Yes, and not as an experiment. Paying suppliers has quietly become the main thing these tokens are for: business to business payments now surpass peer to peer transactions as the leading use case, at roughly two thirds of the market according to blockchain firm Artemis, and the primary driver is cross-border payments, in a market where the number of active correspondent banking relationships declined by around 30 percent between 2011 and 2022 on Bank for International Settlements data.
So the question is settled. The useful question is the one underneath it, and almost nothing on the first page of this search answers it.
Here is the part that gets left out. Almost nobody pays a supplier in stablecoins end to end. Your money starts as pounds or euros in a company account and has to arrive as something your supplier can pay staff and tax with. What a stablecoin rail actually sells you is a different middle. The ends stay exactly where they were, and the ends are where the cost lives.
What actually happens when you pay a supplier this way
Three stages, not one.
The on-ramp. You send fiat to a provider and receive tokens. A stablecoin is a digital asset designed to hold a stable value through a one to one peg, so one USDC is backed by one dollar held in reserve, and the working parts of any transaction are the blockchain platform, the coin issuer, the wallet and key management, and the payments infrastructure that connects it to the banking system. That last component is a regulated business taking your money. It charges, and if your account currency is not the token's currency, it also sets an exchange rate.
The onchain leg. This is the stage every vendor page describes, because it is the stage that is genuinely remarkable. A blockchain-settled payment can move from a wallet in London to a wallet in Lagos in seconds, at a network fee of less than two cents, independent of banking hours, against a correspondent banking model where a payment from Bangkok to Buenos Aires can touch five to seven banks before arriving and businesses wait three to ten days to settle international invoices, while emerging market importers routinely pay FX spreads of 200 to 300 basis points to obtain hard currency liquidity.
The off-ramp. Your supplier, or a provider acting for them, converts tokens back into local currency and pushes it into a local bank account. Another regulated business, another fee, and usually a second exchange rate.
Notice the shape of that. Stage two is close to free. Stages one and three are ordinary money movement with all the usual economics attached. When a quote leads with the network fee, it is quoting you the price of the only stage that was never expensive.
The saving is in the corridor, not in the technology
That same source is unusually honest about the limit: the fit is real but concentrated in specific corridors, specific transaction types and specific operating models. That is the sentence to hold on to, because it means the answer to "should we do this" is not a property of stablecoins at all. It is a property of the route you are paying along.
Look at the numbers again and the logic falls out on its own. Three to ten days and five to seven intermediaries is what a thin corridor looks like: somewhere with few direct banking relationships, so your payment gets passed along a chain, each link charging rent. Two to three percent in FX spread is what scarce hard currency costs. Bypass that chain and the saving is enormous, because the chain was enormous.
Now run the same reasoning on London to Frankfurt. There is no chain. The corridor is dense, competitive and already same-day. There is nothing there to bypass, so there is nothing there to save, and every ramp you add is a fee and a spread you did not previously pay. Correspondent relationships thinned out over the last decade in the places that were already marginal, not in the euro area.
The honest rule: the case for stablecoin settlement is strongest exactly where your existing rail is worst, and it collapses toward zero where your existing rail is fine.
The comparison almost nobody runs
We sell the conventional rail, so treat what follows as a party with an interest showing its own numbers rather than as neutral commentary. The numbers are published, which is the point.
Take a 50,000 EUR supplier invoice. If you already hold euros, the payment is a SEPA transfer costing 0.99 GBP and there is no conversion at all, because nothing was converted. If you are paying out of sterling, one conversion at 0.70 percent is around 350 EUR, and that spread, not the transfer fee, is the entire cost of the payment.
Which tells you what to ask a stablecoin provider. Not "what is the network fee", which will be pennies and is true. Ask what the total spread is across both ramps, quoted as a percentage of the invoice, and whether it beats one conversion at 0.70 percent. On a euro or dollar corridor it usually will not, because you are paying for two conversions where the bank rail charges one, or none. On a corridor where the local bank charges you three percent and takes a week, it very well might.
The reason so few people run this comparison is that the two products are marketed by different industries using different units. One quotes gas fees, the other quotes wire fees, and neither volunteers the spread. If you want to see where a conventional payment actually leaks money, how a SWIFT payment routes and who takes a cut at each hop is the mechanism, and what a SWIFT cross border payment costs in practice puts numbers on it. If the real requirement is holding several currencies so that most of your payments never convert at all, that is what a multi currency business account is for, and it removes the FX line rather than relocating it.
Four things you take on that a bank payment does not carry
Your counterparty has to want it. This is what actually stops these projects, and the SERP barely mentions it. Either your supplier holds a wallet and agrees to be paid in tokens, which is a conversation about their treasury policy and their auditor, or a provider off-ramps on their behalf and they simply see a local payment arrive. The second model works and is what most business services really sell. It is also worth being clear-eyed about: if your supplier never touches a token, you have not changed how they get paid, you have changed who you buy an international transfer from.
