There’s a question I’ve stopped hearing in meetings: “Does this work?”
A year ago, finance leaders wanted proof. Case studies, pilots, reassurance that stablecoins were real infrastructure and not a speculative experiment in a business suit. That conversation is over. The question now is: “We’re not doing this yet. Is that a problem?”
Honest answer: it depends on how you calculate the cost of not doing it. Most companies don’t. They look at the fees on cross-border transfers — wire charges, FX spread, the occasional repair fee when a payment bounces between correspondent banks — and add those up.
What they rarely calculate is the capital that isn’t moving at all. A company moving US$1 million per month in supplier payments across the Asia–Latin American corridor — a modest volume for any midsized importer — pays up to US$64,900 a year in transfer costs alone, according to World Bank data for this corridor (1Q25). That’s before accounting for the capital in transit.
With settlement windows of two to six business days, between $67,000 and US$200,000 sits frozen at any given moment — already debited, not yet received. Not a fee. Just time.
Then there’s prefunding. To guarantee same-day execution across currency pairs, companies on traditional correspondent banking rails must park capital in foreign accounts days before an invoice arrives. For businesses operating across the Asia–Latin American corridor — where settlement windows collide with time zone gaps and local documentation requirements — this isn’t a rounding error. It’s a recurring cost that doesn’t appear on any invoice.
Those are the costs that show up in a quarterly report. The ones that don’t: working capital consumed maintaining pre-funded accounts across multiple jurisdictions; delays triggered when documentation requirements freeze funds even when the payment itself is compliant — a missing field in China’s SAFE documentation process can hold up a fully legitimate transfer for two to five business days; and the hours treasury teams spend managing exceptions and reconciling invoices across systems that were never built to talk to each other.
Slow payments don’t just cost money. Supplier relationships get strained when payment timing is unpredictable. Inventory decisions shift when settlement dates are uncertain. Midmarket companies expanding between Asia and Latin America end up holding larger buffers — capital that could go toward a new market or supplier relationship instead.
Waiting has a cost. Most companies just haven’t added it up. For a long time, the most defensible reason to wait was regulatory uncertainty. Until recently, even a CFO ready to move faced a harder conversation internally — legal and compliance teams had legitimate concerns about operating in jurisdictions without a clear regulatory framework.
That argument isn’t available anymore. Europe’s MiCA framework is in effect. Singapore and Hong Kong have both moved to classify regulated payment stablecoins separately from speculative digital assets. The jurisdictions where Asia–Latin American trade actually flows have addressed the regulatory questions that once made this a board-level risk.
The market is responding accordingly. In a 2025 EY-Parthenon survey, 13% of corporates and financial institutions were already using stablecoins operationally. Of those not yet using them, 54% expected to adopt within six to twelve months. Most of the companies inside that number aren’t starting from scratch — they’re catching up.
When settlement that used to take days starts happening in minutes, companies built around that capability operate differently. They don’t prefund accounts in advance. Treasury teams spend less time on exceptions. Suppliers get paid on predictable timelines, which changes the terms of those relationships.
Expansion into new corridors doesn’t require building a separate correspondent banking structure before the first transaction clears. I’ve worked in the Asia–Latin American corridor long enough to recognize what happens next. Companies that eventually make the move tend to describe it as obvious in retrospect. What held them back wasn’t skepticism that it worked. It was inertia — the sense that the current system, friction and all, was at least familiar.
That’s a legitimate thing to weigh. Rebuilding treasury architecture takes time and governance work. The companies that get real results — not pilots, but operational infrastructure — make a governance decision before a technology decision. Clear policies, compliance embedded from the start, risk frameworks that reflect the actual jurisdictions involved. But that decision has to start with an honest accounting of what the current system costs. Not just the transaction fees on the record — the capital sitting in transit, the buffers held against settlement uncertainty, the decisions delayed because the financial layer can’t keep pace with the business.
That’s the number most companies haven’t calculated. Once they do, the question of whether to wait tends to answer itself.