Stablecoins, the once-in-a-lifetime shift in payments

The Paypers sat down with Eric Barbier, Founder and CEO of Triple-A, to discuss the potential and future of stablecoins and how they stand to revolutionise the payments world.

 

Stablecoins are deemed to be the bridge between traditional finance and digital assets. How do you see stablecoins transforming cross-border payment flows compared to traditional methods?

I believe stablecoins represent a once-in-a-lifetime shift in payments.

Cross-border infrastructure still runs on decades-old architecture: multiple intermediaries, cut-off times, prefunding, fraud risks, and foreign exchange friction. It works, but it’s inefficient by design.

When I first discovered stablecoins, I immediately saw how many of these long-standing issues they could address.

Take chargebacks. In certain markets, fraud and disputes from card payments are a constant burden for merchants. With blockchain-based payments, once a transaction is confirmed, it cannot simply be reversed. That fundamentally changes the risk equation.

Then, there’s liquidity. Traditionally, you must park capital across multiple markets and prefund local partners. When banks close for holidays or operations slow down, flows get stuck. Stablecoins allow liquidity to move and rebalance in near real time.

In many corridors where card economics are expensive and unreliable, stablecoins offer a more cost-efficient structure.

Among the key concerns, volatility and regulatory uncertainty remain high. What developments are crucial for stablecoins to gain broader trust for both businesses and financial institutions?

Trust ultimately comes down to predictability.

Businesses don’t want crypto exposure, nor are they looking to hold digital assets or manage volatility. They just want payments to work. If you remove that volatility by instantly converting into fiat, stablecoins stop being about crypto and start being about infrastructure.

That’s an important shift. Companies should be able to access payment rails without changing their balance sheet strategy.

A second pillar is regulation. From the beginning, I was clear that Triple-A had to be a financial institution first. Large enterprises and banks need clarity around reserves, redemption mechanisms, anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, and reporting standards. Without that clarity, adoption stays niche.

We’re seeing more regulatory clarity now in key markets, which is a healthy development. As regulatory frameworks mature, institutional confidence follows. Stablecoins scale when they operate under the same standards as any other regulated payment instrument.

What are the main benefits brought by stablecoins for cross-border transactions, from an infrastructure perspective?

The biggest problem in cross-border payments is fragmentation. You’re connecting multiple domestic systems, each with its own rules, timelines, and intermediaries. It’s intrinsically complex.

Stablecoins introduce a much cleaner settlement layer. Value moves across a standardised network that operates 24/7. There are no banking cut-off times, no weekend pauses, and no reliance on long correspondent banking chains. That fundamentally changes how global liquidity can be managed.

Stablecoins also simplify the transaction architecture. Fewer intermediaries mean fewer operational breakdowns, lower fees, and less complexity in reconciliations. When liquidity moves in near real time and settlement is more resilient, the entire cross-border model becomes more capital-efficient.

From an infrastructure standpoint, it simplifies how value moves internationally.

With growing adoption, what can companies such as Triple-A do to improve stablecoin-based payments experience for merchants and end users?

Most merchants don’t want to become crypto companies. They don’t want to manage wallets, private keys, or blockchain compliance. They want higher acceptance rates, faster settlements, and lower overall payment costs.

Our role is to remove that operational burden. Merchants should be able to accept stablecoins and settle directly in local currency within a regulated framework, with full compliance and transparent reporting – without introducing digital asset exposure to their balance sheet.

This simplicity cannot stop at just acceptance; it must extend to payouts as well. Whether paying suppliers, marketplaces settling with sellers, or exporters receiving funds from overseas buyers, businesses should be able to seamlessly move between stablecoins and fiat across borders.

That’s why integration is critical. Stablecoins shouldn’t force companies to redesign their payment infrastructure. They need to fit naturally into existing systems and processes in a way that feels incremental rather than disruptive.

The good thing is that we’re seeing increasing adoption on the end-user side. Stablecoin ownership is steadily growing. For many customers – particularly in cross-border or digital-native segments – it is already a popular way to pay.

The experience must be fast, clear, and reliable for both companies and end users. When that balance is achieved, stablecoins become just another payment rail within global commerce, rather than a separate world.

Looking to the future, what role will stablecoins play in global commerce and cross-border interoperability and connectivity?

I see stablecoins becoming a structural layer of global payments.

They won’t replace banks or payment networks like Visa, Mastercard, or SWIFT. But they introduce a fundamentally different rail – always on, programmable, and globally accessible.

Their strongest impact will be on cross-border trade and emerging markets, where access to US dollars and efficient banking remains constrained. Stablecoins address a very practical need in those regions by enabling faster and easier value transfer across borders.

Over time, I believe stablecoins could represent 10–20% of global cross-border payments.

Stablecoins are not a revolution to replace the system, but rather one that reshapes it.

This article/interview is part of the The Paypers` Money Movement in 2026: Trends in AI, Payments & Regulation Newsletter, a source of expert insights on the forces reshaping fintech, payments, and banking, covering fraud and financial crime, AI in fraud prevention and risk intelligence, real-time and cross-border payments, European payments sovereignty and the future of instant rails, stablecoins, agentic commerce, compliance and the evolving regulatory landscape, payments fragmentation driven by geopolitics and regulation, infrastructure bottlenecks in banking modernisation, the shift from generic scale to verticalised, value-added payment models, and digital wallets changing consumer payment behaviour – delivering a clear, data-backed view of what will shape strategy and innovation in 2026 and beyond.

Explore the other contributions in this Money Movement in 2026: Trends in AI, Payments & Regulation Newsletter series for more expert insights:

• Bizum - European instant payments: sovereignty and cross-border interoperability
• McKinsey - Payments in transition: the forces shaping the future of global money movement
• Oliver Wyman - Navigating the future: how agentic commerce is redefining payments
• UniCredit - Navigating regulatory change: compliance and the future of digital payments
• Unlimit - Why the future of digital wallets depends on interoperability at scale
• ACI Worldwide - Global orchestration for a real‑time, APM‑driven payments era
• The Paypers - 2026 fraud forecast: AI, deepfakes, and rising cybercrime risks

About the interviewee

Eric Barbier is the Founder and CEO of Triple-A, a globally licenced payments institution specialising in stablecoin-based payment infrastructure. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years’ experience in mobile and payments, he previously founded and scaled Mobile 365 (acquired by SAP) and the cross-border payments platform TransferTo (now Thunes and DTOne).

 

 

About the company

Triple-A is a globally licenced financial institution that enables businesses to send, receive, and convert money through a unified platform that connects traditional banking rails with stablecoin infrastructure. Regulated in Singapore, the US, and Europe, Triple-A delivers compliant, real-time cross-border payments without requiring merchants to hold or manage cryptocurrencies directly.