HERON ADVISORY SERIES #1
June 2026

Heron Index June 2026

Annual volume of global cross-border payments: $190 trillion

Share of that handled by businesses paying other businesses: $44 trillion

Average cost of a traditional cross-border wire, as a percentage of transaction value: 2 to 3 percent

Working capital floating in transit across SWIFT at any given moment: $12 billion

Days a traditional cross-border payment takes to settle: 2 to 5

Seconds a stablecoin rail requires to settle the same payment: under 10

Number of international payment corridors that have disappeared since 2011: 1,000+

Estimated value of cross-border B2B stablecoin payments today: $13.4 billion

Projected value by 2035: $5 trillion

B2B Stablecoin Marketcap : +733% YoY

The Cost Nobody Sees

Cross-border payment costs have been normalized so thoroughly that most treasury teams stopped treating them as a problem worth solving. Momin Mirza thinks the moment that changes is now. And the past thirty days suggest he is right.




Jason Laing in conversation with Momin Mirza

The Interview

Momin Mirza spent a year at Verizon doing a post-mortem on SoftCard, the three-way joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon that collapsed around the time Apple Pay arrived. Google bought the patents. Mirza was asked whether telcos had any future in payments and told to come back with an answer. He concluded the business models were real, the friction points were structural, and cross-border was the most stubborn of them. He has been watching the space ever since, partly out of professional habit and partly because of his father, who built Citibank's cross-border FX business in the late 1980s and grew it into what is now a several-hundred-million-dollar business. The family angle is not incidental. It turns out to be the sharpest way into the problem.

The standard explanation for why enterprise treasuries move slowly on cross-border payment reform is that they are risk-averse. Mirza thinks that framing misses the actual mechanism.

“Most businesses will simply resign themselves to that. It is no longer top of mind for them that this is a problem that needs to be solved.”

That is a different claim than risk aversion. It is not that treasuries have evaluated the alternatives and passed. The cost has been normalized so thoroughly, built so deeply into operating models and ERP configurations and approval workflows, that it has stopped registering as a cost at all. You cannot sell against inertia the way you sell against a competing vendor. The question is what breaks it.

What broke it for Mirza’s father was not a better product in the conventional sense. The innovation was operational and almost embarrassingly simple: when New York closed, calls switched to London. When London closed, Singapore picked up. Clients who had spent years limited to New York business hours realized they were running global operations and could be served accordingly. New business followed. But what Mirza remembers most is the second-order effect.

“It got the customers to realize they were a global business.”

The service change did not just save them money or inconvenience. It changed what they thought was possible. A company doing business between North America and an African market had not been irrational when it factored settlement uncertainty and fee drag into whether that relationship was worth pursuing. Remove those constraints and the calculation changes.

“You are going to think about how much more you can do, and who else you can do business with.”

The cost was not just a line item. It was quietly shaping which markets felt worth entering at all.

That is the context for why the current moment in stablecoin infrastructure is more significant than another incremental improvement in settlement times. The meaningful threshold is not T+3 to T+1, which the most forward-looking treasuries have already crossed. It is T+1 to same-day, with fees reduced dramatically and the correspondent bank no longer structurally in the loop. That combination does not just make existing business cheaper. It makes previously marginal business viable. The GENIUS Act, passed in 2025 is answering the compliance hesitation that kept cautious treasury teams on the sideline, and that matters because the hesitation was the last serious objection. The treasury teams who move quickly will not just cut costs. They will find themselves reconsidering markets they had quietly written off.

What We’re Reading — June 2026

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This section is written for people who already know the space. Our advisors do not need a primer on stablecoin rails or a summary of headlines they have already read. What we aim to offer here is a second reading: the implication beneath the announcement, the number that matters more than the number being cited, the move that looks incremental until you consider what it is actually replacing. Four items from the past thirty days are worth that kind of attention.

The thread running through all of them: the question is no longer whether stablecoin rails will carry enterprise cross-border payments. It is who controls the layer that makes those rails usable. That is where the real competition is forming, and it is forming quickly.

