Where Stablecoins Fit in Your Payments Stack, and Where They Don’t.

Stablecoins are not a new payment method, but their use has been gathering momentum in the past few months: Visa crossed $3.5 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement, and Deel recently paid 10,000 contractors across 100 countries in stablecoins. 

And yet, most companies evaluating stablecoins are still pondering over the wrong question. It’s no longer about whether stablecoins work. The better question to ask is, will stablecoins solve a payment problem you actually have?

If you’re already collecting payments at peak efficiency, adding stablecoins may not move the needle much for your business. But, if you’re currently navigating cross-border conversion issues, slow collections, reconciliation overhead, or customers who struggle to pay through traditional rails, stablecoins may provide a welcome solution.

This article serves as a framework for making the right call on stablecoins for your business.

Stablecoins vs. Crypto: Why the Distinction Matters for Payments

Many businesses are still sitting on the sidelines with stablecoins. Only 13% of mid-market firms currently use them, according to a PYMNTS Intelligence survey of CFOs, and as BVNK co-founder Chris Harmse acknowledged, “the skepticism feels rational.” 

We sometimes see finance teams confusing stablecoins with crypto, which could explain this skepticism. But, stablecoins and Bitcoin are built for completely different purposes. Reframing your understanding of stablecoins is the first step in evaluating whether they’re right for your business..

• Bitcoin, the most well-known of thousands of cryptocurrencies, was designed from the ground up for scarcity. The total supply is hard-capped at 21 million. As demand grows against a fixed supply, price fluctuation is a feature, not a side effect. You hold Bitcoin because you hope it’ll be worth more tomorrow than today. It is a speculation instrument.
  
• A stablecoin is the exact opposite of a bet. Every token is backed 1:1 by real reserves like US dollars or treasury securities. These are held by a regulated issuer. One USDC equals one dollar. Always. That’s by design. There’s no volatility because there’s nothing to speculate on.

Here’s the mental model: Bitcoin is like an asset you hold. Stablecoins are like the cash you spend. You use cash to pay rent, run payroll, and settle invoices. Stablecoins work exactly like that, just moving on a shared digital ledger instead of bouncing through a chain of correspondent banks. The problem stablecoins solve has nothing to do with crypto and everything to do with how money moves across borders today.

What’s Broken About Cross-Border Payments Today

International payments have worked the same way for decades. And that’s the issue.

International card transactions carry a 3–4% processing fee that either eats into your margin or sometimes gets pushed to your customer. Neither is a great experience. And that’s before the authorization challenge kicks in: 72% of merchants report higher failure rates on cross-border payments compared to domestic, with declines running 15–25% above baseline in markets like Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa on perfectly legitimate transactions.

Alternatively, a larger customer wires money. This incurs under 1% in fees, but the payment takes two to five business days to land. Your accounts team gets an email: “I made this payment, here’s the bank and the amount.” They log it. They wait. They check the statement on day three. They confirm. The amount is slightly off: on top of the transfer fee, intermediary banks deduct fees from the principal in transit and currency conversions add a markup. The sender has paid once. Your company absorbs the rest. Your accounts team reconciles the difference and repeats this for every international customer, every cycle. That’s the baseline most global software companies have accepted as normal.

How Stablecoin Payments Fix Cross-Border Settlement Speed and Cost

Stablecoins solve for both high card fees and wire delays on cross-border payments.

With stablecoins, settlement happens in minutes, because the asset moves directly on the blockchain, bypassing clearing and settlement intermediaries entirely. No two-day settlement wait. No “pending.” You know the payment arrived the moment it does. The reconciliation grunt work largely disappears.

This speed and ease helps explain why the market has finally begun to embrace stablecoins. Real-world stablecoin payment volume reached $390 billion annually as of late 2025, more than double 2024 levels, with B2B payments leading at roughly 60% of that total, up 733% year over year.

And the cost? Currently around 1.5% through providers like Stripe: meaningfully more affordable than card processing fees for cross-border.

