Simon Taylor wears more hats than most. He writes the Fintech Brain Food newsletter, hosts the Tokenized podcast covering stablecoins and real-world assets, runs Fintech NerdCon, and serves as Head of Market Development at Tempo, a new Layer 1 blockchain incubated by Paradigm with support from Stripe. He also comes from a payments background, which shapes how he thinks about all of it.
Dayana sat down with Simon live at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam for an episode of Payments Pulse, WalletConnect Pay's talk show on the convergence of traditional and digital finance. Simon has been writing and thinking about fintech and crypto longer than almost anyone in the room, and his perspective reflects that: he's optimistic about stablecoins, but clear-eyed about what still needs to be built.
In this episode, Simon explains why the stablecoin alphabet problem is holding back consumer adoption, where payment rails genuinely rupture and why that matters, why settlement is the underrated killer app for stablecoins, and what Tempo is building to make all of this connect. He also shares his take on whether agentic payments is the next big theme or whether something else is quietly overtaking it.
Full Transcript
Dayana: Welcome to Payments Pulse, WalletConnect's talk show where we discuss anything finance, decentralised finance, traditional finance, and how the two converge. We're live at Money20/20 in Amsterdam with a very special guest who wears many hats. Simon Taylor, I'll let you introduce yourself.
Simon Taylor: Thanks. I write a newsletter called Fintech Brain Food. I run a podcast called Tokenized, which covers stablecoins and real-world assets. I work at Tempo, which is a new Layer 1 blockchain incubated by Paradigm with support from Stripe. And I run an event called Fintech NerdCon. Many hats, not wearing one today though.
Dayana: Stablecoins handle trillions in annual volume, yet most consumers have never actually spent one. What's the biggest barrier to everyday adoption?
Simon Taylor: Because it's got a letter on it. Why does the dollar now have a new letter? That makes no sense to a normal person. A dollar should be a dollar. You shouldn't have to think about which brand of dollar you're holding, or worry about whether this particular dollar might go bust. It should feel like cash, and it doesn't. You shouldn't have to think about which wallet supports which network, or whether you need passkeys. The user experience was genuinely bad for a long time. But what we're seeing now with embedded wallets is that all of that starts to disappear. If you're using Deel or Monogram, both of which work with Tempo, you're just using their app and managing dollars. There's a stablecoin behind the scenes but you never see it. That's where we need to get to. The plumbing should become invisible. And once it is, the consumer question shifts from "do I want to hold this stablecoin with some letter at the end?" to simply "do I want to hold dollars?" That's a much easier question to answer.
Dayana: Where do you see the biggest rupture in payment rails and what can be done to fix it?
Simon Taylor: Payment rails are domestic by nature. There's no single global rail to rule them all. Correspondent banking is a patchwork of banks that talk to each other, and most payment systems in the world don't work on weekends or bank holidays. Even where you have local instant payments, you're still relying on the slowest part of the system. Stablecoins are dependent on those underlying systems to some extent, and on banks to support them. So right now stablecoins are like an incredible island. You can do whatever you like once you're on it, but getting in and out means crossing an ocean.
That said, once people taste 24/7 instant global money, it's very hard to go backwards. I had dinner last night with the CEO of a remittance company and he said his company has dollarised their entire treasury with stablecoins. He's no longer worried about money getting stuck. Most consumers don't see those ruptures in the existing system, but the ruptures exist. The conversation is shifting from "stablecoins will replace everything" or "stablecoins are just for criminals" toward something in the middle: stablecoins are an upgrade. They help money move 24/7. They'll always connect back to existing payment systems and they'll coexist with them. But that connective tissue isn't fully built yet, and that's exactly what Tempo is trying to create.
Dayana: Which piece of legislation has been the biggest game changer?
