Privy's Henri Stern on Deel's stablecoin launch, global corridors, and the explosion of institutional adoption

Deel goes consumer; Privy powers the wallet

Deel's stablecoin launch, announced at Money 20/20 in Amsterdam, is a move into consumer fintech. The product has three components: any business can pay contractors in stablecoins regardless of where they are; contractors get a wallet app that looks like a standard account, lets them hold a balance, earn yield on it, and spend from it; and Deel is issuing its own stablecoin to control how the underlying treasury is managed. Henri Stern, whose company Privy built the wallet infrastructure, describes it as "the full package coming together."

The spending side is further along than it might appear. Stablecoin-linked cards that settle on Visa and Mastercard rails are growing fast, meaning merchants see a normal transaction and contractors can spend from their balance anywhere card payments are accepted. Stripe, which Privy also works with, is simultaneously building merchant-side stablecoin acceptance, so the infrastructure is being built from both ends.

“Deel is doing three things: enabling businesses to pay contractors in stablecoins, rolling out a wallet app that's basically a savings account, and issuing their own stablecoin for more treasury control. We serve a company called Felix Bago that's doing 5% of the US-to-Mexico remittance corridor — the entire corridor is $60,000,000,000 a year. At Money 2020, we're seeing a lot more institutional adoption from larger banks who historically have been waiting to come in.”

Corridors, not countries

Stablecoin adoption is less about which country is winning and more about which pairs of countries have volume. Stern cites Felix Pago, a Privy customer handling roughly 5% of the US-to-Mexico remittance corridor — a corridor worth around $60 billion a year. UAE-to-India is another active pair. Mexico has regulatory clarity and is seeing heavy volume; Latin America broadly is where most of the growth is happening. China is essentially absent — capital controls make stablecoin adoption structurally incompatible, and Stern says Privy has no customers there.

US adoption has accelerated since the Genius Act and the broader regulatory clarity around stablecoins, which Stern says has kept the team busy domestically even as international corridors expand.

Where new startups are forming

Stern sees two active areas for new company formation. The first is localized money pipes — building the ground-level banking integrations in individual countries, where the real differentiation is local partnerships rather than software. The second is agentic commerce infrastructure: control systems that let AI agents discover services, execute payments, and meter spend so a hallucinating agent doesn't blow through a budget. That last point — metered spend for agents — applies to fiat as much as stablecoins, and Stripe is active in the space.

The third signal he flags is institutional adoption. Larger banks that had been waiting on the sidelines are now moving in, a shift he says was visible at Money 20/20 this week.