How Automation + Liquidity Scaled OpenFX to $45B w/ Prabhakar Reddy

We ended 2025 with about 98% of our transactions settling in under 60 minutes. What is required to make that work? That can only happen with a pure focus on automation. In your review, what can't people copy? If I had to summarize it down to three points, I would say number one is. Presented by StableCon Media, powered by BVNK, Views are personal, not investment advice. This is MoneyCut. It's a show where we decode StableClin's and programmable money. I'm Chuck Ocabaligo. And I'm Raj Parik and today we're joined by Prabhaka Reddy, co-founder and CEO of OpenFX. Prabhaka, welcome to the show. And let's jump in. OpenFX has had a pretty awesome story and scaled from 4 billion to 45 billion in annualized TPV in 2025. What was the biggest unlock for you all? And what does that reveal about what's actually broken in cross-order FX? Fantastic. First of all, thank you for having me. Lovely to see you both over here. 2025 was a fantastic year for us. First thing we came out of stealth, made way through the year. We were operating instead for the first 18 months for operation. What clearly unlocked the growth for us in the first 18 months and mostly through 2025? Where three different things. One is, I would say, focus on our core ICP. We did not try to build everything for everyone in this space. It is quite a wide space in the entire cross-order payment space. We decided to focus on a specific ICP. You just see to CDC, FinTech companies and service them really well rather than trying to be everything for everyone. We tried to be something for just those people, which is allow them to convert currency A to currency B and withdraw that in under 60 minutes any time of the day, any time of the week. That really resonated with them. So that's one. Second thing is a fundamentally focused on automation. Rather than like this in our industry currently operates on chat, WhatsApp, Telegram, phone calls, even some of the old school FX players, we said, no, that's not our ICP. If anyone wants to even pay 5% per trade because they're going to do a phone call and execute a 50 million dollar trade with us, we're like, go to our customers, you better service there. We are pure, pro-chromatic API-driven platform. What we are trying to build is a platform for other platforms to put up. Which means that everything from deposit taking to sort of collections to banking, to FX conversion to payouts, everything needs to be automated. That's the only way we'll bring the time for cross-body money moment down. We started off 2024, roughly at about six hours of settlement time. We ended 2025, with about 98% of our transactions settling in under 60 minutes. All FX currency, stablecoins, whatever that may be. That is a phenomenon. That's been the second primary thing. The third thing is a little bit cliche, but I will still say it because it actually has been one of the core things and a core focus for the company, which is the team. Without this team, who actually comes from a very background of understanding, stablecoins, FX, compliance, licensing, regulation, how to operate it 24/7, 360 business, it cannot come together in such a short time span. If you look at other companies, they transfer as an example. They've been around for 16 years, roughly. They do about 25, we do about 25% of their volume and we only do their whole company. The 6,000 finite employees are roughly like 35. So there's a big delta in terms of how we operate as a team and how we are an end-of-one team that allows us to do what we do. That's awesome. We'd love to break those things down as we get on here. The specific focus on the customers and the types of products that you serve, then the automation, I think that's a key piece to unpack. The team is well. As we break all that down, I really want to get into today, what are the non-obvious constraints in FX that you have understood and have been proven to be true as you've scaled? Then we'll walk through a transaction end-to-end through open FX just to understand exactly how everything's pieced together and the automation that you mentioned. We've discussed what makes you differentiate it and then as you scale what breaks and all this means really for the future of FX. Before all that, can you just describe open FX to folks who don't know and who the buyers, you mentioned the C2CUSD FX? What job are they hiring you for and what part of the stock are you replacing? Fantastic question. Open FX started with one mission vision. It's been a core focus today for a long time and we'll continue to be, which is to make sure that money across borders moves 24/7 365 in single-digit minutes, almost like how an SMS or text moves rather than how a post-lera post most today, which is how money moves around the world. You put a post in the post box, somebody comes, collects it at the evenings, goes to central post office, goes to post box ABCB and eventually reaches your home five days later, which is exactly how cross-border transactions move. Instead, we're trying to build the iOS, IMSS ecosystem where money can move, whether it's $100,000 transaction or a 10 million base of transaction near instantly across borders. So that's what we do. Who's our core focus as a client base? Other Fintech companies and that's who we started with today, right? Why? Because like I said, can we build everything for everyone? No. We go after the legacy Fintech companies. We go after large hotel chains. They have all these ERP integration requirements, large sales cycles. They do not want to go after that. With a customer base, who faces a pinpoint most acutely, are other Fintech companies. And having been a former VC, I've heard so many pictures. All the Fintech companies coming to me and saying, I need to raise my series A, B, C, D, all for working capital. It's not like the Fintech companies have huge uphexies. It's all pure capital. And for them, they want to make sure that they're pre-funding their assets in country A, country B, bank A, bank B, C. So that they can actually sort of mimic payments in real time for various different companies. And this happens at Cross of Globe for a while. It's a remittance company. Payment gateway or travel platform. Every single one is repeating the same infrastructure again and again. Realized rather than every single platform trying to do this, can we seamlessly integrate all of this and sort of solve that problem for them. Could we have done this five, seven years ago? Very unlikely. Few things have happened in the last few years. Number one, stablecoins have found PMF. So what that allows us to do is without showing anything to the users, right? Without letting the users know about the underlying tech, we're able to move money from country A, convert it into whatever currency you want, bypass with Flair if you need to move it to country B in single-itrements and give it to the customer and the local RTP. Again, five to seven years ago, most of the local image sort of last my