Templado System offers merchants the option to receive settlement in USDT, a stablecoin settlement that pays out your card transactions on the blockchain rather than through a wire transfer of fiat currency. USDT is a type of cryptocurrency that maintains a set value pegged to the US dollar, so merchants get the stability of a fiat balance with the speed of crypto. Payments made via USDT typically complete in minutes rather than days.

Conversion and On-Chain Payout

At the end of each settlement cycle, Templado System takes the total value of the transactions we have cleared on your behalf and converts that value into USDT. The USDT is then sent directly to your merchant cryptocurrency wallet, a process that typically takes only a few minutes to complete. By contrast, a SWIFT wire takes between one and two business days and passes through several banks along the way.

Faster settlements: In the current world of payment card settlements, merchants typically do not receive their funds until well after the day that they earned that revenue, typically between Monday and Tuesday. However, because stablecoins clear in minutes, the merchant can receive their funds at any time of the day or night, regardless of the local time zone of that merchant.

Lower cross-border costs: The costs of sending money through a SWIFT wire involve the fees of a number of correspondent banks, and their foreign exchange rates typically differ from the market foreign exchange rates. By contrast, stablecoins collapse that number of banks into one transaction at the acquirer, and the cost of sending the funds is a fraction of the cost of the SWIFT transaction. These cost savings are even more marked for merchants whose payments are sent to countries with thin or costly correspondent banking relationships.

Reduced working capital requirements: To pay merchants in their local currencies, the acquirer must have pre-funded currency accounts with each merchant's local banks. By contrast, the acquirer can pay merchants in a stablecoin that they can off-ramp into their local currencies. Therefore, these currency accounts no longer need to be pre-funded, and the working capital that the acquirer would have otherwise had to lay down for these accounts can be used elsewhere.

Where Stablecoin Settlement Beats Domestic Instant-Payment Rails

Domestic methods do solve the problem within the country in which the central bank is responsible for operating that domestic instant-payment system. None of these instant-payment systems solves the problem of cross-border transactions.

Each of these domestic instant-payment systems is a separate system with its own membership requirements, technology integrations, currencies, and operating hours. For Templado System to settle merchants in Brazil, India, and Nigeria, we would need access to all three of these domestic instant-payment systems, as well as the foreign exchange systems necessary to fund each of them. Instead, using a single stablecoin that operates on a single blockchain lets Templado System settle merchants in all three of these countries with only one software integration — an advantage that exists independent of how quickly those domestic instant-payment systems are able to settle transactions.