A customer wants to pay in USDT. The business prefers USDC. Its supplier needs dollars in a bank account. Making those preferences work together is where stablecoin payments get interesting for businesses.
Following our interview on Visa’s stablecoin settlement infrastructure, Coinspaid Media spoke with Wesley Rios, who leads US and Latin American partnerships at Morph. He brings more than 15 years of payments experience, including roles at Mastercard, J.P. Morgan, and Citi.
We discussed how businesses choose stablecoins, what happens when payments reach the banking system, and how much freedom companies should give AI agents handling their money.
Why Businesses Accept Multiple Stablecoins
Allium’s Q3 report shows us that more stablecoin issuers compete for distribution, including companies developing their own branded coins. For a business trying to decide what to accept, that creates more choices.
In your conversations across the US and Latin America, what’s actually pushing businesses to accept a second or third stablecoin?
That’s still an open question. You can see different finance experts trying to predict what the future is going to be. Are we going to have a long tail of stablecoins, or are we going to have consolidation around the ones that have the most liquidity?
I would say stablecoins are not all the same. One size doesn’t fit all. Let’s start with that.
They might have different uses. If you’re a company like MoneyGram, you might be thinking, “Why don’t I issue my own stablecoin?” MoneyGram is in the business of moving money across so many different markets and countries. There’s a use within its own business: how do you move from country A to country B and make settlement easier?
So they’re looking at, “How can I make my business operation more efficient? Can I do that by issuing my own stablecoin?” That’s one scenario.
The other scenario is a small business owner who wants access to digital dollars. They need to make sure they use a stablecoin that has the strongest network effect and the most liquidity.
In the Global South, including Latin America, USDT is more prevalent. It has adoption, the network effect, and people know it. They want to do business and receive and make payments using USDT.
Then you have USDC, which is much more aligned with the GENIUS Act and has more appeal for US players. It resonates better with them.
I think there will be many different stablecoins for different uses. For consumer payments or small businesses, you’ll adopt the ones that have the most liquidity and concentration. I would say USDT is number one, and then you have USDC. But there will always be stablecoins specialised for a specific use case.
You have companies like MoneyGram and Western Union, and PayPal has its own stablecoin. There’s always going to be a long tail, but I think payment usage will be concentrated among one or two that have the most liquidity. At the end of the day, you need liquidity to make money movement efficient across counterparties.
So let’s look at that from the business owner’s side. Their customers might hold different stablecoins on different networks, while the business has its own preference for how it gets paid.
Does giving customers those options mean the business needs to hold and manage several stablecoins?
In our case, the way we designed our platform is to focus on the ones that have the most concentration. We enable USDT and USDC because that’s, I would say, over 90% of the issuance market for digital-dollar stablecoins.
The ability to make and collect payments in USDC and USDT covers most of the use cases for the small business owners we’re focused on.
But this is the thing: your payment platform should abstract all the complexity away from the business owner.
As a business owner, I might say, “I prefer to receive USDC, and I want to receive it on Base.” But I also want to give my clients as many options as possible.
I can say, “You can pay me in USDT or USDC across these different Ethereum-compatible networks. Pick your preferred way to pay, based on where your money is today.” Then the platform itself handles that, and I receive USDC on Base.
There’s a need to make it easier for a business to give clients the option to pay where they have their money today. If they’re using USDT on Ethereum, they can pay with that. If they’re using USDC on Base, they can pay with that.
If I want to receive USDC on Base, all of that should be handled for me. I don’t even need to think about it. All I want to think about is running my business and making it easier for my clients to pay.
Stablecoin Payments For Invoices and Online Checkout
The payment itself can look quite different depending on the business. A small online purchase and a $50,000 supplier payment involve different amounts, but also different steps before and after the money moves.
How does that change what businesses need from a stablecoin payment platform?
Right, so there are different workflows. For a $50,000 payment collection, you’re looking at invoicing and the ability to automate that workflow as much as possible. It’s a different profile.
Think about the small businesses we’re going after. One is a Web3 marketing agency dealing with clients across different markets. It wants to collect payments from those clients without having a banking relationship in every country.
The agency might say, “I’m based in Brazil, and I can help you run a marketing campaign here, but I know you’re in the UK. You can pay me with USDC or USDT, and I can provide an invoice.”
Maybe it’s a $5,000 invoice, and I can use Morph Payments to automate that workflow. I generate the invoice and a payment link, then send that link to the client by email.