emerging countries did not have RTP. Now we are in like the second, third generation of articles in most of these countries. So it's Mexico, Brazil, Europe, India, Philippines. And so we're able to sort of like move money across borders seamlessly, programmatically, and give that experience to our clients. Right? And what's happening is they're able to take our platform, compete with their legacy fintech competitors and sort of eat their lunch. They're able to slash their costs. They're able to give them real time experience for their clients without having to have really large balance sheets like the predecessors and compete with them. So that's basically how we've been able to crack this market segment in a very short span of time. This we started with. Now interestingly in the last six to nine months ever since we've come out of stealth, all the legacy fintech companies have started reaching out to us. And they're like, hey, what's going on in space? These new kids on the block, some new Remittance player which has started out from UK or from Mexico is eating our lunch left right and center. And when we dug up, we heard that open effects is powering there. And we're going to understand what's going on. What is this stable coin? What is this Solana? What is this blockchain? We're like, oh, you're running to understand all of these things. It's the same infrastructure that you used to use in currency cloud, wherever, you know, CD bank infrastructure. It's the very same. It's the same thing. Plug your plug open of X's API into it. Give us your asset A, convert it to asset B and click withdraw and you get it. You're only to understand wallets. You don't understand stable coins. You're going to understand anything about blockchain. And that literally blows their mind because it's like a to our integration for them. That's right. And I think the key thing you mentioned there that was interesting for folks is the capital element. The fact that startups and fintechs working capital is a key constraint that stops them from scaling. And you go and raise capital out of very expensive cost, right? The cost of capital is very, very high, especially for startup in order for them to grow. And so it's a great use of the capital. But if there's a way for them to scale quickly globally without that balanced need, then you're giving them fuel essentially and that improves the ROI of scaling a fintech, particularly across both fintech massively. You mentioned then the new customer segment, the more traditional fintechs. If you can, what's the breakdown of the kind of a $45 billion across the different segments that you have? Understanding that obviously you started with the original fintech. So obviously they've had more time to scale. Good question. So I would say it's almost 70, 30 at this point. 70% is still the fintech segment. Interestingly, the companies that will see CDs A when we started have now grown to CDs B, CD already using open effects of platforms. So they've seen hyper growth. They've become billion dollar companies using our infrastructure. So now we just call them A, B companies perhaps not. And so they've become their own like a fintech companies of sorts, of certain regions, but the newer players. And we can't recognize them into two segments. Companies that started before 2020 and the world. that start after 2020. The ones before that start before 2020 are almost like the legacy fintech players, some are publicly listed companies, some are old school players, they've started adopting and leaning into stablecoin narrative a lot more. They're like we understand that we have to get into this, if not, it's going to get troublesome and they're like great, we only convert anything into stablecoin since it's great, if you don't eat, you will just give fiat a to fiat b, again seamless programmatic experience in that blower's remind, and that's how we've seen adoption in that segment. That's awesome. And how does it split also across corridors? I think we haven't talked about the many countries that you support and the different currencies that you support, both fiat and crypto, it will be helpful to understand that as well. So it's been about 20 months since we've gone live. We're live in about 12 currency so far, 10 or R in GA and two R and B test age. We've been going live with one currency a quarter previously and now we've accelerated that to one currency every six months. I eventually like, now we're in over the onset of AI, our ability to sort of integrate with local banks, providers, liquidity providers, licensing, all the infrastructures in place, ready to bring down what used to take two months down to about four days now in terms of the entire integration timeline. So we're able to move much faster. So we should be launching almost one currency every four to six weeks. Now all of those 12 currencies, I would say it takes us about six months to go from zero to maybe like two 50 million dollars to 300 million dollars of TPB per currency. That's when we're like, okay, this currency is in a very stable place and it's post GA. And so we basically have launched bulk of our currencies in the last six to five to six months. So all the newer currencies are still in the zero, I would say like 50 to 50 million dollar range, but the ones that actually were launched in the early part of 2025, AED for example, MXN, euro, GPP dollars, they're through the roof. Like we have entered those markets and sort of dominated those regions. And interestingly, even the new currencies that we're launching these days, I'll give an example, PHP, we just announced that we're going like PHP in the market and all the existing players sort of like change the enterprise and strategy knowing that open indexes entering the market, slash their rates by like 56%, just to stay competitive because that's been our entry model. What we do is we enter domain, we slash the pricing and bring it down to like such bare minimum, it's almost the Amazon business strategy where we are saying, you know what, FX is a market where people charge 70, 80 basis points for everything instead. We make markets ourselves. We are market makers by DNA, you know, having bullfackel eggs, having come from a lot of these institutional platforms. We're able to bring a construction down to like single-liger books. Why don't we charge that to clients and give that kind of a construction to them. So what that allows us to do is competitively enter market, while bringing it on the settlement time. And so that's been our playbook. