2020 Europe is taking place in Amsterdam.
This is a high profile conference for the global fintech payments as well as financial services ecosystem.
Anastasia Kinski is on the ground where BVNK and Transformmate have an announcement.
Hi Anastasia.
Thank you, Remy.
I am so pleased to be here at Money 2020 alongside Gary Gary Conroy, the CEO of TransferMate, and Chris Harmse, the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of BVNK.
Gary and Chris, thank you so much for joining me.
Um, I want to start with you, Gary, uh, talk to us about this brand new um move into the stablecoin space.
Why has TransferM decided to integrate stablecoins, and what is the problem that you guys are trying to solve right now?
Great, thanks for having us, Anastasia.
Yeah, Transma is a global fintech company.
It's been around since 2010, and our mission. is to make it easier to move money across the world for corporates and enterprises.
So we've been on a mission to do that in terms of both payables and receivables.
So we embed into business platforms you need to pay 50 suppliers around the globe in 10 different currencies, or you need to pay 2000 employees across the globe, or you're an e-commerce retailer and you need to receive payments from your customers in Brazil.
In Mexico, in Singapore, we make all that easy.
So by providing a global solution, and stablecoin is just an extension of fiat money for us.
So in particular with cross border payments there can be issues with regard to the speed of the payment, the cost of the payment, or friction related to it.
So that could be transaction fees.
It could be an FX cost, or it could be friction relating to, you know, a financial transaction tax.
So let's say I'm a Chinese, you know, retailer that, you know, is collecting, you know, money from out of uh out of Brazil, right?
So you know I can use fiat or I can use some other method, right?
So for Translate whether you're You're based in India, whether you're based in Brazil, whether you're based in the US, whether you're based in Europe, we allow you to send, receive, and hold both fiat and stablecoin now through our partnership with BBNK.
So would you categorize then your move into stablecoins as more an offering of options rather than solving a specific problem that you see in other remittances that can't be solved without, without stablecoins?
Yeah, I think it's about optionality, right?
So let's take the example of a student making a university payment.
So I'm based in India.
I'm going to make a, you know, I'm going to go study in George University in the states, so I could pay by a card payment.
I'm going to get a pretty high merchant service charge associated with that because it's not only a cross border, it's a cross regional transaction, right?
I can make that more efficient if I want to pay via local bank transfer.
So I might pay locally an Indian rupee and then I'll have a conversion.
There'll be an exchange and ultimately I end up paying the university in US dollars or I go, actually, you know, this might be really simple to pay via USDC or USDT, so I'll make that payment via stablecoin.
So for me as a student, It's really about which choice I want to transformate for the university.
No matter what payment method that student chooses, we'll give them a fully reconciled amount.
They'll receive exactly the full amount of that tuition payment in US dollars.
The student has the choice card, bank transfer, via whatever currency, whatever rail, or stablecoins.
And again, we're going back to those options, but a key thing we've heard a lot about here at Money 2020 is about the fear that people can accept.
And accept it in a way that is still interoperable with the existing existing payment methods and talk to us about specifically partnering with BVNK and strong regulatory framework in place of BVNK established part of, you know, the digital asset space completely moved on into the regulator space now.
Tell me more about why BVNK in particular was so important to Transform me.
Yeah, we think it's, you know, a perfect partnership, really, so.
The birth of Transformate was we were set up in 2010.
So if you think all the way back for those fintech nerds to the Payment Services Directive in Europe in 2007, so that allowed a legal framework for non-bank institutions to exist and to move money.
And so we've been busy building out our license network since then.
Started in Ireland.
You may detect both the accent and the what used to be ginger is now a little bit gray beard and hair.
And recently we've actually just added our 100th license to our global footprint, which is Bahrain.
And so when we thought, look, stablecoin makes sense, it's the next evolution for us.
We wanted to find a partner that had an equally strong regulatory footprint, so BBNK is over 40 licenses, and really, you know, our partners want one.
A single provider solution that can do it all across the globe because they'll have customers that are based everywhere and through Transformate they can do that today with Fiat and now through Transformate and BVNK they can do that with Fiat and Stablecoin, which is why Chris, we come to you.
Why are we seeing big companies like Transformate?
I mean, 2026, we've been talking about the tipping point for digital assets and stablecoins for a very long time now, but it really feels here at Money 2020 that We've moved completely beyond that and it is fully established.
Why are we seeing big enterprises adopting stablecoins or working with companies like yourself now, um, as opposed to before?
Yeah, I think it's a few things.
The first one was really, I guess 2025 was a kind of breakout year from a regulatory perspective with the passing of, of the Genius Act, which gave enterprises, banks, Payment platforms, the um the confidence to kind of lean into the space and add stablecoins to their already vast, you know, options of payment methods and use it as an international payment rail.
So that, that was one of the regulatory clarity.
The second one was actual liquidity in these payments.
You know, stablecoins is a couple of $100 billion in market cap, trillions of dollars of payment volume.
For this to be meaningful for companies like Transformate and other large payment providers.
It needed to be at scale.
The liquidity needs to be there.
And I think 2025 was a great breakout year for that.
Um, and I think the, what's kind of coalesced with this regulatory clarity, increased liquidity and payment volume has been customer demand from merchants, users to want to use stablecoins across their payment flows.
So that's really driven payment partners, acquirers, issuers, even card networks to kind of look at stablecoins as a, as a, as another rail to integrate alongside others.
So it's those kind of 33 key things that are making 2026 a really exciting year for stablecoins.
I mean, it's completely changed landscape.
Um, what about the next 12 to 18 months?
What do you think we can expect from that same landscape and in particular for BBNK?
What are your hopes and plans?
Yeah, so we, we're really excited about the just taking the existing, you know, putting stablecoins into more payment platforms, into more payment networks, um, and getting more scale in there.
So some today stablecoins are probably 1% of global payments DPV.
We expect to kind of B2B use cases, marketplace payouts, gig economy payouts, and soon to be stablecoin checkout use cases that you can drive that in the next couple of years to, you know, hopefully 5% of global payments DBT and, and BBNK wants to play a key role in that.
Um, and then also I think what's very exciting about not just stable.
Coins as a payment rail, but stablecoins is infrastructure to build new financial experiences where you can embed a digital dollar account into a consumer remittance app or a, a B2B neobank who can now start taking their products global, um, using stablecoin infrastructure and then how that starts playing into, um, Agentic toolkits and how stablecoins can be provisioned to agents to really uh go out and spend in the world.
So all of these things are, are quite exciting for us coming to the next 12 months.
And as you say, you can draw that line all the way from 2027, sorry, from 2007 into 2027 to see that full digitalized and transformed, uh, payment services and, um, and, you know, infrastructure.
Well, Gary and Chris, thank you so much for joining us.
Um, you've been fantastic, and I really hope you enjoy the rest of Money 2020.
Great, thanks for having us.
