UBS, one of the world's largest investment banks, recently hosted a deep-dive on a startup called OpenFX, founded in 2024. OpenFX uses stablecoin infrastructure to speed up cross-border payments — moving money between countries faster, cheaper, and with less friction than the existing system. In a single year, the company grew from four billion dollars in annualised payment volume to forty-five billion dollars. It now serves over one hundred institutional clients and recently raised ninety-four million dollars in Series A funding from major venture firms including Accel, Pantera, and Lightspeed.
The problem OpenFX targets is correspondent banking — the decades-old plumbing that moves money between countries. A typical international corporate payment bounces through multiple banks, each running its own compliance checks, operating on different time zones, and settling in batches at the end of the business day. The actual processing might take only two hours, but end-to-end delivery often takes a full business day. A payment from Mexico to the Philippines, for example, might pass through up to six intermediary banks before reaching the recipient. The friction is invisible to most consumers but enormous in aggregate.
Stablecoins — digital tokens pegged one-to-one to the US dollar — let OpenFX sidestep most of that chain. The key technical innovation is collapsing the messaging layer and the value-transfer layer into one step. Traditional SWIFT-based payments separate them: one message instructs a bank to move money, then a separate settlement process actually moves it. Stablecoins do both simultaneously. The result is something close to real-time settlement, with no intermediary banks needed for the core transaction.
The capital efficiency gains are large. Global capital sitting idle in so-called nostro accounts — banks' foreign-currency holding accounts — totals approximately four trillion dollars, while daily spot foreign-exchange volume is about two trillion dollars. That capital turns over less than once per day, an enormous balance-sheet drain on the global financial system. OpenFX achieves roughly two-and-a-half times daily turnover on eighty million dollars of working capital, hitting five times on peak days. Their stated ambition is ten times. Traditional banks rarely exceed half a turn per day on similar balances.
Stablecoins do not eliminate the need for local banking partners or regulatory compliance. A digital dollar still has to be converted into Philippine pesos by someone with a bank account in the Philippines. The paradox is that even a decentralised technology requires very centralised, real-world relationships to function. The next phase of this transformation depends on whether legacy players like Visa, Mastercard, and Western Union — and the major banks defending their foreign-exchange revenue — can absorb the new infrastructure or whether startups like OpenFX displace them. Regulators worldwide are still deciding how to classify and oversee stablecoins, and those decisions could either accelerate the entire industry or stall it for another decade.
Sending money from Mexico to the Philippines still takes a full day and passes through up to six banks — a startup thinks it can collapse that journey to minutes using digital dollars.
UBS, one of the world's largest investment banks, hosted a deep-dive on OpenFX, a startup founded in 2024 that uses stablecoin infrastructure to speed up cross-border payments. OpenFX grew from $4 billion in annualized payment volume to $45 billion in a single year, now serves over 100 institutional clients, and just raised $94 million in Series A funding from major venture firms including Accel, Pantera, and Lightspeed.
The core problem OpenFX targets is the correspondent banking system — the decades-old plumbing that moves money between countries. A typical international corporate payment bounces through multiple banks, each running its own compliance checks, operating on different schedules, and settling in batches. Even though actual processing takes about two hours, end-to-end delivery often takes a full day. Stablecoins — digital tokens pegged 1:1 to the US dollar — let OpenFX bypass much of that chain by combining the messaging and value-transfer steps into one near-instant transaction.
The best way to understand what's happening is through two parallels that make the inefficiency click.
If you're thinking about careers in finance, tech, or international business, this is a space where the rules are being rewritten right now. Cross-border payments is a multi-trillion-dollar market still running on infrastructure designed decades ago. Companies like Visa, Mastercard, Western Union, and major banks are all watching — and competing. Understanding how stablecoins work isn't just crypto trivia; it's becoming core knowledge for anyone entering finance or fintech. And if your family sends remittances abroad, the fees and delays you experience are exactly the friction this technology aims to eliminate.
Historically, payment infrastructure shifts happen in slow waves — from gold to paper currency, from checks to wire transfers, from cash to cards. Each transition took decades and faced fierce resistance from incumbents. Stablecoins represent the next potential wave, and the race is on between startups like OpenFX, legacy players like Visa (which acquired Currencycloud), and traditional banks defending their FX desk revenue. The second-order effects to watch: if stablecoin rails become standard, the $4 trillion locked in nostro accounts could be dramatically reduced, freeing capital across the global financial system. But regulators worldwide are still deciding how to classify and oversee stablecoins — and those decisions could accelerate or stall this entire transformation.