For years, African banking competed on branches, then on apps, then on instant domestic rails. The next contest is already underway, stablecoins are becoming the rail customers choose when they want money to move now, across borders, with rules attached, at lower cost. The fact is that this adoption is scaling outside traditional pipes, through wallets, exchanges, and platform ecosystems. The opportunity, and the risk, is simple, the institution that owns the customer’s stablecoin journey, owns their flows, their data, and the expanding set of services that ride on top.
The client journey is transforming
Picture (I use picture very loosely given the data suggests this is happening at scale, with adoption increasing YoY) a grandson in London sending £100 worth of digital dollars to his grandmother in Hammanskraal on a Saturday evening. He buys a regulated USD stablecoin from a wallet connected to his UK bank account, presses send, and the grandmother’s phone buzzes in seconds. On Sunday morning she pays at a local merchant that accepts stablecoin, or she converts a portion to rand inside the same wallet, or she stakes a small balance in a dollar savings product, all without touching a branch or waiting for banking hours. The entire user story, funding, cross-border transfer, domestic spend, savings, and occasional cash out, is now a single interface with instant settlement and transparent fees. The bank is still in the loop at the edges, it provided the initial fiat on-ramp in London and will likely handle some rand off-ramp in South Africa, but the center of gravity has moved. If this pattern repeats across corridors and categories, the relationship that used to live in the bank app migrates to the wallet that controls the rail.
Adoption is compunding, beware!
Three forces are reinforcing each other. First, price and time, cross-border flows on stablecoin rails compress fees and latency, weekends and holidays are ordinary business hours, settlement is final in minutes, reconciliation is automatic. Second, usability, wallets have abstracted keys for mainstream users, merchants accept through QR or existing POS integrations, and refunds or chargebacks can be implemented with policy logic rather than phone calls and manual queues. Third, programmability, smart contracts make conditional payments trivial, a school can set fees to release when a child is confirmed on a register, a cooperative can run community savings with on-chain milestones, a marketplace can fund sellers just in time against verifiable orders. When money behaves like software, new routines become products, and those products attract more users, which, in turn, attract more merchants and partners. The flywheel is commercial, not ideological.
Where banks win, and where they are losing?
Banks still dominate trust, compliance, treasury, and corporate distribution. They issue cards at scale, manage liquidity, and understand regulated flows. Yet two pressure points are eroding that advantage. First, the consumer and SME front-end, wallets and super-apps are teaching customers to expect instant, dollar-denominated value they can spend anywhere, at any time. Second, the long tail of merchants and platforms, from township retail to cross-border e-commerce, is discovering that instant settlement, automated reconciliation, and programmable refunds reduce cost and operational pain in ways traditional rails struggle to match. A failure to provide stablecoin accounts, custody, and acceptance, others will, and the institution will be left with low-margin on- and off-ramps while value accrues to whoever orchestrates the journey.
Stablecoins are becoming a key differentiator
Treat stablecoins as cash and cash equivalents for the customer experience, with bank-grade controls underneath. Offer dollar and domestic stablecoin accounts in the same app that holds deposits, let customers fund, hold, pay, and convert with clear disclosures, real-time attestations, and a conservative liquidity posture. For merchants, enable acceptance that looks and feels like card, or QR, with instant settlement into either stablecoin balances or local currency, MDR that is meaningfully lower, automated refunds that mirror card rules where appropriate, and policy engines for limits, sanctions, and blacklists. For remittances, build corridor products that price in stablecoin settlement economics, share part of the savings, and own the post-receipt experience, bill pay, savings, micro-credit, and working capital against on-chain receivables. Differentiation comes from joining regulated trust with programmable rails, not from rehypothecating what wallets are already doing.
The economics are real
Reserve-backed payment stablecoins redefine a stack of interchange, scheme, correspondent, and reconciliation costs with near-instant settlement and atomic record keeping. For inbound corridors, time to cash drops from days to minutes, float windows shrink, fraud operations shift from ex-post dispute teams to ex-ante policy checks, and reconciliation moves from batch files to event streams. For merchant acquiring, a bank that can settle in hours, price below legacy MDR, and offer programmable refunds will win volumes from verticals that live on tight margins, groceries, fuel, quick service, informal retail. For corporate treasurers, cross-border payables and receivables with stablecoin in the middle reduce trapped cash and FX leakage. These gains do not require speculative yield, they come from compressing legacy frictions and redeploying capital faster.
Ah, yes, risk and compliance?
Stablecoin does not erase obligations, it heightens the need for real-time control. The model that works is perimeter first, not protocol first. Run bank-grade KYC for customers and merchants, enforce travel-rule compliance, implement screening on wallet creation and transfer, and design freeze, unfreeze, and recovery workflows that satisfy internal audit and external regulators. Custody must be industrial, with segregation of client assets, hardware security modules, multi-approver policies, and disaster recovery tested regularly. Treasury must publish attestation signals in near real time, manage conservative buffers for redemptions, and define circuit breakers for abnormal activity. On technology, support multiple chains for resilience, with a clear deprecation path and fee predictability for customers, and integrate tightly with existing rails, card, ACH, RTP, mobile money, so stablecoins sit behind familiar user journeys rather than forcing users into a new maze.
What does this mean then for remittances, merchants, and our grandmothers?
Back to London and Hammanskraal. The grandson funds from a UK bank into a bank wallet that offers USD stablecoins, he sends to a bank wallet in South Africa tied to his grandmother’s profile, the funds arrive in seconds, she sees a dollar balance and a rand balance, and she can spend at local merchants that accept through QR or a card-present flow with stablecoin settlement behind the scenes. If she wants cash, she taps cash-out to a participating retailer, if she wants to save, she taps dollar save with daily accrual aligned to underlying reserve yields, if she needs to pay school fees, the school receives a programmed payment that releases on confirmation. One relationship, one app, one institution responsible for safety and service, and a rail that collapses the distance between diaspora, household, and the local till. The differentiator is the end-to-end design, not a press release about a pilot.
Proliferation at the till
Merchants will not rebuild their stacks to accept a new currency, they will adopt acceptance that looks like what they already use, while settlement flips to stablecoin under the hood. There are two workable patterns.
Card plus stablecoin hybrid, the customer taps a network card, the issuer or wallet funds the settlement leg in stablecoin to the acquirer, the acquirer pays out in domestic currency or stablecoin according to merchant preference, MDR falls because interchange and cross-border components compress.
Or QR plus stablecoin, the merchant shows a code, the customer pays from a bank wallet, settlement is instant to the merchant’s bank wallet, reconciliation and refunds are automatic through smart contract hooks, and the merchant can sweep to fiat on a schedule. In both models, the merchant receives faster money, fewer chargebacks, and simpler books, the acquiring bank gains share by being the cheapest, fastest, safest path to cash.
Parting thoughts
The direction is visible. As customers learn they can move value instantly, at lower cost, with rules attached, they will prefer the providers who offer that experience safely and simply. In Africa, where remittances, cross-border trade, and informal retail sit at the heart of daily life, the shift will feel like a step change, not a novelty. Move now, build the rail, wrap it in controls, integrate it with the journeys customers already live, or watch those journeys settle somewhere else.
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