Author: Charlie Little Sun, the terry-cloth lion of Sand Hill Road
Over the past two years, the stablecoin payments industry has been undergoing a very interesting change.
Initially, when startups pitched stablecoins to customers, they usually talked about faster, cheaper cross-border transfers and 7×24 settlement.
But with Stripe's acquisition of Bridge, Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK, and companies like Rain and HIFI successively securing large funding rounds, competition in stablecoin payments has gradually expanded from pure payment rails to global treasury management and next-generation financial infrastructure.
At this year's Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, I conducted this interview with Tom Borgers, co-founder and CEO of Walapay.
Just earlier this month, Walapay announced the completion of a $4.6 million seed round led by Generative Ventures, with participation from Commerce Ventures, Polygon, Verda Ventures, NGC Ventures, FGV Capital, and other institutions.
Compared with many startups still emphasizing stablecoin technology concepts, Walapay has already disclosed considerable business scale: $2.5 billion in annualized payment transaction volume (annualized TPV), coverage of more than 180 countries and regions, support for more than 60 currencies, and customers including Kast, Nuvei, and Bastion.
However, these numbers are not the part of this interview that interested me most.
Walapay was co-founded by Tom and his brother Dimitri Borgers. Tom worked at ConsenSys for four years, participated closely in the development of the early Ethereum ecosystem, and has deep ties to infrastructure projects such as MetaMask and Infura.
But today, what he has built is not a pure Crypto technology company.
On the contrary, Walapay devotes a great deal of energy to the most traditional and hardest-to-digitize parts of the financial system: local bank networks, regulatory licenses, and payment clearing infrastructure in emerging markets such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Central America.
In Tom's view, these traditional financial links, which technology startups often regard as troublesome, may instead become the real moat of the next generation of cross-border payment companies.
And in the second half of the interview, we talked about a bigger topic:
In the future, will the center of corporate treasury operations still be bank accounts, or stablecoin wallets?
The following is a transcript of the interview. For ease of reading, some colloquial expressions have been streamlined and adjusted, while the main content and viewpoints of the original conversation have been retained.
1. From Mexico to Pakistan: Where is the real difficulty in stablecoin cross-border payments?
Charlie: You have been expanding rapidly in global markets recently. Which regions are Walapay's top priorities now?
Tom: We have always had a lot of business in Latin America, and we are increasingly establishing direct partnerships with local banks in emerging markets.
Mexico is one of the key focuses. We have already obtained a local license and are still advancing full operations.
Another important market is South Asia. We have directly partnered banks in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which allows us to support cross-border remittances and commercial payments in these markets.
Southeast Asia is also a key focus going forward. We already have direct bank connections in the Philippines, and Indonesia and Vietnam are two markets I am particularly focused on at the moment.
Of course, B2B cross-border payments related to China and Hong Kong have also always been a very important part of our business.
Charlie: Pakistan is very interesting. When I was working on cross-border payments before, I came into contact with this market and also know that the local regulatory and banking systems are relatively complex. How did you manage to make Pakistan work?
Tom: The most critical thing is still banking partners.
We have directly partnered banks locally. Pakistan has always been relatively cautious about stablecoins and digital assets, so many of the businesses we handle locally are actually still completed through traditional bank payment channels.
The local authorities are also developing new digital asset regulation and licensing systems, and we will continue to follow and participate in the relevant processes.
But at this stage, what matters most to us is that we have already established a banking network that can actually support payment business.
Charlie's observation:
This passage actually points out the most easily overlooked aspect of stablecoin payment startups: on-chain transfers are easy; what is truly difficult is the last mile.
Suppose a U.S. company pays a supplier in Pakistan via USDC.
Sending USDC from a U.S. wallet to another wallet may itself take only a few seconds. But what the supplier ultimately needs is Pakistani rupees in a local bank account. This process involves local banks, currency exchange, regulatory compliance, liquidity, and final clearing and crediting.
Moreover, in different countries, whether stablecoins can be used directly, how funds should be settled, and which financial institutions are qualified all vary greatly.
Even if a global payment platform covers more than a hundred countries, that does not mean it has equally deep direct bank connections in all of them.
