The Last Unsolved Layer in Global Stablecoin Payments

There's a whole story as to how we got to this problem. If you try to make payments real time, now bringing a lot of that risk upfront, that window to react is much smaller. What makes Coinbase or Robinhood at any of these crypto exchanges extremely successful is their ability to price risk. People think compliance is deterministic and static. We've noticed over the last year how much compliance requirements and controls even across all these partners has evolved to go bare metal in every way possible.

If you're building a fintech, you're not gonna avoid the ability to go bare metal. A lot of our learnings has been really trying to think critically about the end user experience even though we're building a developer product. Thinking about, like, our customer's customer, first and foremost, AI will be the biggest consumer of these technologies. Payment processors may end up running the agent itself.

Hey. It's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz.

So excited for this. Something that's been really fun about doing these interviews in this format, which is new for us, like this in person, you know, we've we've taken a family room and we've made it into like an interview studio, but getting to talk with you what has been now for over an hour before we push record. That's been sweet. So thanks for joining us. And thanks for having me. Yeah, man.

A lot of what we've talked about so far has been, like, personal and non non work related stuff, so I'm really excited to dive into what you're building. We've been connected for like a year, but we've never Yeah. We've never done something like this. And I my spidey senses are sort of starting to go off with you with with Infinite in terms of the moment that's about to happen. And I don't know what it is, but I just I feel like there's an exciting next couple months ahead.

And so even though we've been in touch for a while, I'm really excited that this conversation is happening now Absolutely. Because there's so much there. We kick off, why don't we start with a full intro, your name, little bit about Infinite, and then we can start with a little bit of the problem and the the core kind of ethos of what you think you're solving as a core problem. But Absolutely. So I'm Nikhil. We run a company called Infinite,

and our focus is really global businesses, helping them move money faster, cheaper, and programmatically. And there's a whole story as to how we got to this problem. We have a team that has come together that's worked together before, which I think is fairly unique. Our founding team, my cofounder and I, worked together at a company called Sardine, where I led compliance.

My cofounder led payments, and we had an opportunity to build in the stablecoin space, like, front and center, like, building virtual accounts, kinda tackling a lot of the real challenges of productionizing stablecoin payments.

Sardine for, like, the payment nerds out there or people who are, like, in the industry, they will hear that, and they'll be, like, eyebrows go up. Like, oh, sorry. Like, Sardine is obviously, you know, crushed it. But for those like, define what sardine does Yep. And, like, why why maybe the vantage point of working there was so

important. Yeah. And sardine sardine is itself a very unique company. I had met the founder of Sardine at Coinbase. And in many ways, Sardine is solving a problem that companies like Coinbase and many others kind of face with new payment rails. The speed at which fraud and compliance attack vectors can now surface themselves and the time to response is very limited. If you try to make payments real time, now bringing a lot of that risk upfront, that window to react, is much smaller.

And so underrated part of what makes Coinbase or Robinhood and any of these crypto exchanges extremely successful is their ability to price risk

in,

you know, around crypto, which is something that's very real time. If I'm using ACH, there's a two day window to settle that money. If in that period of time I'm allowed to withdraw my crypto, that's a huge problem in case I don't actually have those funds within that two day period. You could have an empty account and non sufficient funds. So that's just an example.

There's every payment method, as it becomes more real time, whether it's faster payments, RTP, etcetera, by nature is now experiencing faster and faster kind of fraud vectors.

And and the time to response is much shorter. Yeah. The the damage of it not going well is bigger Bigger. Because the window of like, if if, you know, someone takes your credit card out of your physical pocket or something, like, how many merchants can they actually run to to go swipe it versus like I the feel scale of damage in a real time. Yeah. I can see how that can become so so Sardine actually, I didn't know that was the founder of Coinbase or before this? Was head of risk at Coinbase.

Saw these problems. Saw these problems. Was at Yelp before that, and Okay. You know And you met this person. Yeah. We worked together. Oops. I've heard this name. Yes. You know, so I think Coinbase was an experience. You know, I I I had landed my first company at Coinbase. I think we overlapped maybe a bit during that time. So it was 2018. Pre IPO, so the company was early in its journey to becoming the Everything Exchange. Yep.

