Coffee with OpenFX's Prabhakar Reddy & Atomico's Niklas Zennström

Episode Description

Our founder Prabhakar Reedy recently sat down with Atomico's Niklas Zennström to discuss his entrepreneurial journey. In this podcast, he talks about how growing up and returning to Dubai led him to see the importance of faster, more efficient cross-border rails. He learned that the problems in FX were bigger than finance, they touched the lives of billions of people everyday across the world.

He also discusses how his time as a venture capitalist and his previous founders role at FalconX helped to shape the way he looks at building businesses today. OpenFX is far more than a company that provides liquidity, its goal is to be Embedded FX, to be that platform that every payment company on the planet builds on top of, a potentially $200 trillion market.

He Talks About

• How he measures success as an entrepreneur with multiple startups under his belt.

• His belief that improving the way money moves around the globe can change the way economies function, reducing global poverty and leading to a more dynamic world.

• How OpenFX, a company that is only two years old with just over 100 people has managed to hit billions of dollars in TPV, a milestone other payment firms need many times the staff to accomplish.

• How the largest users of cross-border FX in the future may be AI agents rather than people, and how cross-border rails will need to adapt.

Chapters

00:00   Meet Prabhakar Reddy: from FalconX to OpenFX

00:42   Redefining what success means

01:22   Turning a $2tn market into $200tn

02:02   1% more remittances, 22% less poverty

03:04   What OpenFX is and who it powers

03:54   Why money still keeps banker hours

04:27   AI agents as the biggest users of cross-border FX

04:43   Where settlement speed currently stands

05:36   The road to near instant settlement by 2030

06:26   $40 billion in volume with 65 people

07:17   Building the team

07:58   Automation as the only path to a trillion a day

09:54   Banks without APIs

10:18   The ICP

11:47   No pre-funding, no hidden fees

12:26   Five companies, 19 years

13:15   Pulling 2030 into 2025

14:04   Growing up in Dubai

14:50   From Red Envelope to OpenFX

15:33   Mission and responsibility

17:12   What new fintechs have to compete on