S1E16: OpenFX, Making Money Move Like Data

Introduction to Karan Shah and OpenFX Today's episode of Stablepill is brought to you by Limited, the global business banking platform built for founders in the US, Latin and AIPAC who operate across borders. Limited makes international scale seamless. You can open AUS bank account for the US or non-us entities and accept funds locally with accounts in the UAEU, Mexico, Brazil and the UAE. They support cross-border payouts in over 80 currencies across 300 local payment methods and your team gets premium Visa cards shipped globally that can be used anywhere. I've actually been trying them out so far and found their method for converting between Fiat and crypto very easy. It's just in Mexico City recently using them and I can tell you that is not the case for many products. So stop letting legacy banking slow down your growth. Go to limitedapp.com and unlock Borderless banking today. Speaker 2 All right, welcome to another episode of Stable Pilled. Today we have Karan Shah, who is one of the Chief of Staff at Open FX and part of the founding team. Open FX is a cross-border payments infrastructure company using global sediment rails. And before Open FX, he invested at Excel and Y Combinator. And he's seen fintech across multiple markets, including the India and US. So thanks for being here, Quran. Karan's journey through fintech markets Good to be here. I'm excited. Speaker 2 So yeah, we're really excited to have you. Open FX is obviously one of the Trail Blazers in the stablecoin space that we look at and would love to spend some time diving into a lot about Open FX. But you also have had an incredible journey in your career. So before jumping into the business, would love to just hear a little bit about your journey, some learnings that you've had and some surprises along the way or whatever you'd like to share. Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. I think maybe to start, I'll start with saying I've been privileged that to have gotten the opportunity to live, you know, in the UK, in the US and sort of India where I was born and raised across the last 15 years. That was for both work and school. And specifically on the work side, got to effectively see how fintech went from zero to 1 and then from one to 10 over the last decade and a half across these markets. You know, through the companies that I worked with, I actually initially started out in capital markets, in the equity markets evaluating sort of not fintech, but Finserv businesses in the Indian market and then switched over to to the tech and in sort of tech investing side joined, joined Excel in the II focused early stage fund. Spend time with the UK team. Also got a chance to work with the US team later on. Went to work at Y Combinator. Interestingly, I wasn't on the accelerator side of things at YCI. Actually worked on worked in the internal growth investment fund called YC Continuity. It no longer exists, but the idea when it was set up by Sam Altman in 2016 was to basically create some kind of a touch point for the top YC companies to effectively come back to Y Combinator and get the best practices, shared best practices, you know, with each other, have that founder cohort experience. And I got to do that from 2020 to 2021 to 2023 and primarily sort of focused on international investments as the only international expat on, on the US investment team. The origin story of OpenFX and crypto payments So got to work, got to meet and work with a lot of fantastic fintech founders in Latam in Africa and Europe, in, in Asia, Southeast Asia, India through that job as well. And so really got a bird's eye view across initially what was consumer fintech, then became B to B fintech, then became fintech infrastructure. And then the last major area that I was spending time on was cross-border payments at YC. We did a growth investment in deal which obviously worked out very very well, but also got a chance to spend a lot of time with the founder of Jeeves, Flutter Wave, you know a host of other companies that were much more earlier in their journey in the YC ecosystem and then cut to 23 YC decided to shut down the growth fund. My old friend and ex colleague Prabhakar who I worked with at Excel, he had actually gone under Co found Falcon X and had invited me to join him in the Falcon X journey. I was just not ready to take career risk as a 25 year old in in 20/17/2018 on crypto. So did the thing that every Asian kid is supposed to do go to Business School and and sort of have like a respectable job but made an Angel investment and and kept working with them and sort of advising them helping them on the side. Falcon X was obviously went on a tear of a journey is set to go public next year. So proud of sort of everything that they did, but in for his second rodeo, rather his fifth rodeo because this is his fifth business. He had a very similar sentiment in the sense that crypto worked in the zero to one phase for the speculative use case. But there's a much deeper promise that crypto was supposed to have, which is global payments and at least the Gen. one winners and crypto have done such a great job at building crypto trading infrastructure that they've sort of gotten detached with the traditional world or the outside world, specifically fintech. Now, it's not for it's not all their fault. I think operation choke point, the regulatory sort of, you know, clamp down and all the shit that the regular world through at the crypto folks definitely distance them away from being able to set up that kind of infrastructure. OpenFX's vision to move money like data So in 2324 when when he was in ideation phase and we got together, we realized that you have to sort of start from scratch. You have to have both the DN as you need to have the crypto DNA, but also the traditional Fintech DNA and literally set the foundations of crypto payments, table gun payments from from the get go. And so that got us to this journey, which is which is converted to open FX. We're coming up on two