A panel discussion on the stablecoin landscape with Ben Brown (Partner, Flagship Advisory Partners), Nabil Manji (SVP, Head of Fintech Growth & Financial Partnerships, WorldPay), Ali Heiring (Director of Corporate Strategy, MoneyGram), and Ben Reynolds (SVP, Head of Big Business Banking, SoFi).
Together, we explored how stablecoins are being applied across consumer and B2B payments, what it takes to integrate them into existing payment stacks, and how incumbents and innovators are navigating regulatory, operational, and risk considerations. We'll also dig into where stablecoins deliver real advantages over traditional rails, as well as where hype still exceeds reality.
The presentation is available for download by clicking the PDF button in the right hand side panel (desktop view) or below the post (mobile view).
Please don't hesitate to contact Ben Brown at Ben@Flagshipap.com with your comments or questions.
Joseph Kraut | 00:00
Thank you all so much for joining us for this webinar and discussion panel on stablecoins and their role in the global payments ecosystem. This webinar will be recorded and shared by Flagship. We will share the link to view the recording with each of you after this webinar via email. During the last five to 10 minutes of this webinar, we will have a Q&A portion. Feel free to drop questions in the chat during the webinar, and we will select questions for the panelists to answer towards the end if time allows. I want to thank our panelists for joining us today. Thank you so much. For today's webinar, our panelists include Nabeel Manji, SVP of Enterprise Growth and Partnerships at WorldPay, Ali Herring, Director of Corporate Strategy at MoneyGram. Ben Reynolds, head of big business banking at SoFi, and your host and first speaker, Ben Brown, a partner at Flagship Advisory Partners. Ben will open with a brief presentation of Flagship's perspective on the stablecoin payments landscape. Without further ado, I will pass it off to Ben.
Ben Brown | 01:04
Thanks, Joseph. Really appreciate that and appreciate the time that our panelists are giving us today, as well as all of you out in the audience joining us early morning for those in California, middle of the workday for those of you in the East Coast or in Europe.
So we're really excited about today's discussion. Stablecoins are a super interesting topic that are moving from many years of technology development and sort of conceptual formation to really being a new technology that's in many ways ready for prime time to rewire the global payments and banking ecosystem. And so we're excited to talk about that with several companies that are actually putting this technology into use. And we're going to hear about how they've thought about the application of their business how they've gone through the process of building new solutions and the kind of experiences that they've had as they've done that. Before we get into a joint discussion, we wanted to just take a few minutes to level set on the topic of stablecoins. It's an emerging topic for many in the industry. A lot of people have heard the term but might not know exactly what stablecoins are. And so we wanted to start by just describing what is this technology relative to some other types of digital assets that you may have heard of. And how is it growing? And so with that, Joseph, let's go to page three there and Start with what do people mean when they say stablecoins?
So when people use this term, they often mean very different things. So we just wanted to lay out a few of the similar technologies that people might see. First is cryptocurrencies, something that people have heard about for a decade plus. Bitcoin is the, most widely known version of this. And Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are decentralized digital assets that have a lot of volatility to them.
So they're not really payments grade, we've come to learn. Stablecoins are Still digital assets like cryptocurrencies, but they're often fiat pegged or value stabilized in some other way.
So they're more appropriate for those payments use case. And that's the focus of what we're going to talk about today. There's other versions of technology like stablecoins, including tokenized deposits where banks are issuing representations of bank money on distributed ledgers that are viewed legally as deposits and central bank digital currencies, which are state issued versions of similar assets that hold the legal value of money. But those initiatives are moving a little bit slower than stable coins are, whereas stable coins are really entering production grade use cases around the world.
So stablecoins are really interesting right now because they sit right at the intersection in many ways of a few different things of speed, programmability and global reach without necessarily waiting for some of the politics around central bank digital currencies to come together. And so we wanted to think a little bit next about what do stablecoins actually do better than traditional payments rails? And so if we move on to the next page, Part of the reason that companies and innovators are so interested in stablecoins is their value.
So we view four key benefits around stablecoins. First is that they're accessible. They're usable 24/7. Across borders, around the world, with no dependency on local bank business hours or operating restrictions.
So their accessibility is key. The speed at which stablecoins can affect payment transactions is really differentiating. Stablecoin transactions can happen in seconds or minutes rather than days or sometimes even weeks for cross-border payments that get caught up in multiple steps of the correspondent banking system. Stablecoin transactions can be cheap. They're not always cheaper. We'll talk about that today, but they have the promise of being cheaper than traditional interbank payments. Due to having fewer intermediaries in the middle, more of true sort of peer to peer payments when you're talking about on-chain transactions, rather than correspondent banking payments that can take five banks to make money move from one country and one currency to another country and another currency. One of the really interesting things about stablecoins is that they're programmable.
So they can affect smart contracts, they can affect through smart contracts, they can affect logic on transactions and on the ownership of those funds, which enables Completely new concepts around how we can manage money and the financial products that we can build on top of it. So... Given those benefits, we've seen a huge rise in the volume and the usage of stablecoins over the past few years. Which really show this is moving out of science fiction and moving into real world practical use cases within payments and banking.