Simon Taylor: GENIUS Act, no question. Though I want to give MiCA more credit than it typically gets. MiCA allowed European banks to move in a way that was genuinely unprecedented. SocGen and Banking Circle both have their own stablecoins. Until SoFi launched a few weeks ago, you couldn't name a US bank with a stablecoin. MiCA made that possible in Europe first. The GENIUS Act has now changed how everyone thinks about stablecoins in the US and beyond. The conversation is no longer "obviously tokenised deposits will win" or "obviously central bank digital currencies will win." Stablecoins are now part of the fabric. The question is just what we do about it.
Dayana: Cross-border payments is always cited as the headline use case. What else should we be talking about?
Simon Taylor: Settlement. Most people don't really understand what settlement is, and I think it's the most underrated use case for stablecoins. When you tap a card at a shop, no money actually moves. What happens is the card network asks your bank whether there's enough money to cover the purchase. Your bank says yes, the shopkeeper releases the goods, and then everyone figures out how to move the actual money later, today, tomorrow, next week. It appears instant but underneath it's extremely slow. Fedwire is closed on Saturdays. CLS, the international version, is closed all weekend. Real actual settlement often doesn't happen until days later.
With stablecoins, it's gone. It's there. It's now. Deposits are money that stays still. Tokenised deposits can only ever stay inside one bank. Stablecoins are money that moves, and it moves fast. From a corporate standpoint they may not be as risk-free as a deposit, but they move in a way deposits can't match. These two things will coexist rather than compete. If you want to move money quickly, stablecoins. If you want to hold money safely, deposits. I think the killer app is the merchant use case: your inventory has left the store, you haven't been paid yet, you need to cover your costs. What if you could just get the money now? That's the real unlock.
Dayana: You've been writing about fintech and crypto longer than almost anyone. What has surprised you most about how stablecoins have developed?
Simon Taylor: That banks have started to genuinely adopt it as their own. I'm thinking about SoFi, about Coastal Community Bank specifically. They're using stablecoins to do bank-to-bank transfers with a bank in Brazil, bypassing correspondent banking entirely. That's not killing Visa or Swift. Those things still exist. But these pockets of genuine institutional innovation are really something. I expected stablecoins to reach certain milestones, I just didn't know the specific shape they'd take. What I didn't expect was how aggressive some of the smarter banks would be. That's been the real surprise.
Dayana: What are you most excited about at Tempo right now?
Simon Taylor: We're working on upgrading ISO 20022 to support stablecoins. For anyone who hasn't gone under the hood of payment systems: ISO 20022 is a standard file format used by essentially every bank on the planet and most large corporates. It's the XML-based messaging standard that says here's the beneficiary, here's the amount, here's the compliance information. Banks have spent 20 years building systems around it. What we're doing is making that standard compatible with stablecoins sitting at the settlement layer instead of traditional bank accounts. It potentially reuses everything banks and corporates have already built, but makes it interoperable with stablecoins. That's a big one.
The other is our privacy zones approach. Enterprises have a non-negotiable requirement: a retailer doesn't want competitors to see their inventory purchases or transaction patterns, especially if they're publicly traded. A privacy zone is like a virtual private cloud on Tempo. Your transactions stay private, but you still get a golden record and you can settle with anyone else on the network in under a second. We're seeing significant enterprise adoption there, from companies launching their own stablecoins to banks working within privacy zones to settle with each other. Every day genuinely feels like we're building something important.
Dayana: Final question. The two things I'm hearing most at Money20/20 are stablecoins and agentic payments. Will those still be the leading themes in two years, or will something else emerge?
Simon Taylor: I think tokenised money starts to overtake stablecoins as the framing, because tokenised deposits are an equal part of this story alongside stablecoins and tokenised assets. It's a more complete picture. On agentic payments, it'll definitely still be around next year, but I'm not sure it'll be the hottest theme. Agentic commerce is more interesting to me, because there are a lot of things that need to be figured out around the payment before we get to the payment itself. And then who knows what else surfaces. This space never runs out of surprises.
Dayana: You heard it here first. Simon, thank you so much for being a guest on Payments Pulse.
Simon Taylor: Thank you.