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is fascinating. I mean, I guess one quick question is that you mentioned the combination about Fiat and stablecoins. Like how do you see that interplaying within the core infrastructure today? And like you also mentioned that hey, you don't really need to know what stablecoins or blockchains are. So I guess like you providing Fiat services, but then is it powered by stablecoins or are you actually seeing demand from your customer base to say we actually do one stablecoins also just curious how it all interplays together. Yeah, yeah. So if you look at our website, you don't talk about stablecoins much or have the word stablecoins anywhere because clients don't care about the tech, they care about the outcome and we pitch the outcomes and the benefits. Now we look at stablecoins as yet and other kinds. If you want euro pound dollar and XNBR whatever it is, we'll give it here. You also want to use DC, USB T. Happy to give that to you. That's how we see it. Do clients want stablecoins? Yes. There are a couple of clients who want it specifically because we don't do the end to end corridor ourselves. For example, we are not live in India as a region and it's coming soon. We're working on it. We need to get the local infrastructure licenses all that sort of. So we only do half a leg for remittance companies who go, I don't know, from dollars to I know or pounds to I know. And so we basically give go from pounds to dollars to stablecoins, give them the stablecoin, they take that, go to whatever they need to in the last mile region, collect the local currency there. But we know that if you can give the last mile currency, sandwich the entire thing, we remove the stablecoin piece completely from this. Yeah, that makes sense. And then I guess like what type of, you mentioned like the fin, these are fintech use cases, like maybe describe just like the types of use cases. Are these, you mentioned remittances as one of them. But like what are the types of use cases are you saying? Is it is a predominant B2B? Are these consumer use cases like what are these fintechs actually doing with the open effects platform? Good question. So predominantly it's remittance companies, payment gateways, payment processors, payroll companies, neo banks, brokerators. These are the six segments. Now there are some enterprises too and niche enterprises like for example, I told you, UAE is a very large corridor for us. In UAE, very interesting use cases. And I say this because I grew up in Dubai, it's home and I understand everything that's going in this country a lot better. We've got one line segment which basically services the oil and gas sector in the shipping industry, fascinating industry because I've got a port right next to my house over here in Dubai. And I see how much they pay every hour for having a ship sort of like dock and the sport. Very interesting use case where before open effects they would basically come, pay lots and lots of fees. Every single hour to basically have the ship at the port to be inspected after the inspection is done for I don't just say bananas or whatever it is right. The weight about you know, 12 hours for the inspection to get done. Once the inspection is done they wire the money. They wire the AD to let's just say the Philippines where the ship came from there or to Guatemala if it came from La Dam and it takes three to five days for the money to reach the render. Three to five days that ship is waiting at the port paying our lead $5,000 in our ship in docking fees right and those bananas that are rotting in the meanwhile. Now got more benefits you basically are saying you know what just give us the AD and whatever currency on the other side we pay it out in one hour to that last minute. Now that's a fascinating use case I'm able to empty the ship clear the dock and the next ship is the world is getting more productive as it is a lot of money going faster cheaper better right now yes we've just stablecoins in between but neither the vendor knows now the receiver knows it just all happened for magically because we've gone from AD dollars dollars to stablecoin the stable coin is moved from UE to La Dam or from back into dollars dollars into that last mal currency given our two or any together. Fascinating use case no one is trying to understand stablecoins that's what's happening. Yeah I mean it's it's it's it's fascinating because I think sometimes people over rotate towards stablecoins and what you're presenting is like hey this is just a innovation and infrastructure on money movement we can make these things a lot simpler and faster and as a byproduct that the supply chain is actually getting faster as well which is actually you know if you compound that over to like the the global supply chain and global trade it's all right to get really fast ending and we've only scratched the service of it too which is which is really kind of cool. Maybe like I'm curious like you mentioned that you know it takes about you know six months to really see a currency go up and you know what I think even it'd be interesting to break that down because in the beginning you're you're talking about you know you got to you know do the integrations with like the local rails you know and then you get to get the liquidity going as well but maybe if you can break down like you have another currency that's going to go live in you know four to six weeks now but maybe what are the different pieces and you know where do you guys do like kind of how do you guys you know try to pick the demand for the currency is it all customer driven or you trying to stay a step ahead because you know what's about to come like here's how you guys are making that decision. Great very good question let's start with the second part of the question how do we pay currencies I don't wake up every Monday morning and go let's go here that's not how it works we actually survey all our customers every month asking them because these little fintech copies are going very rapidly we ask them what currency can we unlock for you that if we give it to you at an extremely competitive rate and very fast settlement times that your business will happen this can you're already doing not like some hypothetical currency that eventually you wish will come for you and so we basically stack rank and we have an activist for our customers the currencies and volume and we haircut that by a little bit and we like okay now we know what exactly is the road map of all the currencies we need to launch and then we have an index of all complex the regulatory regime is how much and our local banks infrastructure we surveyed most of these regions to the have API is to have local equity partners you know how easy or complex is it from money to move out of the ecosystem our stablecoins allow or are they banned in that region so we take all of them to account and then basically pick the regions that we need to go into and once we pick the region a lot of things that need to happen one we need to basically usually have a local presence because we want to have last man we don't we don't just swift wires into that country we do that then we are yet either provider that has existed for 20 years that's not what we do so we need to have a local banking infrastructure local liquidity provider that's local OTC that's the integration local market integration why because that's slicing and dicing a smarter routing is one part of how we get the liquidity but then