The cross-border payments industry just took a decisive step towards stablecoin-native infrastructure. On 31 March, Convera — the $190 billion-a-year payments giant spun out of Western Union Business Solutions — announced a strategic partnership with Ripple to deliver stablecoin-enabled settlement across 200 countries and 140 currencies. For any fintech developer or crypto developer working on payment infrastructure in the UK and beyond, this is a signal that traditional rails and blockchain settlement are converging faster than most predicted.
How the Stablecoin Sandwich Works for Payment Developers
The architecture behind this partnership follows what the industry calls the "stablecoin sandwich" model — a pattern every payment developer should understand.
The flow is straightforward:
- On-ramp (fiat in): A business initiates a cross-border payment in their local currency — GBP, EUR, USD — through Convera's existing platform.
- Settlement layer (stablecoin middle): Instead of routing through correspondent banks, the payment is converted into a regulated stablecoin — in this case, Ripple's RLUSD, a USD-backed token issued on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. Settlement completes in seconds rather than days.
- Off-ramp (fiat out): At the destination, the stablecoin is converted back to the recipient's local currency and deposited into their account. The recipient may never know stablecoins were involved.
The beauty of this model is that it collapses the traditional multi-hop correspondent banking chain into a single digital settlement layer. No nostro/vostro accounts draining liquidity. No weekend blackouts. No value drift during transit.
From an engineering perspective, this is essentially an abstraction layer — fiat interfaces on both ends, with deterministic blockchain settlement in the middle. If you have built payment orchestration systems, you will recognise the pattern: swap the unreliable middle for something faster and more predictable.
Why This Partnership Matters at Scale
Convera is not a startup experimenting with crypto. The company processes roughly $190 billion in annual transaction volume, serves 30,000+ customers across 200 countries, and employs over 2,100 people. When a company of this scale integrates stablecoin settlement, it validates the technology for the entire B2B payments sector.
The numbers backing this shift are compelling:
- $34 trillion in global stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 — surpassing Visa and Mastercard combined
- 3% of all US dollar payments expected to flow through stablecoins in 2026, rising to 10% by 2031
- 88% of firms receiving stablecoins immediately convert them back to fiat — confirming that stablecoins are being used as rails, not as assets to hold
- RLUSD has surpassed $1 billion in circulation within its first year, with HSBC now testing cross-border settlement workflows
Read the full article on tomcn.uk →
About the Author
I'm Tom Wang, a Founding Engineer at Radom building crypto payment infrastructure, Open Banking integrations, and cross-border payout systems with Rust and Go. Based in London, UK.
Currently open to new opportunities in fintech, crypto payments, and AI agent engineering.
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