Stack Chats Episode 4: Making Stablecoins Work Like Money with Sam Broner

Guest: Sam Broner, Founder & CEO, Better Money Company

Host: Pelle Braendgaard, CEO & Co-Founder, Notabene

Topics: Stablecoins, Payments Infrastructure, Stablecoin Clearing, Digital Money, Compliance, Interoperability

In this episode of Stack Chats, Notabene CEO Pelle Braendgaard sits down with Sam Broner, Founder and CEO of Better Money Company and former Andreessen Horowitz investor, to discuss stablecoin clearing, payment interoperability, and the infrastructure required to make stablecoins work at global scale.

Sam shares lessons from his career spanning Microsoft, MIT, the Boston Fed, and venture investing, and explains why the next phase of stablecoin adoption depends less on trading infrastructure and more on payment infrastructure.

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Stablecoins are already faster, cheaper, and more global than traditional payment systems. Yet businesses still face operational challenges when using them for invoicing, treasury management, and cross-border payments. Pelle and Sam explore how Better Money Company is building the clearing infrastructure needed to make stablecoins behave more like traditional money while preserving the benefits of blockchain-based settlement.

📌 Topics include:

• Why stablecoins need clearing, not trading
• The hidden accounting challenges of stablecoin payments
• Stablecoin interoperability across chains and issuers
• Building payment-grade infrastructure for businesses
• The future of global stablecoin clearing networks

Pelle and Sam begin by discussing Sam's path from distributed systems engineering to stablecoin infrastructure. Their conversation quickly turns to one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks: businesses need certainty, predictability, and reconciliation tools before they can fully adopt stablecoin payments.

What follows is a look at the key themes they explored and why they matter for the future of financial infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

• Stablecoins have solved many money movement challenges but still lack payment-grade clearing infrastructure.
• Businesses require exact settlement amounts for accounting and reconciliation.
• Stablecoin interoperability is becoming increasingly important as more issuers and networks emerge.
• Clearing infrastructure can simplify payments while preserving compliance requirements.
• Better Money Company and Notabene are working to reduce friction in stablecoin payment workflows.

Stablecoins are better money, but payments are still too complicated

One of Sam's core arguments is simple: stablecoins have already solved many of the problems associated with moving money.

They are:

• Faster than traditional payment rails
• Available globally
• Programmable
• Available 24/7
• Lower cost than many existing systems

Yet despite these advantages, businesses still struggle to use stablecoins as a payment mechanism.

The reason is that moving between stablecoins often requires trading rather than payment processing.

Today, if a business wants to receive a specific stablecoin on a specific chain, the sender may need to swap assets through an exchange, liquidity provider, or trading venue. While this works for crypto-native users, it introduces unnecessary complexity for finance teams and payment operations.

As Sam explains, people do not exchange Wells Fargo dollars for Bank of America dollars before making a payment. The financial system already provides clearing infrastructure that abstracts away those differences.

Stablecoins need the same capability.

The missing layer: stablecoin clearing

Better Money Company's core product is a stablecoin clearinghouse.

Rather than forcing businesses to manage multiple chains, stablecoins, and liquidity venues, the clearinghouse allows participants to send one supported stablecoin and have the recipient receive exactly what they requested.

This creates a payment experience rather than a trading experience.

The model introduces several benefits:

• Predictable settlement
• Fixed-fee transactions
• Simplified reconciliation
• Reduced operational complexity
• Greater flexibility for senders and recipients

Instead of worrying about how funds move between assets behind the scenes, businesses can focus on the payment itself.

For finance teams, this distinction is critical.

Why finance teams care about exact amounts

One of the most practical parts of the conversation focuses on accounting and reconciliation.

Crypto-native users often focus on liquidity, swaps, and settlement speed. Finance teams care about something different: receiving the exact amount expected.

For invoicing, treasury operations, and accounting workflows, "close enough" is not good enough.

A business invoicing $789.87 needs to receive exactly $789.87.

Small variations caused by slippage, trading spreads, or liquidity fragmentation create operational headaches for finance teams that must reconcile every transaction.