years of our live operations, 2 1/2 years of since we incorporate the company and we're we're effectively on track to crossing 100 billion on our two year anniversary or two year birthday. So it's been an exciting journey so far. Speaker 2 Pretty cool, pretty cool. And tell me a little bit about the vision for Open FX. Speaker 3 Vision very simplistically and maybe this sounds, you know, a bit of a cliche, but the the vision is to move money as seamlessly as data. You know, a lot of people say that, but let me actually to double down on that for a second. If data move like money, the world would not be wherever act today. Why? Because you only have the Internet from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday to Friday and you wouldn't have it on bank holidays. You wouldn't have it on national holidays and weekends because that's when you know, the bankers or the people enjoyed sort of go off on their break. So imagine 265 days of live Internet with 9 to 5 operations only and with everything outside of nine to five. What you have is local, on device, on Prem sort of activity, all queued up waiting to go on 9:00 AM next morning. And that's really how money still moves in in 2026 now. So there's a fundamental problem. Now you look one step deeper and only talk about money movement. Money moves at the speed of trust, whether it's as fast as data or not really money moves the speed of trust. And that's where, again, things start breaking down because historically you've not had, you've had major banks, but banks operated bank space and bank regulations and they're focused on the fortune hundreds of each market, right? So when a city bank, you know, Barclays came to Turkey, came to Indonesia, came to India, came to Thailand, they came to service the Unilevers of the world and the Toyotas of the world who had to set up local operations, whether it's for retail or manufacturing or whatever it is. That business hasn't kept up with the requirements of the global tech companies that I bet that have been built over the last two decades and are being built today. And so really you think about where the world is moving, where the bottlenecks are, like yes, AI is obviously pushing things forward on in a certain part of the world, but really you think about the core elements, you know, of commercial activity. Money movement is still sort of so archaic, especially in cross-border payments, not so much domestic payments. Domestic payments has just progressed so fantastically over the last two decades, especially with RTP rails coming up in every market. And again, I was lucky just given my background having lived in emerging markets. The archaic state of cross-border payments RTP Payments is a emerging market revenue payments revolution that played out so well in India initially, then got replicated in Brazil and announced so many other markets, even Europe. SEPA Instant effectively behaves very similarly. It's funny that the US doesn't have one even today. Technically they do have Fed now and. Speaker 2 And two, they're just not well used, right? Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just it's just not been opened up to everybody and it's not as easily accessible. So you do have, you know, the private players like a Venmo and a Zell and all of that. But yeah, I think domestic payments has evolved in in in a great way, but cross-border payments is still sort of so archaic. And that's why even the first generation of fintech companies that got built in cross-border payments never truly broke out beyond like a billion dollar like that Unicorn, you know, valuation tag, because they all hit some kind of a gap. That gap is artificial. It's set by regulators, by regulatory licences, by bank partners, by just the cost of going and setting up. It's only different markets, by heterogeneous infrastructure that doesn't talk to each other. A Ledger in Mexico is different from a Ledger in Brazil is different from a Ledger in Philippines. Not, not your own Ledger, the bank Ledger. Suddenly you now have the blockchain, which is a unifying Ledger, unifying Ledger at the bank level, at your level, your internal level and sort of the you know your customers interface and you now have much lower barriers to scale or barriers to even enter a market. And so we fundamentally believe like the why now moment for cross-border payments only arrived recently thanks to stable coins. Yes, that's one of the elements, but stable coins represents momentum in the market, and that momentum is only increasing. Now, whether the next thing is tokenized deposits or Nathan or Nathan's next guest decides to invent magic beans, we're not. We're not exclusive to stable coins, unlike most companies in the space who have stable coins as the banner word on their website. You'll have to scroll to the fifth page on our website to find something about stable coins. We're not married to the technology, we're married to the problem. And as long as we can use this tool, whether stable coins as one tool or magic Beans second tool, some of these proprietary cross-border payment networks that have been built as a third tool, we use every tool in the toolkit to basically solve the problem. Speaker 2 Nice. Well I'm looking forward to the next guest and their magic beans. I didn't know that was coming on my show. Speaker 3 Never know what comes. Speaker 2 Up what's been surprising about your journey so far? You guys caught it at the right time. I'll never forget being a crypto founder myself 2022 reading about Argentinians getting 30% of them getting paid in stable coins as their currency was hyperinflating while we were trying to find like any products that would have 1% of the users of the world using them. So like that just blew us away, but you guys timed it really well. But what's been surprising to you on this journey? Speaker 3 So many things have been surprising at the market level, just the pace at which this market has evolved. I mean, the software world has evolved, you know, at a similar sort of blitz scale