The transfer is final. There is no recall, no chargeback and no scheme dispute process. Whatever recourse exists comes from your contract with the provider. A wrong address is a wrong payment, permanently.
A dollar token is a dollar position. The word "stable" removes crypto volatility, not currency risk. A company reporting in sterling that parks working capital in a dollar-pegged token has taken a dollar position and will mark it at every period end. Small operating float, immaterial. Anything larger is a treasury decision that should be made deliberately, and the same reasoning applied to machine spending is covered in our piece on agent stablecoin payments. Nor is an idle balance productive while it waits: under the US framework, a payment stablecoin must be backed by relatively safe assets such as bank deposits, short-term US Treasury securities and balances at a Federal Reserve Bank, and the law prohibits the issuer from directly paying interest. The reserve earns. You do not.
The compliance does not disappear. Know your customer and anti-money laundering obligations follow the money regardless of the rail, licensing requirements vary by jurisdiction, and local currency rules still govern what can be paid into and out of a given country. Sanctions screening, payment purpose and beneficiary verification all survive the switch. What changes is who performs them, and that is a due diligence question about your provider rather than a saving.
Where the UK rules stand in 2026
A lot of writing on this topic still treats stablecoin regulation as something approaching. It has arrived.
Read that as a commencement schedule rather than a warning. Nothing prevents a UK business paying an overseas supplier this way. The regulated questions attach to the firms supplying the capability: issuing the token, holding it for you, exchanging it, or providing the underlying payment service. Which means a vendor can now be asked, in writing, which permission it holds and for which of those activities.
Our own position, stated the way we would want any provider to state theirs. EXFI is a trading name of EX Financial Solutions Ltd, company number 17105188, which is not itself authorised or regulated by the FCA and acts as a distributor of payment services provided by Gemba Finance Ltd, authorised and regulated by the FCA as a payment institution under FRN 804853. EXFI accounts are payment accounts, not bank accounts, they are not covered by the FSCS, and funds are safeguarded in segregated accounts in accordance with the Payment Services Regulations 2017. UK customers, business entities only. If that distinction between safeguarding and deposit protection is new, safeguarding under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 is the piece to read first.
Stablecoin settlement is an announced item on our roadmap. It is not live today, and we are not going to describe it as though it were.
A four question test before you move an invoice
- •Does this corridor actually deserve it? Time the payment and price the spread you pay now. If it is same day at under one percent, you are solving a problem you do not have.
- •Will the counterparty take it, and in what form? Get the answer before the pilot, not after. If they will only accept local currency, be honest that you are switching providers rather than switching rails.
- •What is the all-in cost across both ramps? As a percentage of the invoice, quoted in writing. Refuse a network fee as an answer.
- •Who holds the tokens between the ramps, and under what permission? Legal entity, company number, permission. A brand name is not an answer.
Get four clear answers and the decision usually makes itself. On a difficult corridor it is a real saving that your bank cannot match. On a well served one it is a longer route to the same place, with an extra spread and less recourse.
This article is general information about how cross-border payments are structured and regulated. It is not legal or financial advice.
FAQ
Do both sides need a crypto wallet to make a stablecoin payment? Somebody in the chain does, but not necessarily your supplier. Either they hold a wallet and accept tokens directly, which requires their agreement and their auditor's comfort, or a provider converts on their behalf and they see an ordinary local currency payment land in their normal bank account. The second arrangement is what most business-facing services actually sell, and it means the supplier never has to change anything.
Does paying in stablecoins avoid foreign exchange costs? No. It relocates the conversion rather than removing it. A sterling payer buying a dollar token converts once at the on-ramp, and a euro supplier converting out converts again at the off-ramp, so the round trip can carry two spreads where a conventional payment from a euro balance carries none.
What happens if a stablecoin payment goes to the wrong address? Settlement onchain is designed to be final, so there is no recall mechanism and no dispute scheme to escalate to. Any recourse comes from your contract with the provider that executed the transfer, which is why the identity and permissions of that provider matter more here than on a rail where the scheme rules do the protecting.
Is it legal for a UK company to pay an overseas supplier in stablecoins? Nothing prohibits a business spending its own funds. The regulatory obligations sit with the firms supplying the capability, and those activities were brought inside the FCA perimeter by the Cryptoassets Regulations 2026, with the full scope of regulated activities expanding from 25 October 2027. For any specific arrangement the answer depends on the flow of funds and who contracts with whom, which is a question for your provider in writing.
Can we earn interest on stablecoin balances we hold for payments? Not from the issuer, which is prohibited from paying interest directly under the US payment stablecoin framework. Treat a payments float as a float. Any return offered on a token balance is coming from somewhere other than the issuer, and that somewhere is the thing to understand before agreeing to it.