BVNK and Circle Team to Promote Stablecoin Business Payments | PYMNTS.com

Payments infrastructure provider BVNK has launched a partnership with USDC-issuer Circle.

The collaboration is designed to accelerate the utility of the USDC stablecoin for BVNK customers, according to a Thursday (Oct. 17) news release.

“BVNK will integrate USDC more deeply into its payment offerings, enabling businesses to leverage USDC’s speed and stability for a variety of payment use cases,” the company said in the release. “This includes making global payroll more efficient and simplifying large-scale customer and contractor payouts.”

USDC is a dollar-backed stablecoin that is also compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) law, helpful for BVNK’s EU customer base.

The release says global stablecoin payment volumes have grown tenfold since 2020, reaching $2.5 trillion in June of this year. The companies say the partnership will help BNNK customers by streamlining payment operations, lowering their costs, and ensuring faster cross-border transactions.

“Businesses are diversifying their supply chains, and growing their customer bases globally, but existing payment options don’t always make that easy,” BVNK Co-founder and Chief Business Officer Chris Harmse wrote in the release.

“Stablecoins like USDC travel on 24/7 blockchains, connecting buyers and sellers globally in an instant. Our partnership with Circle reflects our shared vision to accelerate the global movement of money in a safe and compliant way.”

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, stablecoins such as USDC are at the forefront of an emerging crypto payments movement.

For example, PayPal earlier this month completed its first business payment, to EY, with its in-house stablecoin, PYUSD, while Visa introduced a new platform for banks to issue fiat-backed tokens, such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits. And Coinbase is expanding the ways businesses can pay through the Coinbase Prime brokerage platform.

“It’s important to know that crypto is not just bitcoin and Doge and NFTs,” Sheraz Shere, head of payments at Solana Foundation, told PYMNTS in May. “Blockchains are really alternative rails for payments and financial assets.”

“Blockchain solutions and stablecoins — I don’t like to use the term crypto because this is more about FinTech — they’ve found product-market-fit in cross-border payments,” Shere said in a separate conversation.

As covered here this week, traditional international payment methods such as wire transfers can be costly, slow and weighed down by regulatory hurdles. Stablecoins offer a more efficient alternative, with near-instant transactions, lower fees and fewer intermediaries.