There is a type of business transaction that is unremarkable by outcome but exhausting by process. A supplier in Istanbul invoices a buyer in Almaty. The buyer's bank sends a SWIFT message to a correspondent bank, which finds a relationship with a Turkish correspondent, which forwards the settlement instruction to the supplier's bank. The transaction clears in three days, if everything cooperates. It costs somewhere between two and four percent of the value to send. The timeline is approximate. The fee is not.
This is the correspondent banking system, designed in the 1970s and structurally unchanged since. It works, in the sense that money eventually arrives. It works poorly for the businesses that cannot afford the friction — small manufacturers, trading companies, the SMEs that form the operational backbone of most emerging economies and constitute, in aggregate, most of global trade by transaction count.
Fasset, a Dubai-based company, raised $51 million in a Series B led by Japan's SBI Group, with Investcorp and Turkey's Arz Portföy also participating, announced May 14. The company processes more than $32 billion in annualized transaction volume for over 1,000 SME clients across 125 countries, using stablecoins — primarily dollar-pegged tokens — to move money across more than 50 payment corridors in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The payment lands in minutes. The fee is a fraction of the correspondent alternative.
The mechanism is straightforward. Fasset holds stablecoin liquidity on both sides of a corridor. A Turkish supplier receives lira; a buyer elsewhere sends the equivalent in a dollar-pegged stablecoin; Fasset's Own Network handles the conversion and settlement. The counterparties do not need to understand the plumbing. They need to be registered on the platform and trust the settlement.
Stablecoins processed $9 trillion in global payments in 2025, an 87 percent increase from 2024. The fiat-backed stablecoin supply reached $273 billion by March 2026, up from $6.8 billion in early 2020. This is no longer a speculative instrument searching for a use case. It is payment infrastructure, running at scale, serving businesses for whom the traditional alternatives were too slow and too expensive to be practical.
For operators in markets like Mongolia, the specific texture of this matters. Getting USD access through a local commercial bank to pay a non-Chinese foreign supplier involves correspondent relationships that add days and fees at each hop. The corridor that companies like Fasset are building does not require a correspondent relationship at each end. It requires an account and a functional internet connection — a bar that most SMEs in Central Asia and Southeast Asia can now clear, even if they cannot always clear the documentation requirements for a traditional correspondent wire.
Fasset describes itself as a stablecoin-powered Islamic bank. Sharia-compliant financial products are central to its market strategy in Muslim-majority countries across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. This is not a marketing note — it is a product constraint that opens a specific category of client who cannot use conventional interest-bearing instruments. The intersection of sharia compliance and stablecoin rails is a narrower market than "all of global trade," but it is a market that has historically been underserved by the correspondent system in ways that compound over time.
SBI Group's decision to lead this round is instructive. SBI is one of Japan's largest financial institutions, not a crypto-native investor. Their participation signals that the institutional view of stablecoin payment infrastructure has moved from "this might become something" to "this is now something, and we want exposure to it."
The correspondent banking system will not disappear. It is embedded in compliance frameworks, regulatory relationships, and institutional habits that change slowly. But the businesses that need it least are already routing around it, and the volume routing around it is growing at 87 percent per year.
The short of it.
Fasset raised $51 million on May 14 to expand its stablecoin payment network, which processes $32 billion in annualized volume for SMEs across 125 countries. Stablecoins processed $9 trillion in global payments in 2025, up 87% from 2024. For businesses in emerging markets paying foreign suppliers — where the correspondent banking path costs two to four percent and takes three days — the stablecoin corridor is now a practical operational choice, not a speculative one. Watch who leads the next few raises: institutional money following SBI into this space will tell you how quickly the rails are being built.