Don’t put your head in the sand: Stablecoin adoption is not going away

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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with Chanal Subramoney, senior group compliance manager at Yellow Card. Chanal, I appreciate the early morning time. In many ways, 2025 really was a year of inflection for stablecoins.

We had the Genius [Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins] Act passed in … We’ve seen the likes of Visa, JP Morgan and even Swift getting involved or in the process of doing so, and significant volumes going through. There really are real world uses and 2025 kind of proved this for us.

CHANAL SUBRAMONEY: Yes, Simon, thank you so much for having me. What you’ve just said speaks volumes. Stablecoin adoption is actually increasing, and I’m not even referring to crypto firms. I’m referring to these traditional finance giants, the likes of Visa that you’ve mentioned. They are using stablecoins for payment settlements now.

Looking at Swift, they have long been the primary vehicle for effecting correspondent banking payments. And now they are beginning to build this infrastructure into their existing financial reels.

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SIMON BROWN: It really is so. That’s just it. It’s sort of entering the traditional global financial systems. A lot of this is around inefficiencies that exist, particularly in cross-border payments, and the slow settlements, the fees, the volatilities. The point here is this is not around speculating with these stablecoins. This is just around making transactions easier.

CHANAL SUBRAMONEY: 100%. To me this signifies solid evidence of a structural realignment within these traditional financial institutions because these are deliberate infrastructure decisions that they’re making.

It’s within these organisations – they’ve been submerged in these rigorous risk-governance frameworks. They’ve had regulatory relationships that spanned decades, and they don’t usually tolerate, like you’re saying, these speculative risk exposures.

SIMON BROWN: I take your point on that. This is doing it. We have regulation. So Africa is a little bit behind but it’s coming. We have the infrastructure. There is compliance and the trust involved.

This isn’t a sort of fly-by-night. This is the real thing that’s happening in businesses’ implementing.

CHANAL SUBRAMONEY: Absolutely. Touching on the policies, our local regulators, there’s a lot happening. There’s a lot of shift happening in terms of policies being formulated or even revised to incorporate the stablecoin adoption.

We’ve got Excon [exchange control] regulations coming soon, the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework that’s just gone live this month for our tax obligations. And then our local regulators are also incorporating specific stablecoin regulations as well. So it’s an exciting space to be in.

SIMON BROWN: And for business in particular and obviously big, mid and small business. This isn’t around saying, well, ‘We will replace banks’. This is around having plans and strategies in place that bring stablecoins into your process and into your business.

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CHANAL SUBRAMONEY: 100%. Your stablecoin strategy – I’m going to say this very brashly – is that if businesses don’t adopt or even haven’t considered developing a stablecoin strategy, they are accumulating what I like to call ‘optionality risk’ in silence by not acting now, because the strategy, if you’re not going to implement it, is going to cost you.

There are a lot of things you need to consider in the strategy. For example, whom do you choose to partner with in terms of on-and-off ramping the fiat and the stablecoins? Which jurisdictions do you want to operate in – and do those partners operate in those jurisdictions to create operational efficiency for your businesses?

And then you’ve got to also think about enhancing your existing compliance frameworks for stablecoin adoption.

So, to stall these kinds of decisions can be critical and can be very expensive, Simon.

SIMON BROWN: I get your point. Doing nothing is not just going to sort of go away. It is just going to continue and leave you behind – for many of the institutions. This is, I imagine, quite complex. I can’t imagine when last we sort of onboarded a new currency, which is technically what we’re kind of doing here. There is complexity. Your point is, don’t put your head in the sand because it’s not going away.

CHANAL SUBRAMONEY: Yes, absolutely. It is not going away. With the move of these traditional finance giants, they are actually shifting economic behaviour. Cross-border payments historically were inefficient. You mentioned earlier that they are slow settlement windows [with] high correspondent banking fees.

What we like to analyse in terms of this situation is – let’s look at a practical example. Your company is doing business in 10 different countries. Your capital is what we like to call ‘trapped capital’ because the liquidity is siloed in these 10 different local banks, for example. And then the funds could be sitting in different currencies.

Read: This is the best time in years to buy USD

Now stablecoins allow your business to maintain a single global liquidity pool on chain. So instead of prefunding multiple accounts to handle local payments, you can have a Treasury team that can hold a central reserve of USD-backed stablecoins, and then you can deploy them to any market instantly, as and when you need.

SIMON BROWN: It actually ends up making your Treasury team significantly more efficient as a result. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a brilliant example.

We’ll leave it there. Chanel Subramoney, group senior compliance manager at Yellow Card, I appreciate the time this morning.

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