MoneyGram's CEO says blockchain works best when customers don't know it's there

MoneyGram CEO Anthony Soohoo said the company's blockchain strategy works best when customers don't know it's there, in an interview with CoinDesk. The remittance giant, which serves about 60 million active customers, sees blockchain less as a consumer-facing feature and more as a way to make cross-border payments faster and cheaper.

"What you're always looking for is how to use technology to run your business more efficiently and effectively," Soohoo said. "The use case is what do our customers want, and how do we solve that for them?"

MoneyGram's customers are mostly people sending money to family abroad. Traditional cross-border payments can take days to settle, relying on banking hours and multiple intermediaries. Blockchain lets the firm settle around the clock, cutting operational costs. Soohoo said the savings can eventually be passed on to customers.

MoneyGram has partnered with the Stellar network for the past five years. It now also validates on Solana and Tempo. The immediate payoff, Soohoo said, is replacing legacy financial rails, not speculative crypto activity.

"We believe if we do it right, we can achieve all three," he said, referring to time, effort and money for customers. MoneyGram's fees start at $1.89, varying by destination.

Soohoo compared blockchain to the processor inside an iPhone. "I can't tell you what processor is inside my iPhone," he said. "I just know it's faster." Remittance customers care whether money arrives quickly and reliably, not whether it traveled over a blockchain, he argued.

That philosophy extends to MoneyGram's stablecoin, MGUSD. The token is designed for use inside the company's own payments ecosystem, not for institutional markets or crypto traders. "If someone's sending money from MoneyGram to MoneyGram, why shouldn't it be our own coin?" Soohoo said. Owning the infrastructure gives MoneyGram more control over costs and product development, including wallet features and rewards.

Soohoo joined MoneyGram about 18 months ago after leading digital transformations at Walmart. He said his view of blockchain has expanded since arriving. "The opportunity with blockchain and digital currencies is actually bigger than I had anticipated." He cautioned that many financial institutions focus on announcing blockchain initiatives instead of solving customer problems. "The common misconception...is that they get lost in the product," Soohoo said. "These are infrastructure conversations. They're not consumer conversations."

Over the next three to five years, Soohoo said MoneyGram's goal is to become the primary financial institution for its customers, many of whom are underbanked. "Our goal would be to democratize finance for the MoneyGram customer," he said.

The approach mirrors broader industry moves toward stablecoin-based settlement. PayPal's $2.8B PYUSD Gets Polygon Boost as Bank Stablecoin Looms highlights how traditional payments firms are integrating blockchain without requiring users to understand the underlying technology.