So the supply of stable coins, the value of stable coins in existence has really grown dramatically over the past few years, doubled in the last 18 months or so. Even as the market's gone up and down, you know, we've still seen a lot of growth. Both as stable coins are used for things within the cryptocurrency and digital asset ecosystem, but as they're starting to be used outside of that ecosystem for real world business uses. And that volume has grown. The usage of stable coins has grown in parallel.
So we see that in 2025, there was probably a, $250 billion of real world payments that were transacted using stable coins. The run rate at the end of 2025 was more like $400 billion. And that's, an impressive number. It's a big growth, maybe 100% year-over-year growth. And the forecasts are that the volume of stablecoins in existence and their usage is going to continue to grow at that breakneck pace over the next few years, reach it going from $300 billion or so of stablecoins in existence to $2 trillion by 2028, just a few years into the future.
So continuing to compound year-over-year doubling in volume, So it's a really exciting time for these where we're seeing some of the first use cases come into production. But it's quite early stage for this technology because in the next few years, you'll see volumes continue to grow. And to put the volumes here in context, right, that $300 billion of global payments, that's a very small piece of the $2 quadrillion of fiat money payments that happen around the world. If you consider all the wholesale payments that happen between financial institutions, the business-to-business payments, the consumer payments that all of us make every day, there's a huge ocean of electronic payments that happen out there. And stablecoins are just starting to eke out a tiny bit of them, but in really interesting ways that we think are very relevant for companies looking at how to do things in a more efficient and more controllable way. So going on to the next page, as we said, about $250 billion, $300 billion of payments in 2025. And the use cases that stable coins are being used for run across the spectrum. But B2B payments where you're having especially cross-border B2B from a retailer in the US to a supplier overseas, or really between any country pair, that's one of the most common use cases people talk about. We think that's about half of the overall volume of stablecoin payments.
And then you see things like person to person transfers, whether those are domestic or remittances, payments to businesses do occur. They're less common in our research than some people talk about, but they absolutely do occur. And disbursements from businesses to customers where you might be doing an insurance payout or a rewards payout or things like that.
So really stable coins are useful across a wide range of use cases. And we'll talk today about the merits and alignment with some of these and some of the challenges that you might see in different use cases. When we look at survey data on the future interest in continuing to use stablecoins, there's some really interesting signs.
So there's actually a surprisingly large percentage of both consumers and businesses that use stablecoins today. You may not have used them out in the audience, though you probably have if you're listening to this podcast. But there's actually double digit percentages of people that say that they've used these.
So, 13% of corporates and banks say they've used stablecoins. And something like, 58% say they're considering using them, which is a really dramatic exploration of this new technology. But something that we're seeing across areas as technology innovation continues to accelerate across areas like AI, new distributed ledger technology, all kinds of different innovations that are going on these days. And on the consumer side, we see that about a fifth of people say that they've used it. And worldwide, one really interesting stat is that about a fifth as well of people who hold U.S. Dollars that don't live in the United States are hold stable coins. And that's one of the really key use cases for them because they're value stabilized. They can be a way to hold wealth in US dollars, in euros, in those currencies if you don't live in those places and the currency in your home market might be more volatile than you're comfortable with. And so Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world using these things, and we're seeing That's translating into a lot of momentum and activity within the industry. As it seemed like in 2025, there was an announcement every single week of one company or another doing things related to stable coins, including Visa and MasterCard supporting stable coin settlement natively within their card rails. Things like new regulation that came out. Even events recently, which might not even be on the page here because they happened so recently, two weeks ago, Fidelity announced that it will launch its own stablecoin, the Fidelity Digital Dollar, that they'll use for security settlement and other use cases like on-chain retail payments or future financial products that they'll build using that technology.
So very real initiatives happening in the industry. And so Fidelity If you're a business out there looking at this, you may ask yourself, sounds like there's a lot of interest in it.
Sounds like there's a lot of activity. So what does getting started actually require? And when we work with our clients on the topic, we see a few questions. Often it's, What can I use stable coins for? If we go to the next page, Joseph. But we really think the right place to start is, you know, what is the customer problem that we're trying to solve?
And then bounding that by, you know, how bold are we ready to be at this point? What barriers might exist within our own organization and within the country that we sit?
And then making sure that you have a way to measure the success of those initiatives. So as you define your stablecoin strategy, all of those things are really important to consider. But starting with finding a real customer need to apply the technology to is key.
And then we see companies working through a whole range of issues across their sort of cross-functional back office as they look to bring these into production. And that's maybe where it'd be really interesting to shift into discussion with our panelists who've been through these experiences. They've brought some of these products to life within their organizations, which are some of the leading organizations out there in the world. And, Let's hear from the people who are actually out there building and operating stablecoin-based solutions.
So I think we can probably bring the presentation down and let the audience see our panelists here. And, Yeah. We'll work on the view mode there. It looks like Joseph, we've got your screen kind of penned, but we can go ahead and let's jump into conversation. I think that'd be really interesting.
