Crypto Acceptance for Merchants:
A Guide for Financial Institutions
Author: Ekaterina Podgaiskaya
Last updated May 26
Contents
Introduction
The demand for cryptocurrency payment options has been steadily gaining momentum globally. As more consumers begin using digital assets and consider crypto to be an investment and a currency, merchants are starting to understand the value of accepting it at the point-of-sale.
Whether e-commerce shops or global retailers, the message is clear: crypto payments are no longer a tech novelty — they’re becoming a business strategy. And this transition creates a rare opportunity for financial institutions to take the lead.
Merchants traditionally relied on banks, credit unions, and fintech platforms as trusted partners to manage their payments, liquidity, and risk needs. That trust makes them ideally positioned to be bridges into the crypto economy.
This allows for financial institutions to serve a growing market of merchants by providing the infrastructure that enables
acceptance of digital assets in a secured and compliant manner. The idea is to make the acceptance of crypto feel as seamless and secure as card processing.
But this kind of innovation isn’t just a light switch to enable. That takes careful planning, the right partners, and infrastructure that combines contemporary capabilities with centuries-old financial trust. This article explores why merchants want the ability to accept crypto, the opportunities this creates for financial institutions, and the capabilities that are essential to enable it.
For finance leaders prepared to migrate into the digital asset frontier, it’s not simply a matter of embracing the trend — it’s about empowering the next reality of commerce while keeping the fundamentals of compliance and operational effectiveness at the core.
The Case for Accepting Crypto: Why Merchants Want to Accept Crypto
The crypto acceptance demand isn’t coming out of nowhere — merchants are reacting to actual market changes. From the increasing number of crypto-holding consumers to the attractiveness of faster, lower-cost settlements, digital assets provide tangible benefits. This section will highlight what’s fueling merchant interest in crypto payments, such as, accessing new global markets, improved cash flow, and brand differentiation in an overcrowded competitive landscape.
Increasing number of crypto-using consumers
In recent years, the number of crypto-holding consumers has increased significantly. Regular surveys and market reports indicate that tens of millions of people worldwide — especially in the U.S. and Europe, but also in Latin America and Southeast Asia — own some sort of digital asset, be it Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins or other kinds. What’s the bigger trend for merchants is that many of these users want to spend their crypto, not sit on it. Crypto is increasingly being seen not as a speculative gamble, but as a legitimate means of payment, as adoption matures.
This trend is heavily driven by younger demographics. All due to the rise of millennials and Gen Z consumers, who are the perfect match for crypto which is decentralized, transparent and a technological innovation. These generations have grown up with frictionless digital solutions, and they’re more open to adopting new payment methods—especially when those methods align with their attitudes toward tech-forward thinking and financial independence. Merchants serving this audience are being pressed to adapt to these expectations or risk getting left behind.
Accepting crypto isn’t just about being on the cutting edge for businesses—it’s about providing the flexibility demanded by the way modern buyers operate. Similar to the switch to mobile payments or contactless cards, crypto acceptance presents an opportunity to cater to customers by offering them the products in the preferred formats they’re choosing to gravitate towards. Incorporating this payment method indicates that merchants recognize the changing demands of their audience and are prepared to evolve in kind.
Lower transaction costs and quicker settlements
The number one operational headache that merchants face with traditional payment methods is the sheer volume of fees involved. Traditional banking rails can bleed revenue and add unnecessary friction in myriad ways, from card network fees and interchange fees to settlement delays and international processing surcharges.
Crypto payments — especially those that settle on native blockchain networks — have a dramatically different cost structure. Also, with less intermediaries in the equation, merchants could oftentimes pay less per-transaction fees around accepting cards or bank transfers.
And a one big advantage is speed. Whereas card payments settle in batches or wire transfers can take days, particularly if across borders, crypto payments can be settled in minutes or even seconds, depending on the network.
It has near-term impact on cash flow, particularly for small businesses that use access to capital to move fast. Real-time or near real-time settlements mean that funds get to accounts faster, enabling merchants to reinvest or fulfill orders without delay.
