B2B invoicing with wires, EFT and stablecoins

One large invoice, four ways

Suppose a supplier issues a single $25,000 invoice. The table uses the site's illustrative default assumptions: card at 2.6% + $0.30 (2.5% FX cross-border), wire at $17.50 incoming (2% FX cross-border), EFT at $0.50, and a USD-referenced stablecoin received into a self-hosted wallet with a 1% USD-to-CAD conversion and a 0.5% off-ramp. These are not market quotes.

Domestically, the bank rails win easily on direct cost. The stablecoin path costs about $375 on either a domestic or a cross-border invoice because, in this model, the conversion applies to all volume: a USD-referenced coin has to become Canadian dollars at some point.

A month of invoices

Now suppose a firm collects $150,000 a month in invoices averaging $7,500, with 40% paid from outside Canada. Monthly cost under the defaults, from the payment cost comparison:

• Wire: about $1,550 (1.03%), almost all of it FX on the cross-border share.
• Stablecoin: about $2,251 (1.50%), with roughly $47 a month of float cost because it is modelled as settling in one business day.
• Interac e-Transfer or EFT: about $3,306 and $3,500, because the $60,000 of cross-border invoices fall back to card in this model.
• Card: about $5,859 (3.91%), including expected dispute costs.

Invoice references and remittance data

Wires and EFT can carry remittance information that your bank statement shows next to the deposit. An on-chain transfer shows a sending address, a receiving address, an amount and a transaction hash. Nothing in it says which invoice was paid.

There are three common approaches: a unique receiving address per invoice, a payment request that encodes the exact amount and a reference, or a processor that maps payments to invoices. Each has trade-offs for key management and reconciliation. You can build a test invoice with a payment request in the invoice builder sandbox and see how the matching works in reconciling on-chain payments.

• Decide how partial payments and overpayments are handled before the first invoice goes out.
• State the network as well as the asset; a payment sent on the wrong network may be unrecoverable.
• Record the CAD value at the time of receipt alongside the transaction hash.

Net terms, settlement time and holding risk

Net 30 or net 60 terms already mean you finance your customer. Settlement time is a smaller effect on top: a wire or card payment modelled at two business days, EFT at three and the stablecoin path at one. At an 8% cost of capital the float differences in the example above are tens of dollars a month, not thousands. Working capital and settlement time explains how to price it.

Holding is a separate decision. A stablecoin tracks its reference currency but is not Canadian dollars, and the federal Stablecoin Act, which received Royal Assent on March 26, 2026, is not expected to come into force until 2027. Until then no stablecoin is approved or registered under it. A native crypto-asset carries far more price risk: the illustrative 95% one-day exposure in the monthly example is about $409 for the crypto-asset path versus about $7 for the stablecoin.

Payment-instruction fraud

Large invoices attract fake change-of-details requests: an email, sometimes from a compromised real account, asking you to pay a new account or a new wallet address. Whether a wire can be recalled depends on your bank and how quickly you act; an on-chain payment generally cannot be recalled at all.

1. Treat any change to bank details or wallet addresses as unverified until confirmed by phone on a number you already had.
2. Require two people to approve a new or changed payee.
3. Send a small test payment to a new address and confirm receipt before sending the balance.
4. Compare the full address, not just the first and last few characters.

Compliance points for finance teams

If your business is a FINTRAC reporting entity, receipt of virtual currency worth $10,000 or more in one transaction, or in linked amounts totalling $10,000 or more within 24 hours, must be reported within five working days. See large virtual currency transaction reports. MSB transfers also carry travel-rule information, and records generally must be kept for at least five years.

A business that pays suppliers or collects invoices on behalf of other businesses should check whether it is dealing in virtual currency or remitting funds as an MSB. For tax, the CRA uses the fair market value in Canadian dollars at the time of the transaction for both income and GST/HST. These points reflect the rules as of October 30, 2026.

Sources

• FINTRAC — Large virtual currency transaction reports
• FINTRAC — Travel rule
• Finance Canada — Canada's stablecoin framework
• CRA — Income from crypto-asset transactions

Reviewed October 30, 2026. Educational information only; not financial, legal, tax or investment advice. This site does not process payments or hold funds.