So probably the first place to start is All of you have launched real stablecoin products in the last year. It'd be really interesting to talk about those use cases and why you think right now is the time to be doing that. And so, you know, Ali, I thought it'd be really interesting to start with you. MoneyGram launched a new app enabling cross-border remittances between the US and Colombia. Using stablecoin technology as the foundation for that new system. With Stablecoin kind of in the middle of fiat on both ends.
So it'd be great if you could walk us through that decision, that experience. How did you pick that corridor? How'd you figure out what the strategic and financial value of using Stablecoins was? And just what are the experiences you've had since it's gone live?
Ali Heiring | 15:54
I'll be too. Thanks, Ben. As you mentioned, for those that don't know MoneyGram, you know, we're, we have about an 80 year history. We focus primarily on the remittance use case for C2C cross border payments. And these are pretty essential. We're helping millions of people send money across borders, helping their families with essential expenses like food, housing, and education. But there's a lot of friction still in cross-border payments today.
So these can be slow, expensive. The process can be confusing and require a lot of back and forth between senders and receivers. And there's depending on where your receivers are, there's the risk of holding money in a more volatile local currency compared to potentially a more stable currency abroad. And We saw stablecoins as a tool to build better money transfer primarily.
So we weren't looking for a way to use stable coin just for the sake of it, but really identifying a customer problem that we were facing and realizing stable coin was a really interesting tool to help us solve it. So... The reason we were interested in Stablecoin is they offer instant 24/7 money transfer. Whereas today, a lot of times our receivers are at the whims of local bank hours and holiday weekends, and there can be frictions and delays caused by that. They're able to hold their value in a more stable USC pegged form.
So this gives a receiver of a remittance the ability to hold the entire original value of that remittance amount and then convert to local fiat how and when they want. So we're very interested in us like creating a better money transfer experience. That didn't actually require our customer to be familiar with crypto or to be seeking out stablecoin intentionally, but really building something that met more of their needs.
So that's why we launched our app in Colombia. It basically allows a recipient of a remittance to hold their funds in a USD peg stable coin balance, giving them protection from local currency volatility.
And then from there, they have flexible ways to use their money. They can control how they hold and manage their funds, and then they can cash out whatever amount that they received when they want to at any of our retail locations. And throughout this, we've been able to build a direct relationship with our receivers.
So. Formerly, you know, MoneyGram was very focused on senders as our customer. This is really the first time we've launched a receiver focused technology, which gives us a platform to expand these features and deepen our use cases with our receiver.
So as we're thinking about This use case, I mean, we didn't. As I said, we were really viewing Stablecoin as the tool to help us meet that customer need. And we viewed stablecoin as very complementary to our traditional rails that we use for money transfer.
So, yeah. Given that you know, we're operating in the space of cross border, like the on and off ramp becomes a really essential part of that journey. And so, Sablecoin is a way for us to offer stored value. To our customers. And access to USD-pegged currency.
Ben Brown | 19:10
It's so accessible to end users without them having to really worry about what stable coins are or the infrastructure behind the scenes is a big advancement. Because actually, it's amazing to think it's been more than 10 years since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. But when that happened, the consulting firm that I was at the time decided to close our business in those two places. And we wanted to offer...Sort of rescue payments or travel subsidies to people who were working for us in those regions to move to other places and continue working for the company. And we actually worked with the treasury group of this multinational consulting firm and thought about could we use stablecoins for this purpose back in 2014, 2015 and talk to some of the largest stablecoin issuers today? And the response was, absolutely you can. They just have to sign up for this wallet and that wallet and know this address and everything.
So my team here at Flagship thinks it's kind of funny when I ask, is it babushka friendly? But that's really a key thing is like, you know, would your grandmother understand how to use this without having to be a fintech nerd? And so I think it's really interesting what you guys have done there by taking a trusted financial services brand and putting a really familiar customer interface over, you know, some really interesting next generation technology. How did you guys pick the US Columbia Corridor as the right place to start?
Ali Heiring | 20:43
Yeah, Colombia was a very intentional choice for us. So it's one of the largest remittance destinations in Latin America. It has significant inbound flows from the U.S. And it's a market where some of the challenges I was discussing are especially relevant. The Colombian peso has seen meaningful volatility in recent years. There's a lot of domestic interest in holding funds in a USD-pegged form. So it ended up being a corridor where the technology could solve a real everyday problem and not just be a tech experiment for us.
Ben Brown | 21:14
That's interesting. And when you thought about using stable coins for that, I mean, was it? We want to find a corridor to experiment with this technology or was it You know, we're actually seeing a big cost difference between using traditional correspondent banking rails versus this new technology?
Ali Heiring | 21:37
Yeah, so for us, because right now the way we've designed this product is it actually sits in the middle of our existing product. Transfer flow.
So you have the sender sending a payment to a recipient in Columbia and that recipient has to use that those funds, usually in the near term. So this isn't they're able to hold funds as long as they'd like, but typically shorter duration than you would think in a traditional savings product and Yeah, I mean, I think... It was... From a cost perspective, interesting. We still have the same on and off ramps largely on both ends of that transaction.