we also make our own markets so we actually what happens is our trading desks and we are like maybe just diagnosing for 30 seconds we're like citadel securities that sits underneath Robinhood so we're both at the end of the day because we're building our own market being infrastructure so for that currency our trading team sets and starts making markets and starts going deeper and deeper in terms of reducing construction right and then I'll combine all of this and try to make keep it programmatic the biggest challenges and our piece is banking ecosystem most of these banks in these countries don't have APIs they say they have APIs maybe they have in some regional language which is not translated into English how things are broken be fixed you know errors for them and be basic create-on infrastructure. And a lot of times when they don't have APIs, we actually create RPA systems, robotic process automation systems where we have an ops guy who go and like, click, click, click, share what needs to be done and the RPA system repeats. So we are, because we need to get the deposit instructions scraped and put into our system, we do ensure that every time money comes in, it's credited accurately, then when there's an affix transaction, the money goes out, to whoever it is to go out, that is where, and when the last mile money needs to go, that also needs to be prepared. All of this programmatically by APIs, when the bank doesn't have APIs, means there's a lot of automation that needs to go. All of these boxes are checked, then, and that usually happens when, you know, we've gone from zero to like, two, 300 million dollars in volume and done all of these things, then it goes into GA, and that usually has historically taken a six months, but the time is shrinking faster because now, we're out there in terms of, you know, our brand and everything else, so people know, and we're able to see that, that pick up and curve instead of six months in five months and five in the end, you should look on four to three. Yeah, that's fascinating. I think, you talk about automation and AI a lot, but what that means in practice is taking a lot of these steps that are human-required, with clicks and browse automation and things like that, and turning those into processes. And when there are no actual APIs, it can be quite brittle. I'm sure, as you've seen, but over time, you catch edge cases, you improve, and like I mentioned, you know, maybe it takes, you know, 200 million of a volume to have seen sufficient edge cases where, you know, feel comfortable making it automated. You want an underlying system that itself really isn't. That's right. And if you go back to what we were discussing originally, though, reason the world operates this way in five to seven days, settlement times is because one part of it is tech. Yes, a lot of these last mile countries don't have the tech and integrations, but a lot of it is also like missile and incentives. A lot of the banks, I mean, all banks, are not in the business of moving money, then the business of keeping money. So they want to keep money and sit on the float for as long as they can because that's how they make money. And the entire intermediary banking infrastructure that is operated in the world for the last 57 years, where, you know, you send dollars from US to say, India, I and I in India, goes through five to six intermediary banks in between, it goes from your words, for I go to Bank of America, to CD Bank to Jakimah, and finally goes to access bank in India. And every single bank has a different time zone, different operating hours, everyone wakes up in the morning, a lot of manual processes, and then they want to sit on the float for the entire day if they can because they're making them interested. All these misaligned incentives, you know, basically make money more slower along with the technological problems. Now, if you automate this entire thing, remove the intermediaries in between, make it fully programmatic, suddenly the world starts getting more efficient. And that's the unique thing that we're doing. It's not rocket science, right? But just removing all these friction points in between and making sure that the next generation of tech companies that are building on top have access to these kind of fields. That's great. That was one of the questions that we have for you just to break down what is wrong with the current infrastructure and landscape today. And I think most people know or understand the correspondent banking problem. And like you mentioned, the incentives are key to it at the beginning, where, you know, depending on how many steps there are, each one is taking the code, each one is holding it just overnight, just in that additional spread. And, you know, that's a key thing. And I think there's still a bit of misconception with what plots plays in that, it's actually a messaging layer, it's not actually the one doing the movement. But outside of kind of correspondent banking, there's a lot of fintechs. I think you mentioned them, some of them are your customers who have tried to solve this with balance sheet and netting. But they, there are still problems for that perspective. Maybe you could just describe, for the fintechs who are trying to solve the correspondent banking system, what problems do they still have in cross-border payments? That's a very good question. And, in fact, before starting out with effects, I just went into a deep research mode. I actually said, let me understand this space very deeply. I understand I know Bill Falcon X before, so understand crypto space quite deeply. But I was like, this world of effects is fascinating. Let me just unpack it layer by layer. So spend time from the founders of currency cloud to the FX desk set, Barclays, spend deep amounts of time sitting in their offices if in fact a couple of times, don't understand how they move on. Where is it getting stuck? What are the incentives? And it was a fascinating experience as you peel every layer of the onion to understand what's going on. So let's start with the market structure. Every day about $7 trillion moves around the world, and FX, of which two trillion spot fighter lenses are option service swaps, right? Of the two trillion, good chunk of it moves around nine different banks around the world. JD Morgan, CDHSBC, it's very concentrated, right? And now if you look at the next layer of fintechs that all started in the last, say 15 years companies that started between the 2010 to 2020, they're all multi-billion dollar fintech companies that basically said, I'm going to take all these nine banks, create API wrappers and give access to the next level of tech companies. So they're all built as wrappers around these large banks effectively. They're not trying to reinvent the wheel, they're saying I'll just take a Barclays API. I'll give a programmatic experience to them, and I'll charge a nice margin at top of that and give them access to collection, making FX PRs. Great. Now the fundamental problem is