And a big part of our team's effort was helping kind of expand the the number of assets and the type of assets on the platform, adding new blockchains, adding new assets like USDC, and making all of those things capable like, available to the different, you know, internal business units. So really a shared kind of thesis for the crypto platform.

So I think taking that experience, going to, like, a place like Sardine that was intentionally trying to give these fraud and compliance kinda capabilities to every business that wanted to participate in faster payments really gave our team, you know, kind of a very unique background to go after the stablecoin, like the global b to b stablecoin problem. Yep.

To make it even more exciting, my cofounder ended up working on a project at Sardine that really brought one of the first virtual account programs to the market. So in partnership with a sponsor bank and a liquidity provider, we were basically able to offer, you know, virtual account US virtual accounts, which, you know, more specifically, are these crypto native accounts, US account and routing numbers, that you could assign to individuals anywhere in the world, which is a distinctly unique thing.

Using wallets as like Using wallets versus like an actual bank account. Which is typical. The the ACH and routing was the

traditional custody layer, and all all that is the unique unlock is that same kind of paradigm is being applied with maybe those two things with an on chain account to custody things like stablecoins is my Exactly. This was the light bulb moment for our team. Like, we saw firsthand the amount of demand in the market for

this unique product, and this is the reason why. If you think about The US financial system, we have 300,000,000 Americans. Most of them have US account and routing numbers. There are billions of people in the world that do not have access to those same account and routing numbers, millions of businesses around the world. So The US account and routing numbers don't serve as like a unifying API for payment routing.

By unifying and giving everyone access to this, you know, US account and routing capability, it really does simplify how different businesses all over the world interact. You could be a business in Nigeria. You could be a business in The UK, you could be a business in India, and you could theoretically be accepting funds in US dollars

through a US account and routing number. It's it's kind of like, in my mind, giving someone a phone number to offer Exactly. Giving someone an iPhone in a different country, and you can have like a messaging layer that's very easy, and even though you're not it doesn't matter where you're physically located, even though Apple's an American company Exactly. You can use the iMessage system no matter where you are. Is that a good way to think about it? It's a great way to think about it.

Obviously, these are very US centric examples.

This same concept of virtual accounts, they can be applied internationally. So take Swift, for example. You could be an international bank if they wanted to participate and open up these wallet oriented accounts, which my personal take is this is gonna be a bigger and bigger trend internationally. You can offer these same capabilities. You can open up account in someone's name, and, you know, that capability accessibles. In this case, I gave US virtual accounts as an example.

I think that concept is not US specific, but we're very focused on making these US virtual accounts very accessible to businesses all over the world. This allows them, if they're transacting in US dollars, to much more easily participate in kind of commerce.

So it reduces a lot of different challenges that different banks globally or regionally have interacting with each other, either through because of costs, because of the networking through SWIFT, maybe they're not directly in a correspondence relationship, or maybe because of regional differences on compliance or kind of risk. So, stablecoins really kind of unify

how these different participants could kind of part, like, work together. Yeah. So you're okay. So you're at Sardine. You're you're exposed to, I'd imagine, it sounds like Sardine was really forward in this virtual account

trend. I think we were one of the first. I I don't recall how many others had a product back then. It's very common now. Very common. It is. Getting those things through some sort of like service provider is not like,

you know, there there are a lot of people in that game. Absolutely. But what what what was it about? So like seeing that at Sardine, what I guess, what would be the unique intel or edge or insight you think you took from Sardine that's kind of, you know, giving you that sense of conviction on building Infinite Now? Or what what were some of those It's key

a great question. I think working at Sardine gives you a unique opportunity before deployed across hundreds of companies that are experiencing some of the most challenging risk problems, and having to actually successfully mitigate those problems. I think when we launched our own product, we had a very unique perspective into visibility into the risks and challenges in a given space. What do risks look like? Can you define I think for compliance I mean, depends. Fraud is, you know, account takeovers.

Like, if you are offering, say, virtual accounts to individuals, they're very susceptible to credential stuffing or account takeovers. I could have Drew's information and stolen KYC information. I could use that to open a virtual impersonate you, open a virtual account, move the money. You know, I think there's I could get into your account, you know, theoretically, by impersonating you. I could impersonate support. There there's a lot of fraud vectors on the individual side where, you know, there's elderly abuse.

