Are stablecoins a B2B payments silver bullet?

Stablecoins have become one of the most talked-about innovations in the payments industry, attracting significant attention from banks, fintechs and regulators. However, as adoption accelerates, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern hype from reality.

Are stablecoins a B2B payments silver bullet?

Payments Industry Intelligence speaks to Pat Bermingham, CEO of B2B payment specialist Adflex, to discuss whether stablecoins could become a silver bullet for business payments, or if the digital currency adds unnecessary complexity to an environment that craves simplicity.

Why is there so much hype around using stablecoins for business payments? 

Business payments are still more complex than they should be. Despite most mid- to large-sized organisations already have critical components in place – think Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, payment gateways, approval workflows and reconciliation tools – the mismatch of systems, rails and manual processes invite opacity, error and fragmentation.

This matters because slower payments mean slower business. Cashflow is impacted, capital reporting stymied, and supply chain relationships tested.

For many, stablecoins offer a route out of this, supporting faster, lower-cost, cross-border payments. 

What is the unique value of stablecoins for business payments?

Business payments have become increasingly digitised over the last decade. It is only natural that digital currencies would one day become part of this transformation. But high-value business payments need to be rooted in trust, and while cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Tether have stolen the limelight, at times showing incredible growth, their volatility has made them wholly unsuitable for business payment infrastructure.

Enter stablecoins. Growing interest in these digital assets as a payment instrument stems from their design: by pegging to a fiat currency such as the US dollar they maintain a stable value. The also retain the agility of their cryptocurrency cousins: faster settlement, lower processing fees and, crucially, lower operational friction than traditional payment rails. Their distributed nature also supports both trust and security.

Are businesses already using stablecoins for payments?

Yes, among early adopters, stablecoins are big business already. Recent analysis from McKinsey & Company and blockchain analytics firm Artemis estimates that payment-related stablecoin activity – including critical B2B requirements such as supplier payments and remittances – reached around $390 billion in 2025. It found that “early adopters are using stablecoins to streamline supply chain payments and improve liquidity management” and estimates that B2B stablecoin payments account for about $226 billion a year.

This may sound high, but it remains just 0.01 percent of global B2B payment volumes.

The scale of today’s stablecoin payment flows isn’t important though. What is important, is their potential for growth. Juniper Research suggests that cross-border B2B stablecoin flows could exceed $5 trillion by 2035, as the infrastructure to deliver them within business environments evolves.

I want to emphasise this. Could.

What about the big payment players – are they embracing stablecoin adoption?

To truly understand stablecoins’ momentum, look at the behaviours of established payment networks: Visa has expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities across multiple blockchains and digital assets. Mastercard has invested heavily in frameworks for integrating stablecoins into payment flows, including issuance, settlement and merchant acceptance.

Meanwhile, Klarna has begun launching stablecoin-based initiatives within its own ecosystem (such as KlarnaUSD), aimed at reducing settlement friction and improving cross-border payment efficiency.

These developments signal an important shift: the big players, as well as individual businesses, are starting to embrace and prepare for mass stablecoin adoption. They’re no longer the sole reserve of crypto-natives, they’re being integrated into mainstream payment infrastructure.

Establishing regulatory clarity is essential to enable mass adoption of any new payment technology. What regulations are in place to support stablecoin adoption?

A lot of progress has already been made on the this front. In Europe, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) framework has created a structured regime for stablecoin issuance, reserve backing and operational oversight, providing much-needed certainty for issuers and financial institutions. In the United States, the GENIUS Act has moved the market further forward by establishing a federal framework that requires full reserve backing and regular disclosures. This is helping to formalise stablecoins as a regulated financial instrument, rather than an experimental asset class.

Taken together, these frameworks are doing more than just defining rules, they are creating the conditions for institutional adoption. By reducing regulatory ambiguity, they allow banks, payment providers and corporates to begin exploring stablecoins within controlled environments such as cross-border settlement, treasury options, and closed-loop ecosystems.

What barriers remain before stablecoins can enter mainstream use in business payment workflows?

Regulation alone is not enough to enable mass adoption. For stablecoins to operate effectively at scale in the B2B world, there are still important gaps to address – particularly around interoperability between jurisdictions, consistency in compliance standards, and alignment between traditional financial regulation and emerging digital asset infrastructure. Integration with existing enterprise systems such as ERP and treasury platforms must be seamless, so as to avoid adding to the often-high B2B payment management burden.

Without this, fragmentation risks emerging across markets, adding further complexity to what is already a highly complex B2B payment flow, limiting the efficiency gains stablecoins are designed to deliver. 

Once all adoption barriers have been surpassed, will stablecoins be a silver bullet to today’s business payment challenges?

Possibly. On one hand, stablecoins offer a compelling route to faster settlement, reduced intermediaries, improved liquidity management, and lower operational friction – particularly in cross-border and supply chain payments where traditional rails remain slow and fragmented.

On the other hand, they introduce a new layer of complexity into an already crowded payments landscape. Without clear standards, interoperability and integration with existing enterprise systems, stablecoins could add yet another rail, adding to the fragmentation problem instead of bypassing it.

The outcome will ultimately depend on execution. If regulation, infrastructure, and enterprise adoption evolve in step, stablecoins could become a foundational layer of modern B2B payments – enabling near instant, programmable, and globally interoperable value transfer. If not, they risk becoming just another parallel system that adds optionality, but not simplicity.