Barclays is not the business of rapid money moment. Barclays doesn't work after four PMST. Not picking them up, but specifically, but every different bank in the world, right? They don't work on weekends, they don't work on national holidays. And then you compound that with five different banks in between and the problem gets really compounded. Right? And every single one wants to set up the money for as long as they can. And then you add different compliance rules, different manual processes, and suddenly the problem really compounds. And that's literally the way the industry is working today. Now every single fintech that has ever operated in the space historically is connected to some infrastructure that was built using this infrastructure. So we said, if I try to build another application on dot grid solids using a wrapper on Barclays DBSHSBC, nothing is going to change. In fact, I may sort of simplify the product experience. I may remove some of the on-boarding fees, you know, some slashed on the costs a little bit. But this is trying to basically pick from a very small pool and trying to create incrementally better experience, then trying to build for a platform and ecosystem that is going to be in 10 years time. I was slightly different view on where the world is going to be in 10, 20 years time. We decided, you know what? This is not the way to do this. If I have to fundamentally read when the entire way this is going to work and what it's going to look like in 10 years time, you have to start in the crux of the problem. The crux of the problem is not in collections, the crux of the problem is starting to bank it. It's in liquidity and it's in effects. And we have to solve that at that grass root level in every region, right? And we have to solve for the last mile liquidity. Now, in the last five years, what has happened is crypto exchanges have popped up, right? And so as a result, bit so coins, your pH, coin, weena, et cetera, et cetera, crack. And all of these have a little bit of liquidity where you can convert stable coins to some level of effects. And a lot of these new age remittance companies, new age cross-border companies, all the tech crunch news articles that you see got built and got started using crypto exchanges. So it's a great start for them. Now the problem is crypto exchanges are built for. Shitcoins and Bitcoin and everything else and stable coins to effects have some liquidity. And you can get started on it. You can do a very good 100,000 dollar size order or maybe a 100,000 year order, but you try to do a 10 million year order and you have five percent slippage. And suddenly it's better off to send money using Western Union than to use one of the crypto exchanges. So there are very few cases where it makes sense to use the crypto exchange to pay 5% to do it, rather than and wait, rather than to wait five days to use money. So we decided what crypto exchange also won't work because again, it needs to make markets and crypto exchange is my previous up there. So I know why I wouldn't or why I wouldn't make markets there. So we decided let's basically go back to the drawing board and let's start figuring out if this was getting rebuilt or we'll get rebuilt. We need to make markets in every region. We need to plug into all the local vendors, local commodities, local market makers and have a predictive ledger as well. Because and this is one of the learnings that we took from Transvise. Transvise is one country that has done something in a way that in the last 15 years of anything where they give in near instant money movement experience where they collect money from pocket A but be out from pocket B. But what they do behind the scenes is prefund their assets in all the regions to three days in advance. And they've done a fantastic job of it. Now can every company have that size of a balance sheet and sort of prefund everywhere? No. So what we're saying is can we basically take some of those learnings, key of access to all the people. So we actually have our own predictive ledger, of the $50 billion that we move. We know historically now it's Friday 7 PM in the pie for me. I know it 8 PM, I know it 9 PM, I know 10 PM across all currencies. What kind of flow? With 80th percent all accuracy that I'm going to expect. I see 80th but so that because we have new customers joining every way, doing new things. And suddenly those models break, which is a good thing and a bad thing. So now what that allows us to do is make markets and hold positions ourselves. So we do that as well. In addition to slicing and dicing and smart routing and all that infrastructure that's in place. So combining all of these things, we're able to sort of append the historical way the money has been moved in the past few years. It's sort of like get to a place we're able to programmatically move money using against stablecoins, FX currencies, programmatic infrastructure or APIs to give that wonderful experience to us. That's awesome. I'd love to get into that. I think throughout this conversation, you've picked on the various different parts of the stack. Let's walk through a 10 million dollar transaction. I think it's a well known thing that, yes, crypto exchanges don't necessarily have the liquidity for the very large B2B payments that need to occur instantly. And they're very, very good for small retail payments. And that's how, as you said, many startups have gone off the ground. Let's take the example you shared earlier. 10 million dollars worth of AED to the Philippines. Where does it fit into the system? What is stablecoin? When is it on a ramp? When is it touched by open effects and so on? Good question. So. Then million dollars is a decent size to talk about because you try to do execute that on exchanges and suddenly things break Right, you're not able to do not even just one side both sides you do and everything breaks So without open effects what typically happens. Let's talk about that Let's just say it's a limited company. They will collect the AED they'll usually use a digital back They will convert those aid that A to PHP will cost them 50 60 basis points and they will initiate the wire to go to Philippines Usually takes two three days. It's Friday. So the banks are already closed right now I'm going to be Saturday Sunday nothing's going to happen to Monday They'll you know, they initiate the wire on Wednesday. They'll reach so what usually the limited company has historically done is they've already pre-funded their Back-count in Philippines with PHP and kept it saying hey, I already know that 30 million dollars of PHP is required every day I'll keep $32 million. Maybe what's of PHP over there? If I've gone about that Back to Swift Rails I can't service my customer. I'm gonna make them happy. That's how historically it's worked But in the last few years with the onset of crypto exchanges some of the newer players had said you know what? Let me basically execute part of these trades on a coin V9 UA Convert that to stable coins with the