Twenty years ago, sending money across borders was a painful experience. It meant physically going to a bank, verifying your ID, and then waiting days, sometimes weeks, for the payment to clear, while losing a chunk of the money to opaque fees and bad exchange rates.

Fast forward to today, and not much has changed. The interface has shifted from a bank teller window to a mobile app, but the underlying infrastructure remains slow, opaque, and exclusionary.

Meanwhile, global demand for cross-border payments is exploding. Remittances are projected to hit $930 billion by next year, while global e-commerce sales are set to grow by 25% this year alone. Simultaneously, the expanding gig economy, with over 150 million freelancers across the U.S. and Europe, has exacerbated the demand for fast and reliable international payouts. 

While the Internet revolutionised communication through Email and WhatsApp, payments remain stuck in the dial-up era, failing to keep up with the needs of a truly global society.

Stablecoins offer a way out. 

By enabling direct, peer-to-peer payments over public blockchain networks, stablecoins eliminate unnecessary fees and the concoction of intermediaries that plague today’s payment rails.

In this post, we’ll explore two of the most common cross-border payment types - B2B (Business-to-Business) and C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer) - and compare how they work today versus how they could work using stablecoins.

B2B Payments: Traditional Payment Rails

By far the largest component of cross-border payments by value - approximately 86% - is payments between companies. Firms pay overseas suppliers for goods and services, settle invoices, and move funds as part of international trade deals.

To illustrate the inefficiencies in B2B international payments, let’s take an example of a manufacturing company in the U.S. paying its Thai supplier $50,000 for components.

The payment flow looks as follows:

1. U.S. manufacturer initiates payment from their U.S. bank

2. The U.S. bank processes and routes the payment to a correspondent bank

3. Correspondent bank executes the payment instructions via SWIFT

4. Currency conversion from USD to THB occurs

5. Thai correspondent bank receives and processes the payment

6. Thai banking system routes funds to the supplier’s bank

7. The supplier’s bank credits the funds to the supplier’s account

This transaction can take anywhere from 3 to 7 days to settle, while incurring fees of up to 4% (initiation fee, conversion spread, correspondent banking fees, and incoming wire fee).

In addition to these direct costs, there are hidden and opportunity costs from capital being locked up for days, plus cash flow uncertainty for both parties.

Out of the $3.4 trillion in global cross-border transactions last year, businesses lost a substantial portion of each transfer to hidden fees. The World Bank estimates that transaction costs alone can eat up to 4% of cross-border revenues, with small businesses losing as much as 5 - 8% of their international earnings.

For example, a company with 100 international employees making 1,200 transfers per year loses $180,000 annually in fees (assuming an average transfer size of $3,000 and a 5% fee). That’s roughly the equivalent of two to three full-time salaries lost every year, simply due to opaque and under-the-radar payment costs.

B2B Payments: The Stablecoin alternative

Compared to the traditional payment stack, stablecoins offer a cheaper, faster, and simpler alternative for global B2B transactions. Here’s how the same use case would play out over stablecoin rails:

1. U.S. manufacturer initiates a stablecoin transfer from their digital wallet

2. The transaction gets confirmed on the blockchain network

3. The Thai supplier receives the payment in their digital wallet

Unlike its traditional counterpart, cross-border payments using stablecoins settle within seconds to minutes and cost $0.01 or less (transactions on Noble cost less than $0.01).

C2C Payments: Traditional Payment Rails

Now let’s look at the C2C remittance use case - one of the most common, yet most inefficient cross-border payment flows.

Imagine a migrant worker in the U.S. sending $300 every month to support their family in the Philippines. Here’s what the payment flow typically looks like:

1. The sender initiates the transfer using a money transfer app or by visiting a remittance agent

2. The funds are debited from the sender’s account

3. The remittance provider converts the funds into the destination currency at a non-transparent exchange rate

4. Funds are routed through intermediary banks or payout partners

5. The recipient receives the money via bank transfer or in-person cash pickup

What the sender often doesn’t realise is that a meaningful chunk of that $300 never arrives. Once you factor in transfer fees, FX markups, intermediary deductions, and cash-out costs, the total cost of sending money can exceed 6%. An effective regressive tax on some of the world’s poorest workers.

Remittance costs vary dramatically depending on the corridor. According to the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide report for Q3 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive region to send money to, with average costs of 8.45%. 

C2C Payments: The Stablecoin Alternative

Now let’s take a look at that same $300 remittance but using stablecoins:

1. The sender opens their digital wallet or stablecoin app and sends $300 worth of stablecoins to their family’s wallet in the Philippines

2. The transaction is broadcast and confirmed on a blockchain network

3. The funds are credited to the recipient's digital wallet

If the recipient needs to convert to local currency, they can do so via a local exchange, on/off-ramp provider, or stablecoin debit card, often at far better rates than traditional remittance corridors.

Noble: The Premier Destination for Stablecoin Applications

While stablecoins improve upon the current payments stack, they require specialised infrastructure in the form of programmability, asset routing, and efficient price discovery for global adoption. This is where Noble comes in.

Noble is building purpose-built infrastructure for stablecoin-native applications. With one-second block times (targeting 100ms) and transaction costs less than a cent, Noble has issued greater than $580 million worth of stablecoins and processed over $8 billion of volume across 50+ blockchains.

We recently announced the upcoming launch of Noble AppLayer, an EVM rollup that offers reliable stablecoin infrastructure for companies to build financial applications. Noble AppLayer does for stablecoin apps what Shopify did for e-commerce: providing purpose-built infrastructure explicitly designed for its use case.

The Money Revolution

Twenty years ago, when email was on the cusp of replacing letters, and music streaming was replacing CDs, it seemed inevitable that money would undergo the next major revolution. Yet here we are in 2025, still waiting days for international transfers and haemorrhaging fees at every step of the process.

But the wait is finally over. Stablecoins aren't just marginally better than traditional payment rails, they offer a 100x improvement in speed, cost, and usability.

We see the same pattern that transpired with email, digital photography, and streaming music. There comes a tipping point where the new technology becomes so obviously superior that the switch becomes inevitable.

Money is finally catching up to the internet age. And stablecoins, with protocols like Noble leading the way, are at the heart of this movement.