Opinion | Why retailers could hold the key to mainstream stablecoin adoption

If money starts moving at the speed of trade, it will be because top retailers decided that waiting weeks to pay for a T-shirt made no sense

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A woman walks past a currency mural on shop shutters in Hong Kong on December 26. Photo: Antony Dickson

Published: 6:30am, 13 Sep 2025

A T-shirt can travel from Guangzhou to Sydney in less than a week, yet the money to pay for it can take three. Logistics run at lightning speed while money still crawls through pipes built for another era. That mismatch isn’t just inconvenient, it’s a hidden tax on global trade.

Behind every item on a shelf is a long chain of payments. For a supplier in Vietnam or Brazil, waiting for funds can choke growth. A retailer can hold payment for two weeks, and a cross-border transfer adds a few more days.

That delay can slash factory output. A business that could run 12 production cycles a year is forced down to seven – a 40 per cent decline. To bridge the gap, suppliers turn to costly short-term loans, eroding margins and leaving smaller firms fragile.

Banks then take their cut. A 2 to 5 per cent foreign exchange (FX) spread can wipe out a third of profit. Some fall into the “double conversion trap”: paid in local currency, then forced back into US dollars to pay upstream suppliers. It is an invisible drain on competitiveness.

Fintech firms have made payments faster and cheaper, but they are still running on old rails. They lower the tolls, but the tollbooths remain. Also, their business model depends on fees and spreads. They cannot eliminate the cost entirely without erasing their own revenue.

Retailers do not need to make money from payments. Their business depends on efficient supply chains. That gives them a reason to treat payments as infrastructure, not a profit centre.

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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}If money starts moving at the speed of trade, it will be because top retailers decided that waiting weeks to pay for a T-shirt made no sense

If money starts moving at the speed of trade, it will be because top retailers decided that waiting weeks to pay for a T-shirt made no sense