pace with AI and everything that we're seeing with sort of clawed or entropic open AI and the way their revenues have scaled up is something that we had never seen before in the tech ecosystem. Similarly, Fintech is not supposed to scale at this pace. When, when we were out doing our seed raise, I'd sort of created this slide that if we get to $5 billion and $10 billion in year 3, Year 5 will be the fastest players to sort of reach that kind of scale. Market surprises and timing in fintech And we blew past that in like 6 months. Really that's a function of where the market was. And I don't think our timing was great in the sense that when you're in the ideation phase, everyone looks at you and says, what's wrong with you? This is never going to work. Like what is a stable coin? It just got D pegged. You think about the USDC D peg when SVB went down, that was March of 24 wasn't a long time ago or March of 23 wasn't a very long time ago. That was around the time that we were sort of going down this rabbit hole and thinking this thing that just D pegged is probably the best tool for cross-border payments. The timing was way off back then, but it really, I think the wind shifted, you know, in our favor and so we got lucky. So that so that surprised me about the. Speaker 2 Sorry, one thing about the wind shifting, what was the biggest, what do you see as the biggest shift? Like where'd you get the most lucky? I know like luck is a huge factor in a lot of businesses I've been successful in. So I don't think it's bad to say that, but just curious what you see as the biggest factors. Speaker 3 Again, so many so many factors. Major ones. I would say 1 is just the the regulatory sort of mood shifting from Gary Jensler's era. Funnily, I took the the cryptocurrency class at MIT when I was at doing my MBA with Gary Jensler. He's the biggest proponent of Bitcoin. So I was shocked to see his tenure and everything that went down. But I think coming out of that to the, to the current regime, that was definitely one of the things. The second one is, I think everyone's been talking about blockchain being, you know, this major innovation that the tooling required, the adoption required, the liquidity required to make it work for real use cases. It took the last decade, it took the 2015 to 2025 journey to get it to this level where it can start applying to different use cases. So that started coming through. Stableco started out with Terra Luna and that was much smaller host of other ones, you know, around not not a very long time ago. And that completely shifted and you can even see the infrastructure updates that Circle had to go and make post the USDC, DPEG, the SVB crisis. A lot of these players effectively formalized or institutionalized their infrastructure. So a lot of things came together on the regulatory side, on the infrastructure side. And then thanks to, again, early stage founders just finding very unique niches and crevices across sort of the fintech ecosystem, there were sufficient proof points to point to this thing potentially working. You know, whether it's at the application layer or the infrastructure layer with the likes of Bridge and BBNK and the others, there were enough proof points that we could point to that, yes, there are people who are starting to put this together and make it work. It just requires much better, much deeper focus, dedicated infrastructure to make the scale. I was again lucky that I got to meet the dollar app guys back when they were super early stage, back in the early stages in the YC journey post the accelerator. And initially I thought this is this is just, it's just evading capital controls in markets like Argentina and helping people with capital flight and the government's going to shut this down. That was my opinion around the demo daytime. And then just saw them scale across multiple markets and actually went and did customer surveys and customer research as we were trying to get smarter in the business and truly understood that these guys are not trying to get money out to escape, you know, regulatory issues, but they're trying to protect their own, preserve their own wealth. And so there has to be some solution. The economist in me says the central bank should clamp down and control this overnight. The the human in me says people should be allowed to preserve their wealth. And if the government's not working for them, voting with their dollars is as important as voting at the poll booths. And so when crypto, when stable coins take off as a way to to hedge against inflation, that is people voting with their dollars that they do not believe in the central bank and their monetary policy. And something really needs to change at a structural economic level. So all of that put together just gave us enough signs that, you know, there is a there there. And so we went down a deep rabbit hole both with these early stage sort of crypto companies, with the fintech, with the traditional fintech applications who were using traditional money movement rails, with the infrastructure providers who were who were powering them, the currency clouds, the names, tunes, the database of the world. We didn't spend time with them and really tried to identify where's the bottleneck even with the Gen. 1 providers, like why the Gen. 1 providers, why can't the Gen. 1 providers scale? And then that bottleneck turned out to be FX, which is not a technology prop function, it's a capital markets function. And we were just lucky that Prabhakaran sort of already built a capital markets business more on the crypto side of things. I'd spent time on the crypto on the capital market side of things. And so we understood the language that the capital markets speak and we understood why this was so disjointed historically from the fintech ecosystem because Silicon Valley engineers or SAS engineers and hedge fund high frequency trading engineers are two very different DNA and they they don't mix too much. Competitive landscape and OpenFX's edge But really you have to build a