The battle for the future of payments is not the one you think it is. For years, the fintech narrative has been dominated by the clash of crypto versus fiat, but a far more subtle and significant war is being waged beneath the surface. It’s a conflict not over the assets themselves, but over the infrastructure that moves them. This is the war of rails versus layers, and payment giant Worldpay may have just fired a decisive shot.
In May 2025, Worldpay announced it would enable stablecoin payouts across more than 180 markets. In partnership with infrastructure provider BVNK, Worldpay is offering its clients the ability to pay anyone, from contractors to creators, nearly instantly using USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. This isn't just another feature.
It is a fundamental rewiring of the global payout fabric. The move signals a seismic shift in strategy: from sending money to routing value. To grasp the significance of this strategic pivot, it's essential first to understand the battlefield itself: the payment rails that have governed global finance for decades.
Payment rails are the foundational infrastructure that money travels on. Think of systems like SWIFT for international wires, ACH for bank transfers in the US, or the Visa and Mastercard networks for card payments. For decades, these rails have been the bedrock of global commerce.
However, they were built for a different era. Many legacy systems are slow, expensive, and operate within siloed, national borders, making cross-border transactions notoriously inefficient. A single international payment can bounce between multiple correspondent banks, accumulating fees and delays at every stop.
This friction is creating an opening for disruption. The challenge comes from newer, more technologically advanced rails, primarily those built on blockchain technology. These new systems offer the promise of 24/7 settlement, lower costs, and true global reach from day one.
In response, some companies have adopted a "multi-rail" strategy, using algorithms to dynamically route payments across the best available path, whether traditional ACH or a real-time payment network, such as SEPA instant, to optimise for speed and cost.
But this is an evolution, not a revolution. The real change comes from layering a new form of value, stablecoins, on top of this emerging multi-rail world.
A payment layer, commonly referred to as a payment orchestration layer, is a technological framework that sits on top of various payment rails to manage and streamline transactions. It acts as a single, unified interface that integrates multiple payment service providers, gateways, and methods, functioning like an "orchestra conductor" to ensure all parts of a transaction work in harmony.
This layer serves as an intermediary between a business's systems and the different payment providers, handling the routing of transactions, managing currency conversions, and screening for fraud. By centralising these functions, a payment layer simplifies a business's payment infrastructure and reduces the complexity of managing separate integrations with each payment rail or provider.
In the context of digital currencies, a payment layer can also refer to a secondary system built on a blockchain, such as the Lightning Network, to enable faster and cheaper transactions. This orchestration layer provides the elegant architecture for a new payment paradigm, but it is the stablecoin that serves as the revolutionary asset flowing through it.
Stablecoins offer the best of both worlds: the stability and trust of traditional fiat currency combined with the speed and borderless nature of digital assets. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, a stablecoin like USDC is pegged to an asset like the U.S. dollar, ensuring the value sent is the value received. This predictability is critical for commercial use cases.
The Worldpay and BVNK collaboration is a masterclass in this new model. A Worldpay merchant in Europe can now pay a supplier in Kenya almost instantly, without either party needing to understand blockchain or manage a crypto wallet. BVNK’s embedded wallet infrastructure abstracts away all the technical complexity. The value can be sent as USDC and arrive in the recipient's M-Pesa mobile money account in Kenyan shillings.
This system bridges the gap between the bleeding-edge digital asset economy and existing, trusted local payment networks. It’s a powerful tool for financial inclusion, potentially reaching the 1.4 billion adults worldwide who remain unbanked but may have access to a smartphone. With the U.S. digital payments market forecast to exceed $3.8 trillion in 2025, the scale of this opportunity is immense.
The strategic pivot towards abstraction layers is not just being embraced by established giants, it is also shaping the vision of the industry's next wave of innovators. Jordan Lawrence, a key figure behind the hypergrowth of open banking champion Volt, is now channelling his experience into a new venture, Damisa.
