According to Bloomberg, Western Union and MoneyGram are building stablecoins into their services to fight competition from transfers that settle in minutes. Western Union is pushing its own USDPT and a wallet with a card through Rain, while MoneyGram has MGUSD and cards in Colombia and El Salvador. Western Union shares have lost about 70% over five years. An Alvarez & Marsal study puts stablecoin payments at $401 billion from January to August 2026, up 42%.

What it means: Remittances have always been among the most expensive and slowest services for migrants, and at the same time the most obvious use case for stablecoins. The two historic giants of the market have two advantages new players lack: huge networks of physical locations where recipients can collect cash, and licences in dozens of countries. What they lack is speed and low cost. The move to stablecoins is an attempt to combine the two: the transfer happens in minutes on a blockchain, while getting in and out of local currency runs through their network. The risk is that this cuts foreign exchange margins, a key profit source. Falling app user numbers show customers are already moving to cheaper options. For countries such as Greece, with many migrants sending money home, a faster and cheaper remittance market is a real benefit. In the EU, these services would have to use MiCA-compliant stablecoins and apply the travel rule to each transfer, which limits which tokens can be used.

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