Send money home faster and cheaper

The challenge with traditional remittances

Cross-border payments are notoriously slow, expensive, and unpredictable. A single transfer often passes through multiple intermediaries, each adding cost, introducing delays, and increasing the risk of errors. Newer "instant" cross-border services improve the user experience, but typically require remittance companies to hold liquidity on both sides of a payment corridor, which increases operational and capital costs.

How stablecoins make remittances better

Stablecoins can address these challenges by enabling cheap and near-instant cross-border payments. Beyond peer-to-peer transfers, where users send stablecoins directly to each other, three stablecoin-based models are now widely used in the remittance industry:

Direct transfers

A sender, for example, in the United States, can onramp to stablecoins within the mobile banking app and transfer them directly to a recipient abroad. The recipient can choose to hold the funds in stablecoins, spend them with a stablecoin-linked card, or off-ramp into local currency and deposit into a bank account.

Orchestrated payments

A sender initiates a cross-border payment from a mobile app, and the recipient receives funds directly into their bank account. Stablecoins are routed through a stablecoin orchestration platform that automatically converts them into local currency, preserving the speed and low cost of stablecoin transfers while delivering a familiar, traditional cross-border payment experience for both sender and recipient.

Backend settlement

Stablecoins operate entirely behind the scenes. A remittance company uses stablecoins to move liquidity between its own entities across jurisdictions, eliminating the need for correspondent banks and removing the requirement to maintain expensive, pre-funded liquidity on each side of the corridor.

In each case, blockchains and stablecoins help eliminate the patchwork of correspondent banks in between the sender and the recipient, or the need to hold liquidity to emulate "instant" payments. Stablecoin transfers typically cost less than a cent and arrive within seconds, introducing noticeable cost reduction and increasing speed.

Benefits beyond speed and cost

Beyond the speed and cost improvements, stablecoin-based remittances offer a far smoother user experience for both senders and recipients. With no correspondent banks or intermediate hops, there are fewer points of failure and no unexpected holds, returns, or error paths. Transfers settle onchain in seconds, at any time of day, and the recipient sees the funds immediately.

Further, users around the world increasingly value being able to hold USD-denominated stablecoins. These provide a simple and affordable way to send and receive remittances and pay for global digital services such as LLMs, software subscriptions, and online content platforms.

Onchain settlement also delivers major reconciliation benefits. Each transaction is recorded in real time on a single ledger, giving remittance providers instant visibility into balances and flows. This reduces reliance on delayed bank statements, minimizes reconciliation errors from intermediary hops, and streamlines audit and compliance through a single, authoritative onchain record.

Building with Tempo

Tempo is purpose-built to handle the volume and cost requirements of modern remittance corridors, enabling providers to move beyond the limitations of correspondent banking. We understand that transitioning to onchain settlement involves navigating complex liquidity and operational questions.

If you are evaluating how to restructure your remittance corridors for higher speed and lower cost, our team can help you map out the architecture for your specific regions. We invite you to explore the technical and operational improvements stablecoins can bring to your flows.