Mastercard Is Bringing Stablecoins Into the Settlement Layer

Hey Payments Fanatic!

Mastercard just made one of its clearest moves yet in the stablecoin space.

The company is expanding its settlement capabilities to include regulated stablecoins, alongside new intraday, weekend, and holiday settlement options.

That might sound like a technical infrastructure update, but I don't think it is.

For years, stablecoins have been discussed mainly as a new way to pay. Mastercard is focusing on a different piece of the puzzle, which is the settlement itself.

The company plans to support stablecoins, including USDC, RLUSD, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, and SoFiUSD, allowing issuers and acquirers to settle transactions through the same network they already use today.

What stood out to me is that traditional payment rails aren't going anywhere. The real shift is making them work on a more flexible schedule.

Money doesn't stop moving on weekends, holidays, or after banking hours. Therefore, payment infrastructure isn't expected to stop either.

And if you keep scrolling, you'll also find the latest Q1 2026 results from American Express, offering another interesting perspective on how established payment giants are navigating the industry's next phase of growth.

Today's remaining Payments headlines are just below. 👇 See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

INSIGHTS

📊 American Express delivered its strongest spending growth quarter in three years, with revenue rising 11% and billed business reaching $428 billion. Beyond the financial results, the company continued to invest in AI-driven commerce through its ACE developer kit and the acquisition of AI startup Hyper, while expanding strategic partnerships with the National Football League and National Basketball Association. Find the full breakdown here

NEWS

🇺🇸 Mastercard expands settlement capabilities to include stablecoin, intraday, holiday, and weekend options. These enhancements will give issuers and acquirers greater flexibility in how they settle card-based transactions across Mastercard’s global payments network, helping improve liquidity management and expanding choice in how money moves.

🇺🇸 Payment giants Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are reportedly backing a new stablecoin platform, with Coinbase also exploring participation. The initiative would mark another step in the convergence of traditional payments and digital assets as major financial players expand their stablecoin infrastructure strategies.

🇺🇸 Checkout.com scales stablecoin settlement for US merchants in partnership with Fireblocks. Leveraging Fireblocks' regulated stablecoin conversion and payouts technology, Checkout.com’s merchants will have access to round-the-clock availability and an alternative to traditional banking rails.

🇸🇦 Checkout.com and Nahdi partner to drive digital payment performance in Saudi Arabia and across the GCC. This collaboration will integrate Checkout.com's cutting-edge payment acquiring and processing technology into Nahdi’s online platforms, optimizing the digital payment experience and improving payment success rates for millions of its customers in KSA and across the GCC.

🇺🇸 Fireblocks launched Fireblocks Flow. Fireblocks Flow provides the infrastructure to help PSPs and FinTechs accept any stablecoin and digital asset, settle in the stablecoin of their choice, and gain a competitive advantage for meeting today’s demands and tomorrow’s use cases.

🇺🇸 SBI CEO reveals plans to invest $1.25B in Ripple IPO and predicts timeline for Ripple to go public. SBI Holdings and Ripple have built a strong relationship over the years, starting in 2016. Their partnership focuses on cross-border payments, the use of XRP through On-Demand Liquidity, and joint business efforts across Asia.

🇮🇳 BharatPe launches Credit-on-UPI solution with YES BANK. The new offering, called Pay Later with BharatPe, has enabled eligible users to make UPI payments using a pre-approved credit line rather than relying solely on funds in a linked bank account. 

🇬🇧  Ramp, the Revolut of New York, is hiring in London. Ramp is preparing to open a London office later this summer as part of its international expansion strategy. The $40 billion FinTech is expected to bring its high-performance hiring model to the UK market.

🇺🇸 Thunes unlocks real-time payments to the US from the rest of the world. For Members of the Thunes Direct Global Network, this expansion unlocks superior global payment capabilities for sending money to the US, combining lightning-fast transaction speeds, optimised cost efficiency, and flexible settlement choices all through a single API.

🇺🇸 OnePay has reached 6 million monthly active users and $50 billion in annualized payment volume, doubling both metrics year over year. Backed by Walmart, the FinTech is expanding beyond payments into banking and BNPL services as it pursues its ambition of becoming a financial super app.

🇺🇸 IXOPAY launches payments intelligence and IXONav, an AI payments assistant built to unlock real-time insights across the payments journey. The new tools combine analytics, anomaly detection, and AI-driven recommendations to help merchants optimize routing, improve authorization rates, reduce transaction costs, and enhance payment performance.

🌍 Stablecoin start-up YouSend launches in the UK and Canada, targeting Africa's diaspora remittance market after $1m in transactions during quiet beta. The company uses stablecoin-based settlement infrastructure to enable near-instant money transfers from the UK and Canada to African markets, aiming to reduce costs and improve speed compared with traditional remittance services.

🇳🇱 Paymentology launches Lume to accelerate growth for FinTechs and banks. Lume has been designed around three core priorities for modern issuers: global scale, deep localisation and continuous innovation. Through a single platform available across regional instances in every continent around the globe, Lume gives issuers a future-ready foundation for international expansion.

🌎 XTransfer and the BBVA team on instant cross-border payments. Under the MOU, XTransfer and BBVA will combine their respective strengths to explore the delivery of integrated cross-border financial solutions, spanning FX conversion, local payments and cross-border payments across Latin America, Europe and Hong Kong SAR.

🇧🇬 Paypercut raises EUR5m for Central and Eastern European payments platform. The funding will help with meeting capital requirements for the licence and will also be used for product and infrastructure development and expansion across the region.

🇬🇧 XFolio AI acquires Absolute Payment Solutions to unify treasury and payments for UK Corporates. This acquisition creates an integrated platform spanning Bacs and all payment types, open banking, risk management, and treasury, giving UK corporates of all sizes the tools to manage cash and execute payments in one place.

🇺🇸 Coinbase invests in ProShares’ GENIUS Money Market ETF (IQMM), a fund designed to support stablecoin reserve requirements under the GENIUS Act. The move reflects growing demand for institutional-grade reserve infrastructure as stablecoins become a larger part of payments, treasury management, and digital financial markets. 

🌎 Deel chooses Stripe to create a stablecoin wallet to help millions of contractors hold, earn, and spend globally. The solution combines Stripe’s payments infrastructure with its subsidiaries Bridge and Privy to facilitate stablecoin-based payroll and spending for Deel’s global workforce network.

GOLDEN NUGGET

𝗠𝗥𝗖 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 #𝟮 | 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗔𝗜 𝗣𝗮𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 — 𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴. 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂?👇 Created by Arthur Bedel 💳 ♻️

The 2026 MRC | Merchant Risk Council - Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report goes deeper — and the readiness gap is striking.

Based on a survey of 1,278 merchants across 37 countries, here's where the industry actually stands.

On Agentic AI Payment Readiness:

▪︎ 15% have no plans or solutions in place — yet

▪︎ 31% are just starting to explore

▪︎ 32% have a plan and are actively implementing

▪︎ 19% already have full solutions in place

That means 63% of merchants are already in motion.

But the size gap tells the real story:

▪︎ Enterprise merchants lead at 28% fully ready

▪︎ Mid-market at 41% in active implementation

▪︎ SMBs largely still exploring — 40% just starting out

▪︎ 46% of MRC members have no plans in place yet — a notable outlier

Enterprise is setting the pace. Everyone else is catching up.

AI agents are already transacting. The question merchants need to answer today is not if they'll support agentic payments — it's whether their infrastructure will be ready when their customers' AI agents come knocking.

Source: MRC | Merchant Risk Council 2026 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report

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