Remitly Global, the digital remittance company whose app millions of immigrants use to send money home, has been one of 2026's better-performing fintech stocks, climbing more than 60% at points during the first half of the year and drawing a chorus of buy ratings, even as it still trades at a modest-looking valuation of under nine times this year's adjusted EBITDA. The stock got there by recovering from a beating: for a couple of years it was weighed down by fears that its business was about to be disrupted, and much of the 2026 rally is simply those fears failing to come true. Now the argument is whether to buy it.

That argument, though, tends to skip past the question that actually decides it. The bull case and the bear case on Remitly are not really disagreements about growth rates or margins. They are disagreements about what business Remitly is fundamentally in, and everything else follows from which answer is correct.

The growth is real, and so were the fears

First the facts, because they are genuinely impressive. Between 2021 and 2025, Remitly's active customer base grew from 2.8 million to 9.3 million, its annual send volume jumped from about $20 billion to nearly $75 billion, and revenue rose from $459 million to $1.64 billion. Recent quarters have shown revenue up around 26% year over year on send-volume growth of roughly 35%, and the company has crossed into GAAP profitability with 2026 guidance near $1.95 billion in revenue and positive net income. It remains a single-digit-market-share player in a large, growing global remittance market, which the bulls read as a long runway.

Two fears held the stock down before this year. One was that a U.S. immigration crackdown would shrink the customer base, since fewer immigrants sending money home would mean less volume; that risk is real to name but has not shown up materially in results so far. The other, and the more fundamental, was stablecoin disruption, and it is the one that reveals the deeper question.

Two theories of the business

The bearish theory holds that Remitly is essentially a money-movement company. On this view, what it sells is the transfer of money across borders, and its revenue comes from the fees and spread it charges to do so. Stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to currencies that can be sent across the world almost instantly and nearly for free, threaten to make that core service dramatically cheaper, and the big payment platforms integrating them could commoditize cross-border transfer entirely. If moving money becomes close to free, Remitly's fees compress and its reason for existing erodes. In this framing, Remitly is a toll-taker on a road that is about to become a free highway.

The bullish theory holds that Remitly is not really in the money-movement business at all, or at least that money movement was never the hard or defensible part. Moving money across a wire has been getting cheaper for decades, through bank wires, then cards, and now stablecoins, all of which are simply rails. The genuinely difficult thing, on this view, is everything that happens around the rail, and that is where Remitly's value lives.

The last mile is the moat

What the bulls mean by that is the last mile of a remittance, which is far harder than the transfer itself. It is the payout network that lets a recipient collect cash at a local agent in a rural town, or receive funds directly into a destination bank account or mobile wallet, across dozens of countries with different systems. It is the regulatory compliance required to operate legally in all of those jurisdictions, the fraud and identity infrastructure, and, not least, the trust of a first-generation immigrant sending scarce, precious money to family, who needs it to arrive reliably and will not experiment casually with an unfamiliar service. Layered on top is the familiar, dependable app they already use.

A stablecoin does none of that. It is a way to move value between two points cheaply; it does not build a cash-pickup network in the Philippines, does not obtain money-transmitter licenses, does not earn a worried sender's trust. Which is why, on the bull theory, cheaper rails are not a threat but a gift: Remitly can adopt stablecoins as a lower-cost input, as it has in fact begun to do by introducing its own stablecoin functionality, reducing its own transfer costs while keeping the last-mile business that customers actually pay for. A cheaper rail, in that case, widens Remitly's margins rather than destroying its franchise.

Why the evidence leans bullish, so far

The results to date tilt toward the last-mile theory. Remitly has kept growing at 25% to 35% and gaining share even as stablecoins matured and as the disruption narrative peaked. The company is adopting stablecoins itself rather than being killed by them. And the payment giants, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, have mostly been integrating stablecoins as rails inside their own systems, not replicating Remitly's payout network and immigrant-trust franchise. So far, stablecoins look more like a rail Remitly can ride than a substitute that replaces it, and the market has responded by partly unwinding the disruption discount that kept the stock cheap. The rally is, in large part, the last-mile theory gaining credibility.