company that straddles across both, because cross-border payments is both a capital markets function as well as a payment function. Speaker 2 Lovely. Thanks for sharing a bit of the history. Fast forwarding a little bit to what's happening now the the stablecoin space is hot. It's no longer, you're no longer your parents are no longer asking you questions about why you're doing something here. Everyone's talking about it. Like you said, regulations change. The volumes have just gone crazy. So you guys were obviously, you know, pretty well timed in retrospect have been doing really well. But this is a competitive space. There's stories of, you know, Google overtaking Alta Vista over time in in the past of technology. So what are you guys doing to kind of keep that advantage and keep the momentum you've built as it gets more competitive? Speaker 3 Yeah, within cross-border payments, there's a lot of early stage companies. As you said, the the space is competitive. There's a lot of competition at the application layer. There's a lot of competition at the Middle Valley here. The application layer is typically the consumer facing or business facing either is a near banking function. So that's hold money is a remittance function for consumers. You call it a remittance for businesses, you call it payouts like vendor payments. And then the third one is more of a collections, you know, function. So how you receive money, whether that's payroll for consumers or like APSP for businesses, right? So there's a lot of competition at both these layers. The mid you go and spend time with the middleware providers, they're evolving as the application layer is evolving. But really middleware is an aggregator business. You're aggregating a bunch of underlying modules and a bunch of underlying bare metal providers and putting things together for the application providers for the application layer companies to do sort of, you know, utilize. You think about these modules that all disjointed, they're coming from a host of different places. And primarily the function that we blame, which is liquidity has always been extremely archaic, extremely manual in the sense that FX trading is done or any kind of liquidity sort of market making is done through voice chats, text chats, like orders are placed on Telegram, on WhatsApp, in Slack chat, sometimes an e-mail, depending on which markets. And so it's really not as dynamic like electronic FX is as much of A new thing in within traditional capital markets sort of then even in, in inside of payments, right. So if electronic FX is still scaling in the traditional capital markets world, it makes sense that the payments guys do not have the best access to electronic FX. So we decided to play in this part of the stack where effectively most providers do not offer programmatic access, do not have any kind of S performance SLE that they're measured against. It's all, it's all about rates. Because if I have 5 providers on WhatsApp, I'm just going to keep, you know, requesting for quotes and it's an RFQ basis RFQ business. So you ping 5 people, you get the rate, you choose the best one, how long it takes for the money to settle, whether it's done through WhatsApp manually or they even providers who have APIs, the most of them didn't have APIs. All of that is an afterthought. So we started with the things that are an afterthought and said, let's flip this model. 5 years from now, 10 years from now, people aren't going to do white space trading, chat based trading. It's actually going to be an AI agent. Maybe the AI agent can do chat based trading, but really it's APIs talking to APIs. And so if you create a programmatic interface, you open up a part of the market and you open up, you know, a product experience that hasn't existed before, you pair that with real time settlement capabilities. Because as I was explaining earlier, inside a lot of these markets, you do have real time payment rails. So I can now collect Brazilian AI in real time and I can deliver Indian rupees in real time or euros in real time. And so if that's the case, why are we talking about D + 1, D +2? Where's that coming from? That comes from the FX desk, the traditional FX desk, the bank, the traditional bank FX desk, which is powering the Gen. 1 cross-border payment players. But we don't have to operate that way because again, we're not operating a manual FX desk. We're trying to take ideas and inspiration from the high frequency trading guys and execute algorithmically, programmatically in an automated way. Even today, we, I mean, we're coming up on about $100 billion of volume. We have 3 traders, one from L Max, some major exchange, one from CMD Digital, Brevin Howard, one who is the founder of like a perps, like FX perps company. All three of them are not sitting and clicking buttons all day. Automation, trust, and future of FX trading They're thinking about systematic trading. And how do you set up systematic algorithmic trading and effectively create the engine that's going to go out and, and run, you know, 24/7 on whichever flow, whichever corridor sort of we needed to run. So that's effectively what, what, how we decide to play in the market, how that shows up is a differentiated product, differentiated product both in terms of interface, in terms of settlement times and in terms of availability. Because we're now up and running 24/7, right? You can even execute transactions on weekends. A lot of our customers have come to us and says and, and, and they say, well, we don't operate on weekends. So actually, can you offer us T + 1 T +2 because which is going to come in on Friday, execute transactions and let it like all play out on Monday? Like, OK, great. In sort of you, the treasurer, the trader, why don't we go and talk to your PM and actually get our EPS in their hands so that they can set up automated weekend, you know, money movement execution, just so you don't have this problem and you're not increasing your workload, you're actually reducing it. So I think that's a transition