PayPal’s Xoom Begins Settling Cross-Border Payments with Stablecoin

PayPal will begin letting its disbursement partners use PayPal USD to settle cross-border money transfers.

The new service will be offered through PayPal’s Xoom cross-border payments business, according to a Tuesday (Nov. 19) press release. Philippines-based financial services firm Cebuana Lhuillier and Africa’s Yellow Card are the first users.

“Cross-border transactions are an important driver for economic growth and prosperity in developing countries,” Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal senior vice president of blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital currencies, said in the release. “With this step, Xoom and its partners, like Cebuana Lhuillier and Yellow Card, will be able to leverage PayPal’s payment technologies and the blockchain to further enable seamless money transfers across borders.”

Cebuana Lhuillier, described in the release as “the largest micro-financial services provider in the Philippines,” has worked with PayPal for 18 years to facilitate money disbursements to the Philippines.

PayPal integrated with Yellow Card last year, per the release, making that company the first FinTech in Africa to list PYUSD, the stablecoin PayPal rolled out in 2023.

“We are thrilled to partner with Xoom to support money transfers made by PayPal customers across the African continent and rising world,” Yellow Card CEO and co-founder Chris Maurice said in the release. “PayPal understands that stablecoins like PYUSD are changing the payments landscape, and by integrating our technology, they will be able to move money in the most effective way possible thanks to our stablecoin and payments infrastructure.”

Earlier this year, Xoom began allowing users to make transactions with PYUSD, letting customers in the United States convert the stablecoins in their linked PayPal Cryptocurrency Hub to U.S. dollars to fund transactions to recipients in approximately 160 countries.

In related news, PYMNTS spoke earlier this month with Raj Dhamodharan of Mastercard about financial service giants’ efforts to unlock the potential of blockchain platforms.

“Blockchain technology, and public blockchains in particular, are opening up a number of new use cases one of which is to transfer value — such as remittances — from one country to another,” he said.

“But while the underlying infrastructure enables you to transfer value, it doesn’t really lend itself to doing so in a very easy way,” he added, noting that “the consumer experiences are hard.”