M13 The Flywheel | The future of cross-border payments

Episode Description

What might the world look like if money could move across the hardest corridors in hours rather than days?

Our founder Prabhakar Reddy recently appeared on an episode of The Flywheel, recorded live at M13's annual meeting in Montana. There, Managing Partner Latif Peracha sat down with him to discuss OpenFX, and what drove him to build a business around such an audacious goal. Prabhakar discusses his history as an entrepreneur, the time he spent at Accel as a VC, and FalconX, his previous venture which is now worth $8 billion.

He breaks down how OpenFX works, our massive growth trajectory, and how we've managed to build a platform capable of settling 98% of all transactions in under 60-minutes. He also makes the case that the real competition in this trillion-dollar industry aren't the other fintechs, but the correspondent banking system itself.

He talks about

• Why cross-border payments are still so slow, and how an increasingly volatile world makes the risks of that slowness substantially worse.

• How OpenFX uses stablecoins to move money across the globe without our clients ever having to worry about crypto.

• How we moved from $2 billion to roughly $50 billion in volume in about a year, and how we plan to achieve our moonshot target of $1 trillion.

• How we are building our mote, focusing on the entire transaction: compliance, licensing, market making, collection, and payouts, not simply one part of the trade.

Chapters

• 00:00 — The longest journey to Montana: meet Prabhakar Reddy 

• 01:40 — Growing up as an entrepreneur

• 02:55 — Why cross-border money movement is broken, and what it costs 

• 04:40 — Stablecoins and why we use them

• 06:50 — 20x in under 2 years, OpenFX's growth story

• 09:25 — Picking investors as a former VC

• 12:25 — The moat: why banks, not fintechs, are the real competition 

• 16:00 — The Amazon-esque model: wholesale FX and 90% cheaper rails 

• 17:55 — What stablecoin regulation may and may not break

• 20:05 — From security threats to the fear of becoming a slow company 

• 22:40 — Operating leverage: keeping opex flat while volume explodes

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