Fintech and stablecoin firms should consider looking outside of the US-to-Mexico corridor to win the $174 billion Latin America remittance market, according to a Bybit executive.
Most firms have focused too narrowly on the $61.8 billion US-Mexico remittance market and are missing faster-growing corridors between the US and Central America, as well as remittances within Latin America, Bybit Chief Marketing Officer Claudia Wang said in a post on X on Sunday.
“The corridors that look ‘hot’ right now are not the corridors most fintechs are optimized for,” she said, citing Venezuela-to-Colombia, Argentina-to-Bolivia and Spain-to-Ecuador as examples. The non-US-to-Mexico remittance market stands at about $112 billion.
“Stop treating LATAM as one market,” Wang said, adding that she spent six months studying the region:
“Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia — each needs different licenses, different rails, different stablecoins, different marketing. The companies winning here run country-specific stacks, not regional ones.”
Remittances throughout the Americas have largely been facilitated through banking rails by firms such as Western Union and MoneyGram. However, both unveiled plans to roll out stablecoin infrastructure following the passage of the GENIUS Act in July.
Western Union is building its own US dollar-backed stablecoin, USDPT, which is in the final stages of readiness and expected to launch this month.
Crypto-native companies such as Binance, Bitso, Strike and Felix Pago are also competing in the LATAM remittance market, as are banks and retail and telecommunications companies such as Walmart and Tigo, Wang noted.
US immigration policy is influencing LATAM remittance market
Wang noted that the US-to-Central America corridor “is exploding,” with remittances in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala rising 19%, 18% and 15%, respectively, in 2025.
By contrast, remittances in the oversaturated US-Mexico corridor fell 4.5% to $61.8 billion.
Wang said the divergence between rising Central American flows and Mexico’s decline is the result of US immigration policy: “Migrants from Central America are sending more home — faster, larger amounts — to hedge against deportation risk.”
By contrast, Mexico has a “more established and documented diaspora” and thus “doesn’t show the same panic-send behavior,” Wang said.
Top remittance corridors in 2025. Source: Claudia Wang
As for the non-US corridors, Wang noted that while some of these remittance markets are small in absolute terms, they are “barely served” by US money transmitter operators and “almost untouched by crypto rails.”
Latin Americans want to hold stablecoins, not just move them
Wang also said many Western fintechs haven’t realized that in LATAM, the “killer app” is holding stablecoins, not moving them.
“Users don’t want to ‘use’ stablecoins for a transaction and convert back to local currency. They want to hold dollars. The transaction is the side effect.”
Wang said there is no clear winner in the LATAM remittance market, adding that “the fintechs that win the next decade in this region will combine local rails, stablecoin liquidity, trust and closed-loop economics — remit → hold → spend → earn.”
Related: Australia draft payments vision eyes stablecoin interoperability
She added that many fintech companies in the space have built their products for the typical 25-year-old crypto trader, not the average remittance sender, who is 40 to 60 years old and presumably is not tech-savvy.
Profile of the imagined LATAM remittance user (left) vs actual user (right). Source: Claudia Wang
“If your product makes a 50-year-old factory worker in New Jersey think for more than 30 seconds before sending $300 to his mom in Honduras, you’ve already lost,” Wang said:
“The crypto industry has spent five years optimizing for the wrong user. The retail remittance customer in LATAM doesn’t want to ‘self-custody.’ They want to know the money landed.”
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