Coastal is turning cross-border settlement from days into minutes
Coastal is building stablecoin-settled payment infrastructure on Tempo for its fintech clients, pairing existing institutional messaging with onchain settlement to move money faster, at lower cost, with fewer intermediaries.
The problem with cross-border payments
Cross-border payments still move through chains of correspondent banks, each adding cost, latency, and operational overhead. A transfer between two banks in different countries can take days to settle, requires pre-funded correspondent accounts, and operates only during banking hours. Banks and their clients absorb the difference.
For Coastal Financial Corporation, a regulated sponsor bank that powers financial products for fintech companies nationwide through its CCBX division, those limitations directly affect the partners it serves. Coastal's fintech clients need faster, cheaper ways to move money across borders. Traditional correspondent banking infrastructure was not built to deliver that.
What Coastal is building
Coastal and Tempo are building a cross-border payment corridor that keeps existing compliance infrastructure in place while replacing the settlement layer underneath with stablecoins on Tempo.
Here's how it works: a customer at a partner bank abroad initiates a payment. The sending bank runs its standard KYC/AML screening and sends a payment instruction to Coastal with the transaction details. The sending bank then funds a wallet on Tempo via a stablecoin issuer, converting local currency to USD stablecoins. Those stablecoins transfer to Coastal's wallet on Tempo. Coastal redeems the stablecoins, confirms the payment back to the sending bank, and credits the recipient's account in USD.
The entire settlement happens in minutes. The compliance infrastructure, including messaging, KYC/AML screening, and bank-to-bank confirmations, stays exactly where it is. What changes is the settlement layer. Instead of routing through multiple correspondent banks over several days, the value moves on Tempo, near-instantly, at a fraction of the cost.
This is a controlled implementation by design. Both sides of the transaction are known, regulated financial institutions with an existing relationship. Wallets are whitelisted. The flow is permissioned end-to-end. It's the kind of use case that lets a bank move into stablecoin settlement without rebuilding its compliance stack.
Why Coastal chose Tempo
Ryan Hall, Chief Product Officer at Coastal, joined the bank after building and scaling the SoFi Money product. He came to Coastal specifically to help transform it into a next-generation sponsor bank.
When Coastal evaluated stablecoin infrastructure partners, what stood out about Tempo was focus.
“What was particularly interesting about Tempo was that they were focused on a payments-first use case and on enabling the next generation of money movement. Faster, more efficient, and more secure payments.”
That focus translated into features that matter for institutional cross-border settlement. Tempo Zones give banks the equivalent of a private cloud on a shared network: only the zone operator and transaction counterparties see the details, with selective disclosure to regulators, while institutions retain full access to shared liquidity across the broader network and the ability to meet their compliance obligations. Gas abstraction lets institutions pay fees in any USD-denominated stablecoin, avoiding uncertain capital treatment on volatile crypto holdings. Protocol-level compliance controls, including allowlists, blocklists, and freeze-and-pause capabilities, are built directly into the chain. And native memo fields support structured payment data compatible with ISO 20022, the messaging standard used across global institutional payments.
For Coastal, the alignment went beyond features. Hall described the Tempo team as builders with the same urgency to get real use cases into production.
“The immediate focus was, which use cases can we bring to market right away? How do we think about where the need is, where the opportunity is, where the greatest friction is, and how can we solve those problems right now, today, in a real-world use case?”
Bridging legacy and next-generation rails
Coastal's approach is not to replace legacy banking infrastructure overnight. The bank is building a system that runs stablecoin and traditional rails in parallel, giving fintech partners access to both through a single integration.
“We are building the next generation of infrastructure on digital currency and stablecoin while also supporting legacy rails. The goal is to abstract those two systems into a unified experience, while giving our partners access to the next generation of innovation.”
Full distribution in the United States still requires legacy rails. Every endpoint, every bank account, every existing payment flow still runs on traditional infrastructure. But for specific corridors where speed, cost, and settlement time are the priority, stablecoin rails on Tempo offer a step change. For Coastal's fintech partners, that means access to stablecoin-powered cross-border settlement without abandoning the infrastructure they still depend on.
What's ahead
“Our partners are continually raising the bar for what modern financial services should look like: faster, more flexible, and always available. By integrating stablecoin capabilities and Tempo's blockchain-based infrastructure into our platform, we're enabling our partners to build more seamless, efficient experiences for their customers while staying grounded in the trust and reliability of the banking system.”
Cross-border payments are the starting point. The infrastructure Coastal is building on Tempo, combining institutional messaging, compliance-native controls, and stablecoin settlement, is a foundation for any payment corridor that needs to move faster and cost less.
