According to PYMNTS.com, Bitso Business, the B2B division of digital financial services company Bitso, announced on Thursday, December 18, that its payout rails in Mexico have reached an annualized volume of $15.6 billion. The company provides about 1,900 institutional clients—including global marketplaces and remittance providers—direct access to Mexico’s 24/7 instant payment system from countries like the U.S. and Mexico itself. Felipe Vallejo, Bitso’s chief corporate affairs officer, stated this total processed volume (TPV) milestone is “a signal that the global financial system is undergoing a structural shift toward stablecoin-based infrastructure.” The company’s offerings include enhanced stablecoin rails for forex and treasury, plus API infrastructure for real-time settlements. This news follows Bitso Business’s September partnership with spend management platform Clara to launch stablecoin-backed corporate cards and its role as an exchange partner for Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin in October 2024.
The Stablecoin Practicality Play
Here’s the thing: when a company starts talking about “structural shifts,” it’s easy to roll your eyes. But the numbers Bitso is throwing around—$15.6 billion in annualized payouts in just one country—are hard to ignore. This isn’t about speculative crypto trading. It’s about using dollar-pegged digital tokens as a superior rail for moving value. Think about it. For a business paying contractors or suppliers in Mexico, converting to pesos via traditional banking is slow and expensive. A stablecoin transaction can settle in minutes for a fraction of the cost, and then be instantly cashed out into the local real-time payment system. Bitso is basically building a bridge where the stablecoin is the vehicle and their API is the toll road. It’s a pragmatic use case that bypasses the volatility problem entirely.
More Than Just a Rail
But Bitso isn’t just selling a pipe. Their play, as COO Imran Ahmad hints, is to become the “key payments hub” for global businesses touching Latin America. The partnership with Clara is a genius move in that direction. It turns idle stablecoin balances held at Bitso into working capital for corporate expenses. So a company can receive payments in USDC, keep them on Bitso, and immediately use them as collateral for a corporate card to pay for cloud services or office supplies. That’s a full-stack financial service that locks clients into their ecosystem. It also shows how the infrastructure is maturing. We’re past the “what is a stablecoin?” phase and into the “how can it streamline my treasury ops?” phase.
The Regulatory Tightrope
Now, the big asterisk on all of this is, of course, regulation. Bitso name-drops “regulatory engagement across jurisdictions” for a reason. Operating in this space, especially connecting to national real-time payment systems like Mexico’s, requires serious regulatory goodwill and licenses. One wrong move or a shift in political winds could derail the whole operation. But that’s also their moat. They’ve done the hard, boring compliance work that many crypto-native firms avoid. It’s a trade-off: move slower, play by the rules, but gain the trust needed to handle billions for institutional clients. It’s a fundamentally different strategy than the wild west of decentralized finance, and for B2B payments, it’s probably the only viable one.
A Regional Blueprint
So what does this mean? Bitso’s growth is a compelling case study. It proves there’s massive demand for efficient cross-border value transfer, and stablecoins—when paired with local payment connectivity—can meet it. If this model works in Mexico, why not Brazil, Colombia, or Argentina? The quote from Felipe Vallejo about a “global financial system” shift might feel grandiose, but look at the activity. From Ripple to Visa, big players are betting on stablecoin infrastructure. Bitso is showing it can work at scale, right now, for real businesses. The question is no longer if stablecoins will be used for B2B payments, but which corridors they’ll dominate first. Latin America, with its history of currency volatility and reliance on remittances, looks like ground zero.