The client can say, “I want to pay with the USDC I have on Base.” The process is automated, and I receive that money in my account in near real time. That’s one workflow.
Now, what if I’m an e-commerce business selling digital goods? One of our clients sells digital memberships that allow people to participate in entertainment prediction markets. These are markets around culture, such as which movie is going to be successful. They sell a digital pass so people can enter the ecosystem.
That’s a different collection workflow: a checkout experience. They can integrate our APIs to automate it. Their clients can buy a $5 digital pass using USDC or USDT, whichever they prefer, as part of that checkout experience.
Everything is handled through the integration with Morph Payments. It’s a different type of merchant: a digital e-commerce website giving its clients the option to pay with stablecoins automatically.
In those examples, the customer already has stablecoins. But plenty of businesses still expect to receive an invoice and pay it from their usual bank account.
What if the business wants to receive stablecoins, but its customers don’t want to use them?
We have consulting firms in that situation. I work closely with a client based in Brazil that carries out consulting projects across Latin America. Its customers are based in the US, and they don’t have stablecoins or want to pay using them. They want to use existing banking routes.
So we need to give them the ability to receive that money using the payment methods their customers already have in the US, and automatically convert it into stablecoins behind the scenes.
The invoice and collection process stays the same from the US customer’s perspective. They’re not making any changes or trying to figure out how to get stablecoins.
They’re paying in USD, and we do the conversion behind the scenes so our client can receive stablecoins.
There are different use cases and business profiles. We’re trying to give them as much choice as possible so they can complete their workflow, collect payments, and focus on delivering the service to their clients.
24/7 Stablecoin Settlement: Bank Payouts and Business Liquidity
One of the big selling points of stablecoin payments is that they’re available around the clock. But say a Brazilian business needs to pay a US supplier on Saturday, and that supplier needs to use the money that day.
Where can a delay still happen between sending the stablecoin and receiving spendable funds?
A couple of things here. One of the things about blockchain technology is that you have a unified ledger that allows instant settlement. I think the perfect product-market fit is when you digitise the dollar on a blockchain.
That’s the concept of stablecoins: instant settlement, 24/7 availability, and global reach.
The challenge comes when you have to do what we call the last mile: moving between stablecoins and traditional money.
Does the business need to receive fiat in its existing bank account? Or does it already run most of its operations on-chain without needing to convert the stablecoins on the receiving end?
If I’m paying a vendor in the US and they’re using USDC, we’re staying entirely in stablecoins, and they can receive the money right away.
The challenge is whether they need to use that money over the weekend and receive it in their bank account on Saturday or Sunday. That’s the off-ramp component, where I think most of the friction is today.
You can settle on-chain instantly, but the last mile depends on the country, its banking system, and the payment methods available there.
In Brazil, for example, we have Pix, a real-time domestic payment system. That makes it much easier to move between stablecoins and traditional money.
If you’re in the US and using ACH, you might be looking at anywhere from one to three days because you have to follow that payment system.
It varies by country. The on-ramp and off-ramp are, I would say, the unknown when you’re trying to promise that someone will get their money instantly. If you stay within stablecoins, you have that instant settlement.
You mentioned continuous settlement, which is something we also discussed with Andranik Mnatsakanyan from Visa: how it changes liquidity management. For a smaller business, that comes down to knowing what money is available and what needs to be kept aside.
How does this work in practice? How much cash does a merchant still need to keep available?
That goes back to the type of business the merchant owns.
If you’re operating entirely in stablecoins, you can see how much cash is coming in and going out, and manage everything from one central wallet. That’s one of the things Morph Payments does.
Let me take a step back. What blockchain enables is for small operators to access financial services that were previously limited to big banks and corporations.
Those players have their own treasury teams, banking relationships across different markets, and people looking day in and day out at the cash flow: how much money is coming in and how much is going out across those markets.
A small business owner can now access those payment services without having a treasury team or banking relationships across multiple markets. In your own wallet, you can see in real time what’s coming in, what’s going out, and the difference between the two.
If you have excess cash, you can potentially put that to work generating yield through decentralised finance, or DeFi. If you need working capital, you can try to source that yourself. It gives the small business owner real-time visibility.
Now, if that business also runs on traditional payment systems and needs to know how much cash it requires for bank payouts, that’s a different conversation.
