From Crypto Asset to Business Tool: How Stablecoins Are Transforming Cross-Border Commerce

Stablecoins are increasingly being viewed as payments infrastructure for millions of small and medium sized businesses operating across borders.

Traditional payment rails remain fragmented, slow as well as incredibly expensive, but stable coins do promise to fix that with instant settlement as well as lower friction, but only if they can seamlessly connect back into local banking systems, and they could also become a key part of agentic commerce.

Now so far this year we've seen Western Union launch a. coins so I also became the first US bank to enable stable coins within a banking app and payments giants Mastercard and Visa are enabling new ways for stable coins to fit into their payments ecosystem.

Well joining me live here at the New York Stock Exchange this morning is Rob Morgan, Head of Stablecoin & Banking Strategy at Payoneer.

Rob, great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Well we're talking about stablecoin, not just in the US but also around the globe.

It has seen quite the.

Transformation as well as evolution.

So give us a brief overview of how they have evolved over the years.

Yes, absolutely.

I think for us stablecoin has really matured, particularly in the last few years.

We've seen stablecoin move from this crypto asset designed to provide liquidity in and out of existing crypto assets into a tool that can be used to improve money movement for real world businesses.

That's what Pioneer does today.

That's our bread and butter.

That's why we're excited about the opportunity for stablecoin.

We think you create real value when you help real world businesses move real world products, services, hire employees, and, and grow those businesses.

Uh, we see an opportunity to do that with Stablecoin.

Yes, and for our American viewers out there who are watching, staplecoins may not have been something that they're familiar with until last year, but tell us about some of the problems that staplecoins are solving, especially when it comes to cross-border payments.

Yes, so I think the good news for those in the US is payments tend to work in the US, right?

We have a lot of options for real-time, nearly instant payments.

We have a lot of options for sending money.

B2B, B2C, but globally, it can be really challenging to navigate a network of correspondent banks, find liquidity in individual markets.

There's often time delays.

There's often high costs to moving money across borders, and what stablecoin does is creates sort of the universal translator that allows you to move funds from one jurisdiction to another.

I can instantly send from my wallet to yours, and we think that can really meaningfully improve the way that.

Businesses who operate globally manage their balances, get paid, and pay their suppliers.

So for the layperson out there who is watching right now and they want to know where we're seeing the most value when it comes to day to day transactions, what is happening right now in the ecosystem?

Yes, so generally what we see is that the adoption of stablecoin by real world businesses, we saw a ton of adoption in terms of retail early on where there were pain points.

Markets it is hard to get Fiat in and out of.

We're starting to see that adoption by businesses.

Generally, the Genius Act provided regulatory clarity in the US that has helped global regulated entities like Pioneer engage in this space.

So we've seen acceleration from that.

What we're seeing today is there's really one remaining barrier to that sort of stable point adoption, which is off-ramps, the ability to go take that token and make it useful.

And so in particular what we see is, you know, if I'm a business in Colombia that gets paid by my customers in stablecoin today, uh, it's really hard for me to take that stablecoin.

I can't take that, walk down the street and buy a cup of coffee.

I can't pay my employees, uh, and I can't go pay for supplies, etc.

So today there's sort of one remaining barrier we see for a lot of these global entities.

It's how do I off-ramp from stablecoin into local fiat, create that interoperability with the way I do business today.

Yeah, and another area I do want to get your take on is artificial intelligence and the role of agentic AI and stablecoin.

So what can we realistically expect, especially since you mentioned legislation?

Yes, so I think gente AI is an area where there's a ton of opportunities.

Stablecoin is a digitally native payments instrument, naturally works in the same language that we see AI models do.

I think the wallet infrastructure is a very flexible infrastructure that can allow for rules to be written at the money level, not at the program level, and I think most importantly what what that allows.

To do if you try to put those controls in after the fact or separately, it can be really hard to, you know, an agent isn't designed for an API call that waits x number of seconds, but if they can read that same database, operate on that same database as payments as money, they can move at the speed of AI and help facilitate those payments in a digitally native way.

Yes, and Rob, finally, I do want to ask you, I understand that Pioneer is pursuing a US National Trust Bank charter to issue its own stablecoins.

So tell us the why behind this.

Yes, so our strategy in this space is a little bit different, as I said, our real goal is interoperability.

How do we take that global business and make it as easy as possible for them?

To move from stablecoin into the markets they operate and so we've submitted an application to form Peyo Digital Bank, a national trust bank that would allow us to be a genius approved stablecoin issuer.

Now this stablecoin is not designed to compete with the stablecoins out there.

This won't be listed on any exchange.

Instead, it's the holding currency that exists within our ecosystem.

What this allows us to do is give our customers one balance instead of 5 different stablecoins that they may transact in.

It allows us to have easy access to the reserves that back that.

We hold more liquid reserves than other stablecoins so that we can really quickly take those reserves and push them into the markets that our customers operate in to provide that interoperability, that off-ramp that can make stablecoin actually useful for the way they do business.

Well, Rob, we will have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining us here today at the New York Stock Exchange.

I appreciate your time as well as your perspective.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you, Rob.