Stablecoins Expand and Deepen Access to International and Tech-Forward Customers

Payments practitioners know that there’s no single best payment method. What converts in the US doesn’t always work in Southeast Asia. What serves enterprise B2B doesn’t serve a high-velocity B2C checkout. Every payment method you’ve ever added — Apple Pay, Google Pay, local wallets, regional card schemes — was a decision to meet your customer where they are, and you should evaluate stablecoins through the same lens. Stablecoins are in no way a replacement for existing payment methods. They’re simply another option for customers who may be difficult to serve through traditional rails.

This is the same conviction that led us at Chargebee to support 40+ gateways, 30+ payment methods, and merchants operating across 150+ countries. Merchants deserve both the freedom to choose the right payment offerings for their business and the visibility to choose well.

So, what makes stablecoins a good choice for you? In markets like Indonesia, Colombia, or across much of Africa, a significant portion of your potential customers likely have either no credit card at all, or one that cross-border networks routinely reject:

• In Indonesia, credit card penetration sits at just 2% of adults because the country’s payment ecosystem evolved around wallets and QR transfers, not cards.
• Across Southeast Asia, credit cards reach only 21% of adults because limited credit bureau infrastructure means cards simply aren’t issued widely. 
• In Africa, the picture is different but the outcome is the same: over 500 million adults in Sub-Saharan Africa remain unbanked. And while mobile money has filled the gap, with 835 million registered mobile money accounts across the region, it doesn’t always connect cleanly to international merchants. Local currency volatility has pushed many of these customers toward USD-backed digital alternatives like stablecoins out of necessity. 

These markets are where a significant share of the next hundred million customers live. If you’re not offering stablecoins there, someone else from your peer group will.

Conversely, a second reason to offer stablecoins is that some of your customers are already holding them. These are the tech-forward early adopters who would rather pay with what they have than convert back to a card. Offering stablecoins at checkout can send a strong signal that you embrace and understand these early adopters.

The sectors moving fastest on stablecoins reflect this dynamic. Mark Nichols, a principal at EY specializing in financial services and capital markets strategy, noted in CFO Dive that the early stablecoin movers are in “e-commerce, payroll and merchant services: these sectors are moving a lot faster, obviously, because they’ve got customers that need them.”

How Stablecoin Payments Can Impact DSO for Finance and Receivables Teams

Many finance teams managing international collections deal with a version of the same problem: revenue is recognized on paper long before the cash lands. The median DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) for SaaS companies in Cloud and IT infrastructure sits at 50 days, driven primarily by when customers choose to pay, not by how the transfer moves. But wire transfers add 2–5 days to every international collection after a customer has already decided to pay. When you’re running hundreds of international invoices, that adds up.

Here’s the delta: blockchain payments settle in under three minutes, any time of day, any day of the year, including weekends and bank holidays when traditional rails go dark. A payment your customer initiates on a Friday evening doesn’t sit pending until Monday. It arrives confirmed.

The speed creates a direct balance sheet benefit. A seven-day DSO reduction frees roughly 2% of annual revenue in working capital for a $10M ARR company: cash that was always earned, just sitting in transit. Offering faster-settling payment methods reduces DSO by five to eight days on average. That’s working capital freed up without changing your pricing, your terms, or your customer relationships.

Thinking back to wire transfers, the cost of stablecoin transactions (~1.5%) appears higher than a wire on paper. But wire pricing doesn’t include the days of float, the manual reconciliation overhead, or the operational cost of the follow-up chain when a payment goes quiet. When you factor in the full cost of collecting an international wire, the gap narrows considerably. And fees are compressing. 

The data reflects this. EY’s 2025 survey of corporates and financial institutions found that among companies already using stablecoins, 41% reported cost savings of at least 10%, primarily in B2B cross-border payments. Clare Adelgren, EY’s Global Head of Blockchain Sales and Operations, puts it plainly: “This is really about reimagining and redesigning the settlement rails — it is going to touch on everything payments-related.”