Kyriba and Circle bring USDC inside the treasury management system

The announcement out of Kyriba Live 2026 deserves more attention than it got. Kyriba and Circle announced a collaboration to bring USDC capabilities directly into enterprise treasury systems, embedding stablecoins into the platform alongside an agentic AI layer that monitors liquidity in real time and executes within predefined policy constraints. Kyriba is used by over 3,000 companies worldwide, including many Fortune 100 enterprises. When stablecoin settlement lands inside a TMS a finance team already uses, the adoption question changes character entirely. It stops being “are we ready to try stablecoin payments” and starts being “do we want to enable this feature.” That is a structural shift in how enterprise adoption happens.

The caveat worth holding: Kyriba’s integration is built around a single stablecoin on a single set of rails. For a treasury team running payments across ten corridors with different liquidity profiles, that is a starting point, not a solution. The routing question, which provider, which rail, at what cost, for which corridor, remains open. That is the gap between a feature and an infrastructure decision.

We put this announcement to two of our advisors and got two different readings on what it means for enterprise adoption timelines. We will share both perspectives in the next issue.

Learn More : https://www.kyriba.com/news/kyriba-circle-usdc-stablecoin-enterprise-treasury/

 

The Federal Reserve publishes an analytical note on stablecoins and cross-border payments

When the Fed's own economists publish a structured analysis of how payment stablecoin settlement affects monetary policy implementation, the conversation has moved. Published in late March, the note examines how stablecoin issuers' asset management strategies interact with Treasury bill demand, reserve management, and cross-border payment flows. The Fed models stablecoin growth not as a peripheral phenomenon but as something requiring active recalibration of reserve policy. Treasury Secretary Bessent's projection that stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030 is cited without skepticism. A central bank publishing that kind of analysis is a different institution than one issuing crypto risk warnings.

Learn more: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/payment-stablecoins-and-cross-border-payments-benefits-and-implications-for-monetary-policy-20260330.html

 

Bessemer Venture Partners publishes a serious analytical case for stablecoins as infrastructure

Buried inside a week of product announcements, this one deserves a slower read. Bessemer published a detailed piece arguing that stablecoins have crossed the chasm. The data is striking: global fiat-backed stablecoin supply exceeded $273 billion in March 2026, adjusted transaction volumes grew 91% in 2025 to $10.9 trillion, and real-world stablecoin payments volume doubled to $400 billion, with 60% of that estimated to be B2B. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Fiserv, Meta, and Ramp have all integrated or announced plans to adopt stablecoin rails.

What makes the Bessemer piece worth flagging beyond the numbers is the framing. A firm of that calibre publishing a structured investment thesis rather than a market commentary is a different kind of signal. It means the institutional conviction is no longer speculative. The capital is already moving.

Learn more: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/stablecoins-from-defi-primitive-to-global-financial-infrastructure

 

Tearsheet: the last barrier to enterprise stablecoin adoption is not regulation

This piece, published three weeks ago, is the most practically useful item in this issue for anyone advising an enterprise client considering stablecoin rails. Avinash Chidambaram, who has spent his career building stablecoin payment infrastructure and is in active conversations with Canadian regulators and legislators, makes a precise claim: the compliance, custody, FX, and accounting stack has now been bundled into APIs that product teams can actually consume. The barrier that remains is integration into existing ERP and treasury systems. For treasury teams that have been waiting for legal clarity before evaluating vendors, his advice is direct: that clarity exists now, and the question is where you get the most value.

Learn more:  https://tearsheet.co/partner-content/stablecoin-infrastructure-is-rewiring-cross-border-payments/

 

The read across all four.

Every one of these announcements is a bet on abstraction: make the stablecoin layer invisible, make the complexity someone else’s problem, make the enterprise client feel like they never left the financial infrastructure they already know. That is the right bet. It is also the bet that makes the orchestration layer, the thing that sits above all of it and routes intelligently across providers, more valuable with every new entrant, not less. The more options there are, the more consequential the routing decision becomes. Momin Mirza’s father changed what his clients thought was possible by answering the phone when New York was asleep. The next version of that insight is already being built. This newsletter exists to make sure our advisors see it forming before the rest of the market names it.

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Next issue: Abel Martins Alexandre in conversation with Momin Mirza.

Abel Martins Alexandre spent fifteen years at Rio Tinto, including as Group Treasurer and Head of Commercial Treasury in Singapore, where his team was recognized as the best treasury operation in Asia two years running. He subsequently led infrastructure and industrials coverage at Lloyds Bank and now serves as CFO of Eramet, a global mining and metals company operating across multiple continents and currencies. He has managed cross-border treasury complexity at a scale very few people have. That conversation is next.