Leaders In Payments

Cross-border payouts are one of those problems everyone complains about and then quietly accepts: high fees, slow settlement, and endless workarounds to get money into the hands of real people. I sit down with Cyril Mathew, Co-Founder and CEO of Latitude, to talk about why “faster money movement” only matters when the recipient can actually spend it in local currency, not just hold a stablecoin balance.

Cyril walks through the career path that shaped his view of payments infrastructure, from scaling partnerships at Facebook to seeing the payout pain firsthand at Uber, then helping launch international expansion at Coinbase and working on USDC. That experience leads to a hard-earned lesson from Stripe: even if stablecoins let you reach 100 countries, adoption stalls if users cannot convert easily into pesos, reals, or other local currencies to pay for everyday life. The real product is the bridge between stablecoins and fiat, built with compliant rails, strong controls, and the “boring” payment details that enterprises demand.

We break down what Latitude is building with its Liquidity Network, how stablecoins can reduce cross-border payment costs, and why real-time settlement can cut the need for prefunding and complex treasury float. We also cover where the biggest growth opportunities are showing up right now, including creator economy payouts, contractor payments, AI data labeling, fintech apps going global on day one, and the looming question of how AI agents may transact across borders.

If you care about stablecoins, blockchain payments, real-time payments, or global payout infrastructure, this episode is for you.

A “credit card fee” can protect your margins or quietly create compliance risk, and the difference usually comes down to one word: clarity. We sit down with Jim Oberman, CEO of Payroc, to unpack credit card surcharging in a way that merchants, software platforms, and payments teams can actually use, without hand-waving and without confusing it with every other fee customers see at checkout.

We start with the fundamentals: what surcharging is, why it exists, and why it applies only to credit cards, not debit or prepaid. Then we cut through the biggest source of mistakes by separating four commonly mixed concepts: surcharging, dual pricing, convenience fees, and service fees. From there, we get practical about the rules that matter in the real world, including Visa’s 3% surcharge cap becoming the de facto standard, Mastercard’s different limit, and how brand enforcement programs and secret shopping can expose sloppy implementations.

The bigger story is why surcharging has taken off so fast. Technology now makes it possible to present buyer choice at the exact moment of payment, across online and in-person experiences, with options like debit, ACH (electronic check), and emerging rails like real-time payments. Jim explains why embedded payments and ISVs increasingly treat surcharging as more than cost recovery: it can be a strategic feature, a trust-builder, and a way to keep reconciliation and settlement clean for merchants at scale.

Final settlement sounds great until you’re the one holding the fraud and compliance risk. That tension sits at the heart of my conversation with Pete Glyman, Founder and CEO of Coinbax, where we explore what it will actually take for stablecoin payments to work for banks, credit unions, and serious fintech programs.

Pete shares his path from building and selling a fintech platform to leading digital asset strategy work, and why the regulatory climate and the rise of blockchain, tokenization, and stablecoins pushed him back into founder mode. We get concrete about the real blockers to adoption: not speed, but controls. We unpack how smart contracts can support payment workflows people already trust, including escrow, lockup periods, delays, and even reversibility, while layering in fraud mitigation, OFAC screening, and multi-party account verification. The goal is simple: make on-chain payments feel safe, compliant, and operationally usable inside existing bank compliance systems.

We also look forward. Pete explains why cross-border payments are an obvious early win, why domestic “wire-like” payments could be rebuilt with programmability, and why agentic payments could create an entirely new machine-to-machine economy. We close with a direct challenge to payments leaders: stop waiting, start tinkering, and learn the rails firsthand.

Gift cards have a branding problem and it’s costing the payments world a big idea. Alex Preece, CEO and Co-Founder of Tillo, joins us to make the case that gift cards aren’t really “gifts” at all. They’re programmable stored value, a modern redemption rail that can sit inside bank apps, fintech wallets, cashback programs, employee rewards, refunds, and payouts. Once you see them as a payment instrument, the market looks a lot less like novelty and a lot more like infrastructure.

We dig into how Tillo built a two-sided marketplace that connects thousands of retail brands with the businesses that want to reward customers and employees. Alex explains why a single API matters in a fragmented global ecosystem, what it takes to support multi-country catalogs, and how better tooling and transparency can make brands more confident partners. We also talk about a surprising insight: most volume is self-use, not gifting, because people are optimizing everyday spending by converting earned value into higher-impact rewards.

We zoom out to the bigger payments trends reshaping rewards and loyalty: the demand for real-time gratification, the opportunity created by open banking and faster payments like RTP and FedNow, and the emerging push toward “global but local” benefits that actually work when customers travel or live abroad. If you’re building in payments, loyalty, or fintech growth, this is a practical look at where rewards infrastructure is heading and why it can change behavior at the moment of decision.

“Instant” payments are usually a well-designed illusion. The customer experience feels real-time, but behind the scenes money still crawls through delayed settlement, fragmented rails, and market-by-market workarounds. That gap is exactly where stablecoins start to look less like hype and more like infrastructure.

We sit down with Tony Tom, CRO and Co-Founder of Stable Sea, to unpack how enterprise stablecoin payments can improve cross-border payments, shorten settlement times, and reduce the operational drag that finance teams accept as normal. Tony shares how his journey through payments led him to Block and then to building Stable Sea, plus what he learned by watching stablecoin adoption accelerate outside the US. We talk liquidity, on-ramp and off-ramp realities, and why “bank-grade” processes matter when you’re moving serious volume.

A big part of the conversation centers on trapped cash: revenue stuck in markets with capital controls or limited FX access, from Argentina to Nigeria and beyond. We also explore stablecoin treasury management, the need for a single view across wallets and bank accounts, and how automation and rules-based movement can turn visibility into action. Finally, Tony lays out why regulated, Wall Street-aligned tokenized real world assets may be the bridge that pulls stablecoin settlement deeper into mainstream enterprise payments.