So for us, it was really about delivering a better and differentiated customer value. And building a foundation on which we could build new revenue streams. And we think that, you know, the cost advantage really comes when you're able to build end to end stable coin. So that's where looking at it both from the consumer facing end, but in our back office, like how we settle with our partners locally. As that shifts to stable coin, you start to see more of that cost advantage emerge.
Ben Brown | 22:45
Yeah, that's interesting. It's kind of like the remittance space historically is a lot of the cost is in the agents at the end of the ecosystem, right? The compliance work and then the agent network are where a lot of the costs reside. But thanks for sharing the story about building that app. I mean, what kind of usage have you seen since it's come out? Are people... You using it in ways that it may be different patterns from what you'd seen with the traditional solution?
Ali Heiring | 23:12
Yeah, so as I mentioned, this is one of the first products we've launched specifically focused at our receivers. And we've been really impressed with the level of engagement we've been seeing. So a lot of interest from our receivers in the stablecoin offerings and just engaging directly with MoneyGram. But what's been most surprising has actually been the organic interest in the market of people participating. That maybe aren't already a MoneyGram receiver looking for ways to leverage this product.
So gives us a lot of excitement about our product market fit.
Ben Brown | 23:46
Awesome. Like I said, thanks for sharing that story. I'd love to. Maybe Nabil, I'll call on you because you guys are building something really interesting. You're piloting a solution at WorldPay right now that will enable stablecoin payouts for clients in the US and Europe, businesses that want to pay out to consumers or other businesses. Instantly without having to really hold stable coins themselves. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that. I mean, what use cases are you guys expecting to see when that goes live?
Nabil Manji | 24:21
Sure, yeah. So we are launching, as you said, a what we call stablecoin payouts product. And for those of you that are on the call and know WorldPay, you'll know that we're primarily a payment acceptance company. But we have a suite of payout products that allow our clients to disperse funds to a number of beneficiaries around the world in different currencies and payment rails. And so I would say our customers on this largely fall into the category of what I would call big B to little B or big B to C type payments.
So slightly different from MoneyGram in the sense that we're not playing in the C to C or P2P market. And so some of the examples of the clients that use our platform for this and some of the interest we're seeing fall into the categories of things like marketplaces or creator platforms wanting to pay out their sellers or creators in stablecoins.
So when those providers or participants on their platform want to withdraw their earnings, rather than just having local currencies as an option, they can choose to receive in stablecoins. We're seeing some interest for that. Just more generally, I would say in the gig economy space and what people call the... I think it's employer of record type companies where they're paying out contractors around the world or other types of service providers having interest in having stablecoins as an option. One actually that has come to light that I did not expect at all when we first started marketing this and building it was... Airlines wanting to pay out passengers for delayed or disrupted flights or lost or damaged baggage. It was totally surprising to me, but actually it kind of makes sense. If you're an international airline, you've got passengers from almost every country in the world that have bank accounts in almost every currency in the world. Having a network to pay out funds to passengers all around the world and those local currencies and maintaining that network would be quite expensive. And If people are happy to receive stable coins, obviously, it can be cheaper and quicker to disperse in that way.
And then finally, I would say is social gaming, sports betting, iGaming, video gaming. Any sort of business where users are very quickly depositing and withdrawing funds, often multiple times per day or multiple times per week, depending on what they want to use that money for. So just when you've got that frequency of money movement, obviously you want to reduce the cost of taking your money in and out. And what we've actually seen with some of those platforms is the quicker the customers can get the money out, actually, the more quickly they want to put it back in.
So you might ask yourself, why don't they just leave it on the platform? But sometimes, hey, they want to take it out for a day, maybe go buy something, spend it, whatever, and then put whatever's left back in the next day. And so the more quickly they can turn the funds actually is synergistic from a revenue perspective for some of the clients in that space.
And then in terms of what people are excited about, I think the you know, payouts as we've just spoken about is definitely one. But the thing I'm hearing more and more about actually, I would say is in the treasury management space and using stable coins for kind of internal money movement or, you know, what you, I think refer to earlier to some degree as wholesale payments. So if you're any sort of multinational company, particularly in the payment space where you've got to move a lot of money around a lot of different legal entities and a lot of geographies and a lot of different currencies, you know, Even if you've got the best rates with your banks from a price per transaction and FX spread perspective, it's still expensive. No matter how well architected your system today is, You can never match perfectly bank holidays, public holidays, weekends, banking hours, and things like that across different jurisdictions. And so having a 24-7, 365, always available, intra-company liquidity movement rail to bridge that and reduce your...You know, duration exposure to things like FX currencies is actually something we're starting to see a lot of interest in. And then on a related topic, you know, as we've moved out of a zero interest rate environment since COVID, treasurers around the world have been very focused on maximizing the return and the yield on corporate cash and other cash. And as the rate environment trends downwards, I think any opportunity to buffer that with higher yielding instruments, potentially like a stable coin, is definitely interesting from a value maximization on cash holding perspective.