For many merchants, just the financial logic encourages crypto acceptance. Lower costs and quicker settlements are not merely technical innovations — they are business accelerators. They enable the kind of agility that merchants today — especially those who operate in fast-moving or globalized industries — demand. For financial institutions, supporting clients in unlocking such benefits constitutes a compelling value proposition that can deepen commercial relationships.
Access to global markets without conventional FX barriers
Merchants participating in the global economy are confronted with an age-old situation: how best to address foreign currencies, international fees and volatility in exchange rates. The traditional marketplace payment model (selling to customers in another country) required expensive FX conversions, cross-border payment rail delays and compliance pain points across jurisdictions. Crypto cuts through much of that friction by providing a virtually instant, borderless way to get money in or out of a country anywhere in the world.
With stablecoins such as USDC or USDT, merchants are able to receive payments pegged to major fiat currencies, without the risk of volatility that is typically present with Bitcoin or Ethereum. Thus, they can service international buyers but keep stable margins. For customers, paying in crypto avoids conversion rates or bank charges that may make international purchases seem expensive or complex. The net result is a better experience on both sides of the transaction.
For merchants that want to scale up or service niche international markets, crypto provides a new lane of access — one that’s more straight-line and less reliant on traditional banking infrastructure. And when the financial institutions supply the tools necessary to power those flows, they’re not just facilitating payments — they’re enabling global commerce. It is an opportunity to broaden the merchant services value proposition and seize a piece of this new and limitless economy.
Marketing and brand differentiation
In a competitive retail environment, distinction matters. Consumers today aren’t just searching for the lowest price or fastest shipping — they’re also attracted to brands that feel progressive, forward-thinking and in tune with cultural shifts. Merchants that accept crypto can stand out in a crowded marketplace. It communicates to customers that the brand is future-oriented, tech-minded, and open to gm 60 extent to innovations that enhance the buying experience.
For a significant number of companies, particularly in lifestyle, luxury or digital-native verticals, accepting crypto is a marketing tool as well. In fact, announcing plans to accept crypto payments often gets favorable press and buzz on social media, especially when it comes as part of a larger digital strategy. In a world of perception determining purchasing behavior, being perceived as an early adopter, or tech innovator gives merchants a competitive advantage. It transforms a back-end technical decision into a front-facing brand asset.
Crypto merchant services enable financial institutions to address this desire for differentiation. They craft solutions to be functional in addition to brand-enhancing, which delivers more than a technology—it delivers a competitive position. Enabling merchants to market their crypto readiness becomes a way to deepen partnerships and be seen to add value that goes beyond processing transactions.
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The Opportunity For Financial Institutions
Merchants are motivated by customer demand and operational efficiencies, but financial institutions may actually be looking at a broader strategic opportunity. Allowing crypto acceptance paves the way for new revenue streams, enhanced relationships with merchants and future-oriented offerings. This section illustrates how institutions can do more than just provide payment rails, and instead act as full-on crypto enablers, with custody, conversion, reporting and white-labeled infrastructure.
Fiat-crypto bridge for the merchants
The majority of merchants aren’t crypto geeks—and don’t need to be. What they want is to be able to accept digital asset payments from their customers while still receiving fiat currency in their bank accounts without having to handle private keys, wallets or the volatility of crypto markets. And this is where financial institutions can play a leading role: by providing conversion services that abstract the complexity away from merchants, they can be a trusted intermediary between crypto and fiat.
Banks and fintechs are making it easy for businesses to get into crypto by providing backend infrastructure that handles everything from crypto receipt to fiat settlement. This means merchants don’t have to concern themselves with price volatility or handling digital currencies directly.
And they get their currency of choice, with complete transparency of transactions, via terms and dashboards that feel familiar. This sort of simplicity and security is hard to deliver through crypto-native providers alone.
