Ramp Partners With Stripe and Bridge for Stablecoin Bill Payments, but Fiat Conversion Costs Remain
Oct. 28, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets.
The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin payment rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement puts a practical question at the center of stablecoin adoption: how much does a payment cost once moving a token, converting currencies and delivering money to a recipient are all taken into account?
Stripe completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in February 2025. Bridge provides infrastructure that businesses can use to build stablecoin payment and issuance services. Connecting that infrastructure to a spend-management platform illustrates what stablecoin orchestration means in practice: coordinating the steps around a payment, rather than treating an on-chain transfer as the entire transaction.
The price of a payment is more than the transfer
Stablecoins can reduce reliance on correspondent-banking hops for the on-chain portion of a cross-border payment. That does not make the complete service free. A business that needs to receive funds in a local bank account may still pay to convert stablecoins into fiat currency and exchange one currency for another. Those off-ramp and foreign-exchange costs typically range from 0.3% to 2.0% when funds are liquidated into local banking systems.
Commercial pricing also matters. Stripe charges merchants a flat 1.5% for stablecoin transactions at checkout, compared with its standard credit-card processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30. That comparison identifies one potential difference in merchant-facing fees; it is not a published price for Ramp’s B2B bill-payment arrangement. Nor does a checkout fee, on its own, establish the total cost of an international payment that requires currency conversion and a local payout.
Bridge’s Transfers API also lets developers add a custom fee, denominated in U.S. dollars, to each transaction. The fee is deducted programmatically from the customer transaction and paid out monthly. That feature shows how an orchestration platform can make charges part of the payment workflow. It does not mean every transaction carries such a fee.
Local delivery still depends on local rails
A stablecoin transfer can move value on-chain, but recipients often need money delivered through a domestic payment system. End-to-end delivery therefore still depends on connections to networks such as Pix in Brazil, SPEI in Mexico, SEPA in Europe and ACH in the United States. The on-chain leg can change how value moves between parts of a payment chain without removing the need for those final connections.
The same distinction applies to compliance. An enterprise platform handling cross-border payouts needs to integrate identity checks, sanctions screening and automated Travel Rule reporting before executing payments. Orchestration includes coordinating those controls alongside the transfer and payout. Its value to a business cannot be measured solely by blockchain transaction costs.
For Ramp’s proposed bill-payment use, the relevant comparison is consequently the full route from a fiat-funded account to the recipient’s usable funds. The verified details establish the partnership and its planned uses, but do not provide a total transaction price or a measured saving for Ramp customers.
Bridge expands issuance as its regulatory structure develops
Bridge has also rolled out Open Issuance, a platform for partners to create branded stablecoins. Its partners include crypto wallet Phantom, which is launching CASH, and MoneyGram, which is launching MGUSD. The stablecoins are backed by reserves managed with BlackRock and Fidelity. Issuance is a different service from moving a payment, but it adds another component that an infrastructure provider can connect to transfer and settlement workflows.
In February 2026, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted Bridge conditional approval to organize Bridge National Trust Bank. The proposed federal trust bank is intended to support stablecoin issuance, custody and reserve management under a single charter. Conditional approval is not the same as an unconditional authorization to operate the bank.
In the European Union, Bridge operates through Luxembourg-based Bridge Building S.A., which holds electronic money institution and MiCA crypto-asset service provider authorizations. Those arrangements show why regulation is part of the infrastructure question, not merely an issue to address after a payment product launches.
Together, Ramp’s planned deployment and Bridge’s broader services point to a more useful measure of stablecoin payment economics: the combined cost of the customer-facing service, any currency conversion, compliance and delivery into local banking systems. Removing a correspondent-banking hop may improve one part of that equation. It does not erase the others.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.