Ben Brown | 28:55
It's fascinating the range of use cases. What we see in sort of legacy payments world, the digital payments world is a verticalization of payment solutions and just hearing the wide range of the things that you described being served by, you know, what are really early stage solutions, right? We'll look back in, you know, 10 years and, you know, this will be the sort of beginning of, you know, when stable coins became widely used. But you're still getting take up of all of these interesting niche solutions. And as the technology continues to evolve and the things built on stable coins continue to evolve into the vertical SaaS solution for airline payments, you'll probably see stable coins becoming even more deeply penetrated in some of those things. But that's definitely a fascinating use case I would not have imagined. Thought about and it's one where the systems behind some of these airlines are really archaic. And that just goes to show that maybe you can use really modern technology with really old systems that a lot of companies have. By having the right partners or technology in the middle. And we've done projects in the past taking a look for major FIs at what is the impact on our systems and our processes and our policies of digital assets. And, you know, it sounds like increasingly there are ways to engage in like the digital asset economy without, you know, having to reinvent, you know, the entire back office stack.
So, you know, Ben, you're at SoFi now. You were at Silvergate in the past, which is a bank right at the heart of the digital asset economy. So as you think of, so you've been an insider in this space for a long time. I mean, as you think about the killer use cases for FIs.
I mean, why are you guys at SoFi building in this space? 'cause it seems like there's a lot of excitement among the FIs we talked to about the technology, but oftentimes maybe more often than not, FIs haven't really picked out like the practical use cases that they want to apply it to. But I think you've got some advanced thoughts there.
Ben Reynolds | 31:13
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Ben. So I think there was kind of two questions there. One is kind of why do FIs care about stable coins in general? I think, you know, when you think about what banks do well. A lot of it is around deposits and payments. And so, you know, as we've been talking about, you know, store of value use cases and remittance use cases, those kind of fall squarely, in the business that the banks are in. And so I think that's part of the reason why just FIs in general are interested in this space because those are businesses that we, you know, historically have done well. In terms of SoFi, the calculus, was a little bit, complicated in a sense.
So just because of who SoFi is. So SoFi at its core is an OCC regulated insured depository institution with about 35 billion of customer deposits. We have about 14 million retail members who use our services and we're focused on helping them get their money right, whether that's through savings or through investing or through crypto or through a loan. And so similar to the use case that Ali was describing, oftentimes our members want to send money overseas and they want to do that within a unified experience, right? And within the SoFi app. So there's definitely one aspect of our strategy that's focused on that. The other is that SoFi is a card issuer, right? And a card processor. And so there we're working with, with hundreds of institutions to help them issue their cards. And one of the things that we've kind of come out and seen as a use case is that, you know, people want to you know, oftentimes in emerging markets, they'll have a wallet, could be a non-custodial wallet, and they'll want the ability to pay with their credit card, right? Either they want a MasterCard or a Visa on top of that wallet that they can then spend their stable card holdings. And so that's sort of the second piece of that.
And then the third piece is we think that it's still really early days for businesses that wanna go between, that are still working on their strategy as you highlighted Ben and are gonna do something in the space, but aren't sure what to do and aren't sure like, for a long time, I think we're gonna see this need to go between fiat currencies and digital currencies. And so I think a bank with its regulators is in a good place to be able to help other businesses kind of navigate this, you know, this transition that we're going to see between fiat and digital currency. So those were sort of the three legs of the strategy for us at SoFi. And then that just sort of led us to, okay, well, if we're going to do all of those things, we might as well issue our own stablecoin, SoFi USD. And so we did that. In December. It's on the Ethereum network today. It's still early days for us, but we think every stable coin that's out there requires network effects in order to be successful. And so you really, I think, as you think about stable coins and you think about issuing it, you have to start to ask the questions of, do we think that we can get sort of both sides of the network, right? And like in the simplest terms, you can think of that as kind of the consumer use case or the consumer usage, as well as businesses using it for, you know, either payments or settlement or whatever that might look like. And so in that regard, I think that SoFi is uniquely positioned to do that.
Ben Brown | 35:05
Yeah, we were workshopping with a client recently on what's the right use case for stablecoins and the conversation quickly. I won't say devolved, but it quickly focused on what are the mechanics of issuing a stablecoin and realized that's not necessarily a must do. It's not about always issuing your own stablecoin. That can be an option. And it's interesting how you point out you've got to find a use case or have some confidence you're going to achieve those network effects to make that worthwhile. But you can use stable coins that already exist like USDC or Tether or other things that are out there.
Yeah, so it's interesting that think about the decision tree of choices that companies have to make as they look to implement this technology, which can be implemented in so many different ways. Including in like, in collaboration with or as part of existing financial systems. Which makes it so much more like real to me. Maybe I'm a traditionalist or something. But when I went to, you know, Bitcoin conferences in 2012, 13, 14, the whole ethos was all the banks are going to disappear and this is going to be the new financial system. And that seemed a little far-fetched to me. But now we're at a point where it's more like, hey, here's this new technology and we can actually, you know, the companies that exist and the banks that exist around the world can make use of it. To do better things for customers, which seems really practical and realistic.
So it's exciting to see some new use cases come to life.