Walapay's choice is to go as deep as possible into local banking and regulatory infrastructure, rather than merely wrapping another API on top of existing aggregators.
This is also highly consistent with the "Own the Last Mile" logic emphasized in its latest funding announcement.
2. The next step is not simply to grow transaction volume, but to layer more financial products on top of the payment network
Charlie: Now that the funding has been announced, what is your most important goal for the next stage?
Tom: Over the past year, we have invested a great deal of time in building bank partnerships and obtaining licenses, and we will continue to do so in the future.
I think the most unique thing about Walapay is the relationships we have established with banks in many long-tail markets.
There are not many competitors that truly have such extensive banking connections in emerging markets.
But once the basic fund-flow network is established, we can add more products on top of it.
For example, Treasury management, Card Issuance, and in the future we can also extend to products such as Credit.
We previously put a lot of energy into building infrastructure and transaction scale, and now we are beginning to have the opportunity to launch higher-margin financial services.
Charlie: So you are not simply trying to become another cross-border payment API company?
Tom: We remain very focused on the infrastructure layer, and we hope to master more underlying financial connectivity in the markets we cover.
Once we have these foundations, we can build more products on top of them.
This is worth discussing further.
As the stablecoin payments industry has developed to this day, many companies that look very similar on the surface have emerged: everyone can provide wallets, virtual accounts, fiat on/off-ramps, USDC/USDT conversion, and global payment APIs.
If you compare only API features, it is actually difficult to form truly long-term differentiation.
But if a startup can accumulate independent bank relationships, local operational experience, and compliance capabilities in different markets such as Mexico, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the competitive barrier is no longer just code, but a financial network built up over years.
Of course, this is also a noticeably heavier business model.
Every time you enter a country, you need to deal with local regulation, banking partnerships, transaction monitoring, and operational issues. Compared with pure software companies, this kind of expansion is difficult to achieve entirely by adding servers.
Therefore, whether Walapay's business model can hold up depends on the key question: whether the upfront fixed investment in building a banking network can generate sufficiently large operating leverage through continuously growing payment volume and subsequent products.
III. Bridge was acquired by Stripe, BVNK was acquired by Mastercard—how much opportunity is left for independent companies?
Charlie: Recently, financing for stablecoin payment startups has been very active. Rain has already raised a lot of money, and HIFI has just announced a new funding round.
Do you think this is because the entire TAM is growing rapidly, or because the industry has already begun to enter a stage of concentrated competition?
Tom: This is a very large market, so many companies are doing well, and I am not surprised.
And I think everyone has actually taken different development paths.
For example, Rain's positioning is very different from ours; it is more focused on providing enterprises with stablecoin-driven financial products and applications such as payment cards.
HIFI is also very interesting, especially their work in Tokenized Assets and institutional financial infrastructure.
But this is not the direction we are mainly focused on right now.
Our focus is on making money flows between the United States and emerging markets, and among emerging markets themselves, as seamless as possible.
We believe that the U.S. banking system and stablecoins will become one of the most important infrastructures for global money flows in the future.
And our goal is to connect these infrastructures with local banks around the world.
Charlie: Today I also listened to Rain and several other stablecoin companies share their views. Bridge and BVNK have already been acquired by Stripe and Mastercard respectively, while Rain is still developing independently.
How do you view the current competitive landscape of the entire industry?
Tom: I have great respect for Bridge, BVNK, and Rain; they are all true pioneers in this industry.
But at the same time, I think no company has yet fully realized the ultimate vision that stablecoin financial infrastructure may eventually achieve.
Some companies were acquired before reaching that endgame. Of course, companies like Stripe are still continuing to vigorously advance the development of stablecoin infrastructure.
This is an extremely huge market.
I think it is still very early, and everyone is just gradually moving toward that future through different paths.
Charlie's observation:
Putting recent industry changes together is actually quite interesting. In February 2025, Stripe officially completed its acquisition of Bridge.
In August 2026, Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK, and in October this year it officially launched the Global Money Platform, which integrates fiat accounts, stablecoins, treasury, and local payment capabilities.
On the other side, HIFI announced in September that it had obtained a $37 million Series A, and began to extend more clearly toward financial infrastructure such as tokenized capital markets, institutional settlement, and card issuance.
