The Central Bankers Who Whisper: What Stablecoins Reveal About the Future of Money

Imagine going out for dinner with clients and having to carry enough cash in your suit pockets to pay the bill. Not because you prefer cash, but because the payment infrastructure simply does not support cards.

That was the reality for Nick Philpott during his time working in Nigeria. And when the bill was particularly large, the restaurant wouldn't bring over a card machine. It would bring a money counter.

It is a story that sounds almost unbelievable today, but it captures something important about the global financial system: money does not work equally well everywhere.

In the latest episode of the Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock'n'Roll podcast, Jonas Groß and Jonathan Knoll sat down with Nick, Co-Founder and Head of Partnerships at Zodia Markets, to discuss stablecoins, cross-border payments, FX markets, and why some of the biggest opportunities in digital money are emerging in places traditional financial infrastructure has struggled to serve.

And as the conversation unfolded, one question kept coming back: are we building better financial infrastructure for those who already have access to it, or for those who stand to benefit from it the most?

As Nick pointed out, “What you often lack is the voice of [...] the rest of the world.”

And perhaps that's why some of the biggest opportunities in digital money are being overlooked.

When Money Doesn't Work, You Notice

Nick's journey into digital assets wasn't exactly conventional. Before spending years at Standard Chartered and eventually co-founding Zodia Markets, he had planned a career in the British Army. Finance became Plan B after the Army and he landed through Finance almost through luck.

Working across markets such as Nigeria gave him a perspective that many people in established financial centres rarely experience firsthand.

In Nigeria, it wasn't just about carrying cash. Currency controls meant that even accessing foreign currency to visit family abroad required paperwork, passport stamps, and monthly allowances.

A few years later, Nick discovered Bitcoin through his brother, who was mining it using computers in his London flat. What started as curiosity gradually became a conviction that financial infrastructure could work differently.

During the podcast, Nick made an observation that deserves more attention. In countries where payments already work reasonably well, innovation might improve the experience from a seven out of ten to an eight. But in places where financial infrastructure barely functions, the same technology could take the experience from a three to a seven.

That is a much bigger change.

And it helps explain why stablecoins are finding some of their strongest use cases outside the world's most developed financial markets.

What If Payments Worked Like the Internet?

One of the most memorable moments of the discussion came when Nick compared international payments with something we use without thinking: messaging.

Imagine sending a message on Friday and being told it would arrive on Tuesday because the receiving system was closed for the weekend.

Or imagine being unable to send it at all because the person you're contacting uses a different provider

It sounds ridiculous. Yet this is surprisingly close to how parts of the cross-border payments system still operate.

Money moves through different banks, payment systems, intermediaries, and databases, each with its own operating hours, reconciliation processes, and limitations.

For Nick, stablecoins offer an opportunity to rethink that infrastructure rather than simply make the existing processes a little faster.

And the implications go well beyond remittances.

Consider tokenization. Financial institutions are increasingly exploring tokenized securities, bonds, and other assets. But as Nick pointed out, tokenizing the asset without tokenizing the money used to settle it creates an incomplete system.

A security might move instantly on a blockchain, but if the cash payment still takes days to settle, how much have we really improved?

This is precisely why Nick sees tokenized cash as such an important foundation for the future of financial markets.

As he put it, “Tokenize cash and you lay the groundwork for everything else.”

And his point is simple: the real potential of tokenization can only be unlocked when both assets and the money used to settle them can move just as seamlessly. That's where the opportunity to transform cross-border payments and foreign exchange becomes particularly interesting.

The Stablecoin Opportunity Might Not Be Where We Think

Stablecoin discussions are still overwhelmingly dominated by the US dollar. And understandably so, given its role in global finance.

But Nick offered an interesting perspective on where non-dollar stablecoins might find their place.

The biggest opportunity may not be in currencies such as the euro or Swiss franc, where payment infrastructure already works relatively well.

Instead, consider someone working in the United States who wants to send money home to the Philippines.

Opening a Philippine peso bank account in the US would be difficult. Holding a Philippine peso stablecoin, however, could make it possible to transfer value without waiting for banking systems in different time zones to open.

The same logic applies to regional trade and currencies that are difficult to access internationally.

Nick even suggested that some currencies could become regional alternatives to weaker neighbouring currencies. In those cases, the competition isn't necessarily against the dollar. It's against the payment and monetary options already available locally.

This raises an interesting possibility: the future stablecoin ecosystem may be much more diverse than today's dollar-dominated market suggests.

And success might not always be measured by how many tokens are circulating. For payment-focused stablecoins, how frequently those tokens move could be just as important.

The Hard Part Is Still Moving Traditional Money

There is, however, a practical challenge that often gets lost in conversations about instant blockchain settlement.

Stablecoins can move quickly. Traditional money doesn't always follow.

At Zodia Markets, this is precisely the problem Nick and his team are working on: helping institutions move between stablecoins and fiat currencies at wholesale scale.

During the conversation, Nick shared that Zodia Markets settled 90% of its trades in under an hour last year, with an average transaction size of $2.4 million.

That distinction matters because moving a few hundred dollars through a payment system is very different from settling millions in a wholesale transaction.

It also highlights why simply making blockchain networks faster isn't enough. Banks, treasury operations, liquidity management, and domestic payment infrastructure all need to evolve alongside them.

Even a move towards 24/7 central bank settlement raises difficult operational questions. Who manages liquidity over the weekend? What happens when the markets used to fund those positions are closed?

The technology might operate around the clock, but the institutions supporting it aren't necessarily ready to do the same.

The Central Bankers Who Whisper

Perhaps the most revealing story came towards the end of the episode.

At Sibos, one of the world's largest banking conferences, Nick met a central banker who quietly admitted to using stablecoins personally for cross-border transactions.

What made the moment amusing was that he almost whispered the admission, despite being in a private conversation.

It captured a fascinating contradiction.

While parts of the traditional financial industry continue debating whether stablecoins are useful, some of the people working within that very system are already using them to solve everyday problems.

And perhaps that's the bigger story.

Adoption doesn't always begin with a grand institutional announcement. Sometimes it begins with someone who needs to send money home, access a currency their bank doesn't offer, or make a payment without wondering whether it will arrive.

The future of digital money may not be decided solely in the world's largest financial centres. It may be shaped just as much by the places where the limitations of today's infrastructure are impossible to ignore.

Because for people whose money already moves easily, stablecoins might feel like an incremental improvement.

For everyone else, they could mean something much more fundamental.

The ability to move and use their money when and where they need it.