You’re running two models: stablecoins on-chain, and cash in an existing bank account. Whenever you use traditional payment systems, you have to accommodate how long it takes to move money.
You have delays in settlement because you’re going through batch processing or correspondent banking. That’s a completely different animal.
Our goal is to empower businesses operating entirely in stablecoins to run as efficiently as possible. That’s one of the key areas for us.
How much cash a merchant should keep is an open-ended question. It’s driven by the business model, the clients it serves, the number of markets it operates in, and how reliant it still is on traditional payment systems.
Has it migrated entirely to stablecoins to manage working capital and treasury, or does it still need those traditional routes?
Self-Custody and Control Over Business Payment Funds
We’ve talked about making payments easier, but there’s also the question of managing risk. Mastercard recently announced Stablecoin Security, combining payment intelligence and blockchain analytics to help financial institutions identify fraud, scams, and sanctions risks.
Looking at the business owner’s side, which responsibilities stay with them in Morph’s model, even when the platform handles much of the complexity?
One of the key things is that the model we have right now with Morph Payments is self-custodial. That’s important because it gives a small business owner a wallet that is entirely under their responsibility.
Whenever money lands in that wallet, it doesn’t sit with us or anyone else. They don’t need to ask our permission to move it. They have full ownership of that wallet.
What we simplify is key management and security. You don’t need to memorise a private key to access your non-custodial wallet. You can use social logins and the latest wallet technology without dealing with the complexity of the blockchain.
But it’s up to the business owner to manage that login and authorise transactions in and out of the wallet. They have to be thoughtful and careful about protecting those credentials, because that’s how they move money.
With that empowerment comes responsibility. Our job is to simplify the complexity of security and give them a familiar experience. But they have to make sure they’re protecting their credentials.
The other thing is that, because it’s non-custodial, we’re not asking them to go through an application process to have a non-custodial wallet. They can open one on their own.
We don’t have custody of those funds, and we don’t control them. Everything is owned by the business owner or account owner. That gives us flexibility in how we offer it to people who need to make payments.
AI Agents and Stablecoin Payments: Automation and Spending Controls
That question of control also comes up with AI agents. Recent payment data has shown more agent transactions alongside lower transaction values, which makes it useful to look at what those agents are actually doing.
Among the requests reaching Morph, where are businesses seeing a recurring need for AI-initiated payments?
That’s a good point. As the number of agentic transactions increases and the value per transaction reduces, what I’m thinking about is automation. People are automating a lot of tasks and workflows.
What we hear from merchants is, “How can you make sure your platform is AI-enabled so I can automate the workflow as much as possible and focus on running my business? I don’t want to manage all those different workflows myself.”
From an agentic perspective, we want to help businesses use the AI tools they have to make payments, receive payments, and automate their workflows as much as possible.
That’s where we’re focused, and that’s the demand we hear from merchants.
They’re saying, “AI is here to help me run my business. I need it to be able to tap into Morph Payments so it can run those workflows for me.”
Business process automation is where we see the opportunity.
Let’s connect that back to the choice of stablecoin and network. If an agent is handling a payment, it might encounter a route that’s more expensive or less available than expected.
Should it be allowed to switch stablecoins or networks to complete an approved payment?
I think AI should be empowered to the point that the business owner feels comfortable. Every transaction needs the right delegation profile and a clear scope for what the agent is allowed to do.
Those controls need to be in place because you don’t want to give an agent a blank cheque to do whatever it wants.
You want to make the scope specific to the part of your workflow you’re trying to automate. You need to control it in as much detail as possible so you don’t have a surprise at the end of the day.
AI agents are very powerful tools. But when it comes to moving real money, you want as much control as possible, and you want to limit the scope as much as possible.
Before we wrap up, you’ve described the demand you’re hearing from merchants and the controls you think they need.
Are you planning to implement those agentic workflows in Morph?
We’re very responsive to what our clients are asking. We’ve heard from many different small business owners that they want to automate their payment and collection workflows.
The question is how we enable them to do that using AI in a way that is safe and controllable. That’s something we’re exploring.
Right now, we don’t have anything clear on that front in our roadmap yet, but it’s definitely a demand we’re seeing from merchants.
Rios keeps returning to the business’s actual workflow: how customers pay, where the money needs to arrive, and who can authorise its movement. Faster settlement helps when the rest of that process works too. His view of AI payments follows the same logic: give software a useful job, define its permissions, and keep the business owner in control.