A Simple Framework for Evaluating Stablecoins

Before adding stablecoins as another payment method, start by asking four questions:

• Where are your customers? If most of your revenue comes from customers who already pay successfully with cards, stablecoins may not be a priority. If you’re selling into regions like those we mentioned above, where card penetration is low or cross-border payment acceptance is inconsistent, the calculus changes.
  
• How much of your revenue is cross-border? The more international your business becomes, the more settlement speed, collection efficiency, cost effectiveness and payment flexibility start to matter.
  
• Are payment failures limiting growth? Look at authorization rates, checkout abandonment, and unsupported payment methods. Stablecoins are most valuable when they’re solving a conversion problem.
  
• What does your current collection process cost? Don’t just look at transaction fees. Consider reconciliation effort, payment tracking, delays in cash availability, and the operational work required to collect international payments.
  
• Where does regulation stand in your markets? Regulation varies by market, but it’s evolving toward clarity. The US GENIUS Act, and Europe’s MiCA framework are both signs of that, and only 18% of European respondents in a recent Fireblocks survey viewed regulation as a barrier to adoption. There are real edge cases too: some markets with high stablecoin demand are also sanctioned jurisdictions, so your provider’s compliance infrastructure matters here. Payment processors handle KYC/AML and screening on their end and won’t process payments from sanctioned geographies, but understand what markets you’re offering it in and where your provider’s limits are.

If stablecoins improve one or more of these metrics for a meaningful segment of customers, and the regulatory picture in your markets is clear enough to move forward, they’re worth evaluating.

When Stablecoins Are Not the Right Fix for Your Business

Here are some situations where enabling stablecoins might not make sense for your business: 

• Your cross-border volume is low. If the majority of your revenue comes from domestic transactions, the operational gains from stablecoin settlement are minimal. Revisit when your international mix grows.
  
• Your business is based in a market not yet supported for stablecoins. While customers around the world can pay via stablecoins, support for accepting them depends on where your business is headquartered, and this varies by provider. Stripe, for instance, currently supports businesses based in the US, the EU, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Switzerland in private preview. Check with your own payment provider on what’s supported in your region.
  
• Your customer base isn’t drawn to stablecoins yet. If your customers already pay reliably through cards or wallets and have shown little interest in newer payment methods, stablecoins may add complexity without adding conversion. Revisit as interest and awareness for new-age payment methods grows in your customer segments.

How to Enable Stablecoin Payments

The complexity people imagine with stablecoins (wallets, blockchain networks, cryptographic keys) isn’t actually part of the setup. Getting started is quite straightforward. For Chargebee merchants using Stripe, it’s just two steps.

Step 1: Enable ‘Stablecoins’ in your Stripe account.

Step 2: Enable Stablecoin in your Chargebee Stripe settings. It appears at Checkout alongside your other payment methods (as shown below)

When a customer pays using USDC (a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar 1:1), Stripe handles the network complexity, specifying the amount and the network. You get a confirmation on the transaction, and it gets converted to your preferred fiat currency like USD before settlement. You never hold stablecoins or manage a wallet unless you explicitly choose to.

Furthermore, if a customer has never paid with stablecoins before, they’re not stuck. The experience allows them to sign up with a wallet provider, add funds, and pay, similar to setting up any new digital payment method. You don’t need to build this experience. The only decision you make is whether to offer it.

Note: Stablecoin payments via Stripe are currently available in businesses headquartered in select regions only.

The Stablecoin Decision 

Most companies don’t need a stablecoin strategy. They need a payments strategy that best suits their business. 

The companies seeing value from stablecoins are adopting them because they’re trying to solve practical problems: reaching customers who struggle to pay through traditional rails, collecting international payments faster, reducing reconciliation overhead, and improving cash flow.

Like every payment method, the value of stablecoins depends on who your customers are, where they are, and how they prefer to pay. Stablecoins are another tool that may be useful to add to your payments stack. The answer to the question of whether they’re worth offering should come from your customers: not from us, not from any single provider, and not from the noise in the market.

Get started with stablecoin payments on Chargebee via Stripe.