that's happening with a lot of our customers, but it's a behaviour change, and that behavior change will take some time because the ecosystem is still not there. Then it doesn't operate at this level. Speaker 2 So if I'm hearing you, your competition, the way you're trying to win is essentially bringing in a high frequency trading, a philosophy which a lot of people aren't doing. I've, I've had people on this show who even do the OTC, you know, WhatsApp kind of stuff you're describing. And then also you're building trust. And so even because you know, one of the challenges people in the aggregation layer talk about is like rate compression, but even as things like that make your business harder, you have built trust for these people. You help them change their rails. And so, you know, 5 or 10 years from now, more competitive players come along, but you have kind of a legacy set of relationships that other people are going to have to be 10X better to beat you. Is that am I understanding your competitive edge and how you guys trying to win? Speaker 3 I think that captures most of it. You said one thing and sort of flew past it, which is rates compressing. I've been hearing FX as a race to the bottom from the time I started working and so that's why I went into the equity markets instead of going to the FX markets. Not that rates are not compressing in the equity market side of things, but you know, it's different business Collector 2025. We're still talking about, you know, this race to the bottom. This race is being run by turtles. If every decade everyone sort of saying the same thing and so we look at this and and say, OK, why have rates not compressed even faster? And that's because of how operationally intensive cross-border payments is, because of voice trading, because of manual settlement, because of manual workflows. Now if you automate most of this and have it run 24/7 with very minimal human intervention, your capacity to process payments triples, quadruples, 10 excess on the same infrastructure. If I take all the automation away, I can execute 100 payments. Now I can execute 1000 payments. I don't need to generate the same amount of fees in take rate, you know, to cover that same amount of OpEx. I can actually compress the fees myself because I can drive far higher turnover on the same, on the same foundations that I've built, right. So that's effectively the approach that we've taken and said when we go into major markets, we're not going to charge 10/20/40 basis points what a lot of players are charging, lot the middleware providers are charging, we're actually going to offer tier one FX rates. But completely, you know, through the programmatic sort of real time settlement model that I spoke about, we're trying to induce that avalanche, the race to the bottom by effectively crashing it ourselves. That then shifts the business away from a fee based model to a volume based model. Because then you have a few providers who are doing massive amounts of volume with a very thin take rate. But that thin take rate across the large volume and a very tight up up internal operating sort of system is a profitable enterprise today. What you have is a lot of mom and pop shops, a lot of non venture scale companies operating inside of every market. Go to Mexico, there's five providers, go to Brazil, 5 providers, Go to Colombia, 10 providers, maybe 4 providers, whatever. Each market has it's own provider, heterogeneous product interface, completely independent integration process, completely independent money movement process, completely independent customer, customer success, customer support model. And your operational overhead suddenly to play in 1520 markets is so high that you're not going to scale beyond the point you're going to say, I'm just going to play in LATAM, I'm just going to play in APAC where so they give you everything that is truly problematic and and money movement works like software. You then say, why am I playing in one continent? Why can't I service customers everywhere? And so that's the model that we've taken on on on rate compression. And that again shows up in a competitive sort of mode because we're now providing a 10X experience at the same or lower price than what you have access to from traditional FX brokers or traditional FX banks. Maybe not at JP Morgan City, maybe we just match them on rates, but the product experience is 10X better. Would you compare us to brokers like Stone X, Crown Agents Bank who sort of just been doing FX for decades, Adm sub 10? These are major companies that initially started out as agricultural exporters. They exported so much of agriculture all over the world that they took that FX unit and created a business out of it. And today that's the main business. And look up what their product looks like on Google Images. I don't think the interface has been redesigned since Windows XP was launched. It's extremely archaic and I feel bad for our team that has to use it. Speaker 2 Yeah, no, it's definitely wild how old school some fintech tools are, but it does speak to the, you know, money moves at the speed of trust. They trust those and you know, you're in the job of behavior change, which is a hard job too on that front. You know, the area I've heard it's the hardest is like on and off ramps, maybe off ramps even more than on ramps. So if you guys are in the aggregation layer, how do you also then influence this important off ramping part as well? Speaker 3 One way, so the aggregation layer is the middleware layer where the layer below that the infrastructure layer. And So what we do today is we provide one of those modules, right, which is liquidity. Now liquidity like what does that mean? Effectively, what that means is we make markets in these local currencies against stable coins. Liquidity layer and off-ramp solutions We take directional positions, we take risk, we take FX risk, we manage that effects risk on the back end through a host of, you know, tools like derivatives, forward futures, other risk management