Ben Reynolds | 36:47
Yeah, Ben, I think that's a really good point. You know, there's just under 5,000 banks in the United States and banks work together all the time and banks are customers of other banks. And I think I see this playing out the same way. You know, obviously we launched a stable coin, but we're not SoFi USD agnostic. Like we think that there will be a number of different stable coins that are out there. And, you know, having the capability to go in and out of the different stable coins is meaningful. You know, I don't think that some people think it's sort of like a winner take all. I don't think that that's the case. And so within our operation, we're certainly prepared to work with all of the regulated stable coins that are out there.
Ben Brown | 37:35
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's... It seems like - 0.01% of global payments. Though Nabil, I read one of your LinkedIn posts recently and I think the thing that stuck out to me was you said, this will be the year stable coins go mainstream. So, you know, what does that mean to you? And like, why do you think like it's 2026 that'll be the year and not, you know, 2028, 2030, you know, sometime in the future?
Nabil Manji | 38:15
I hope it comes true because if it doesn't, then everyone next year is going to be like, Nabil, you were so wrong. But anyways, I will explain my thinking.
Nabil Manji | 38:26
I'm not a lawyer, so I always forget my caveats. So the reason I said that and the reason I believe it is if you think about general cross-border payment flows in most segments, whether it's P2P, B2B, etc., and foreign exchange the big player in the room is the US with the US dollar, right? And if you look at stablecoins, something like 99% plus of stablecoin value in circulation is USD denominated. Whether or not stable coins quote-unquote become mainstream is largely dependent on what happens with them as it relates to the US dollars and as it relates to flows coming in and out of the US or to and from US people and companies. And I think if you look at 2024, we were in a different regulatory environment as it relates to stablecoin and digital assets that made it quite difficult for many companies to engage seriously on the topic. We then entered 2025 and of course the regulatory environment around the topic changed pretty quickly. That manifested itself through the Genius Act and now another piece of legislation called the Clarity Act, which will hopefully make its way through the Congress at some point soon. And so we kind of went to the in very quick in a very quick time period, probably more quick than any other change in regulatory environment on a specific topic that I've witnessed in my career. We went from this place where in 2024, It was a topic that many people didn't want to touch. To a topic that had regulatory clarity. And people were starting to investigate and explore. To now we start 2026, there's a clear regulatory framework in place. A lot of companies have gone through a decent portion of that "explore and learn" phase. And many companies are hiring teams and professionals and setting aside budgets to actually go invest in things here. And so for me, this is the first kind of full year where you've got the foundational building pieces of regulation, investment budgets at a number of large companies. And talent at those companies or soon to be at those companies that can go execute and make use of those investment budgets. And so that's why I think this is the year where we're going to see quite a bit of activity.
Ben Brown | 40:47
Yeah, and you see investment of all kinds, right? I mean, you see people building up teams in-house, but you see M&A events happening, you know, billion-dollar transactions where companies are, you know, buying capabilities in the ecosystem.
Yeah. So I think that's a super interesting trend as well. Between you guys over at WorldPay and I think you chose to partner mainly to enable the stablecoin payout initiative. And Ben and his team over at SoFi, I think you guys are building a lot of what you had. I mean, Ali too, you guys chose a lot of partners to enable the Columbia app. I mean, maybe I'd love to just hear the pros and cons that you all think on that choice to partner versus build. And is that a choice you make? At an atomic level, like are there certain capabilities that are important to own certain things that are easier to hand off to partners, but you know, maybe Nabil, you can kind of start the conversation there and I'd love to sort of hear your different experiences.
Nabil Manji | 41:51
Sure, yeah. So I think whenever we're trying to launch a new product or a new payment method or whatever it might be, there's always the buy versus build versus partner question, right? And I think from a buy perspective... This didn't quite make sense for us when we embarked on this journey on the payout solution last year. I think two main reasons for that. One is, at the time, we were owned by a private equity firm. And this space, I think, was more from an investment standpoint in that venture growth class. And if you think about the risk reward profile and return on capital for an acquisition in this segment a year and a half ago, it was more aligned with that VC or growth return profile, not quite aligned with you know, the risk reward from an M&A perspective that we would look to do.
So I think from a financial profile fit, it just didn't make sense. And then the second is, you know, from a technology standpoint, a regulatory standpoint, even 18 months ago, it was still quite dynamic and changing. And so there was a lot of moving pieces and particularly on the regulatory front. And so we thought, you know, given the stage of the market, the risk reward, the moving pieces, being able to partner with, you know, what we at the time, selected as a leading player made a bit more sense. And then with any product or service where we partner, of course, we evaluate that over time. If things scale in a couple of years, we may look at and say, okay, do we need additional partners for resiliency purposes or coverage purposes or asset availability purchases or whatever? Or has this product become large enough that we do want to insource or build certain bits and pieces of it or maybe the entire thing? So it's not a decision that's made and then is static for 10 years. It's something that's evaluated based on the trajectory of the product and the business. But I think for now and for the foreseeable future, partnering makes sense. We're very happy with the partners that we've chosen in this endeavor. And we'll keep an eye on the space. And if and when we need to change something, we'll evaluate that.
