Stablecoins Hand Manufacturers a Working Capital Windfall, if CFOs Move

Stablecoins are technically capable of eliminating one of global manufacturing’s oldest financial inefficiencies. The simple, persistent, and compounding friction of money that spends too much time traveling.

But turning a three-day supplier payment into a three-minute one exposes a different bottleneck. The money can now move faster than many manufacturers can verify who is receiving it, reconcile what it paid for or recover it when something goes wrong. The harder question is whether manufacturers can redesign the controls surrounding those payments quickly enough to capture the working capital benefit without accelerating fraud, compliance and reconciliation failures.

For CFOs across the industry, particularly those looking to streamline and optimize their global sourcing and procurement, that makes stablecoins less a payments modernization project than a treasury operating model project.

Read more: Italy’s Central Bank Finds Stablecoins Still Can’t Beat Traditional Payments 

Stablecoins Shrink the Wrong Part of the B2B Payment

Cross-border payments have forced multinational companies to optimize around infrastructure constraints. Banking cutoffs, correspondent relationships, currency conversions and settlement windows can determine when money leaves one entity and becomes usable by another.

And it’s not just Fortune 500 firms, either. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Cross-Border Opportunity: How Payments Innovation Can Help SMBs Go Global” found in May that 57% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the United States buy goods or inputs from overseas suppliers.

Manufacturers, for their part, traditionally compensate with liquidity buffers, regional bank accounts and working capital that sits in different parts of the organization waiting for the financial system to open. Stablecoins challenge that architecture because dollar-denominated value can move internationally around the clock.

“We’ve seen a shift in moving away from the batch mindset,” Matthew Miller, managing director, treasury product executive at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in an interview published this summer. “It’s no longer nine-to-five. It’s now happening nights and weekends. The digitization of our environments is driving more to that single flow.”

But settlement is only one interval in a much longer corporate process, and settlement that happens on the blockchain can complicate, rather than streamline, certain processes.

An invoice must still be approved. The supplier must still be authenticated. Payment instructions must still be verified, and compliance checks must still occur. The transaction must still be associated with the correct purchase order, subsidiary and general-ledger entry. And if the supplier needs local fiat currency, the stablecoin still needs to be converted.

A payment that settles in seconds but takes two days to approve, reconcile or convert has not created a seconds-long payment process.

Read more: B2B Payments’ Next Legacy Format Is the PDF 

The Wallet Becomes Part of the Vendor Master Data

The companies best positioned to capture the benefit may be those whose procurement, treasury and accounting systems already share enough data to move a payment from approved invoice to reconciled transaction with limited human intervention.

For a company paying through an expensive correspondent chain, digital dollars could produce measurable savings. For another whose primary bottleneck is procurement approval or reconciliation, changing the payment rail could produce little working capital improvement.

Manufacturers face another complication that technology companies and financial institutions experimenting with stablecoins may encounter less acutely: unusually complex third-party networks.

Stablecoin payments add another identity layer. Finance now needs confidence not only that the supplier is legitimate, but that a particular wallet belongs to that supplier, remains authorized and is approved for the token and blockchain being used.

After all, the faster the rail becomes, the more important authentication becomes before money moves.

These reasons and more could be data in “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” a recent installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 Certainty Project, shows that most middle market companies remain cautious about digital assets: 13% of firms use stablecoins and just 5% use other cryptocurrencies.

Still, the competitive landscape of cross-border services is, in fact, in flux, according to “The Cross-Border Opportunity” report. The PYMNTS Intelligence report found that while traditional banks remain the dominant provider for international payments, FinTech companies are steadily expanding their role by combining faster digital experiences with services designed for businesses navigating global trade. Rather than replacing banks, many SMBs appear to be building a broader payments tool kit as international commerce becomes more common.

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