Correspondent banking was not built for a 24/7 digital economy. Settlement takes one to five days, total intermediary cost reaches 5 to 7 percent in many corridors, and prefunding traps working capital in local accounts. Latin America has spent the last three years routing around all of it.
In our recent webinar, Jorge Borges (Head of Sales & Strategic Business Development, LATAM at Fireblocks) and Antonio Neto (Solana Foundation) broke down what LATAM runs in production and what it takes to move stablecoins across a corridor.
Why stablecoins gained traction in Latin America
Argentines hold dollars to protect savings against inflation. Colombians keep dollar reserves out of habit even with inflation controlled. And most people in the region bank through at least two or three fintechs, so a new entrant has no incumbent relationship to displace.
Regulation arrived after the usage did. Neto described a gray area where people adopt first, companies follow, and rules catch up afterward, the pattern Brazil ran through before formalizing a virtual asset service provider license. Our recent remittances report covers the US to Mexico corridor in depth, alongside Nigeria, the Philippines, and India.
What does prefunding cost a remittance company?
Neto framed the delay through a supply chain: a buyer in Brazil pays a supplier in Asia, the transfer takes three days to land, and the supplier cannot ship until it clears. For remittance companies the same drag shows up as idle capital.
Western Union's CEO has said publicly that the company had real-time cross-border settlement long before it touched stablecoins. Speed was solved, but the cost was in the float. Borges walked through the math:
"So why is Western Union starting using stablecoins? Because it costs $1.5 billion in pre-funding and other kinds of collateral that they have to post to make this happen. So they can free up this capital by using stablecoins."
Before Western Union adopted stablecoins, a SWIFT-routed transfer could reach 8 percent of the transaction, and the company held correspondent accounts around the world so local currency would be there when someone asked for it.
From stablecoin sandwich to stablecoin treasuries
At first, stablecoin implementations looked like a sandwich, where stablecoins were the plumbing between two fiat endpoints. A Brazilian real deposit landed at a payments company, which bought dollar stablecoins, sent them to a processor in the destination country, and paid out in local currency.
Companies are now moving treasury and reserves onchain and holding them there, reaching money markets and tokenized funds without leaving the network. Solana settles those transfers in under a second at a fraction of a cent. The volume has followed, with Solana recording roughly $650 billion in stablecoin transaction volume in February 2026, the highest monthly figure on any network that month.
Success stories: LATAM in production
- Wenia, part of Bancolombia Group, started with buy and sell, added a Colombian peso stablecoin, and now offers yield products.
- Nubank, with over 100 million customers, pays a return on dollar stablecoin balances with no separate signup. Holding the balance is the product.
- Bitso went from zero to close to 10 percent of volume in the US to Mexico corridor, the largest retail remittance corridor in the world.
- ARQ, formerly DolarApp, sells a global account with faster access and a tighter spread. It wins by abstracting the complexity, and a good part of its treasury runs on stablecoins the customer never sees.
- BTG Pactual has run digital asset operations for over ten years, starting from custody.
Demand is shifting underneath the incumbents, with volume into Mexico declining while Caribbean corridors grow. Borges framed the commercial case around principality, the fintech term for being the main app a customer moves money through. Cross-border opens the account, and payments, savings, yield, and trading win the rest. One stablecoin integration supplies several of those lines at once.
What a remittance company needs to start
Four pieces have to be in place before a company can support stablecoin payments across corridors:
- Wallet infrastructure: the connection to the network, and the thing that scales from one wallet to many.
- On and off-ramp partners per corridor: a company in Panama paying out in Brazil needs a Brazilian partner, or has to become one.
- Liquidity: either a provider relationship or a mint account directly with an issuer.
- AML and KYT screening: transaction monitoring and policy controls, a must-have from day one
Stablecoins themselves are permissionless. These four pieces turn stablecoins into an operation a regulator will accept. Our remittances report maps four entry paths for getting there, from back-end treasury operations through launching your own stablecoin.
Resources
Visit payments.org for technical resources on onchain payments.
Watch the webinar on Youtube.
Download the latest remittances report.
