Many expatriates can video chat with family back home with the click of a button, yet sending money to relatives is far from seamless. Despite decades of globalization and numerous initiatives to modernize cross-border payments, the remittance experience has changed surprisingly little.
For financial institutions, this represents a significant opportunity. The global remittance market is expanding rapidly, but these transactions are more than a revenue stream—they are often a lifeline for recipients. When delivered quickly, reliably, and transparently, remittances can become the foundation of lasting relationships with both the sender and the receiver.
In a recent PaymentsJournal webinar, Ran “Goldi” Goldshtein, SVP of Payments and Network at Fireblocks, along with Luke Tuttle, Chief Product and Technology Officer at MoneyGram, and James Wester, Co-Head of Payments and Director of Cryptocurrency at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how stablecoins could play a transformative role in reshaping the remittance landscape.
Rather than simply addressing existing inefficiencies, stablecoins open the door for remittance providers to evolve into broader financial platforms. When paired with digital wallet infrastructure, stablecoins enable new services for customers while giving providers a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded field.
Underestimating Revenue Streams
Momentum around digital assets has accelerated in recent years. Regulatory frameworks in both Europe and the U.S. have brought greater clarity to the industry, helping drive institutional investment in blockchain technology, tokenized assets, and stablecoins.
Typically backed by reserves of fiat currency like the U.S. dollar, stablecoins combine reliability with the advantage of blockchain infrastructure—including real-time settlement, security, and lower transaction costs. These qualities make them a natural fit for international payments, where delays, fees, and regulatory complexity have long been the norm.
“One of the things that’s interesting about remittances is it was always considered a payment use case, but it wasn’t one of those use cases where there was a lot of development,” Wester said. “For decades, it was just the way things were done. You knew that if you had to send money person-to-person across a border, it was going to take a long time and it was probably going to cost a lot, and that’s what you did.”
“Within the last 18 months to two years, the fact that we are beginning to see development for an area where there was real pain, cost, and delay is almost surprising,” he said.
One factor behind this acceleration is the increasing volume of remittances performed on blockchain networks. While crypto-based remittances are not entirely new, companies like MoneyGram have offered crypto on- and off-ramps for years.
Even as this footprint is expanding, the functionality has now been significantly transformed.
“What has been underestimated in the past is the potential for unlocking new revenue streams and new user bases around the world,” Goldi said. “What MoneyGram is doing right now is giving the receivers of remittances a wallet as well—a wallet that maybe a few years ago would have been considered peculiar for a company like MoneyGram to issue.”
“A lot of companies are still underestimating the power of these new rails. Not only for faster money movement, but also for unlocking new types of users and revenue streams,” he said.
The Transformational View
Today, the underlying infrastructure supporting stablecoin remittances is far more flexible and scalable. A model deployed in one corridor can often be replicated quickly in another. For example, the same wallet and stablecoin framework used to send funds to Colombia could be implemented just as effectively in Bangladesh.
This portability delivers substantial benefits for financial services providers.
“Up until blockchain and stablecoin and some of this regulation has enabled these things, you either had to be a bank, partner with a bank, or use a sponsor bank for your solution. And that partner and infrastructure is different in every country,” Tuttle said. “Then, your partner also has their own risk controls, they have their own view on anti-money laundering, and they have their own view on Know Your Customer. It creates a bit of a complicated dynamic.”
Traditionally, remittance products require multiple intermediaries, including partner banks and payment processors, to facilitate transactions and maintain balances. Nearly every fintech offering stored balances relies on these relationships. By contrast, blockchain-based models can consolidate much of this complexity under a single umbrella. With fewer intermediaries involved, financial services firms can streamline operations, reduce costs, and reinvest resources into improving customer experience and expanding services.
In some cases, this approach can also bring greater control over compliance and regulatory processes back in-house.
“We no longer need to coordinate in all cases with a partner whose motivations in some cases might be different,” Tuttle said. “They might have other constraints on their business. Maybe they’re choosing to move slower than us and we’d like to move more quickly.”
“That’s one of the most exciting things as I look to the future, the ability for MoneyGram to control its own destiny,” he said. “Given the stack on the blockchain with stablecoin, with the evolving regulation around the world, that lets us be in the driver’s seat for the implementation of products and services to our consumers and our consumers are the sender and the receiver—that’s the real transformational view on this.”
Balancing Trust and Speed
Even with these advantages, challenges remain. Providers must deliver the speed and convenience customers expect while maintaining rigorous standards for security, compliance, and fraud prevention. Meeting these expectations is particularly difficult because consumer experiences in other digital payments environments have dramatically raised the bar.
“We expect to be able to improve the efficiency, but also change the behavior,” Tuttle said. “Today, many of our customers will send money once a month or every other month because of the way that fees and FX work. With stablecoins, there’s an opportunity to move money more quickly, to send on a more on-demand basis to your loved ones again.”
“It’s back to that receiver being in the flow,” he said. “Is there a way that remittance can be more of a conversation than a once-a-month batch transfer?”
Those expectations often clash with the realities of traditional remittance systems, where multiple intermediaries introduce delays, higher costs, currency conversion complications, and limited transparency.
Stablecoins offer a compelling path forward. By reducing friction and improving visibility across the transaction lifecycle, they can address many of the longstanding pain points in cross-border money movement.
“The biggest challenge is that you need to build fast, because last year volumes grew by more than 120% year-over-year, which means you need to make your infrastructure grow 120% year-over-year,” Goldshtein said. “This is not an easy thing to do, to just make your infrastructure double under the throughput within a few months and to balance that with security.”
“A single exploit in this tech stack of blockchain could cause—and we’ve seen this over the years—hacks of hundreds of millions and even billions,” he said. “We’re moving as fast as we can, but maybe not as fast as we potentially could because we need to be so minded to security and to reliability. It’s all about trust. If we don’t have that, then we don’t have a right to serve any client.”
Shelving the Telegram
For financial services firms considering entry into the remittance market, technology alone isn’t enough. Trust is paramount.
“When you look at remittances, it’s oftentimes people sending money from one country to another country because they are using that one piece of value that they can exploit, which is their labor,” Wester said. “They have moved somewhere and they’re sending back to their family; they are sending it back to friends.”
“You do not want to have remittances that don’t work when you have people who are trying to support their families in their home country or when they are sending money to somebody who needs it because it’s an emergency overseas,” he said. “That’s why you have to have that security, reliability, transparency and compliance.”
Stablecoins can meet these requirements while operating largely behind the scenes. Customers benefit from faster and cheaper transfers, while providers gain a modern infrastructure capable of supporting broader financial services.
“It’s exciting to watch the evolving landscape of new blockchains coming out from a variety of companies, but at the end of the day, the consumer just does not care about the underlying mechanisms to move money,” Tuttle said. “They don’t need to know it’s a stablecoin; they need to know that it’s going to work every time. They want it to be instant and not have an ounce of anxiety on whether that transfer will work or not.”
For most financial institutions, the effectiveness of integrating stablecoin and blockchain technologies has crystallized. The question is no longer whether these tools will shape the future of remittances, but how quickly they will choose to adopt them.
“If we could go 150 years in the past, we would move money through telegram—not the app, the telegram,” Goldstein said. “Technology and companies have evolved, and they have adopted other payment rails. This is another payment rail that you need to adopt and have a leg in. Maybe not for everything, but for some corridors.”
“Some companies will adopt it and won’t underestimate the complexity and will go into this space,” he said. “Some won’t, and they’ll probably be extinct like other companies have been. It doesn’t mean that it’s a magic wand, but it’s definitely a technology that you should explore because otherwise you will become that store that’s trying to move money with the telegram.”