By doing so, financial institutions bolster their position as stewards of stability in a turbulent and transforming economy. This opens many benefits of crypto payment to merchants, such as faster payments and new customers, while avoiding risks and technical overhead. The result is a value proposition that is equally appealing for customers, combining the best of traditional finance's trust and secure relationships with the speed and novelty of digital assets, all while keeping the user experience frictionless and intuitive.
Activating additional streams of revenue
Crypto merchant services aren’t only about helping business customers stay — they’re also a lucrative revenue stream of their own. While serving as intermediators of crypto transactions, financial institutions can earn fees in multiple forms. Transaction processing fees, conversion spreads, or even revenue-sharing agreements with crypto liquidity providers can create a new source of service-based revenue. As volumes expand, such particular revenue can become material — most clearly in high-transaction verticals.
Besides, crypto services would even enable premium offerings. Fintechs and banks are able to offer additional value propositions around digital assets, including custody, automated tax reconciliation tools, or fraud detection algorithms for crypto payments. Like current merchant services models, these extras can be packaged into tiered packages or sold à la carte. The larger and more compliant the suite is, the more merchants will shell out for it.
Essentially, crypto represents a monetizable frontier for financial institutions that have the appetite to innovate. It’s not only about becoming a better signaler; it’s about building new products that capture new demand. In doing so—intelligently and methodically—institutions can enhance their commercial portfolios and future-proof their pipelines for merchant services in a world that’s increasingly flocking to digital assets.
Improving merchant retention and loyalty
The talon of disintermediation is a real risk. As crypto-native platforms start to provide more traditional forms of financial service, established institutions may find themselves losing commercial customers to younger, more agile rivals. But this scenario isn’t preordained. In a shifting ecosystem, financial institutions can solidify their relationships with merchants and engender long-term loyalty by providing tools to accept crypto and establishing themselves as full-spectrum partners.
When merchants can accept crypto, settle, track performance, and ensure compliance through their existing banking partner, the act of switching to an alternative provider becomes a far less attractive opportunity.
Banks play the role of enabler of growth, not only to customers but also to businesses. This builds confidence, which is paramount in the Crypto space since a fair number of regulations, security and transparency questions exist.
More critically, keeping business customers via modern services lays the foundation for engagement over time. Whether it is providing lending based on crypto revenue, bundling merchant accounts with new analytics tools or education on digital finance, the relationship grows sticky. Relevance creates loyalty—accepting crypto might be the key to continued relevance for traditional institutions.
Fundamental Capabilities You Will Need to Activate
And enabling crypto acceptance is no flip of a switch, it requires careful buildup of technical and regulatory capabilities. Institutions will need to provide merchants a seamless, secure experience that encompasses everything from real-time fiat and crypto conversions to complex KYC and AML protocols. In this part, we will deconstruct the basic capabilities required for financial institutions to build in order to provide a competitive and trusted crypto payment service.
Conversion from fiat to crypto and from crypto to fiat
Seamless conversion between fiat currencies (like dollars) to digital assets (like cryptocurrencies) is one of the foundational capabilities that enable crypto acceptance. Merchants want to be able to offer customers the option to pay in crypto, without the complexity — or the risk — of holding crypto themselves. To bridge that gap, financial institutions will need to handle real-time conversions behind the scenes when it comes to incoming crypto payments, converting them to local currency or, on the flip side, facilitating outbound fiat-to-crypto transactions when necessary.
For such a capability to be effective, it should be integrated with digital asset liquidity providers, centralized exchanges or decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. These partners offer live pricing and access to large pools of liquidity that ensure good execution even in turbulent markets.
Institutions need to ensure that conversions happen quickly and at a competitive price, and importantly, reliably, especially for high-volume merchants that simply cannot afford operational hiccups.
Also, merchant trust depends on the transparency of conversion rates and timing aiming at the specific merchant. If systems need to use less than real-time rates, then institutions should publish clear reporting of the exchange rates applied, associated fees, and any settlement
timestamps. Similarly, merchants should have the option to configure their preferences — for example, to auto-convert at time of transaction or retain a percentage in digital assets for speculative upside. Such customization and control can set a service offering apart in a competing landscape.