measures. But effectively we take both sides at any given point in time. So now it's up to the customer to choose, do they want to on ramp or do they want to off ramp? APSP likely wants to on ramp. A remittance company probably needs to off ramp into an emerging market, right At the liquidity layer. We can actually service both those customers and so each of them becomes a source of flow to the other one. Speaker 2 I see. So you're not actually solving the off ramp, you're really staying in this liquidity layer, but you're providing exciting new tools for these other players to work with you and solve those other problems themselves. Speaker 3 Well, so when when people say off ramp, off ramp is broken up into two things. One is who's actually going to take that stable coin and provide the local currency, right, right. And so we do that and the second leg of the off ramp is I've converted my stable coins or my dollar balances, you know can be in any currency. How do I actually deliver that into a mobile wallet if it's a remittance transaction or into a bank account of the end sort of customer today we don't support that. Again, 2 year old company, what we've primarily focused on is the model is basically called it's it's first party. So it's me to me transactions, right? Nathan sent me dollars. I deliver MXN back to Nathan into Nathan's bank account and then Nathan has to push the MXN to the end recipient. The next product that we're launching actually in, in about a month from now is payouts where you no longer have to do the do the, the second leg of the off ramp yourself, just effectively give us stable coins, we'll cover the entire off ramp and deliver to the end recipient. So that's, that's a product that's launching in six weeks. We've we're unable to launch a service that today because of licensing and licensing gives time. So now that we're coming up on our two years, we've sort of made a major push on licensing across our across our our core markets, which is USUK, Europe, UAE that allows us to originate payments outside of all of these these four markets and pay out globally. And then we'll be supplementing that with LATAM and a back, you know, going into sort of next year. Speaker 2 OK. So in those core markets, what percentage of your volume is in those versus in these more quote, UN quote, you know, exotic markets? Speaker 3 So we support 12 currencies today. We're adding another eight over the next five months over the rest of the year across these 12 currencies. I would say across these 12 currencies, I think like the majority of the flow is probably in the top five, which is the countries that I named and. Speaker 2 That's like an 80% or like a 50% when you say majority. Speaker 3 I'd say like 66 to about 70% is in. Speaker 1 235. Speaker 3 Months. OK. Got it. Effectively, again, launched exactly 2 years ago, launched with dollars, Yeah. Next quarter, we added other G7 currencies. So we added UK pounds, EUR and Australian dollars. So then we started scaling up 1/4. Later, we added UAE, that started scaling. And so that one quarter later summer of last year, we launched Mexico. And so then that one started scaling. So these five currencies make up majority of the flow today, the 6070% of the flow today. Then we launched Brazil, we launched Argentina, Colombia, Philippines. All of these are much earlier in the journey because they're less than a year old and hence they don't show up in the mix of flow. But if you ask me about growth rates when our business double s, you know over whatever period of time 5 to 10 X of the growth, the the newer currencies are growing 5 to 10 X the older currencies are growing thirty 5080%. And so that's how you basically go from $100 billion today to about $300 billion, you know, by next year. Speaker 2 Wow, it's amazing. OK, well, we've covered a lot. What is, what are the most exciting to you? I didn't even ask about because I don't know as much as you what's like, you know, getting you super jazzed at Open FX in August 2026. Speaker 3 In August 26, well, it's crunch time at Open FX, we're launching 22 new products. On August 30th, we're launching banking and payouts. So banking today, you have your own bank account, that's where you hold your money. You ping Open FX, you execute some kind of an FX transaction. You got to move money from your bank account to our bank account and we got to deliver on the other side in the other currency from our account to your account, right? Effectively, what we're doing is collapsing this and giving you a single stop shop where you can hold money and convert money. Think of the Revolute experience when revenue came out in 2016, it was a great travel card when when people in the UK go to Europe, sort of convert your pounds to euros, go swipe, come back home, stick your card in a drawer. Product keeps getting better that you want to use it more and more than they launch a current account product. Now suddenly Revolute's gone from a travel card to a near bank cut to a few years later, they launched crypto investments and a host of other products, right? And so it really become a full suite financial services app for their end customer. Upcoming products and strategic vision Our journey is very similar. Today customers come to us to convert from currency A to currency B. Whether that's in stable conform or Fiat form honestly doesn't matter. It's the same experience across both the next product banking just brings us closer to where where our customers are and it also cuts the largest friction point for for our customers. A lot of these bank providers or near bank providers that exist for cross-border international customers cannot deliver 10X experience because they're limited, you know, in their own capabilities. So I think in housing that and providing dollar clearing infrastructure, euro clearing infrastructure, pound clearing infrastructure and then UAE, Mexico, other major markets I think will significantly improve the quality and experience for our customers. The third product is payouts