Why business payments, not consumers, will drive the adoption of stablecoin-fiat convergence.
B2B
I ended my last piece with a promise: while everyone is focused on consumer adoption, B2B is where stablecoin-fiat convergence will accelerate the fastest. So let me make the case.
The consumer story is obviously compelling. Crypto cards, multi-asset wallets, tap-to-pay from a stablecoin balance. We are building that infrastructure every day at Monavate, and the products our clients are shipping are genuinely impressive. But mass consumer adoption requires something that takes time: behavioural change. Millions of individuals, each deciding to try something new with their money. That is a long game.
B2B adoption does not work like that. It works more like a spreadsheet.
Consumer adoption requires brand trust, user education, app store ratings, and word-of- mouth. B2B adoption requires one thing: a CFO who can see the numbers.
And the numbers are becoming very difficult to ignore. Cross-border B2B payments remain one of the most expensive, slowest, and most opaque areas of global finance. Once every cost is included, a traditional cross-border payment typically loses between 3% and 7% of its value to fees, FX markups, and intermediary deductions. The visible wire fee is the smallest part. The real cost hides in the exchange rate, where banks commonly add 1% to 3% above the mid-market rate, and in the correspondent chain, where each intermediary bank deducts its own fee from the payment in transit. For a mid-size business sending $5 million a month across borders, a 2% average FX spread alone amounts to $1.2 million a year in conversion costs, a line item most finance teams have never isolated.
The incumbents know this, and they are responding. Just this month, Swift announced that its blockchain-based shared ledger is moving to live pilots with 17 major banks across six continents, enabling 24/7 cross-border payments using tokenised bank deposits. The card schemes are building dedicated B2B rails. Real progress, genuinely. But read the fine print: even Swift’s new ledger keeps final settlement on existing payment rails. The innovation happens at the edges. The core, and its economics, stays protected.
Why is the core so well defended? Because it is extraordinarily profitable. The cross-border payments market moved around $208 trillion in 2025 and generated a revenue pool of $625 billion, according to FXC Intelligence. Roughly three quarters of that revenue comes from B2B.
Every day of settlement delay, every intermediary hop, every FX spread is somebody’s revenue line. The system is not slow by accident. It is slow by design, and the design is very profitable. Stablecoin settlement offers a demonstrably better alternative for many of these flows. Near-instant finality. Dramatically lower fees. Full transparency on where value sits at every stage. And increasingly, all of this is available within regulated, auditable frameworks that enterprise compliance teams can actually sign off on.
Here is the point that matters most: it is corporates, not consumers, who stand to capture that difference. The 3% to 7% currently lost to legacy rails is margin, and corporates are the ones running the volume where those percentages compound. For businesses operating across multiple corridors, moving even a portion of their flows to stablecoin settlement is not an innovation project. It is margin protection, measured in six and seven figures a year.
A CFO does not need to believe in the future of crypto. They just need to see the cost comparison. And once they do, the conversation moves very quickly.
Here is the structural reason B2B will move faster. Consumer adoption scales one user at a time. B2B adoption scales one decision at a time, and that single decision can move significant volume overnight. And the effect compounds. When an enterprise CFO adopts, their suppliers, partners, and counterparties feel the pull to follow, because better economics, better cash flow, and better transparency are tangible, compelling reasons to move. Adoption cascades
through supply chains in a way consumer adoption never can.
When a shipping company decides to settle crew payments through stablecoin rails because it is faster and cheaper to reach seafarers in markets where local currencies are volatile, that is not one transaction. That is thousands of payments per month, across dozens of countries, flowing through new infrastructure from the moment the decision is made.
When a marketplace platform switches its global seller payouts from wire transfers to stablecoin settlement because it eliminates the need to pre-fund nostro accounts in every operating market, that is an entire treasury operation re-architected in a single quarter. B2B does not need to convince millions of people to change their habits. It needs to convince hundreds of finance teams that the numbers work. And those finance teams are already sophisticated enough to evaluate regulated infrastructure, compliance posture, and settlement reliability. They do not need to be educated on payments. They need better options. Increasingly, stablecoin settlement on regulated rails is exactly that.
What I find most interesting about the B2B adoption wave is who is driving it. This is not being led by crypto companies expanding into B2B. It is being led by traditional businesses discovering that stablecoin rails solve problems they have been living with for years.
Ship brokers. Steel traders. Import-export businesses. Fleet operators. Insurance companies settling claims across borders. These are not organisations that care about DeFi yields or governance tokens. They care about whether they can get money to the right place, in the right currency, at the right time, for less than they are paying today. Stablecoin settlement is winning in these conversations not because it is novel, but because it is practical.
And this is where the convergence I wrote about from Amsterdam becomes most tangible. These businesses are not replacing fiat. They are using stablecoin rails alongside fiat rails, picking the optimal settlement method for each corridor and use case. Some payments route through traditional bank rails. Some through card networks. Some through stablecoin settlement. The decision is commercial, not ideological.
For Monavate, the B2B acceleration reinforces what we have been building from the start. A single regulated platform that handles the full payments lifecycle, fiat and stablecoin, card network and bank rail, across jurisdictions, under one compliance framework. The businesses driving B2B adoption do not want to stitch together separate providers for stablecoin settlement, fiat conversion, card issuing, and compliance. They want one platform that translates between all of them.
The Babelfish, as I have called it before.
Consumer adoption will come. It is already coming, and we are proud of the programmes powering it. But B2B is where the volume will move first, where the economics are clearest, and where regulated infrastructure proves its value most immediately.
The signal from Amsterdam was convergence. The signal from the boardrooms is adoption. And B2B will get there first.
Craig Ramsay is Chief Commercial Officer at Monavate. This is Part 2 of his post-Money20/20 series.
Connect on LinkedIn or reach out at info@monavate.com to discuss how Monavate can power your B2B
payments infrastructure.
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