Published on 7/31/26
Stablecoins are no longer just a crypto phenomenon. Around the world, banks, payment providers, and fintech companies are exploring how programmable digital money can improve cross-border payments, treasury operations, and consumer financial services. Yet many of the products people use every day still rely on payment infrastructure designed decades ago.
Papaya Finance develops infrastructure for recurring payments using stablecoin settlement rails. The platform is designed to help automate recurring payment flows across the financial services industry.
Sergey Kravtsov, co-founder and CEO of Papaya Finance, talks about the future of digital payments, what financial institutions are looking for today, and why payment infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important focus.
You started your career building consumer products, where users notice every feature. Today you’re building payment infrastructure, where success often means nobody notices it at all. How has that changed the way you think about product development?
In consumer products, you’re fighting for attention. Every feature has to earn its place on the screen, and success is measured by how often people come back. Infrastructure is the opposite discipline. If people are noticing a payment system, something has already gone wrong — a failed charge, a delay, or an unexpected fee. Success means payments happen reliably without drawing attention.
The priorities also change. Consumer products optimize for engagement, while payment infrastructure is built around reliability, resilience, and staying out of the way. Success is reflected when finance teams no longer have to think about a payment flow because it operates consistently in the background.
It also changes who the product is really built for. A consumer feature has to satisfy an end user in the moment. Infrastructure has to meet the expectations of risk officers, compliance teams, and CFOs who will rely on it for years.
Papaya is built around the idea that users should keep control of their money, while banks are traditionally used to holding and managing customer funds directly. How do you bridge that gap when speaking with financial institutions, and what advantages does Papaya’s approach offer?
Banks are already responsible for custody, compliance, risk management, and customer trust. Papaya’s approach is not to replace that role, but to provide a more efficient payment layer beneath the products they already offer.
The advantage is that recurring payments can be managed at scale without every customer interaction creating a separate operational burden. For banks and payment providers, that can mean lower settlement costs, greater automation, and simpler reconciliation across large volumes of recurring payments.
User-controlled payment infrastructure also provides greater flexibility. Banks can deploy it within traditional regulated environments, while fintech platforms can offer customers more direct control over their funds where appropriate. Rather than prescribing a single operating model, the same infrastructure can support different products, markets, and regulatory frameworks.
You’ve spoken with central banks, payment operators, and fintech teams in different regions. What are you starting to see about where payments are heading that’s easy to miss from inside a single market?
From Papaya’s work with banks, payment providers, and fintech teams across different regions, one pattern has become clear: many markets are moving toward similar goals, but from different starting points. A central bank in Central Asia may focus on sovereignty and modernizing national payment rails. A Western fintech may focus on user experience and cost reduction. A payment operator may care most about settlement speed and reconciliation.
From inside each market, those can look like separate problems. But when you look across them, they are all pointing to the same shift: money is moving from discrete, expensive transactions toward more programmable and continuous payment flows.
The part that is easy to miss from inside a single market is timing. What looks like a distant future in one region may already be happening in another. The markets with the highest friction in their legacy systems often have the strongest incentive to leapfrog.
Most stablecoins today are dollar-based, while many Central Asian economies are also focused on protecting their own currencies. How can central banks benefit from stablecoin technology without accelerating dollarization — and could local-currency digital assets or CBDC interoperability be part of the answer?
This is the most important distinction many people miss: the technology and the dollar are two separate things. When people say “stablecoins,” they usually mean dollar-denominated stablecoins, and that is what creates legitimate concerns about dollarization. But the underlying payment infrastructure itself is currency-neutral. Nothing requires it to carry only dollars.
A central bank can issue its own local-currency digital asset or connect a digital version of the national currency to modern payment rails. That gives it many of the benefits people associate with stablecoins — faster settlement, lower costs, programmable payments, and more efficient cross-border flows — without giving up control over the monetary unit.
