Stablecoins cited as a workaround for unbanked businesses in trade

A guest post on Fireblocks, written by the Bitpace team and published on 2026-10-20, argues that the more material gap in financial access is not the unbanked consumer but the unbanked business. It says many mid-sized firms in emerging markets can hold domestic accounts yet struggle to pay or receive cross-border invoices because correspondent banking chains add fees, delay settlement and create foreign-exchange uncertainty.

Evidence and context

The article says businesses in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Eastern Europe often face breakdowns once a domestic payment becomes an international trade transfer. In its account, funds can move through one or two correspondent banks, with $50 to $100 sometimes deducted before the payment reaches the destination bank. It also cites the Financial Stability Board's monitoring data for the G20 cross-border payment targets, saying small and mid-sized enterprise transfers average roughly 1.5% in cost.

The guest post adds that traditional cross-border payments can include foreign-exchange spreads of 1.5% to 4.5% over mid-market rates and, for transactions between non-G7 countries, may require a double conversion through dollars or euros. It says settlement into emerging-market corridors can take 3 to 5 business days, during which working capital is tied up and businesses may face additional FX slippage if the local currency weakens before final settlement.

The piece presents stablecoins such as USDC or USDT as an alternative settlement layer that can move value onchain in seconds to minutes, with 24/7 availability and public transaction records. It also says payment infrastructure providers can bridge stablecoin rails to local fiat banking systems through automated conversion, exchange-rate locking and compliant payouts, allowing one party to pay in digital assets while another receives local currency.

Broader evidence supplied in the background material supports the de-risking backdrop behind the article's argument. The World Bank defines de-risking as financial institutions terminating or restricting client relationships to avoid, rather than manage, risk, and says correspondent banking withdrawals can affect international transfers, foreign-exchange services and trade finance. Related material from the World Bank's 2025-09-02 Pacific assessment points to high compliance costs, low profitability, perceived financial-crime risk and limited economies of scale as drivers of correspondent banking retreat. A separate study summarized by its authors on 2024-09-18, covering firms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary and Turkey, estimated that affected firms' probability of continuing to export fell by 5.2 percentage points in the short term and 19.8 percentage points after four years, with export revenues 57% below comparable unaffected firms after four years; those estimates are study-specific and not a current global forecast.

The source material does not provide independent verification of stablecoin adoption rates, market share or transaction volumes for the businesses described, and it does not establish that any cited infrastructure platform or regional payment mechanism is operational beyond the examples given. The article's central claim is therefore best read as a case for stablecoin settlement as a response to correspondent banking frictions, rather than as evidence that the broader trade-finance system has already shifted.