Transactions among different cryptocurrencies
For financial entities, the ability to handle crypto other than fiat is key (i.e. enabling merchants to accept one form of digital asset and settle in another). For instance, a merchant may receive Bitcoin from a customer, but may want to get USDC or Ethereum. This feature mitigates volatility exposure whilst providing optionality for treasury management and tax planning.
Cryptocurrencies can even add a striking layer of utility for merchants in regions with unstable fiat systems or those who want to go full-on with the digital asset economy, by enabling crypto-to-crypto flows. For this reason, it allows access to global liquidity networks without the hassle of multiple fiat conversions. Stablecoins or Stables are gaining traction with merchants due to their purchasing power efficiency in a manner that retains the cost-effective benefits of blockchain-enabled payments.
In order to do this, financial institutions will need to expand multi-asset support to their backend infrastructure. This includes interacting with providers that support token swaps, automated market-making, or liquidity routing. Institutions also need to ensure that any conversions are transparent and there are clear records of which assets are being input/output, at what rates, what are the fees and how long the settlement process will take. Crypto-to-crypto functionality that is done well can make the merchant experience vastly more flexible, efficient and prepared for the future.
Instantaneous settlement and reconciliation
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of crypto payments is the real-time settlement. Traditional card payments or bank transfers can take days to clear, trapping working capital and delaying financial throughput. On the other hand, blockchain-based transactions can be confirmed and settled in minutes — or seconds, depending on the network. This offers merchants quicker access to funds and more precise forecasting of cash flow.
But settlement speed is just one piece of the puzzle. When it comes to processing transactions in real-time, financial institutions need to tame that feature with robust reconciliation systems that maintain operational integrity.
The incoming payments will be matched to invoices, automatically flagging discrepancies and real-time logging of outcomes through automated reconciliation workflows.
This helps to reduce back office workload, eliminates manual data entry errors, and allows more time for merchants to keep their books and closing intelligent accounting period.
From a product perspective, institutions should provide dashboard views (and/or APIs) that enable merchants to track the status of settlement, include references to the payment identifiers used by the underlying payment network and each reconciliation outcome. Even more flexibility can be provided through integration with widely used accounting software or ERP systems. With seamless reconciliation, real-time settlement effectively reduces friction and constitutes the gold standard in crypto payment infrastructure.
Regulatory compliance and KYC/AML integration
If you are operating in the crypto space, there are a set of unique regulatory obligations that you will need to comply to, especially the Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customers (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) requirements. Compliance-first infrastructures also need to insulate financial institutions, merchants, and customers from illicit activity — and manage increasingly complex and rapidly seen global regulations.
Merchant onboarding should contain strong KYC/KYB checks to ensure the identity and authenticity of businesses that accept crypto payments. This can include document submissions, checks against business registration, beneficial ownership disclosures, and checks against sanctions lists. While these steps should be as seamless as possible without losing local compliance,
Institutions are required to actively monitor transactional activity for signs of suspicious behavior, such as structuring, layering, or activity involving blacklisted wallets. Advanced blockchain analysis tools, machine learning and AI can be used to flag these types of risks through analysis of transaction footprints, wallet behaviors, social network clustering etc. Institutions need to embed reliability at every step — onboarding, transaction monitoring, reporting — and built trust with regulators and merchant clients alike.
Merchant onboarding & risk management
The simpler it is for merchants to operate, the more quickly banks can increase uptake. That’s what building streamlined, fully-digital onboarding journeys at the crypto use case level means. Traditional merchant onboarding typically involves weeks of manual review, whereas using eKYC technologies and crypto-specific risk scoring can streamline the onboarding process to happen in minutes or hours, without sacrificing security.
A good onboarding flow strikes the right balance between convenience and risk management. It collects the requisite documentation, performs identity & business verification, and evaluates the merchant’s risk profile according to industry, geography, expected transaction volume and historical payment behavior.
