Western Union is launching its own stablecoin on Solana next month, for settlement with 360,000 agents globally. MoneyGram is rolling out stablecoin payments across Latin America. An entire category in international payments is rewiring its infrastructure.
Every year, workers around the world send an estimated $900 billion home to their families. The fees for doing so have averaged more than six percent for decades, according to the World Bank — money absorbed by a correspondent banking system built for another era. Now the largest players in international payments are rewiring their infrastructure, not because they are forced to, but because stablecoins — digital currencies pegged to the dollar or other fiat currencies — move money across borders more cheaply and quickly than the established system can.
Western Union, founded in 1851 as a telegraph company, is launching its own dollar-backed stablecoin — USDPT — on the Solana blockchain next month. The token is not a consumer product. It will be used for settlement between the company and their agent network of more than 360,000 locations across over 200 countries — transactions that today run through SWIFT and correspondent banks with all the attendant delays and costs. The launch will begin in selected markets with key agent partners.
The move follows a first quarter in which revenues were flat, driven by weakness in the Americas business. Western Union now points to stablecoins and acquisitions as its two primary growth engines going forward.
In parallel, Western Union is launching DAN — a digital network that connects crypto wallets directly to the company's global agent network. The first partner goes live this week. Later in the year comes Stable Card, a payment card that lets consumers store value in stablecoins and spend globally, with a particular focus on high-inflation markets. «It's no longer a question of whether Western Union will engage in digital assets. It's now about how quickly we can scale», says CEO Devin McGranahan of Western Union.
MoneyGram has been working with stablecoins since 2021, when it entered its first partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation. Together they have built what is described as the world's largest infrastructure for moving between cash and digital assets — a network that lets users move in both directions between physical money and stablecoins across MoneyGram's nearly 500,000 locations globally.
Now the partnership is expanding. The MoneyGram app with a stablecoin balance, powered by Stellar, Crossmint and Circle's USDC, is already live in Colombia and recently launched in El Salvador. Additional markets across Latin America are planned throughout the year. The model is concrete: recipients can receive funds directly into a dollar-denominated stablecoin balance, hold the value there, and cash out at their nearest MoneyGram location. For families in markets with unstable local currencies, it is not just faster — it is structurally different. «Financial inclusion means nothing if it doesn't work in practice», says CEO Anthony Soohoo of MoneyGram.
Wise, which has been challenging established players on price since 2011, now finds itself in a different position. The company processed $194 billion in cross-border payments last year at an average cost of 0.58 percent — well below the industry average. Even so, it hired a product leader specifically for digital assets in October 2025, according to Ledger Insights. The reasoning is twofold: stablecoins are an opportunity to make the infrastructure even cheaper, but new stablecoin-native payment companies are simultaneously becoming competitors. Wise is positioning itself in both directions.
What sets the current wave apart from earlier crypto initiatives is that none of these players are trying to replace the existing network. Western Union's DAN connects crypto wallets into a 175-year-old agent network. MoneyGram's stablecoin balance is tied to cash withdrawals at local stores. Stablecoins solve the settlement problem in the back-end, while the traditional network retains the customer relationship in the front-end.
Analysts estimate that stablecoins will account for three percent of all US dollar payments in 2026, and ten percent by 2031. For players in international payments, the logic is straightforward: on-chain settlement cuts the costs that correspondent banking networks have charged for decades — without customers needing to know it happens on a blockchain.
Sources: Western Union, Stellar, The Block, PYMNTS, FFNews, Yahoo Finance, Ledger Insights
