Ripple surveyed 160 finance leaders, spanning banks, fintechs, corporates, and asset managers, across Mexico and Brazil on how their businesses are using digital assets and how they feel about them. Here's what stood out.
- Stablecoins lead the way. 69% are using or plan to use stablecoins for payments within two years, compared with 54% globally.
- Fintechs are all in. Not a single Latin American fintech reports having no intent to use digital assets.
- Many want to build, few can. 28% of fintechs say they don't have the technical skills to build digital asset products in-house, four times the rate in North America (7%).
- The friction is regulatory. 39% cite compliance complexity as the top barrier, and 48% of financial institutions name regulatory clarity their number one concern, the highest rate for any segment in any region.
- So they’d rather partner. 65% would rather partner than build, and 61% prefer a single provider over a stack of specialists.
Latin America shows the strongest intent to adopt of any region we surveyed. It also has the widest gap between wanting to move and being able to.
Read on to dive deeper into our key takeaways.
Why stablecoins and why now
Picture a mid-sized importer in Mexico City paying a supplier in Asia. Sent through correspondent banks, that payment can take two to five business days. It passes through several intermediaries that each take a cut, and the importer can’t track it until it lands. To guarantee payouts arrive on time, businesses and their payment providers often keep large balances parked in accounts abroad, tying up cash that could be put to work elsewhere.
Dollar-backed stablecoins change that math. Payments settle in minutes, 24/7, usually at a lower and more transparent cost than correspondent banking. In Mexico, fintechs are turning to stablecoin rails for international payroll, remittances and supplier payments. In Brazil, the focus is cross-border business payments and treasury. Some are going further, offering customers rewards on stablecoin balances or exploring credit for import and export businesses. For most of them, moving dollars to and from the US is already solved. The next frontier is reliable local access across Latin America and into Asia.
The region generated roughly $1.5 trillion in crypto transaction volume from 2022 to 2025, most of it in dollar-backed stablecoins. In Mexico and Brazil, stablecoins are already doing what legacy rails cannot.
Stablecoins are becoming the main rail, not the alternative
Counting institutions already using digital assets and those planning to within one to two years, Latin America outpaces the global average on every use case we tested, and stablecoins top the list.
| Use Case | LATAM | Global |
|---|---|---|
| Third-party stablecoin payments | 69% | 54% |
| Stablecoin treasury management | 69% | 52% |
| Stablecoin issuance | 66% | 62% |
| Regulated digital asset custody | 63% | 53% |
Expectations run just as far ahead. 65% of Latin American financial institutions expect stablecoins to become the default for cross-border payments, against 47% globally, and 75% of respondents say stablecoin use cases are expanding beyond B2B payments, the highest of any region.
The reasons are practical:
- 50% want to cut operating costs
- 43% want dollar access through stablecoins as a hedge against inflation
- 38% want payments that settle in real time, around the clock
Fintechs are leading the charge: 82% say digital asset solutions will become a must-have for financial institutions. The institutions themselves aren’t far behind, with 67% saying they'll need them to stay competitive.
So the question is no longer whether to adopt stablecoins but which ones. The right stablecoins are backed 1:1 by high-quality dollar reserves, issued under regulatory oversight and liquid enough to move real value across the corridors that matter.
The friction is in the rules, not the appetite
Demand isn't the problem in Latin America. Getting live is.
- 48% of financial institutions cite regulatory clarity as their top concern
- 40% of financial institutions are concerned about security and safekeeping
- 39% of all respondents name compliance complexity as the top barrier
- 28% of fintechs lack the technical skills to build, compared with 7% in North America
Part of the challenge is that the rules are still being written. In late 2025, Brazil's central bank introduced the region's first comprehensive framework for virtual asset providers, limiting stablecoins to fiat-backed assets. Mexico is still updating its 2018 Fintech Law to widen permitted digital asset activity and open a path for tokenization.
Building against rules that are still taking shape is harder than building against rules that are simply strict. That’s why, for institutions here, choosing a partner is less about features and more about who can get them live safely.
Why the right partner matters
Latin American institutions want breadth from their partners. 81% say it's important for a partner to cover a broad range of infrastructure and services, and 61% prefer a single provider over multiple specialists, rising to 80% among corporates.
The reason is compliance, not convenience. Every additional vendor adds another integration to govern, another audit trail to reconcile and another counterparty to diligence, in a market where compliance complexity is already the number one barrier.
However, needs change with scale. In our conversations with Latin American fintechs, many started with a single all-in-one provider to get live quickly, then added partners as they grew, for redundancy, local expertise, and better pricing.
Ripple is built for both stages. Start with what you need most, like stablecoin payouts, and add more as you grow. Ripple Payments lets businesses accept, hold, convert and pay out in fiat and stablecoins, with custody, treasury and liquidity ready when you are. Teams can choose a fully managed solution or integrate directly through APIs, depending on where they are in their adoption. With 75+ regulatory licenses and more than $130B+ in total processed volume across 60+ markets, Ripple gives you a compliance-first foundation you can build on at every stage.
Methodology
Primary quantitative study conducted January–February 2026 among 1,080 finance decision makers worldwide across banking (18%), asset management (18%), corporates (32%) and fintech (32%). This piece isolates the Latin American sample: 160 respondents headquartered in Mexico and Brazil
