On stage at Cedar-IBSi Singapore Summit 2026, I had the opportunity to talk through the realities of rewiring cross-border payment rails for what’s next.
Before the discussion started, I asked the room a simple question: “Do you know what stablecoins and digital assets are?”
Everyone raised their hands.
Two years ago, you'd have seen a scattering of people say yes — mostly those who'd spent time in crypto. Today, in a room full of bank executives and technology leaders, the answer was unanimous.
That shift matters more than any single stat from the stage.
Stablecoins aren't a side conversation anymore — they're becoming part of the core infrastructure conversation, sitting alongside banking rails, card networks, and every other way money moves across borders.
Why stablecoins are earning their place
Speed and working capital
Ask any treasury team where money gets stuck, and they'll point to weekends and public holidays. Large fund movements that would otherwise clear in minutes sit waiting for a banking day to open.
With traditional cross-border money movement, the experience is still like sending a letter through a relay of post offices. Each one opens at 9am, closes at 5pm, and by the time the message arrives, it's been read, stamped, and re-routed multiple times over.
Stablecoins remove that wait. Similar to a direct video call, businesses can use them to move money instantly anytime, anywhere. Even for banks still bulk pre-funding last-mile, small-value payments, stablecoins can replace the bottleneck.
Traceability
Traditional cross-border payments only give visibility to the next hop. A bank can typically trace a payment to the last intermediary bank in the chain, but the full path — and who's really on either end — stays opaque across multiple correspondent relationships.
With stablecoins, every transaction is immutable on a shared ledger. Full visibility, instantly. Think of it as the difference between a paper trail buried in filing cabinets versus a single searchable database everyone can see.
Cost
The cost advantage is still emerging rather than fully proven, but it's leaning in stablecoins' favor. As volume grows and infrastructure matures, settling in stablecoins keeps getting cheaper.
Here's how I put it on stage: "Where we see stablecoins playing an increasingly important role is in enabling the movement of money across borders. Compared with traditional networks, one of the key benefits is speed, particularly for working capital requirements, and cost is also becoming a significant advantage."
The demand is coming from unexpected places
For years, stablecoin interest came from crypto-native companies experimenting at the edges of finance.
That's changing quickly. Banks are now the ones asking the questions, and they're asking them directly of providers like Nium.
We're seeing this firsthand:
- Our integration with Coinbase brings stablecoin payment infrastructure directly into customer payout flows, letting businesses fund cross-border payments in USDC and convert to fiat within the platform they already use.
- Our connection to the Circle Payments Network extends that further, linking stablecoin settlement to real-world payout rails at scale.
- And through our dual-network stablecoin card issuance platform, businesses holding stablecoins can issue cards on Visa and Mastercard networks through a single integration, spending digital dollars anywhere those networks reach.
- Our acquisition of Cypher brings operational knowledge of how to build and scale product in the space
- Our participation in Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot with MAS-led BLOOM puts us inside the infrastructure being built to settle these transactions at scale.
None of these are theoretical. They're live, and banks are paying attention partly because of what's happening in Asia.
Asia is where the action is
As my colleague and Nium’s VP of Digital Assets, Kuberan Marimuthu, highlighted recently, the stablecoin flywheel is kicking in across Asia and emerging markets. The reason is structural: businesses in these regions are international almost by default.
When the largest share of stablecoin activity coming from APAC (60% of total source volume globally, according to McKinsey), it's time to stop treating stablecoin as an emerging trend and start treating it as infrastructure banks need an answer for.
What it will take for banks to win
That urgency has created a question every bank is now wrestling with: Which rail do I build for? The instinct is to choose one over the other — stablecoins, cards, banking rails, or others. But that's the wrong question.
The real deciding factor: customer experience
Capability alone won't decide which rail will dominate. Customer experience will.
In a multi-rail world, the technology already works. Wires for large-sized transactions, banking rails for instant, cards for almost anywhere, and stablecoins for 24x7. All of these can move money across borders and with different benefits.
While the biggest value of stablecoins lies in helping banks with the pre-funding requirements, solving end-to-end cross-border payments will likely remain a multi-rail scenario, with each rail solving different parts of the problem.
The banks we talk to at Nium that are winning obsess over five key things:
- Invisible complexity. A front-end flow so seamless the customer never feels they're choosing between rails. They tap "send," and the system picks the optimal path behind the scenes.
- Error prevention. Beneficiary name matching that catches input mistakes before they become failed payments, a single detail that can swing trust and cause frustration.
- Improved success. AI and monitoring tools that weed out bad actors and boost payment success rates, without burdening the user with friction.
- Minimize time and maximize visibility. Making every cross-border payment feel like a domestic one and traceable through the process.
- Increased value. Enable cheaper transactions (both FX and fees) for customers while enabling new revenue streams for the bank.
These are the details that determine whether a customer trusts a bank with their next cross-border transaction or looks elsewhere.
Speed to market matters
Banks don't need to build all of this from scratch, and they shouldn't even try. The best part is that these capabilities are already readily available for banks to tap into.
Fintechs like Nium already white-label these capabilities, which means a bank can bring faster, cheaper cross border-payment offerings to market in a fraction of the time it would take to build the underlying infrastructure internally.
One rail won't win — the network will
The near future isn't a single rail replacing everything that came before it. It's banking rails, Swift, wallets, proxy systems, cards, and stablecoins operating side-by-side, each suited to different needs.
What determines who wins isn't which rail a bank chooses. It's how well those rails work together to solve different needs in the market.
Building for what's next
The room I stood in front of in Singapore already understands what stablecoins are. That part of the education is done. The real work now is building the infrastructure, the partnerships, and the customer experience that let banks act on that understanding.
The world is changing. If you're a bank, fintech or corporate thinking through where stablecoins fit in, let’s talk about how Nium can help.