His focus on combining escrow services with stablecoins showcases the belief that the next frontier in fintech lies in solving complex cross-border payment challenges. This move signals that for emerging fintechs, the opportunity is not merely in building faster rails, but in creating sophisticated layers of trust and functionality on top of the new financial architecture, viewing the current cross-border payment system as ripe for disruption.
To better understand this change, it's essential to grasp the distinction between the two related concepts: programmable money and programmable payments.
Programmable money refers to a digital currency that has rules embedded directly into the asset itself. Using smart contracts, the money can be programmed to be spent only in specific ways—for instance, funds that can only be used for approved suppliers or within a certain timeframe.
Programmable payments, on the other hand, focus on automating the transaction process. Here, smart contracts execute a payment automatically when certain predefined conditions are met, such as the confirmed delivery of goods in a supply chain.
The new infrastructure combines both. It uses a programmable payment system to deliver programmable money (stablecoins) as a payout option. This fusion of the "how" (the payment) and the "what" (the money) unlocks unprecedented efficiency, automating complex transaction flows and reducing the risk of errors and fraud. It's akin to upgrading from a manual toolkit to a fully autonomous, intelligent system tailored for global commerce.
The move by Worldpay puts immediate pressure on other major players in the cross-border space. Each is approaching the challenge from a different angle, revealing a deep strategic divide.
Wise: Wise built its success on a superior user experience and its own proprietary, low-cost payment network. It continues to grow impressively, with 15.5 million active customers, and is expanding its B2B offering, Wise Platform, to let banks and enterprises embed its services. However, its strength—its closed-rail system—is also its limitation in a world moving towards open, interoperable layers.
Remitly: A leader in digital remittances, Remitly has established a powerful global ecosystem spanning 170 countries, prioritising trust and speed for consumers sending money home. Its strength lies in its well-established corridors, but its infrastructure is less composable and API-driven than the new programmable layers.
MoneyGram: The legacy giant is pivoting aggressively. Through a partnership with the Stellar blockchain, customers can now on-ramp and off-ramp from crypto to cash using USDC, targeting cash-based economies where bank accounts are scarce. This is a savvy move to bridge the old and new worlds, but it still positions MoneyGram as a bridge rather than the core payment fabric itself.
Western Union: The oldest name in the game is fighting to modernise. While it has seen seven consecutive quarters of double-digit growth in its digital business, it remains heavily reliant on stabilising its vast retail agent network. It is caught between the cash economy of its past and the digital reinvention required for its future.
Worldpay’s strategy leapfrogs these approaches. By focusing on an abstraction layer, it doesn't need to own the rails. It can simply route value over whichever rail, blockchain, RTP, or card network is most efficient for a given transaction.
The future of finance belongs to the organisations that can best manage complexity. The ultimate winner will not be the company with the most physical infrastructure, but the one with the most intelligent abstraction layer.
This trend is part of a broader "unbundling" of financial services, where specialised providers handle different parts of the value chain, and payment orchestration platforms are needed to tie it all together seamlessly. This means building flexible, API-driven systems that can
customise payment flows, manage multi-currency operations, and embed finance directly into platforms without being constrained by any single network.
At Ximedes, this philosophy is not new. It is the foundation upon which we have operated since the beginning, when we started working with financial institutions. We have been building the next generation of payment platforms by helping financial institutions master this very complexity.
The debate between rails and layers innovation lies in building agile, integrated solutions that make inherently complex processes, from EMV terminal gateways and merchant onboarding to real-time reconciliation and fraud prevention, feel simple and seamless to the end user.
Our work is to empower banks and fintechs to build their own winning abstraction layers, transforming legacy systems into sources of competitive advantage and giving them the agility to lead in a digital-first world.
The future of payments requires robust, secure, and invisible transactions, regardless of the underlying rails. It is our mission to provide the expert engineering that makes this future a reality. The war for payments will be won in layers, and the most successful platforms will be those built on a foundation of sophisticated simplicity.