stable coins to Philippines convert that on coins.com So pH back into PHP took now you can do a million dollars two three million dollars What have trades on either side? Fantastic but you try to do that programmatically every single day for double digit triple digit million dollars And so the exchanges don't have the liquidity because they know again in the business of creating a fixed step They're in the business of along you to buy Bitcoin ethereum all the other altcoins that you need to Now with open effects what we do is we make markets in both these regions ourselves deep FX markets So we're able to sort of programmatically can take receive that a D locally into our car It's usually near its time because local a D tails are fast. So we get the money to a D We convert that a into USD. We make the markets for it. So it usually calls You know single very few clips to do that once we've gone from AD to USD We can work that into a multi-dose table coin with stable coin really I can't we don't pick whatever the cheapest fastest most liquid stable coin at that point with the best incentives Our algorithms and pick that take that stable coin You know push that to our Philippines for example and in Philippines off from that back to dollars Right and dollars to PHP again me make the markets so we've gone from AD new aid to PHP in Philippines Usually in under 10 minutes why 10 minutes? Depending on what chain what stable coin we used and the number of conch in confirmations is distributed in 10 minutes Otherwise it can happen in like you know second So once we've gone there PHP local rails are running for seven again We paid out to our customer into their local bank account on Philippines and they're able to pay whichever customers I need to and this can happen whether it's a Friday Saturday Sunday no banking car of ours nothing So that's that's fantastic and great way to really Layed that allowed what is required to make that work? So you mentioned it sort of it is you need real-time rails on either side then you need to have APIs or you mentioned robotic purchase automation on either side They need to make markets on either side with deep liquidity and obviously from if all connects you have experienced there But you need capital to To make those markets on both sides so this capital involved as well And then obviously wallet infrastructure in order to manage the stable coins maybe I've missed some things there And can you just talk about what is needed for that operation? You unpacked a lot of them with a few more things One first of all in every region you need to have local presence to have a local account local back infrastructure local licenses You can't get away with that you're touching fear assets These are not on chain shiq coins that you can say it's you know defi I don't know how to touch it. It's fiat so you need to have local licenses and regulations that usually takes time to get that So like we're a scapegoat as well. So you start from there you need all the local KYC compliance infrastructure and Comply with those rules. So that's one number two You need to have a very deep understanding of our fixed markets and ability to make markets here because One thing you realize after being into space There's no such thing as a interbank rate or a bed market rate It's literally whatever these days like you know You can basically you'll have to make your own markets you have to figure out what the pricing or a call is you have to build out that infrastructure So having a tech team and an FX team and a market team that actually understands all of this and can do real time turning for seven work is a second benefit Third a very deep understanding of crypto and stable coins because that market infrastructure is very different from the FX market structure So understanding that then third thing Sorry, the fourth thing effectively is the ability to do all of this programmatically So an extremely you know jacked up engineering team which can basically get all of this done Whether the API is there not APIs doesn't matter making sure that that entire leg is automated and Number five ultimately is the business model itself right your ability to basically do all of this using a balance sheet A very large balance sheet that can almost pay for itself because it balance sheet is not free Right, you're running a very low margin business, but you're running profitably. So doing it at scale and doing it in a way that you don't basically get hit one hit and wipe down Is another thing and the sixth most important thing is when doing all of this and when millions of billions of dollars Doing it in a secure manner because one step of the way one fat fingering mistake one you know weak link and everything is gone Because ultimately you're going money. You're not shipping, you know burgers and pizza So people are here to be very secure and safe about this So all of these six things doing it while running at 24/7/3 C for businesses hard and You know I didn't start off in fact, so they ended up actually starting this company. I think I told you this when I met here I was looking at companies through any founders who are trying to build this space and I said you know what I Lead your series a myself if you're doing a fantastic job. There's nobody wanted to build this business It's a very complex business to build and anyone who would go into this business were like and treat so many things I want to charge 80 to basic points to 100 basis points and because I deserve it. I am a premium product Then suddenly you're back to the world that we're going to live in and said no Okay, it requires somebody who actually deeply understands all of these things and can build it in a way that You know the world should be I want to basically clear to us from my very money actually doesn't cost so much to move Sort of bending reality to my own well and solving it for myself or anything Yeah, I mean it's and it's a great explanation and I think it's a good segue into you know I think some of the next Topic around differentiation and just I think oftentimes in the stablecoin space We see a lot of orchestration companies or they call themselves you know on an off-ramp aggregators You see a lot of these terms pop up right, but what you're describing is You're talking about debt in terms of infrastructure building in terms of liquidity You know in terms of actually building out that infrastructure and doing it in a certain way Maybe like in your review like describe just like you know what you think is you know Maybe what can't people copy right? I mean a lot of the stuff you talk about it sounds easy when you say it But when you actually do it, it's actually a very different thing and then also I think the most important part that you touched on is the business model itself like building a low margin Business it takes takes a balance sheet and it takes a lot more and there's actually a lot more involved Maybe if you can describe just you know taking a step back of like you know what