Stablecoin Settlement: Why PSPs Can't Afford to Wait
Stablecoin settlement has moved from experiment to execution. Payments leaders from Fireblocks, Nuvei, and EY break down how PSPs go from pilot to launch.
In 2025, stablecoin transaction volume hit $33 trillion, surpassing Visa in annual throughput, and 86% of firms now say their infrastructure is ready. For payment service providers and B2B payments firms, the question is no longer whether to build a stablecoin strategy. It's how to ship one that differentiates.
Neil Chopra (Head of Strategy & Business Development, Americas, Fireblocks), Heinrich Venzke (Director of Product Management, Blockchain Solutions, Nuvei), and Muneeb Shah (Head for Digital Assets Technology Consulting, UKFS, EY) cover the build-vs-buy decision, where cross-border value is being proven today, how stablecoins shift the economics of FX, and why compliance has to be built in from day one. Moderated by Scott Hamilton, Finextra.
Chapters
0:00 Stablecoin settlement crosses from experiment to execution
3:38 Meet the panel
4:10 From toll booth to platform: rethinking the PSP model
6:00 Trapped capital, prefunding, and issuing your own stablecoin
8:00 What merchants are actually asking for now
12:37 Interoperability and where stablecoins fit by sector
17:48 How stablecoins shift the economics of FX
21:39 CBDCs: wholesale vs retail
28:43 Building compliance in from day one
29:25 Where AI and agentic payments come in
34:10 The hard part isn't the tech, it's regulation
56:00 One asset class, different banks, different business cases
58:50 Final takeaways: align, then execute
Key Takeaways
Payments firms are moving from a toll booth model that clips each transaction to platforms that keep funds and build services on top. Neil frames stablecoins as the first scaled utility use case for the technology.
The clearest value today is cross-border. Stablecoins remove prefunding of nostro accounts and free up trapped capital, letting firms move value in real time and put that liquidity to work.
Build vs buy comes down to knowing your customers first. Direct ownership and control matters, but almost no one builds wallet infrastructure to the blockchain level. They rely on providers like Fireblocks and focus their effort on the use case.
Stablecoins change where FX economics sit. Direct-to-wallet dollar payouts in emerging markets shift the FX clip away from the correspondent banking network, though off-ramp pricing is still constrained by current liquidity.
Compliance is the hard part, not the technology. KYC, AML, and travel-rule handling have to be embedded in the foundational layer from the start, and regulation is still evolving by geography.
The close: top-down alignment on technology strategy comes first. Everything built today becomes foundational for the next five, ten, twenty-plus years.
Learn more from our 2025 State of Stablecoins report: https://www.fireblocks.com/report/state-of-stablecoins
Learn more about our stablecoin infrastructure: https://www.fireblocks.com/solutions/stablecoin-infrastructure
Fireblocks Network for Payments: https://www.fireblocks.com/platforms/fireblocks-network/directory
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Talk to our team about your stablecoin program: https://www.fireblocks.com/request-demo
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