Digital currencies are becoming the new favorite in cross-border payments, with more and more enterprises exploring the use of stablecoins for faster and cheaper settlements, replacing traditional international payment service providers such as Swift and MoneyGram.

PayPal Holdings' global payment services have begun using its PYUSD stablecoin to settle Xoom cross-border payments, thereby breaking free from what PayPal calls the constraints of "traditional banking business hours." PayPal has also started promoting digital currencies, including PYUSD, to reduce transaction costs for Xoom and its new crypto payment tools.

Mark Nichols, who leads financial services and capital markets strategy at consulting firm Ernst & Young, said enterprises are beginning to recognize that stablecoins can enable "cheaper remittances, lower transaction costs, less friction, and more open access." In an interview on August 15, Nichols said financial executives also want to learn more about how stablecoins can help manage corporate treasury functions more efficiently. "There's definitely a play here—cheaper, faster, and we see adoption happening."

McKinsey & Co. noted in a July report on stablecoins that traditional global payment networks can take up to five business days to complete a transaction due to multiple intermediaries, different business time zones, and periodic batch processing. The report also noted that most payments require manual or semi-automated regulatory checks for anti-money laundering, sanctions screening, and identity verification.

The report said that due to increased cross-border transaction volumes, "the demand for more responsive, real-time, low-cost, secure, and inclusive global payment solutions has grown over the past decade." McKinsey said in another payments report that the total value of cross-border payments last year was approximately $179 trillion.

The appeal of stablecoins in cross-border transactions lies in three aspects: 24/7 real-time settlement, security, and lower costs, said Bam Azizi, CEO of cryptocurrency payment network Mesh Connect. In an interview on August 13, he said, "The killer app for stablecoins will be payments, whether it's cross-border payments, B2B (business-to-business) payments, or (a form of) disbursement." Azizi also mentioned that for company leaders operating in "more than five to ten countries," "you have to embrace stablecoins because if you don't, you're leaving money on the table, or you're losing money," citing the yield advantages of holding the underlying reserves of stablecoins, such as U.S. Treasuries.

Ernst & Young strategists expect corporate stablecoin business to develop over the next 18 months, Nichols said. "We will see enterprises use this time to adapt and adopt, but overall it will be relatively slow adoption," he said. He added that the exception is "early adopters" who are moving quickly in areas such as e-commerce, payroll, and merchant services. "These areas are clearly progressing faster because they have customers who need these services."

Although settlement delays are often cited as a major pain point of traditional cross-border payment systems, the high cost of sending money abroad remains a burden for many companies and consumers, despite industry efforts to improve cross-border payment efficiency through technological upgrades, such as the recent shift to the ISO 20022 standard. According to the World Bank's latest quarterly report on global remittance prices released in March, the global average cost of sending $500 in remittances in the first quarter was 4.26%, down about 0.26 percentage points over the past five years.

Earlier this year, Swift, one of the major industry players and an international payment messaging company, began trials involving digital currencies. The cooperative said in an October press release that the test leveraged Swift's "unique position at the core of the financial system to interconnect these disparate networks and connect them with existing fiat currencies, enabling its global community to use its existing infrastructure to seamlessly transact with digital assets and currencies as well as traditional forms of value." A Swift spokesperson said on Friday that there was no further comment on the trial.

"Swift does not advocate for any single settlement model and remains neutral on the forms and methods of moving value," the company said in an email statement. "The organization is focused on enabling its network to support multiple types of settlement models based on the evolving needs of its community."

Late last year, Swift said it had successfully completed a pilot program with UBS Asset Management and the Chainlink blockchain to demonstrate the transfer of tokenized funds between public and private blockchains using Swift's infrastructure.

The role of stablecoins in corporate payroll is also growing rapidly, especially for remote workers in regions where local currencies may be less favored than the U.S. dollar or the euro, said Kirill Gertman, CEO of Boston-based Conduit Technology, whose cross-border payment network uses stablecoins. In an interview last month, Gertman gave an example: "You might work for a U.S. company, but you're in Argentina. Most of the time you don't want to receive Argentine pesos; you want to receive your dollars (but) you actually can't receive dollars. So what happens is there are a bunch of companies that basically offer a service to convert your salary into stablecoins and deposit it into your wallet."

In emerging markets, remittance payments are the primary cross-border use case for stablecoins, and corporate payments are also growing, said Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO of Borderless Innovation Labs, at the Stable SF 2025 conference earlier this year. New York-based Borderless operates a cross-border stablecoin payment network that connects remittance institutions with regulated companies in local markets where customers want to send money. Despite stablecoin cross-border growth, specific geography will be very important, he said. "Even in cross-border remittances, which is one of the best use cases for stablecoins today, it actually depends on the corridor; it only really makes sense in certain corridors and is better, faster, and cheaper there."