Lewison, Founder and CEO of PhotonPay, explains why the next phase of stablecoin adoption in B2B payments isn't about acceptance — it's about orchestration

CFOs running stablecoin payments almost never complain about collection. Acceptance, conversion, confirmation — that side works fine. What trips them up is what happens next: reconciling balances across wallets tied to different entities, tracking what converted at what rate, figuring out why a payout in one market can't be funded from a wallet sitting in another.

The Kansas City Fed found stablecoin payment activity is under 1% of total usage — most supply still sits idle or circulates inside crypto markets. PYMNTS Intelligence found the same gap from the demand side: more than four in ten middle-market firms have tested stablecoins, but only 13% report actual use.

So is it that businesses just don't need this? I don't think so.

Enabling stablecoin collection is only the first step in a longer chain of capital decisions. Say a finance team collects $2 million in USDT from a supplier in São Paulo. Convert to reais now, or wait for a better rate? Hold the balance, or move it to cover payroll in Manila next week? What's the real FX cost once the spread and the settlement-timing gap are counted in? None of that gets answered by the tool that took the payment — collection and treasury are different problems, and a gateway built for the first one was never built for the second.

Four maps, and most finance teams don't have all of them

I think about a company's finances the way practitioners do: not as one pool of money, but as four maps that have to be maintained at once.

1. Money map — where the funds actually sit. Broken out by entity, account, currency, fund type. That $2 million in USDT sitting in the São Paulo wallet isn't the same as $2 million in reais sitting in a different account, even though the number on screen matches.
2. Flow map — where it's headed next, and when. Which supplier payments are due this week, which market is about to run short on cash, how that new USDT receipt fits into the picture.
3. Decision map — how it should get there. Convert now, or hold and see if the rate improves? Which chain, which rail, which settlement path actually gets there for less.
4. Permission map — what's even allowed to move. Crypto rules aren't the same from market to market, and shifting stablecoins between your own entities can trip transfer-pricing rules you didn't know applied.

The gap between these four maps and a spreadsheet is the gap between accepting stablecoins and actually running them.

The costs that never show up on an invoice

A wire fee shows up on a bank statement. The cost of a badly timed conversion doesn't — it lives in the spread between the rate received and the rate a better-timed transfer would have gotten. Multiply that across dozens of conversions a month, across currencies, and the total is material but invisible to any single line item. The hours spent reconciling balances by hand, or chasing a failed payout, don't show up either.

Making these costs visible is usually what turns a stablecoin pilot into a program.

Maturity here is uneven, and that's fine

That's the story from inside a company trying to expand globally. Look at it as a payments company ourselves, and the picture doesn't get any tidier. Maturity across the industry is just as uneven.

Some companies are still running treasury on spreadsheets and daily forecasts. A handful of leading PSPs, banks, and large multinationals have pushed forecasting down to hourly, or finer, granularity, wired directly into FX, liquidity, and execution. JPMorgan's Kinexys is a visible example: corporate treasurers there are now rebalancing liquidity across hubs like London, New York, and Singapore in near real time. Most enterprises sit well short of that.

That's not a criticism. It's just where the category actually is in 2026.

What we built at PhotonPay

Here's what we built.

On the payment side, a business collects payment in one of 19+ local currencies or a major stablecoin, and the balance sits in a single multi-asset wallet rather than getting force-converted the moment it lands. That matters for businesses whose partners, especially in emerging markets, want to settle in stablecoins. They don't have to sit on stablecoin exposure any longer than they want to, because conversion happens inside PhotonPay on their own timeline, not ours.

From there, they decide whether to settle out through our payment network, spanning 200+ countries and regions, hold the balance, or move it somewhere else in the operation.

Batch payment tools and automated reconciliation connect all of this directly into the rest of the financial operation, instead of leaving it in a separate system finance has to reconcile by hand at month-end.

On compliance, we hold more than 20 financial licenses and regulatory authorizations across key markets. SOC 2 Type I certification, Travel Rule enforcement, transaction screening, and data protection apply consistently across every market we operate in.

That matters for enterprises entering new markets, or working with partners whose regulatory environment is still evolving.

The questions worth asking any vendor

That's our version of it. But whichever vendor a business is evaluating, the questions worth asking are the same.

Most of the market conversation is still on the front end: which assets get accepted, how fast they convert, what the fee is. Fair questions, early ones. The ones that actually determine whether stablecoin infrastructure delivers at scale:

• Can it show, in real time, where stablecoin balances sit across every entity and wallet, and which are actually available to use?
• Can it execute conversions and cross-entity movements on its own, with screening and approval limits enforced automatically, instead of someone checking every routine transfer by hand?
• Can it reconcile automatically against the ledger?

If the answer to most of these is no, what's in place is a gateway. Maybe a good one. Just not infrastructure.

Global B2B payments are heading toward higher volumes, more markets, more complexity, and businesses running on gateway-level infrastructure will hit that ceiling right as scale starts compounding the problem.

Stablecoin orchestration isn't a fancier version of stablecoin acceptance. It's a different problem, and one more of us in this industry will need to solve as stablecoin volumes in cross-border payments keep climbing.

About the author

Lewison is the Founder and CEO of PhotonPay, a stablecoin-powered financial operating system built for global enterprises, enabling businesses to send, receive, convert, and settle funds across both fiat and stablecoin rails through a single, compliance-first integration, spanning 200+ countries and territories.

For more information, visit www.photonpay.com.

Disclaimer

This material is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, or investment advice, nor an offer or solicitation for any product or service. The availability, features, and regulatory treatment of PhotonPay's products and services may vary depending on the user's location, business model, and the laws and regulations that apply. Any descriptions of functionality, performance, efficiency, cost savings, or compliance support (including, without limitation, references to "real-time," "24/7," "high-efficiency," or "compliant" solutions) are aspirational or forward-looking in nature. Actual outcomes may differ due to market conditions, technological constraints, and regulatory developments, and PhotonPay makes no express or implied representation, warranty, or guarantee as to the achievement of any particular result.