There’s a number I keep coming back to: US$500 billion. That’s how much trade flows annually between China and Latin America, according to ECLAC. And it’s growing.
Yet, when a Latin American importer needs to pay a supplier in Asia, the money still travels through three to five corresponding banks, losing up to 10% along the way, and takes days to arrive. Not because the technology doesn’t exist to do better. Because the financial systems were never designed to talk to each other.
We’ve spent years building infrastructure that connects people instantly across continents. A video call from Buenos Aires to Shanghai takes seconds. The financial layer underneath that same trade relationship is still running on rails built in a different era.
I’ve spent the last few years working in exactly this corridor. What I’ve learned is that the problem isn’t a lack of tools. Asia runs on super-apps like WeChat Pay and Alipay that handle the overwhelming majority of domestic payments in China. Latin America has SPEI, Pix, BRE-B. Both regions have solved payments within their own borders. Neither was built to talk to the other. That’s the gap stablecoins are quietly filling — not by replacing those systems, but by connecting them.
The 14-hour time zone gap makes this worse than it sounds. When banks in Latin America close, the trading day in Asia is just beginning. Settlement waits. Capital sits idle.
Treasury teams compensate by parking money in foreign accounts days before an invoice arrives — holding buffers they wouldn’t need if the system worked. It’s a tax on every transaction. Large multinationals absorb it quietly because they’ve built correspondent banking relationships over decades. The companies that can’t are the ones growing fastest: mid-sized exporters moving into new markets, logistics providers adding Asian suppliers, digital platforms trying to pay contractors across six time zones at once. For them, a three-day settlement delay isn’t a line item — it’s a constraint on how fast they can operate.
What’s shifted in 2026 isn’t the underlying technology. Those rails have been maturing for years. What changed is the regulatory environment.
In the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and Singapore, frameworks now exist that distinguish between speculative digital assets and stablecoins designed specifically for payment and treasury use. That might sound like a technical detail, but it changes everything downstream. When a stablecoin is classified as a regulated payment instrument, it stops being something a CFO has to explain to the board and starts being something the treasury team can actually build around.
In practice: Settlement costs that used to average 5% are coming down to under 1%. Payments that took days now settle in seconds. We’re seeing a 40% increase in after-hours settlement volumes in the first half of this year, because companies are no longer constrained by banking hours that weren’t designed for a corridor spanning 14 time zones. They move capital when they need it, not days before, just in case.
That’s not a marginal efficiency gain. It’s a different way of thinking about working capital entirely.
The harder question isn’t whether this works. It’s how you build governance around it seriously — and this is where I see the biggest gap between companies genuinely integrating stablecoins and those running a permanent pilot.
The ones getting real results made a governance decision before a technology decision. Clear treasury policies. Compliance built into transaction flows from the start, not reviewed at the end. Risk frameworks that actually reflect the jurisdictions involved, because a payment corridor touching Mexico, the United States, and Hong Kong carries regulatory surface area that can’t be managed as an afterthought.
At VelaFi, compliance is where we start, not where we finish. Without that foundation, stablecoins stay a workaround that someone in treasury manages manually. With it, they become infrastructure. And the clearest sign that something has become real infrastructure is how unremarkable it gets once it’s running well.
The companies moving the fastest aren’t doing it because it’s interesting. They’re doing it because their margins depend on it — and because waiting for traditional systems to catch up is itself a decision with a cost.
US$500 billion in trade between two regions whose financial systems were never meant to speak to each other — that’s not a technology problem anymore. It’s a governance problem. And the organizations that figured that out first are already operating differently.