Rain announced in January this year that it had completed a $250 million Series C financing at a valuation of $1.95 billion, with its focus still on stablecoin payment cards, wallets, and enterprise financial products. On the surface, these companies are all building stablecoin infrastructure, but there are clear differences in their long-term positioning.
Bridge and BVNK have already entered the systems of large payment groups, and in the future will be able to leverage Stripe's and Mastercard's channels and customer networks.
HIFI emphasizes the interoperability of tokenized funds and assets.
Rain's commercialization focus is more around enterprise wallets, card issuance, and stablecoin payment products.
What Walapay has currently chosen is local bank access and cross-border money networks in emerging markets.
Of course, these positionings will not never overlap. In fact, as everyone continues to launch new financial products, the boundaries of competition will certainly become more blurred.
And precisely because of this, the long-term value of independent companies cannot be built solely on some product feature that looks novel today.
IV. The judgment that interests me most: Will wallets replace bank accounts in the future and become the center of financial operations?
Charlie: What do you think the ultimate form of stablecoin financial infrastructure development will look like?
Tom: If we look at it according to our long-term vision for the entire industry, I think only perhaps 5% to 10% of it has been realized today.
In the future, an enterprise's entire financial operating system, and even an individual's financial life, may revolve around a Wallet. The wallet becomes the center, public blockchains and stablecoins form its underlying foundation, and then through a connectivity layer it connects to different local payment networks in various countries and regions.
The entire structure will actually be reversed.
The way traditional financial institutions think today is that bank accounts are at the center, and stablecoins are merely a new payment channel attached to the banking system.
But the future we see is exactly the opposite.
Wallets and stablecoins become the core, and traditional banks and local payment systems provide connectivity around them.
This will be a completely different financial architecture.
And I think that at present no company has truly reached this point.
Charlie's observation:
This is the part of the entire interview that I think is most worth pondering.
What many people understand today as stablecoin payments is essentially still using new technology to optimize old financial processes.
A company's money is stored in a bank; when payment is needed, it is converted into USDC, sent through the blockchain, and then converted into the recipient's local fiat currency.
In this process, stablecoins are merely an intermediate channel from A to B.
But the future Tom describes is actually reversing the center of the entire financial system.
Enterprises can regard wallets or on-chain financial accounts as the most core interface for fund management.
In this interface, funds can be held, exchanged, invested, allocated, and paid. Bank accounts, local clearing networks, payment cards, and even different types of financial assets are merely functional modules connected to this financial operating system.
Of course, this does not mean that banks will disappear.
On the contrary, Walapay is spending a great deal of effort building deeper cooperative relationships with traditional banks.
What may really change is the position banks occupy in the value chain.
Banks will still provide irreplaceable compliance, clearing, deposit, and local funding services, but they may not necessarily continue to be the sole center around which enterprises organize all their financial activities.
However, this is still a long-term vision, not a commercial reality that has already been widely realized today.
V. The Next Wave of Cross-Border Payment Growth: Fund Flows Between Emerging Markets
Charlie: When you choose markets and obtain licenses, do you mainly consider payment corridors from the United States to other countries, or do you also consider payment demand between emerging markets?
Tom: We currently place great importance on licenses and banking partnerships in markets outside the United States.
Connecting the United States with Mexico, China, Europe, and other regions is inherently a very natural demand.
But when you start providing services to a company in Mexico, it not only needs to do business with the United States, but may also need to pay suppliers in Asia.
This is also a scenario we hope to support.
Charlie: I am from China, and I have always paid relatively close attention to cross-border payments in emerging markets.
Corridors such as China to Nigeria and China to Brazil have very clear trade demand.
But in the past, when I studied Latin American markets, I found that cross-border fund flows among countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile may not necessarily be as active as one might imagine.
Have you seen any new trends?
Tom: In the remittance business, we are indeed beginning to see more intra-regional fund flows, such as between Mexico and Central American countries.
In addition, some payment corridors with very large demand are instead not in the same region, such as between the Gulf countries and South Asia.
We have also begun to handle more intra-Asia fund flows, such as between markets including Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, and Vietnam.
