A generational opportunity hiding in the plumbing

$50 billion in recoverable payment fees — equivalent to one full year of U.S. GDP growth — sitting in corporate cost structures, requiring no additional investment to capture.

Santiago Roel Santos  ·  February 2026

Payments are not Venmo.

For consumers, sending money feels instant and free. But behind the curtain, the global financial system still moves ~$150 trillion per year in cross-border flows through infrastructure designed in the 1970s.^[1] Every payment traverses 3–6 intermediaries — correspondent banks, clearinghouses, FX desks, compliance checkpoints — each adding latency and extracting a toll.^[5]

Banks need to charge these fees. Money doesn't actually move — messages about money move, and each institution in the chain must independently verify, settle, and reconcile. That's expensive. And those costs get passed through to end customers, eat into business revenue, or get translated into higher prices. It affects B2B and B2C alike.

But here's the thing: none of these fees appear as a line item on an income statement. They are buried in cost-of-goods-sold, embedded in supplier pricing, hidden in FX spreads disclosed only in 10-K footnotes. They are invisible to investors — and because they've existed for decades, treasurers and CFOs have come to accept them as a permanent cost of doing business.

SMBs pay even more.

Large enterprises negotiate volume discounts and have dedicated treasury teams optimizing every basis point. Mid-market and small businesses — companies doing $50M–$500M in revenue — don't have that luxury. They pay 3–5% all-in on cross-border payments vs. 0.5–1.5% for Fortune 500 companies.^[8][9] That's 2–4× the rate, on tighter margins, with less float to absorb the hit.

The World Economic Forum calls small and medium businesses “especially vulnerable, facing higher transaction costs and longer settlement times than large corporations.”^[8] McKinsey reports that 35–50% of SMBs across North America, Europe, and Asia have already turned to fintech or non-traditional providers for cross-border payments specifically because of these costs.^[9]

The pages that follow lay out the full thesis: the fee stack that makes this possible, the sectors where friction is highest, the EBITDA math that shows how infrastructure substitution creates compounding portfolio value, and the enterprise adoption signals that confirm this is happening now.

The short version: stablecoins don't negotiate fees down. They eliminate the intermediary layers that generate them. And the savings are massive.

Legacy financial plumbing extracts value at every layer. On-chain rails collapse the stack.

A single cross-border payment traverses up to 5–6 intermediaries, each adding latency and cost.^[5] The cumulative fee exceeds 345 basis points. Why? Because legacy money doesn't move — messages about money move, and each institution along the chain must independently verify, settle, and reconcile. Stablecoins eliminate most of these layers, but not all — FX conversion still requires exchange, even on-chain.

The Costco Gap

The data: enterprise vs. SMB, line by line

Same function, radically different pricing. Here's what the same $1,000 cross-border payment costs depending on who's sending it.

All-in cost vs. settlement time

Every existing rail forces a trade-off between speed and cost. Every comparison below reflects the full, all-in cost to perform the same function: move $1,000 across a border and deliver local currency to the recipient.^[10]

Where legacy infrastructure suppresses margins

Industries with the highest transaction friction and greatest blockchain transformation potential define our investable universe. The top-right quadrant — where fees are high and on-chain addressability is strongest — is where Inversion Capital focuses.

~$100B in direct cross-border fees paid by S&P 500 companies alone

Approximately 41% of S&P 500 revenue is generated internationally.^[11] Every cross-border dollar pays a toll. The global cross-border payments revenue pool is $240B+ (McKinsey, 2024).^[1] We estimate ~$100B is attributable to S&P 500 companies based on their share of global cross-border flows.

These fees don't appear as a line item. They're embedded in COGS, hidden in FX spreads disclosed in 10-K footnotes, and baked into supplier pricing. Most investors have never seen them itemized. Below is our bottom-up reconstruction of where the $100B sits.

Inversion Capital estimate based on McKinsey Global Payments Report (2024) [1], SEC 10-K filings, BIS Triennial Survey [5]. The global cross-border fee pool is $240B+ [1]; our $100B figure reflects the S&P 500 subset.

The drag nobody measures

Beyond explicit fees, slow money creates second-order costs that rarely appear in financial models. These are Inversion Capital estimates — we flag them as such because third-party data is sparse. But the directional logic is sound.

Inversion Capital estimates. Trapped cash calculation: ~$7.4T in daily cross-border flows × (5 days avg. settlement ÷ 365) ≈ $101B in perpetual float. Lost interest: $101B × 3.7% T-bill rate. See Methodology for full derivation.

Today vs. tomorrow

The adoption signals are already here

Why 50%?

Not all friction is equally addressable. Stablecoins eliminate transfer fees and intermediaries, but currency conversion still requires exchange. Here's how we break down the $100B:

The infrastructure is repricing.

We invest in payment-intensive businesses positioned to capture that value.