'Stablecoins can cut cost of cross-border transactions'

Mumbai: India may be a global standout in digital payments, but it still lags in key areas such as access to credit, modern transit payments and fraud protection, said a top Visa executive, who believes fiat-backed stablecoins could help slash cross-border costs.

"The pace of innovation and disruption in the world of payments in the past five years is more than what's happened in the past 50 years," said Sandeep Ghosh, group country manager, India & South Asia, Visa.

The competitive game in India sets the stage for what's going to happen everywhere else, Ghosh said, speaking at the CII Financing Summit in Mumbai on Monday, while underscoring the relative under-penetration of consumer credit in Asia's No. 2 economy.


"For a country of our size, we have barely 110 million credit cards. China has a billion credit cards, 10x of India" he said. India needs to democratise responsible credit for consumers and small businesses.

Stablecoins, he said, can bring about unrestricted scale, efficiency, and cost reduction, particularly when it comes to cross-border payments.

"We, at Visa, are very bullish on stablecoins, if it is adopted with the right kind of markets. And we think there is a long-term future for stablecoins, which are backed by fiat currency," he said.