For Walapay, this is a relatively new business, but we are very interested in it and are also thinking about what kinds of licenses and banking relationships are needed to support these demands.
Charlie: When I previously worked at Strike, I was deeply involved in implementing Bitcoin payments in El Salvador.
One issue that left a deep impression on me at the time was that the infrastructure of banks in Central America was quite backward, especially the APIs and payment systems of some banks.
Has it improved now?
Tom: To be honest, the technical systems of some banks we have come into contact with are so poor that they might surprise you. But this is exactly where our value lies.
What we need to do is enable customers to use these banking services through the Walapay API without being aware of the underlying complexity at all.
We can connect very traditional local banking systems with modern payment infrastructure.
We also have banking partners in markets such as Guatemala and El Salvador.
The technical conditions in these markets may not be very good, but that also means opportunity.
For example, Félix Pago has already done very well in the remittance corridor from the United States to Mexico.
We also hope to build similar capabilities between the United States and Central America, as well as between Central America and other markets.
This part resonates with me quite a bit.
From my experience participating in the implementation of Bitcoin payments in El Salvador back then, what truly hinders financial innovation is often not that the underlying technology is insufficiently advanced, but that the entire local banking system is not yet ready.
You can use blockchain to settle a payment value in seconds, but if the recipient's local banking system is unstable and compliance processes cannot be automated, end users still cannot obtain smooth financial services.
For cross-border payment infrastructure companies, packaging backward systems into reliable, standardized, and easy-to-use financial services is itself a capability that can create commercial value.
VI. From Money Movement to Money Management: The Opportunity for the Next Generation of Treasury
Charlie: Besides global fund flows, what do you think is the most noteworthy development in the next one to three years?
Tom: I think the most exciting thing is that Money Movement and Money Management are gradually converging.
Because these two types of financial activities can both be completed on the same underlying infrastructure in the future.
We are now seeing more and more financial products being tokenized, including U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, stocks, ETFs, and so on.
These financial assets are beginning to exist on on-chain ledgers similar to those of stablecoins.
This will create many scenarios that were difficult to achieve before.
For example, a company holds a tokenized money market fund. Now it needs to pay an overseas supplier.
In the background, we can first convert the tokenized money market fund into USDC, then complete the fund exchange through a counterparty, and finally pay local fiat currency to the supplier's bank account.
But for corporate customers, the entire process can become a very simple, almost imperceptible operation.
In the past, in the traditional banking system, finance staff might have needed to first transfer funds from the Treasury Account to the Checking Account.
This process might take one business day.
Then they would need to pay the overseas supplier via SWIFT, which would take another one or two days.
In the future, we have the opportunity to compress the entire process from treasury management to supplier payment into a single operation.
I think this is very exciting.
Of course, the liquidity of tokenized financial assets on-chain is still far behind that of traditional financial markets.
But in the next one to three years, we hope to add more and more such products to our API system and truly provide end-to-end financial services.
Charlie's observation:
This may be the most noteworthy direction for the commercial value of the next stage of stablecoin payment infrastructure.
Traditional payment companies mainly monetize through transaction fees, foreign exchange spreads, and payment processing services.
But if a payment company can also manage customers' fund balances, liquidity scheduling, short-term investments, and payment execution, it is no longer just a Transaction Processor.
It begins to participate in the ongoing financial operations of enterprises.
Operations that were previously scattered across different bank accounts, different financial institutions, and different fund management software have the opportunity to be integrated into the same platform.
For example, a cross-border e-commerce platform in the past might have needed to pre-fund in multiple countries to ensure timely payments to merchants.
If its funds can be managed uniformly through more efficient on-chain financial infrastructure, it will have the opportunity to reduce scattered pre-funded balances and improve capital efficiency.
Of course, such a vision still faces many practical constraints, including the market liquidity of tokenized assets, regulation of investment products, redemption mechanisms, credit risk, custody arrangements, and the last-mile bank settlement time.
But from a business model perspective, this means that stablecoin infrastructure companies may gradually extend from charging for single payments to higher-value treasury and financial services.
Seven, The Real Adoption Barrier: Not Technology, but the CFO's Understanding and Trust
Charlie: I've also recently been helping some corporate management teams deal with global finance and asset management issues.