The bear case that actually bites

Being fair to the bear, though, requires stating its strongest form, which is not the naive one. The real danger is not that a stablecoin directly replaces Remitly. It is that a much larger consumer-facing platform, a PayPal, a card network's app, or a crypto wallet that hundreds of millions of people already have on their phones, bundles the cheap stablecoin rail together with a last mile of its own, either building or buying the payout, compliance, and trust layer, and offers the whole package inside an app users don't have to be persuaded to download. In that scenario Remitly loses not the rail, which it never needed to own, but the last mile itself, to a competitor with vastly more distribution and capital.

This is the version of the threat that remains genuinely unresolved. The last-mile moat is real and has proven defensible against bare stablecoin rails, but it is not obviously defensible against a well-funded platform determined to replicate it and armed with a user base Remitly cannot match. Whether Remitly's head start in payout infrastructure and trust is a durable moat or merely a lead that a bigger player can eventually close is the crux, and nothing in the current numbers settles it, because both theories are consistent with the strong growth Remitly is posting right now.

The cheapness is the argument, quantified

This is why the stock's modest multiple should not be mistaken for a free lunch. A valuation under nine times EBITDA, with analyst price targets implying substantial upside, is not the market overlooking an obvious bargain; it is the market pricing unresolved uncertainty about which theory is right. The bull reads the low multiple as a disruption discount that was overdone and is unwinding. The bear reads it as a warranted discount for an existential risk that is real but simply hasn't arrived yet. The multiple is the disagreement itself, expressed as a number, and it will re-rate up or down as the competitive structure resolves one way or the other.

The AI dimension sits inside the same question rather than beside it. Remitly's new integrations with ChatGPT and WhatsApp, and its AI-focused leadership, are a bet on reaching users through the interfaces they already inhabit, which the bull reads as a smart distribution lever and the bear reads as an early sign that the customer relationship, the heart of the last mile, is migrating toward platforms Remitly does not control. Both can look at the same ChatGPT integration and see confirmation.

So the useful way to hold Remitly is not as a growth stock to be judged by its next quarter, since both the optimists and the pessimists expect it to keep growing for now. It is as a wager on a structural question: over the coming years, does Remitly remain the owner of the remittance last mile, adopting each cheaper rail as it comes, or does a larger platform eventually absorb that last mile by bundling the rail with a payout-and-trust layer of its own? The growth rate will not answer that; the competitive structure will. Watch who ends up owning the relationship with the sender, because that, and not the cost of moving the money, is the whole game.

Primary sources

  1. Barron's for the framing of Remitly as a stock pick.
  2. The Motley Fool for Remitly's growth from 2021 to 2025, including active customers rising from 2.8 million to 9.3 million, send volume from roughly $20 billion to $75 billion, and revenue from $459 million to $1.64 billion, recent quarterly growth of about 26% in revenue and 35% in send volume, the two bear cases involving U.S. immigration policy and stablecoin disruption and their failure to materially dent results, the April 2026 WhatsApp and ChatGPT integrations, and the "last mile" framing of Remitly's advantage.
  3. Simply Wall St for the 2026 revenue guidance near $1.94 to $1.96 billion with positive GAAP net income, 2025 net income of about $67.9 million, the AI-focused new CEO and CPTO departure, the introduction of stablecoin functionality and multicurrency wallets, the $200 million buyback and share-price-linked CEO incentives, and the Flex, Remitly Business, and Remitly Wallet products.
  4. Intellectia and analyst notes for the valuation under nine times adjusted EBITDA, the roughly $3.3 billion enterprise value, and price-target updates including Goldman Sachs at $27 and Citizens at $26 with a consensus implying meaningful upside.