This is where stablecoin clearing becomes particularly valuable.

By guaranteeing that recipients receive the exact amount specified, businesses can integrate stablecoin payments into existing accounting workflows without introducing additional reconciliation burdens.

Building the bridge between crypto and traditional finance

Sam's experience spans several worlds.

Before founding Better Money Company, he worked:

• As a distributed systems engineer at Microsoft
• On digital money research initiatives connected to the Boston Fed
• As an investor at Andreessen Horowitz focused on payments and stablecoins

Those experiences helped him identify a recurring challenge.

Crypto infrastructure often optimizes for traders, while financial institutions need systems optimized for payments, controls, and operational certainty.

The gap between those two worlds remains one of the biggest barriers to institutional adoption.

Rather than replacing existing financial processes, Better Money Company focuses on providing the payment guarantees businesses already expect.

Stablecoin interoperability will drive adoption

Another major theme is interoperability.

The stablecoin ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented.

New issuers, chains, and payment networks continue to emerge. While this innovation is healthy, it also creates complexity for businesses trying to accept payments.

Companies do not want to support dozens of different payment paths individually.

Instead, they want a simple way to:

• Send the stablecoin they hold
• Receive the stablecoin they prefer
• Maintain compliance requirements
• Reduce operational overhead

Sam argues that clearing infrastructure can serve as the connective tissue that enables this interoperability without requiring every participant to manage countless integrations.

Why compliance still matters

Throughout the discussion, both Pelle and Sam emphasize that stablecoin adoption requires trust.

Businesses need confidence that incoming funds originate from compliant sources and that payment flows meet regulatory expectations.

This is one reason the integration between Notabene Flow and Better Money Company is significant.

By combining:

• Better Money Company's stablecoin clearing infrastructure
• Notabene Flow's compliance and payment orchestration capabilities

businesses gain a payment experience that is both operationally simple and compliance-ready.

For regulated businesses, both pieces are necessary.

Bringing stablecoin clearing into Notabene Flow

Toward the end of the conversation, Pelle and Sam discuss the upcoming integration between Better Money Company and Notabene Flow.

The goal is straightforward:

A business can issue an invoice requesting payment in a specific stablecoin, while the payer can send a different supported stablecoin.

For example:

• An invoice requests RLUSD
• The payer holds USDC or USDG
• Better Money Company's clearing infrastructure handles the conversion and settlement
• The recipient receives the exact asset and amount requested

This reduces friction for both sides while preserving accurate reconciliation and compliance workflows.

The result is a simpler stablecoin payment experience that feels more like traditional financial infrastructure.

What comes next

As stablecoin adoption accelerates, infrastructure providers are increasingly focused on making digital asset payments easier to use rather than simply faster to settle.

The next phase of growth will depend on solving practical business challenges:

• Reconciliation
• Accounting
• Interoperability
• Compliance
• Operational efficiency

Sam believes stablecoins have already won on technology.

The next challenge is making them work seamlessly within the systems businesses already use every day.

If successful, stablecoin clearing could become one of the foundational layers that enables broader adoption across payments, treasury, fintech, and global commerce.

Episode breakdown

Here is a quick minute-by-minute guide to the conversation:

00:00 - 04:00

Sam's background from Microsoft and MIT to Andreessen Horowitz and the founding of Better Money Company.

04:00 - 08:00

Why stablecoins are already better money and the limitations of today's payment infrastructure.

08:00 - 13:00

The difference between trading and clearing and why payment flows need a new model.

13:00 - 18:00

Accounting, reconciliation, and the operational challenges businesses face when using stablecoins.

18:00 - 24:00

Interoperability across stablecoins, chains, and payment networks.

24:00 - 30:00

Building payment-grade infrastructure for financial institutions and enterprises.

30:00 - End

The Better Money Company and Notabene Flow integration and the future of stablecoin payments.

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🎙️ Stack Chats is Notabene's video series for product leaders, fintech builders, and infrastructure innovators shaping the next generation of blockchain-based payments.

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