the market looks like today What you know what you guys are providing? It's differentiated and you can you touch on some of these parts already And then maybe like we can go into like the liquidity flywheel and the the business model yourself like you guys are able to provide and go and Take this Amazon approach and go into these markets and slash prices But also do it effectively as well. Maybe if you can just like unpack all that together for us There's a lot to unpack here and we'll go on for in the 45 minutes if we do that. So let's touch upon some of these things Look there are lots and lots of players in this entire equation and a lot especially in this day and age How good lot go cursed everything has gotten you can wipe code pretty much anything What is very hard to wipe code is building the regional liquidity in each of the places and sort of building that stack in a way that you can actually make money and Giving access to customers so that they can actually sort of utilize all of this Software layer will definitely get wiped good route in the next 10 years and we actually thought about it very deeply all the orchestration there Just collecting money from point A and paying it out to point B in 100 different artists No, that's not rocket science. I appreciate the companies that are doing it and that's fantastic But all that can be wiped code out by a 14 year old kid in five years time But building all of these things with the licensing stack with a Prochromatic ability to do all of it is hard. So if you talk about differentiation Just upon a lot of these things, but if I to summarize it down to three points I would say number one is having that full end-to-end automation Is a big differentiating factor in fact if you talk to our customers that you found the reasons the users is because they don't talk to us It's just it's weird, but it's also a great thing because we're like, yo If you want to talk to us and have chat and you know be nice. We don't have a Trade operations team Trading desk who sits in chats with you on telegram. What's up? That's how we operate right that doesn't scale because If you want to get to a trillion dollars a day of volume, we cannot do that mainly by three people are not trying to buy a bank of America here with 10,000 employees They have 300 people are most at peak and all of that is going to be primarily engineering So that focus on automation is a key differentiator for us. Second thing I would say is are able to operate 21st set It's also key differentiator. I believe to provide Fricing for effects on weekends when no one does it like in fact We went to some of the largest banks in the world and we were saying hey We want to basically get access to your banking infrastructures so that we can run it when they learn what we do They're like quick you make markets on weekends. We don't have access and they're like 500 euro banks Then actually don't have access to this infrastructure that I can be use you guys for weekend effects and we'll give you access to a bank infrastructure So that's where the conversations are and not even like the Fintech companies for Fintech companies is the one want to operate to it for someone, even the legacy banks would know this is feasible. Third thing I would say that differentiates all of this is underlying business model. And we talked about this briefly, right? Fundamentally, rather than trying to build a business that, you know, let's just say the next competitor in the space of ours would charge 50 basis points. If I charge 45, Chuck will go start a company tomorrow and charge 40 and charge will start charge 35. And eventually becomes a doggy dog business. It's like, if it's going to become a doggy business, that will induce a race to the bottom and operate it at a margin that the next player, if they want to compete with OpenFX, has to bleed 100 to 200 million dollars if cash just to basically get into this business. So very low incremental margins left on the table, which is Amazon strategy. If I tell either if you guys to go start an Amazon tomorrow, we're like, you know, fuck this shit. It's not worth it. So same thing. So we're trying to build that underlying AWS infrastructure that every other fintech can build on top of such low margins. But at scale, we'll actually be very profitable company because I didn't need to charge so much. Because in every stack of the way, I'll make a few basis points. But by charging so low and making the money move much faster, I believe that the $2 trillion a day of volume will eventually get to $50 trillion a day of volume. It's just like an analogy is 50 years ago. And if you said the number of posts that are going through a post that will end up 100,000 a day, hyper-thick. If you introduce SMS, it won't be 110,000 a day. It's exactly a trillion a day, effectively. That level of, you know, when we basically take money and make it programmatic and allow it to move 24, 7, 3, 6, to get extremely low costs, that is going to be the effect of cross-border money movement. And we're also entering this world of AI where money no longer can move at human timescales. And that is going to be a big differentiating factor. Money has to more programmatically. AI agents are not going to wait three days from sending from AI to one day, and doing molecular. Let me wait for the money to receive. They're going to expect to send a trillion transactions off like a few cents each every single day and ensure that the money gets to the other side very fast. And that has to happen through API, that has to happen programmatically. And that's infrastructure willing, and that's how we differentiate ourselves. Right. That's fascinating. You have the 24, 7, deep liquidity on one hand. Then you mentioned the automation and making it programmatic. So that no one needs to talk to the trading desk. So that enables a lot of scale. In this new model, what's the next thing to break? Where does this new bottleneck start to form in this new form of doing this cross-border effects? Yeah. Candidly, where at scale things are already breaking and will continue to break first as in two aspects. One, isn't banking. As much as we are trying to disrupt the existing structure, we still have to learn banks to sort of move money across the world. As soon as anyone realizes you're using stablecoin, they may not have crypto-computer or Web3 company by any means. But it just mere fact that you're using stablecoins, sort of results. It's a red flags banks and they're like, you know, wait, I want to look at you guys. And if you are having that trouble, imagine all the young companies are coming out of YCN saying we're a crypto-native, stablecoin player, et cetera, et cetera. It's just very painful for them. So banking and every shape and form, whether it's access, whether it's access to APIs, whether it's access to banks that actually work 24/7, whether it's infrastructure that doesn't break, you know, sometimes money just doesn't reflect on banks. And why? Because some human is sitting