In fact, the stronger and more convenient the local-currency digital option becomes, the weaker the incentive to dollarize. If people and businesses can move and use the national currency as easily as a dollar stablecoin, they have less reason to switch.
Local-currency digital assets and CBDC interoperability are central to this discussion. Modern payment infrastructure can be adopted without giving up control over the national currency. A neutral settlement layer can support transactions regardless of whether the unit of account is the dollar, a local currency, or a central bank digital currency.
A bank’s head of payments calls you tomorrow and says, “we want to do something with stablecoins.” What’s the first question you ask them back — and the first thing you’d tell them not to do?
The first question should be: which existing payment flow is already expensive, slow, or operationally inefficient?
For most banks and fintechs, that typically means cross-border settlement, supplier payments, remittance corridors, payouts, or other high-volume flows where the costs of fees, foreign exchange, reconciliation, and settlement delays are already well understood.
One common mistake is starting with a highly visible, customer-facing product, such as a branded stablecoin or a retail crypto app. That places the institution’s brand on one of the most complex parts of the implementation and can introduce additional compliance and operational challenges before the underlying infrastructure is proven.
In practice, successful implementations often begin with the underlying payment infrastructure rather than the customer interface. Upgrading one existing payment flow and measuring the operational and economic impact provides a clearer path to broader adoption. Many institutions have taken this incremental approach, focusing first on improving internal payment processes before expanding to customer-facing products.
What’s the most expensive misconception you still see banks and fintechs holding about stablecoins in 2026?
The most expensive misconception is that stablecoins should be treated as a new product category rather than a way to improve existing payment operations.
For banks and fintechs, the real question is not, “How do we launch a stablecoin product?” It is, “Where are we already losing money because settlement is slow, reconciliation is difficult, cross-border payments are expensive, or recurring payments are operationally inefficient?”
That is where financial institutions are likely to see the greatest benefits. Stablecoins become most valuable when they reduce costs and complexity within financial products people already understand. Users may never need to know which payment rail is operating underneath.
If you had to bet on the first financial product that ordinary consumers will use without realizing payment infrastructure is working behind the scenes, what would it be — and why?
Earned-wage access is one of the strongest candidates. It allows employees to access wages they have already earned before the traditional payday, or even receive them on a daily or continuous basis.
These are the kinds of payment flows Papaya focuses on supporting today.
The reason is straightforward. Payroll is universal, and the benefit is immediate and tangible: people receive money when they need it rather than waiting for a fixed pay cycle. Users do not need to understand stablecoins or settlement infrastructure. They simply experience faster access to their earnings.
Everyday subscriptions and recurring payments are another likely area of adoption. Whether it is streaming services, utilities, SaaS products, or installment plans, modern payment infrastructure can make small, frequent payments more cost-effective than traditional systems, where per-transaction fees often make high-frequency payments uneconomical.
The common thread is the ability to support frequent, predictable payments more efficiently. As settlement becomes faster and operational costs decline, new payment models become commercially viable. For banks and payment providers, recurring payment flows can also be easier to forecast, reconcile, and manage than one-off transactions.
Payroll and subscriptions represent two payment categories where improvements to the underlying infrastructure can deliver visible benefits without requiring consumers to think about the technology behind them.
Looking across your experience building both consumer products and financial infrastructure, how has your approach to decision-making as a founder changed over time?
At its core, the approach has remained the same: making decisions with conviction and taking responsibility for them. For founders, the greater risk is often not making the wrong decision, but delaying a decision altogether. In many cases, the opportunities that are never pursued become bigger regrets than decisions that later need to be corrected.
Experience adds perspective. It is impossible to know in advance which decision, project, or conversation will prove to be important. Over time, the focus shifts away from trying to predict every outcome and toward acting, learning, and treating both successes and setbacks as part of the process.
Experience can also make founders more decisive rather than more cautious. The more companies and products they build, the clearer it becomes that momentum is an asset. A timely decision that can be adjusted is often more valuable than a perfect decision made too late.
