If you have ever wired money overseas, you know the drill: it can take days and the fees are murky. "If you make a cross border payment it takes days, the fees are unclear," Michael Miebach said in a Bloomberg TV interview in London on Friday. "From a working capital perspective for a company, if you could move the money instantly it would be so much better." That is exactly where he says Mastercard is seeing the most traction for stablecoins right now.
Stablecoins are crypto tokens designed to hold a steady price, typically tied to assets like the US dollar. Over the last year, they have gathered momentum as banks and other established firms view them as a practical way to make payments quicker and cheaper.
Payment executives talking about stablecoins means the rails are genuinely in play. Market Briefs covers that convergence free every morning.
Mastercard is a backer of Open Standard, a new group that has launched a US dollar-pegged stablecoin, alongside Visa, Stripe, and around 100 other companies. The aim is everyday usefulness, not speculation. As Miebach put it, Mastercard wanted to "create a stablecoin particularly focused on moving money instead of investment purposes."
Policy winds are also filling the sails. President Donald Trump's administration is considering a plan to encourage the use of dollar-denominated tokens overseas. In London, Miebach is meeting with companies that are showing interest in stablecoins and sees openings for Mastercard rather than a threat. He is not expecting rapid, mass-market consumer adoption just yet.
Mastercard has been one of the more active legacy payments players in this space; earlier this year, it purchased BVNK, an infrastructure provider, in a deal that could total up to $1.8 billion. Miebach also weighed in on the tech reshaping payments, calling artificial intelligence "fundamentally a good thing" while warning that "AI is enabling the fraudsters and the scammers as much as the defenders."
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