Similarly, institutions can use machine learning to learn from experience, changing risk-scoring models to detect patterns of fraud or abuse and adjust eligibility accordingly.
Consider this: risk management should be an ongoing effort beyond the scope of initial onboarding. This involves monitoring transaction behavior in real-time, flagging anomalies, setting limits for high-risk merchants, and implementing fraud detection mechanisms. A strong and transparent risk process not only protects the institution’s infrastructure but also gives merchants peace of mind — confidence that they are part of a secure and properly regulated ecosystem.
3.6 Options For White-Lab
Options for white-label apps and API integrations
For financial institutions looking to support a diverse array of merchant clients, modularity in the delivery of crypto acceptance tools should be embraced. White-label applications offer fast in-market availability so merchants can package an out-of-the-box crypto payment solution under their own brand. These apps may include checkout tools, settlement preferences, transaction histories, support dashboards, and the like — and are highly configurable to suit different verticals.
For clients who are more technical — particularly fintechs, marketplaces or large retailers — API-based delivery is the favored path. From e-commerce platforms to POS software and accounting solutions, APIs provide direct integration into existing systems. They also enable more nuanced control over aspects of the payment flow, the design of the user interface, and reporting—effectively facilitating merchants’ ability to customize crypto acceptance to their particular needs.
A robust backend provides financial institutions with the opportunity to provide complete developer documentation SDKs, testing in a sandbox environment, and dedicated support for merchants to implement and maintain these integrations. Providing merchants with flexible entry points into the crypto ecosystem, whether through no-code white-label apps or full-stack APIs, will be crucial to scaling adoption across disparate industries.
End-to-end reporting and audit trails
In crypto, transparency is crucial — not only in establishing trust and understanding how the operation works, but also in terms of compliance for tax, accounting and regulations. Financial institutions should empower merchants with detailed, auditable transaction records that substantiate the entire payment lifecycle, from wallet address, asset type, timestamp, exchange rate and settlement currency.
All of these records can and should be available at the fingertips through dashboards or downloadable reports, and should be, ideally, exportable into formats that can integrate with tax supporting software or accounting platforms. For merchants, crypto payments need to be reconciled against
invoices, to determine net receipts after fees and conversions, and to find out how price fluctuations might have affected individual transactions.
Such transparency is also indispensable for appeasing regulators and tax authorities. This data must be stored securely and in compliance with regulations and reporting automatically if necessary to government entities or licensing agencies. By investing in strong reporting Infrastructure, financial institutions can continue to present themselves as trusted partners who provide transparency and control - not confusion - in a complex and rapidly changing space.
Final Thoughts
The story of digital payments is a fast-evolving one, and cryptocurrency has transcended the fringes of that evolution and become mainstream. For financial institutions, this represents a timely — and potentially very significant — opportunity, to not only keep up with innovation but to take the lead in reshaping how business transactions get done in a digitally native economy.
Merchants are responding to changing consumer behavior, and many are investigating or adopting crypto payment solutions. What they need now are trusted partners — institutions that can help navigate the bridge between traditional finance and the new world of digital assets. This is where financial institutions are uniquely poised to excel. They have trust, infrastructure, and compliance experience to create scalable, regulated crypto solutions that feel familiar and provide future-ready capabilities.
But the window is narrow. Crypto-native companies are already building tools for merchants, and there’s still time to get a first mover advantage. Financial institutions need to act quickly — but also with thoughtfulness. The answer is the right toolkit: instant conversion, quick settlements, solid risk management controls, regulatory sufficiency, and integration flexibility. With these elements all aligned under a reputable institutional roof, the outcome is an agile, compliant, low-risk by design crypto acceptance platform.
Ultimately, crypto payments aren’t just a merchant demand; it’s about future-proofing financial services. Those institutions that act now will strengthen their relationships with their merchant base, while also appealing to a new generation of digitally forward-thinking businesses that are seeking peace of mind and sophistication in a changing financial world!
