Interview: Encryptus board member Dilip Ratha says stablecoins win the risk narrative against legacy systems

Legacy cross-border B2B payments are costly, slow, and opaque. Crypto remittances flip the script. With stablecoins on blockchain rails, businesses can bypass intermediaries and settle globally in near real time at a fraction of the cost—unlocking faster, more transparent operations.

In the interview, Dilip Ratha, who recently joined the board of Encryptus, explains the risks and misconceptions about crypto remittances and the role of policy advocacy in this regard.

EPI: You’ve documented for decades why remittances cost too much and take too long. From your perspective, what are the biggest frictions in the system today?

Dilip Ratha: The fundamental issue remains correspondent banking infrastructure. When a migrant worker in London sends money to Kenya, that payment often passes through multiple intermediary banks before reaching the recipient. Each intermediary extracts a fee, applies its own foreign exchange margin, and introduces settlement delays. This layered structure creates compounding costs and opacity. The World Bank data shows average remittance costs still exceed 6%, which is more than double the UN Sustainable Development Goal target. These inefficiencies are structural, embedded in decades-old correspondent banking arrangements that were never designed for low-value retail cross-border payments.

EPI: What’s one big misconception about crypto remittances that you’d like to correct?

Dilip Ratha: The misconception is that crypto remittances require end users to hold or understand cryptocurrency. What Encryptus has built operates at the infrastructure level. Financial institutions use dollar-backed stablecoins for settlement, but customers interact with their local bank in local currency. The blockchain rail handles the cross-border movement of value between regulated institutions. The customer experience mirrors traditional banking (i.e. send pounds, recipient gets shillings), but settlement happens on infrastructure designed for efficiency rather than legacy correspondent banking relationships. This is infrastructure modernisation, not consumer crypto adoption.

EPI: Many still view crypto as risky. How do you respond to scepticism about using stablecoins for something as important as remittances and migrant money?

Dilip Ratha: The risk profile of a regulated, dollar-backed stablecoin operating through licensed financial institutions is fundamentally different from speculative cryptocurrency trading. Encryptus’ very own stablecoin, USDA, is fully reserved with US dollars and US Treasuries, held in institutional custody, and integrated into regulated banking infrastructure. The alternative is correspondent banking, which carries its own embedded risks: settlement delays, exchange rate volatility between initiation and completion, and opacity in fee structures. I spent decades documenting how these frictions harm migrant workers. The question isn’t whether stablecoins carry risk, but whether they introduce more risk than the system they replace. The data suggests they don’t.

EPI: Do you see stablecoins and CBDCs coexisting, competing, or complementing each other in cross-border payments?

Dilip Ratha: They will likely complement each other, serving different functions within the broader payments architecture. Central bank digital currencies will be important for domestic monetary policy and retail payments within jurisdictions. Stablecoins, particularly dollar-backed ones operating through regulated institutions, are proving effective for cross-border settlement where the correspondent banking system creates friction. In emerging markets, where access to dollars matters for trade and remittances, stablecoins provide an efficient bridge between jurisdictions. Both can coexist in a modernised global payment system – CBDCs for domestic monetary sovereignty, stablecoins for cross-border interoperability.

EPI: How important will policy advocacy and regulatory sandboxes be as Encryptus scales?

Dilip Ratha: Critical. During my time coordinating the G7/G20 Global Remittances Working Group, I saw how policy frameworks shape infrastructure development. Regulatory clarity enables institutional adoption. Sandboxes allow regulators to observe how stablecoin infrastructure operates within supervised environments before establishing permanent frameworks. Encryptus benefits from operating in jurisdictions with forward-looking regulators who understand that blocking innovation doesn’t eliminate demand, it pushes activity offshore or underground. The goal is to bring stablecoin settlement into regulated banking infrastructure, and that requires ongoing dialogue between policymakers, central banks, and infrastructure providers like Encryptus.

EPI: Your TED Talk and World Bank work helped put remittances on the global agenda. What excites you most about finally seeing solutions like stablecoins scale?

Dilip Ratha: For years, the policy conversation focused on documenting the problem (i.e. high costs, settlement delays, lack of transparency). We built global datasets, coordinated working groups, and set international targets. But the underlying infrastructure remained unchanged. What excites me about Encryptus is that it addresses the structural problem directly. This isn’t incremental improvement within correspondent banking, but infrastructure replacement. Stablecoins enable licensed banks to settle cross-border payments without intermediary correspondent relationships. That structural shift has the potential to bring remittance costs down toward the UN target in ways that policy advocacy alone never could. Moving from diagnosis to implementation feels like a natural next step.