where you want to have bank account, you want to be a multinational business and have bank accounts in USUK, Europe, Mexico, Yeah, we can give you those bank accounts. You probably don't want to get a bank account in Vietnam or Colombia because those are markets which are much smaller for you as a business. And hence you only need to make vendor payments on a one off basis or maybe on a quarterly basis. And that's where you're getting into payouts where you don't want to have deep infrastructure, but just rely on open FX to deliver third, third party funds. And So what we can do then is just literally take your dollars, EUR, pounds, whatever currencies you have and deliver in any other markets outside of your, your, your core markets on your behalf. Future ambitions and regulatory plans Both these products launch in exactly 4 weeks from now. We have our early customers all signed up. There's a big wait list. We're being crushed by our customers to just get like the MVP out. And yeah, it's a big song and dance between all the regulatory sort of things you need to do to, you know, be in the clear with the bank partners with compliance and, and just the product actually working at a level that that, that that's better than anything that that our customers have seen before. Speaker 2 Cool. Yeah, that's amazing. So you guys are going to be a super app, financial super app in the future. I can see there, I can see where this is going. Well, thank you for talking a lot. Speaker 3 This basically over time what we've become is a transaction bank. We've we've evaded or sort of, you know, try to avoid calling us, calling ourselves a bank. Influential leaders and companies in fintech But I think if it looks like a bank, talks like a bank, sounds like a bank and is regulated like a bank, you probably call it a bank. So yeah, we're also in the next 4 weeks, we're also putting in our U.S. bank bank license application in the OCC trust order. So it's a narrow banking license. We don't need full-fledged bank bank license capabilities. We're not trying to get into the credit business. And then also thinking about a bank in a couple of other markets. So let me hold that for the next podcast until I have. Speaker 2 Yes, yeah, your ambition level is off the charts. I love it. That's why we do venture stuff. OK, so let's zoom out from Open FX. I have a couple of other questions for you. Who are your favorite leaders in the space when you're looking at cross-border payments? FX, You know, you guys are obviously awesome. Who else do you have kind of nerd crushes on? Speaker 3 Within cross-border payments. Speaker 2 Within, yeah, Fintech, stablecoin infrastructure, tokenization, those those areas. Speaker 3 Great question. It's a hard question. OK, This is a much harder question than I thought it's. Speaker 2 Because you know too much. You're too good of a person to ask it to. Speaker 3 Yeah, look, I think within Gen. one I have my favourites in the sense that, you know, these are companies and founders I interacted with in some shape and form in my previous journey. So all the domestic payment champions, whether you talk about Stripe and Alien in US, Europe or a Razor Pay in India as ended in Southeast Asia. I think all of these companies really were sort of Trail Blazers and emerged as category leaders and are extremely sort of respected and inspiring for for sort of earlier stage companies like us today. They've all won their markets. They've gone through a extremely rough journey to get to where they're at. And so there's something to to, you know, take into place and from there on. Another one that I think is probably the most underestimated is What's the crypto exchange Hyper? Speaker 2 Hyper liquid. Speaker 3 Hyper Liquid, I think Hyper Liquid is probably the most, one of the most foundational companies getting built today, especially in the model that especially the, the route that they've taken to sort of build it out, which is no venture funding completely community driven. Like we take, we, we truly sort of respect that and, and are trying to find ways to take inspiration from that model and implement it, but cannot pretend that we're exactly the same or, or, or even similar to them in the sense that we are the opposite. We've taken a lot of venture funding and we stand on the shoulders of giants, but you know, still sort of keep thinking about what have they done that we can learn from that in what tactics could we implement to sort of deliver a better customer experience. Sure. I think all the domestic payments guys and then hyper liquid on the new age front is probably what I would. Speaker 2 Point Well, slight pitch for myself. I built communities for some of the largest companies in the world and in the crypto space. So we should chat a little bit more on the community side if that's something you think is part of your secret sauce you're trying to add. But that's not why we're here. That's not why we're here. So OK, another. Speaker 3 Question, another point on community, actually maybe a completely different answer to that same question is so many of my customers like I, I, I, you know, I again spend a decade in investing and so I've always worked very closely with founders. We've actually taken all of our Angel deal flow that both Prabhakar and I get and converted to open to sort of open FX deal flow in the sense that we're going to launch something, you know, like an open FX ventures. It's sort of modeled after Coinbase Ventures like Stripe. You know, there's no strategic angle to it. It's literally our Angel deal flow. It's a way for us to be close to other founders building in the space and it's as much money as they want in the sense that it's not large checks. It's anywhere from 30 to 100K. But really we try to throw in a ton of freebies from our side to really just make their life easier in in the scaling journey. We've made now about 15 investments in our gearing up to publicly announce this and actually want to convert this into a true like I don't like the name Open FX