Cross-border payments: fintechs lead banks on cost, stablecoins lag

What happened

Cross-border payments remain slow and expensive for many customers, but fintech providers such as Wise and Remitly have cut costs substantially compared with traditional retail bank wire transfers. Stablecoins, by contrast, still struggle with friction, according to research from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as reported by Finextra.

The findings compare established banks with newer digital operators and with stablecoin-based alternatives. The research points to a clear split: fintechs are winning on cost, while stablecoins have not yet delivered a smooth experience for everyday users.

Why it matters

For cross-border payments, cost and speed are the core of the customer experience. When a transfer is both expensive and slow, the friction is felt at the point of sending, and many customers will look for a cheaper route. The BIS findings suggest that digital challengers have already changed what customers expect from a transfer, with price becoming a visible and comparable part of the service.

The friction associated with stablecoins matters for a different reason. Even when the underlying technology is efficient, a payment that is hard to fund, convert or understand at each step will not be trusted by ordinary users. For leaders in digital transformation, the lesson is that infrastructure gains only translate into service gains when the journey around them is designed for the people using it.

The Renascence take

Most coverage of this story will focus on the price gap. The more useful question is why customers tolerate high bank fees in the first place. Much of that tolerance comes from opacity: people often do not know what they are paying, which makes cost feel inevitable rather than negotiable, and that is a behavioural problem as much as a pricing one.

The fintechs winning this category are not only cheaper; they make the fee and the timeline visible before the customer commits. Stablecoin providers face the reverse problem, where the technology is sound but the journey is not. Operators should audit every step of a cross-border transfer, from funding to delivery, and remove the moments where customers have to guess. Clarity on cost and certainty on timing will do more for retention than another percentage point off the fee.