stablecoins are programmable. Once you treat dollars as programmable objects, you can start building treasury logic around them. 

• Automated sweeps. For example, automatically moving excess stablecoin balances from operational wallets into a treasury wallet at the end of each day, or rebalancing liquidity across regions without manual intervention.
• Conditional payments. Releasing funds only once predefined conditions are met, such as confirming goods have been delivered, a milestone has been completed, or compliance checks have cleared.
• Real-time reporting hooks. Integrating wallet activity directly into internal dashboards or ERP systems, so treasury teams can see balances and flows update instantly instead of waiting for bank statements.
• On-chain cash segmentation. Separating funds by function (payroll, vendor payments, reserves, tax liabilities) across distinct wallets or smart contracts, creating clean internal accounting boundaries.
• On-chain yield as a policy decision. Allocating a portion of idle stablecoin balances into tokenized T-bills or structured on-chain lending markets as part of a formal treasury strategy, rather than treating yield as opportunistic trading. 

Norman Wooding, Founder & CEO of SCRYPT, builds on that final point:

Indeed, stablecoins can act like settlement cash, while opening optionality for treasury returns that don’t depend on being long crypto. 

Exploring Volumes and Separating ‘Settlement’ From ‘Payments’

On raw transaction value, total stablecoin volume hit $35 trillion in 2025, according to media reports, citing McKinsey and Artemis Analytics.

But big on-chain volume doesn’t necessarily mean big payments. A lot of stablecoin flow is exchange rebalancing, arbitrage, and DeFi routing – activity that’s economically meaningful, but not the same as a business paying a supplier. This is why adjusted lenses matter. Visa’s on-chain stablecoin work points to $10.2T in adjusted transaction volume over the last 12 months, aiming to filter out non-payment static. 

When you home in on real-economy usage, the signal sharpens further. According to the Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up report, B2B stablecoin volumes have surged from under $100 million monthly in early 2023 to over $3 billion by mid-2025, roughly a 30-fold increase.

So, stablecoins are moving serious value. Let’s move deeper into the ‘why’. 

Why B2B Keeps Choosing Stablecoins

Talk to anyone actually moving money cross-border for a living, and you’ll hear the same complaints regarding traditional systems: cut-off times, intermediaries, fee leakage, and manual reconciliation.

Stablecoins are an obvious win. They lack intermediaries, work constantly, offer low fees and even lower rejection rates. Moreover, they open up new audiences for the merchant, positioning them as forward-thinking and adding a competitive advantage. 

It’s not like the legacy world isn’t trying to respond. Swift itself has started pushing new rules aimed at predictable retail cross-border payments, cutting out hidden fees, focusing on full value transfers, and faster settlement where domestic infrastructure allows. 

But global coordination is hard, and even the G20’s programme to make cross-border payments cheaper and faster is now widely expected to miss its 2027 targets.

Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex, speaks to the adoption curve:

While little friction remains, some still exists. Let’s expand on that. 

The Real Blockers: Compliance, Redemptions, and Career Risk

Redemption has to be reliable, liquidity has to hold under stress, controls have to be auditable, and the “what happens if…” scenarios need strong answers.

Even the IMF’s pro-innovation framing comes with a warning. Stablecoins can make payments faster and cheaper, but the upside gets undermined fast if the market fragments into non-interoperable coins and networks that can’t cleanly connect. 

Central banks are even harsher. The BIS argues stablecoins fall short on core money properties (particularly singleness and integrity) which is a polite way of saying they don’t automatically earn “no questions asked” trust.

Regulation is trying to close that gap. In the EU, MiCA bakes in specific protections for e-money tokens, including issuance and redemption rules at par value, and the EBA is already publishing guidance on redemption plans, liquidity stress testing, and recovery planning. FSB recommendations push in the same direction globally: consistent oversight, governance, and risk management standards.

Then, there’s the softer limiter: reputational comfort (something Variola framed earlier). What’s needed now might be a more constructive public narrative so skeptical users feel comfortable engaging. For CFOs, this ‘reputational comfort’ translates to a low career risk.

Final Thoughts

Stablecoins move value fast, at any hour, across borders, without the usual chain of intermediaries and delays.

The programmable money layer is what thickens the plot. Once dollars can be moved, segmented, and reported on like software, you start to get treasury use cases that aren’t really possible on banking legacy infrastructure. Automated sweeps, conditional releases, real-time visibility, and, in some cases, policy-driven yield.

At the same time, the remaining friction is real. CFOs care about redemption certainty, liquidity under stress, auditability, and whether the compliance posture is defensible. Until those boxes are consistently ticked, stablecoins will keep growing as a practical option rather than becoming the default everywhere.

But directionally, it’s hard to miss what’s happening. The volumes are rising, the B2B highways are being laid, and the mindset is spreading. The only question left is how quickly the compliance and trust layer catches up.