back on the bank, trying to credit every single thing. So as much as you automate things on your end, if there is a dependency on that bank to have a human being who's going to see that money accredited, suddenly that is the last malchocking point there. So that is going to be a fundamental choking point in this industry and has been for us at this point. And second thing that we're going to face at scale is balance sheet. All right. If you really want to solve this problem, and again, you trillion dollars a day problem means, what do you mean? $500 billion, maybe trillion dollars of balance sheet? I'm good, but I'm not that good. I can't raise the trillion dollars of capital. And that's the most efficient way of doing this too. So, you know, we have to figure out a very creative way to solve this problem. We have some ideas and we're working towards it. Yeah. And I think, you know, as we're, as we're, as we're getting, you know, this has been a fascinating conversation. As we're coming close to the end here, I mean, maybe we can just break out into the future a little bit more. There's, you know, you've talked about how you're fundamentally the rethinking, like the, the FX space, you know, leveraging stablecoins, leveraging automation, you know, now, now things are just getting faster and faster and faster. But like, what does FX look like, you know, I think in a long enough time horizon? And then also maybe, maybe break down like, you know, we're starting to see this like early emergence of non-USD stablecoins also. Like curious how you see like benefits for any of those as well. - Two different questions. So let's unpack them. Long enough time frame could be anything. I actually have my own worldview and where the world's going in about 30, 40 years. Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about 10 year timeframe. More, more bounded. In 10 years, I have a high degree of confidence that the largest users of FX is not going to be anybody in this, you know, sort of call over here. It's not going to be human beings. It's going to be AI agents. Everything that has been built in the last 30, 40, 50 years and the world of Fintech has been built for human time scales, end of day batch processing. That's not the way the world is, the FX world is going to be in the next 10 years. It's going to be AI agents you're going to do, like I said, a trillion transactions a day, or, you know, million transactions a day of $2 each, as opposed to two transactions of a million dollars each, which is exactly how we work today. That's one of the cases. So we're building that infrastructure for that world because we already started to see some of these fascinating use cases. It blows my mind when I see these young startups trying to build for new applications, where like, I really don't know what's going to take. Obviously, 2005 and you're building AWS and you see all these new startups, zero clue what's going to happen in the world, but it's fascinating to see all these use cases get built on up in FX. Now, was the second part of a question left, right? Stablecoins. So let's see, is there inherent advantage of regional stablecoins around the world? Yes and no. So now, if you look at most of these emerging nations, they already have local RTP tails that allows them to move money 24/7 365, right? India, Mexico, Brazil, all of the AD, PhD, what does a stablecoin in that currency allow them to do? Really nothing much like mind-like, maybe. You've been to India, I'm guessing a bunch of times, like if you use a API, there's no limits. It works better than stablecoins. Why do I need a stablecoin for I know? There's really no benefit. If anything, all of the last mile sort of regional countries, the demand is for dollar-based stablecoins, because all of these countries have 10, 15, 20% inflation, and they don't want to basically sit on their local currencies. They want to sit on a dollar-denominative asset. It's very difficult for them to get access to dollar-based accounts, but having access to a dollar-based stablecoin allows them to escape the inflation costs and also get access to higher eels generating abilities and all of that stuff. So that's where the demand is. The only use case that I can see of for regional stablecoins is creating like an on-chain FX world and we touched upon this briefly. Where if you have access to this, maybe the world is going to look very differently in terms of what's going to look like. But so far, the last two years of having operated open FX, we have pushed a lot of these regional stablecoins through our platform. We haven't seen much adoption and success from players, because there's really no use case effort. Yeah, this is always a hot topic and I'm glad we touched upon it here. One of the things you started with was comparing to the regions that had already functional RTP rails. And it makes sense. And anything is an argument that we've discussed on the show in the past where for domestic use cases, if the payment is starting or ending in Fiat and they already have a local RTP rails that work, you're just going to go through the path of least resistance, particularly the path that already has network effect. But there are regions that do heavy and trade that don't have RTP rails. And then there's a question of what does the government choose as a technology based? Does it go and create an RTP rail with its control? Or does it decide to go to the new open blockchain path unseen so far? But I think that's one of the potential areas for non-USD stablecoins to take off, which touches upon the point you mentioned, which is where there isn't a good local RTP rail. I like to play a line. And whether that becomes a CBDC or whether that becomes a stablecoin, you have to be seen. I've heard all different iterations from the Regleta as a central bankers. It's a fascinating world that I've entered, like I said, in the next 10 years. Fondo or should for me. And maybe for another time we hear you're 20 to 30 years vision. But we are at time here. So that will need to be under the episode. The public doubt this has been awesome. A tremendous amount. Where can folks go to find out more about you and OpenFX? Thank you. Thank you for having me here, Chuck and Raj. OpenFX.com is what our website is. If you're going to find me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm on Prebaka Ready. OpenFX. You can look me up. I'm also on Twitter. But Prebaka too. Ready? And you, Rich? You can find me on x@artbarrick and mona.xiy. And for me, stay welcome to Blebring.com, x, check, and discuss. x, y, z, and LinkedIn as well. Check out Blego. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much, but-- This was awesome. Thanks for talking. Thanks so much for listening to Money Code. There was so much to take away from today's conversation. I lend a lot and I hope you did too. If you enjoyed this episode, do us a favor. Share it with someone you know or give us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast from. Until next time.