Brex will begin accepting stablecoin payments on its platform in coming months, the company announced Tuesday.
Customers with a Brex business account can then accept stablecoins — starting with Circle Internet Group’s USDC — as payment, with automatic conversion into dollars, and to send stablecoins from their fiat balances. Customers will also be able to pay card balances with USDC. A Brex spokesperson said the company plans to include other stablecoins for balance payments in the future.
Brex joins a spate of companies throwing resources behind the growing adoption of stablecoins, likely spurred by the passage of the Genius Act, the first federal legislation to offer a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency.
Several companies, including Fiserv and PayPal, have launched their own stablecoins; Stripe unveiled a platform Tuesday for businesses to develop their own stablecoins, born out of Bridge, which Stripe acquired last year.
In launching its financial platform to manage both traditional and stablecoin-backed spend, San Francisco-based Brex is looking to differentiate itself from other institutional payment platforms.
“We’re obsessed with making sure that we own our infrastructure so that we can actually be innovative on payments,” Brex Executive Vice President of Finance Erica Dorfman said Tuesday in an interview. “With stablecoin, it’s an opportunity for us to lean into the newest innovation around payment rails and how you can have 24/7 payment and really the next wave of what is happening in financial services.”
While other firms, like Mastercard and MoonPay, have launched stablecoin-backed debit cards, and Ramp and Stripe launched a stablecoin-backed charge card in May, Brex calls itself the first to launch a credit card that enables stablecoin payments.
“From a customer value proposition, when you think about a debit card, it requires you to immediately reduce the balance of your account by that amount,” Dorfman said. “But there's real value to businesses operating on a charge card or on a credit card, where they have a statement at the end of the month, and they like to reconcile the single payment.
“Of course, you can pay us at any time, but customers like the concept of having a statement and managing that out of the credit framework,” she said. “To be able to offer this with stablecoin is pretty innovative and, I think, solves the sort of multiple needs of our customers.”
The payments offering positions Brex to better support crypto-native companies, as well as firms new to the digital asset space. While the demand for the stablecoin product is currently coming from businesses in the crypto and stablecoin spaces, Dorfman said she expects stablecoins to “continue to be a growing component of how individuals and businesses move money.”
Digital asset firms Figure, Solana and Alchemy are Brex customers, each of which has signed up to accept stablecoins as payment when the platform is live.
“Brex’s stablecoin payments bring that vision to enterprises, allowing companies like ours to move millions instantly across borders, combining the speed of crypto with the safeguards global businesses need,” Figure CEO Michael Tannenbaum, who serves on Brex’s board, said in a prepared statement.