Ventures. I'm thinking about Open FX Collective or something like that network. Yeah. It's, it's the builders sort of community and it's our way of just sort of giving back to these early stage guys and giving back through not just capital, but also time through connects to investors, through product features, through preferential pricing, early access, beta access to our banking product, our payouts product, anything and everything that I quote that I do have in my capability to offer like is available to sort of our our close partners. Speaker 2 Well, that's a good community building pitch right there. OK, we're running out of time. Another question, you can't start Open FX. You want to start a company You're you're very deep in the space. What's the company you start right now Pitch for entrepreneurs out there? Kind of following up on this idea of the Ventures Part 2. Speaker 3 Yeah, I see a massive opportunity on B to B payments. I think too many people have been focused on making the the same type of consumer fintech play work, whether it's in remittance, whether it's in NEO banking, whether it's card issuing. I think people have forgotten that there's a much larger category within B to B payments to go after. We're still today the giants or the winners or the prime primary sort of major brands in that space are companies not even from one generation ago, but from the early 2000s. The largest bill payments company is bill.com. The largest or the most popular treasury tool is Kiriba. And look up the founding date of these companies. These are all software companies pretty detached from underlying money movement. But that's because traditionally you had you could build software and you'd have to go and get license to actually do money movement with stable coins and with non custodial balances. Suddenly money starts looking like software and so do you need to have ADMS system that is not in control of the funds, that is not just a read only product but can also write. And I think there's whole reinvention of the B2B payment stack that's coming, whether it's horizontal players like a bill.com or whether it's, you know, vertical players building for import, export for commodities, for trade and shipping for capital markets. I think each of these categories are up for reinvention just given the underlying modules have completely reinvented themselves in the last five years on the money movement front with blockchain and stable coins. On the software front with AI, with two layers of reinvention, you can effectively deliver 2 times a 10X customer experience. Karan's recommended reading and content favorites So really 100100X customer experience and we're seeing C didn't CDSA companies come up targeting some of these niches? But the spaces are so large that you can have 10X the number of players winning at the CDSBCDC even at the IPO stages in B to B payments. Then you can have in B to C payments or consumer payments, consumer fintech. So that's that's an area that I'm super excited about and I spend a lot of time with with the early stage founders that. Speaker 2 Cool, that's a great pitch. OK, last question unrelated to work, although you can give work answers. What's some content you've enjoyed recently? Book, movie, whatever. Speaker 3 My I actually read this book called The Price of Time and it's a story of the interest rate across the ages. That's. Speaker 2 Interesting. Yeah. Speaker 3 It's it sounds like a dry topic, but the book is written so well in the sense that they point to major civilizations and empires in the past, over the last 2000 years and point to how the Roman civilization fell due to the mismanagement due to poor governance, poor leaders being in charge. Poor leaders led to poor management of everything, whether it's the military, whether it's the economy. But one of the core elements of that was poor, poor, you know, central banking and poor rates management. And that just led to absolute chaos in the economy and it led to the fall or, or it was one of the core modules that led to the fall, you know, the Roman civilization. And they point to this thread across so many major civilizations, whether you look at the Dutch, when the Dutch were expanding with the Dutch E you know, across the Dutch colonies, the French, the Germans, obviously post World War One. And so it's a fantastic way to revisit sort of history through the lens of the interest rate and the impact monetary policy and current currencies and in cross-border money movement or cross-border money in interfacing had through sort of the the interest rate management tool. So just trying to stay on topic, off topic. A book that I really enjoyed is called The Kings of Shanghai. It's the story of the Medicis of AIPAC. It was, it was an immigrant who had to escape Iran during the persecution. So the Jewish family that came to Sassoons who came over initially to Bombay, rebuilt their entire business, their entire business empire from scratch in Bombay in India during the British sort of rule. Then left Bombay when the British were going to sort of exit India because they saw the economy faltering and relocated to Shanghai and built up the rebuilt the empire in Shanghai, lost it when the Chinese sort of communist or, or took over, went, moved to Hong Kong, rebuilt it for the third time. Everything that the Medicis did over 5 to 7 generations, these guys get in two generations and the stories are fantastic. Again, history of, you know, the British Empire both across India and China, The local sort of civil strife and how that impacted this specific family, which was effectively playing the role of JP Morgan, the person and the dynasty in a completely different part of the world, but at the same time. Speaker 2 That's awesome. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for the tips and recommendations, and thank you so much for your time. Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure, this was fun. Hope to do it again soon. Speaker 2 I'd love to have you back. Speaker 3 Take care.