Ben Brown | 43:51
I mean, Ali, you guys chose to partner at MoneyGram and you're private equity owned right now. Do you think that Factored into that, was it ever a discussion of let's go buy capabilities in the space or let's do this as a pilot, let's learn how it goes, and then let's see if deeper investment is warranted?
Ali Heiring | 44:11
Yeah, I mean, we've actually been building in crypto and stablecoin for the last five years, and a big part of that has been kind of curating partners that are very purpose-built to help us, you know, deepen our capability. In that space.
So for us, you know, as we were looking for something that would be really kind of consumer facing, we wanted to make sure from a stable coin perspective, we had something that was trusted, very regulated that if consumers were curious, they could really understand more. And so partnering with Circle and USDC made a lot of sense there. And then Stellar has built a blockchain network that's really designed for this use case at its core. And so that has been a great partnership helping us bring this to market and you know, as we were thinking about our wallet and user experience layer, we partnered with CrossMint because they have sort of a very innovative leading technology in the space and our focus is really owning and differentiating on that on and off ramp and then the localization. So the idea, can we build with partners technology that's global by design but then really focus on knowing our customer and their use case and the localization to make it really successful.
Ben Brown | 45:24
Makes sense. And Ben, how's it going at SoFi? Are you guys finding partners for certain capabilities or is it mostly an effort of, you know, let's build this in-house?
I mean, what capabilities are you seeing as like must own to be part of this, the future ecosystem?
Ben Reynolds | 45:39
Yeah. Yeah. It's, The short answer is that it's a mix. There's certain technology that we're building and there's certain technology that we're buying and certain technology that we're partnering with folks with. I think it's sort of a kind of a classical, a classic, you know, business question in terms of what are you trying to optimize? You know, are you trying to optimize like speed to market? Are you trying to optimize for, you know, being able to control the product roadmap down the future? Are you trying to, you know, what is it that you're trying to achieve. And then, you know, finding the right strategy here in order to accomplish that. So like, as an example, or maybe a parallel, if you were launching a bank, or if you're launching a neobank, you sort of have the same question of like, okay, well, do we want to build our banking core system from scratch? Or do we want to go out and use a FISERV or an FIS or someone like that so that we can kind of, you know, get to market quickly? There's pros and cons of both. But banks do this all the time, right?
I mean, banks have, you know, third party risk management processes that they go through in order to evaluate, you know, things like custodians and other vendors that are in the space. And so I think it's the same type of issue. I think that what's most important for, you know, folks that are trying to figure out like, what do we do? How do we get started is to just start. You know, there's a whole sort of organizational education process that needs to happen here from the people that are doing the work to the executives, to the board and the regulators. And so, you know, my advice to folks that are trying to, you know, that aren't sure really where to start is just do something so that you can kind of start that educational process because, you know, I don't think that you know, I think that the share of payments and the share of store value that are going to be in stable coins are only going up. And so you have to kind of start somewhere and that can be really intimidating. And so just, you know, even if you were to just Do some treasury movements of stablecoin between entities that you owned yourself. At least there you're building some institutional muscle and knowledge that you can then later figure out like, okay, well, what are the more interesting use cases that are out there? And kind of de-risk the whole thing. The whole project and the whole initiative by just starting somewhere.
Ben Brown | 48:06
There's so many facets to how this is and can be complicated. As you use the core banking example, I almost wonder how much do companies really need to know about the tech stack underneath stablecoins? Like when you're picking a core banking platform, I mean, You don't really need to know what programming language it's built in. You need to know what it can do and what the perimeter, the interfaces that you have to integrate with, how those work. But is it the same thing in stable coins? I mean, does everybody need to be complete technology expert or is it okay to know nothing about how the blockchain is underpinning this work or is it somewhere in the middle?
Ben Reynolds | 48:50
Maybe I'll start. So, I think it's probably somewhere in the middle there because There are It would be a little scary from my perspective to just kind of outsource that to someone and just say like, okay, you know, do you know, to a particular vendor or whatnot, that's obviously selling their own solution because there are real trade-offs, right?
Like, and I'll use a really simple example. You know, if let's say you were going to work with a particular blockchain, like, are you going to work with Ethereum or Solana or some other change? Like the gas fees and the cost or the cost to send value over chains is different, right? And so kind of like understanding like what those economics look like is really important. One of the use cases that stable coins enable is the ability to make micropayments or smaller payments that just wouldn't make sense in a traditional context, right? So like, let's say you wanted to support some cause in a foreign country and you only had three bucks to support the cause, but you get enough people contributing three bucks each you know, it adds up. Well, there's, you know, the existing financial system isn't really in a good place to do that because of all of the intermediaries and the charges that happen along the way. But depending on, you know, there's blockchains out there where you could, you know, you could send three bucks and the cost to send that would be, you know, a penny. And I think that those costs will just continue to come down. So that's just one example. So I think you don't need to be an expert on the, on, you know, like how to build a layer one blockchain. But you need to sort of understand, I think, like, what are the trade-offs between the different chains?
And then you can go through like the, you know, the entire stack in the same way.