There's one case that left a particularly deep impression on me: the finance team of a multinational company has a large number of bank accounts in different countries, and sometimes it's not even easy to figure out which account a payment should use.
But when I introduced stablecoins and related financial tools to them, they were actually still very unfamiliar with them.
How do you think a corporate CFO or Controller can truly understand and be willing to adopt stablecoin financial infrastructure? What would that Aha Moment be?
Tom: I think the first reaction of the vast majority of people is almost always to think this kind of thing is risky.
They will feel that they need to understand a lot of new compliance procedures, technologies, and operational processes, and that the cost of adoption is high.
But if you tell a Controller that in the future he may no longer need to spread funds across 20 countries and 40 different bank accounts, but can manage a large portion of those funds in one place.
At that point, he may begin to realize: maybe it really is worth spending the time to understand this technology.
Of course, the whole process won't be smooth sailing.
There is still a lot of regulatory uncertainty right now, for example the progress of the CLARITY Act has not been smooth.
So this still takes time.
But the value proposition is already very clear.
The key is to let financial management personnel see how much of the complexity in traditional operational processes the new infrastructure can help them eliminate.
At that point, it is no longer an abstract Crypto concept, but a real financial management tool.
My thoughts: The real competition in stablecoin infrastructure has only just begun
After talking with Tom, I think there are three issues worth continuing to watch.
First, the real barriers to stablecoin payments may increasingly lie not in stablecoins themselves.
As on-chain settlement protocols, wallet technology, stablecoin liquidity, and basic payment capabilities gradually become standardized, simply building a layer of API encapsulation will easily face competition from large payment platforms and other infrastructure companies.
But local bank partnerships, regulatory licenses, clearing channels, and operational experience in long-tail markets still present very high barriers to entry. Walapay chose to start with these difficult financial infrastructure pieces and tries to gradually add more products on top of them.
This path is very heavy and also carries execution risk, but if scale can be achieved, its barriers may be more enduring than pure software integration.
Second, the integration of Money Movement and Money Management may create a larger business opportunity than cross-border payments themselves.
In the traditional financial system, corporate payments, treasury management, investment, and financing are usually handled separately by different institutions, different systems, or even different departments.
Tokenized financial assets and stablecoins make it possible for these activities to gradually share a programmable settlement infrastructure.
In the future, companies may not necessarily need to first transfer funds from an investment account to a cash account and then initiate another payment process.
The boundary between financial products and payment tools may be much blurrier than it is today.
But whether this integration can form a sustainable business model still depends on regulation, liquidity, and customer trust, and will not happen automatically just because all assets are put on-chain.
Third, will wallets replace bank accounts and become the center of corporate financial operations?
This is the most interesting long-term judgment I think Tom put forward in the interview.
It does not mean that traditional banks will be eliminated by blockchain.
More accurately, banks may still undertake key functions such as deposits, regulation, fund clearing, and local financial services, but companies may no longer need to use a particular bank and its account system as the center of all financial activities.
A unified wallet or financial operations platform can, in the background, call on banks, stablecoin networks, and financial products in different countries.
If this judgment holds, then the competition among today's stablecoin payment infrastructure companies is in fact not only about competing for payment transaction volume.
They are also competing for the core position in the next generation of corporate financial operations systems.
From this perspective, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, as well as Bridge, BVNK, Rain, HIFI, Walapay, and other companies are all participating in this competition through different directions. But which company will ultimately become the irreplaceable financial infrastructure for enterprises still has no answer at all.
Perhaps the greatest significance of stablecoins in the future is not to turn a cross-border payment from two days into two seconds, but to make it so that companies no longer need to organize their own fund management according to the boundaries of the traditional banking system.
This is the real change that the next generation of financial infrastructure may bring.
This article is based on an on-site interview at Money20/20 USA in October 2026. The interview content has been appropriately edited and condensed. Statements involving future products and market plans represent the interviewee's plans or judgments at the time and do not mean that the relevant services have already been officially launched.
Disclosure of interests: The author has a cooperative relationship with Generative Ventures, the lead investor in this round of financing.