You could be, you know, someone who's just taken advantage of, socially engineered. There's pig butchering kind of schemes and attacks that How do you define that? Those are much more like a social attack vector, and think, you know, like a virus or a worm, but over telephone where people are calling you with information and telling you to do things. I would say it all falls under the class of social engineering. Yep.

And so, if you take all these risks on the individual side, you quickly realize, like, you could control for a lot of those risks. You start noticing patterns. Like, if you wanted to have an individual program, you might control for, you know, certain demographics of the type of participants you would have in that program. Maybe you would look for certain attributes, like device patterns or behavioral patterns, that are very indicative of, like, you know, the real identity versus a fake identity.

On the compliance side, it's much more about proofing. Is this the person who they say they are? Liveness is a great way. We've seen it even at Coinbase's scale or, you know, at Stripe's scale where you're able to kind of use not just device intelligence, but behavioral biometrics and liveness to ensure the right person is transacting. And that happens not only at onboarding, but, you know, with the sub customers as well.

From our perspective, risk is so multi tenant that it's it's hard to pinpoint and say, like, you know, this is the worst thing that can happen. AML risk, sanctions risk, politically exposed people, restructuring. Yeah. So there's a lot of different types of and topologies of risk. I think what we saw as a category was there was a visibility gap.

So in traditional payments, if you take Swift as an example, which is how a lot of our businesses that we work with are trad moving funds, they're moving it through a network of banks. There's also an expectation as a member of Swift to kinda conform to certain standards as to how they onboard their constituents to the bank. So that's their onboarding policies, their compliance policies, like, correct. The bank the bank layer has expectations for Exactly.

And you can imagine, you know, most, you know, banks expect you to KYC and go in person and proof, and there's there's no matter where you go in the world, there are decent expectations if it's a internationally network bank that you're gonna participate in in in compliance, a shared kind of model for compliance. This gets really important for, you know, just to

set the right context. I feel like this gets really the idea of, like, first party versus third party payments here, get, like, really the uniqueness of, like, maybe what could be more simple about first party versus third party, and defining those terms a little bit of like, am I, when I'm provisioning something like a virtual account, am I doing that for the bank or am I doing that, or the client, or am I doing that for the client's user or the platform's person who's using that platform?

And that like difference is like, it's such a unique risk difference in in the type of like, you know, thinking about our own, this podcast powered by Altitude now. We're using Altitude for our business. Amazing. We went, you know, went through that onboarding flow, and of course, one of the things that they're gonna ask is like, are you using this account to move funds on behalf of other people? Absolutely. It's like, okay. That's a big what what is that question getting at? That's kind of So that's actually yeah.

Like, I think that's a

great segue. So when you think about the compliance compliance is also something that's such a broad term. Mhmm. We try to drill like, be very specific about parts of compliance that matter. So there's you know, we we look at, you know, our compliance controls that we and policies that we expect to implement as a business, that our partners, you know, kind of align with us on, and we align with them on.

And that's, you know, a mix of these, you know, mostly AML sanctions, PEP kind of procedures, and reporting around that. Like, if we identify risks, how do we kind of, like, report on that? There's also compliance around the flow of funds, which is, is the way that the banks are exposing payment capabilities to the businesses, is it done in a way that, like, is nested or not nested? I can explain what that means.

I'm if I'm doing first party payments, I'm moving money between customer a and customer b, or customer a and customer a. If I'm a platform as a customer, then I'm likely moving money between customer b and customer c, as customer a of the bank. And so there's a lack of visibility into what exactly is happening or why that transaction is moving between those two entities. There's a higher expectation of compliance controls, mitigations, and and how it's even modeled.

Because if you have the visibility, there's nothing wrong with third party payments. And I can give you an example, which is sponsor banking. Right? In the traditional sponsor banking model with, like, FBOs, you don't quite necessarily have visibility with your fintechs.

So there could be a lot of things happening with the fintech program that you're coordinating with the fintech to really understand as a bank if all the controls are being met, but it it is harder than if there was a technology layer that actually facilitated coordination between the bank Yeah. And and the fintech. Oversimplifying

this a little bit. Right? Like, the the FBO model for the benefit of model is a bank or the licensed provider to provide these sort of virtual account type functions is giving that funk giving that ability to a fintech company who's then essentially taking that ability and saying, I'm gonna gonna now give this ability to all of my users.