Ben Brown | 50:37
Because I guess it does have an implication on what use cases you can support. And that micropayments use case is a really interesting one. A lot of the work we are doing is related to agentic commerce. And part of agentic commerce is that there's this rise of good bots, right? And most web volumes, Cloudflare is reporting most of the growth in web traffic is actually from bots. And so you start to see these initiatives to like charge tolls almost for the LLM bots as they go crawl the web. It's a penny to load walmart.com or something. And that's a pretty hard toll to extract with traditional payment methods. Or even if you think about the future of agentic commerce, we talk about with some clients is like a bunch of specialized agents collaborating. And if you have like one $5 affiliate marketing commission for a purchase, and then it has to be distributed down to a dozen different agents that did one part of that journey, that's where... Those micropayments could be a growing use case, but... - I mean, for Ali and Nabil, How about you guys? Did you feel like there was a certain level of technical competency that was required within your organizations to even start thinking about doing something with stable coins? Or was it okay to... Focus on the use case and the right partner.
Nabil Manji | 52:06
Be there. Start on that. I think yes and no. I think, of course, you need a couple people that can talk the talk, so to speak, from a technical perspective, particularly the people working on the product and engineering side and potentially operations. I do think, though, and people who have heard me speak before will hear me say this multiple times is, I think one of the challenges or disservices this space has done itself is they focus too much on the technology. Like they make it about the technology over everything else where to your point, The vast majority of the users don't care about the underlying technology or the coding language or whatever. Like, you know, card payments on Visa run on base two. I bet nobody can like explain that to me. And that doesn't matter, right? It's the backend infrastructure. And I don't think many people could tell you how ACH payments work, even though they use them every day. I don't think many people can tell you how wires work, even though they use them every day. So it's that fine balance where yes, a couple people need to know it so you can build it and make sure it works. But everybody else should just see it as utility and understand how they can use it, not how it's working in the background. And then as far as like your original question around you know, what people should be doing this year to get ready for it. I think Just make it someone's full-time job. I really find it funny when these large, complex organizations say, " hey, we want to do something in stablecoins." And then hey you. Who knows nothing about it. Why don't you spend 20% of your time on this for three months and then present something really great to me?" And then they get surprised when it goes nowhere. So my biggest advice is hire someone or hire a few people who are passionate about it, who understand it, give them a little bit of leeway, a little budget, and... Let them explore that. 'Cause I think if you just have a couple people Am I interested in spending a small amount of time on it? You're probably not going to get much done.
Ben Brown | 54:05
It's just potentially the future of the entire financial structure, right? So 20% of one person's time is enough. Yeah. But I think that's an interesting, we always go into the sort of Q&A period for the audience with these because they're such interesting discussions. But maybe as we wrap up in the last couple of minutes here, where you just open the discussion, like what's the one thing to do this year? I mean, maybe Ali and Ben, I'd love to hear your As people who've been there and done this or are doing it right now, what's the one recommendation that you have for people out in the audience, whether they are thinking about implementing this within their bank or company, whether they are investors looking at the space or... You know, users of the tech, builders of the tech, you know, within the sort of digital asset industry. I mean, what's the one thing that you'd recommend companies like yours out there do this year? Al, you want to go first?
Ali Heiring | 55:06
Yeah, happy to jump in here. I mean, I think the biggest recommendation at Coating to Veal is to get started and just start building somewhere, right? So understanding, I think, stablecoin as a tool and the way that you can rethink the business model or the funds flow that you have today and really understand what it can unlock. And just start small. We picked a very specific customer use case in a very specific market and view that as like a great place to test new technology and build a lot of the organizational. Knowledge around stablecoin and its applications and to help us figure out how to really find product market fit and scale. So thank you. Don't be intimidated by the stablecoin or crypto industry and just find a path to start working with it.
Ben Reynolds | 55:56
Yeah, I totally agree. It's not enough to just. Start doing a bunch of research projects. You've got to actually do something tangible because otherwise you're not going to approach it with the same rigor that you need to. The other thing is like, there's a lot of good talent out there. Ben Brown is always so modest, but like, you know, he was working with, you know, with Facebook on Libra and DM, you know, back in the day, what was that like eight years ago or something. And so there are experts out there that, you know, that understand these things and can really help you get up the learning curve, like a lot more quickly than if you just do it on your own. And so, you know, find someone to partner with, or, you know, that you can learn from, and just start somewhere.
Ben Brown | 56:49
Maybe to help the audience with that, as we send out the slides and a link to the recording for today's webinar, maybe we'll send everybody a dollar through a Stablecoin app, and then everybody will have a trigger to get started on playing with it in 2026. But with that, you know, I think we're at time. Everybody has a super busy schedule. I know that some of you out in the audience ask questions. We'll collect those questions. We'll follow up with you one-on-one by email, even if that means, you know, relaying the questions to our panelists. But I want to thank all the panelists for giving us some of your time and your insights today. And I thought it was a really interesting discussion and Nabil, I'll be calling you at the end of the year to say, was it the year they went mainstream or not? And we can see about that prediction. Awesome. Thanks, everybody.