BIS paper finds stablecoins don’t remove payment middlemen

A Bank for International Settlements (BIS) paper finds crypto exchanges effectively function as correspondent banks, while retail wires at large banks carried markups up to 470bps in the authors’ own transfers. Figures drawn from Wise data published in a working paper by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), found banking fees, treasury activities, and foreign exchange (FX) account for £0.02 of the £0.24 in fixed costs Wise incurs for every transfer from British pounds (GBP) to euros (EUR). The paper finds stablecoins do not eliminate intermediaries in cross-border payments; rather, they simply replace them with other parties.