So you're you're essentially, you're giving me permission to offer these services my my users, clients, businesses, people, and like there's so much there and the extra layer of like, okay. I just provisioned like a million of these accounts and now they're transacting with each other and the bank is back back here, or whoever's like holding the bag or the the the compliance burden,

and saying, what's actually happening Yeah. With all of like, and and And a good example is like, your bank, a fintech is built on top of your bank, and another fintech is built on top of that fintech. Yes. Now you're thinking about recursively how many of these fintechs are are, you know, kind of nested under each other in terms of and the risk as well. That's the word nest that when you use that word, that's what that means.

And it's nesting is when there's, like, a single account and there's multiple sub accounts under them. And so you have a concentration of like customer risk, portfolio risk. Mhmm. And so that's typically how banks have like opened up accounts. They'll open up a master account, and the fintech can go open sub accounts. Yeah. On behalf of their customers. Now, I do think a lot of that can be solved if we actually opened a master account for every customer. Right? There's no reason we couldn't do that.

And it's likely more operational lift for the banks, But it's also a technology problem that banks can solve. So that's like an exciting way to think about solving some of this visibility and the compliance controls that the bank would need to have

where they can directly own every relationship. So instead of thinking about this fintech, going back to the example, as like some sort of there's like some sort of wall in the way Yeah. You kind of just like bring that layer of compliance to the end

and you treat that end client almost with the same rigor as you would the fintech? Is that kind of the model? I think that's the model. I think it also it's it's more of a relationship. You extend the relationship. You're opening these master accounts on behalf of every entity. And so when the entities are interacting with each other, you have clear visibility which entity is interacting with which other entity. This matters in the first party and third party use case, as you asked.

Very important to understand in third party use case who's moving the money to who and why. So if you're moving, you're the platform, and I'm moving money to a friend, and you're processing that on my behalf between me and my friend, that relationship is something that would be much more distinct and clear who, you know, who those entities are, what they're doing, what that activity looks like. What is the downside

of not doing this well or or not doing this at all? If I think a lot about the kind of era that we're in, where we're kind of in this Wild West on chain payments world where, like, a conversation that's coming to my mind actually recently was with Rodri from Cross Mint, and he was talking a lot about, like, he had some very clear and convicting takes around how out of bounds a lot of builders are right now. And and, you know, go back into some of that episode with him. That was a really interesting one.

And and how, you know, there is there is about to be a very clear slap on the wrist for a lot of teams and a lot of companies and a lot of people who have been doing business in ways that are non non compliant. If you look at, like, the standard that the there's so many laws that have been passed and, like, big secrecy acts and, like, all of these things that apply to fintech, web two, that are completely, like, almost, like, web three builders aren't really taken seriously.

He at least believes that like, we're about to enter this era where like, compliance is going to become a massive, massive part of a lot of the priority. Do you kind of resonate

do you resonate with that? I resonate I think our whole thesis is that, you know, we're taking the simple problem of global b two b payments and saying, stablecoins can be the technology solution, but in order for it to integrate with all the existing flow of funds, there's trillions of dollars moving internationally, you're gonna have to solve that last mile of compliance.

And even closing the loop with, you know, to answer your question about, you know, do I do I kind of agree with the sentiment, or what do I think could happen in the space, or what do I think is necessary, I do think that stablecoin processors are in many ways fintechs. They're no different than any other fintech.

So the challenges we've seen in the last couple years with concentration of risk and portfolio risk within fintechs that emerge in the banking sector is a risk that, you know, stablecoins also present to banks. Right? And so I think the compliance will really dictate how the the affordances that the companies make or the controls that they implement will really dictate how quickly we can grow this total pie and integrate with the existing flow.

It is important for us to to always think about the portfolio risk, and and this is a very new technology. One of the key insights we had at Sardine, and Sardine still is is very convicted in this thesis, is that with new payment rails, there are visibility gaps that emerge. And so you can think about the visibility gap of cross border payments, where maybe you are originating a stablecoin transfer, fiat to fiat. It's a stablecoin sandwich. You know, there's a dollar coming in The US.

There's local currency coming out internationally. In between, stablecoins are used to route this traffic through stablecoin providers that are willing to on ramp and off ramp internationally. And if you take that concept and and you really ask yourself, like, okay, how at least today, where does the visibility gap lie? It's on the international side. We have incredible technologies for visibility into American accounts. So if you're originating a US dollar payment from The US, you have Plaid. Right? You have MX.

You have Stripe Financial Connections. You have all these capabilities in addition to, you know, the Sardine device intelligence and transaction monitoring, things like Socure that can do KYC, KYC, KYC really well internationally. So you have ways of doing this proofing. But then when you get to the international leg, there's so much variance in open banking standards and bank linking standards and even the compliance requirements in the local market. And compliance is kinda interesting.

Think it's gonna be the theme for the for a while in stablecoins. I think a good analog for stablecoins is PayPal mass pay, where the technology solves moving money between different entities internationally. It's a ledger, so to speak. But you're responsible to bring your own compliance. I think PayPal PayPal quickly realized that they were in the compliance business pretty pretty fast. Yeah. And I think there's a famous story of I I forget if it's Max or someone else.

Like, their bathrooms apparently had screens with graph analysis that would surface fraud rings, AML rings, etcetera. So you could visually see the structuring, and you could highlight risks, and you can give that feedback to the team. They were innovating on how quickly they could even identify and target because Mhmm. The business opportunity here is massive.

If you're a company today that takes compliance seriously, that takes fraud prevention seriously, and wants to take on this challenge of moving money faster using stable coins or any other real time payment rail, you're positioning yourself to actually build one of the most interesting and exciting datasets. Because ultimately, that's the network effect is the ability to identify and predict where the risk in the network lies and mitigate that.

In order to compete with, like, a network like Visa, you really have to be able to build a network on top of an open protocol. And so that's where Infinite sits. We the technology is highly available. We work with a lot of different providers under the hood that help us deliver stablecoin rails, whether it's on ramping or off ramping. Getting US dollars into stablecoins, getting stablecoins back into local currency or US dollars.

Yep. So you're spending a lot of the time in that kind of In that sense. Open banking, international kind of endpoint.

Well, we're thinking about, though I mean, we're starting with the the idea that there's a network effect between all these different providers, and the unifying network effect is the stablecoin. The fact that most of these providers accept USCC and USCT allows us to stitch together what would otherwise require a ton of capital locked up at a ton of banks internationally in a correspondence network.

Rather, we actually have all of these processors in the local markets as well as regionally here in The US that allow us to enable this. Now, Infinite's unique model is to partner with, you know, this finite group of ecosystem partners Okay. And work closely with them on our compliance controls. So we wanna go above and beyond with our partners in really defining how we collaborate on compliance. Okay. One of our key insights is, you know, compliance is not purely a technology problem.

There's a degree of actual operationalizing of the compliance program, coordination, and collaboration.

And that's really, you know, a huge part of our focus. So so you guys are, you know, you're an American. Give kind of the the bullet points of like, based here in America,

you've Where are you at in the fundraising journey right now? Yes. So we're yeah. We went through YC. So we're a new company. We're about a year old. We started last year, January of last year, 2025. We my cofounder and I had left Sardine. Our first hire was our chief compliance officer at Sardine, who had then gone to Socure. And we our our vision, really, the beginning has been how do we solve the what we call enablement problem in the stablecoin space.

So there are a lot of orchestrators, and we use and partner with many of these orchestrators. How do you define orchestrator? I think orchestration is, you know, I would take, for example, what Stripe is doing or Bridge is doing, what BB and K is doing. A lot of these are providers that have licenses to move money in their local jurisdiction in and out of stablecoins. And what we've done is built a network of these providers that allows us to move money to 40 plus countries, between 40 plus countries. Right?

Pay ins and payouts. What we found in the process is that each one of these providers is implementing their own compliance control in a very unique way. And so if you think about Stripe, one of their key insights early on was solving for identity and compliance. The Stripe identity experience has always been phenomenal. Yep. Even Link feels Link is great. It's a you know, it knows who you are, and that's how it's able to give you a better You like hate how good it is. It's so good. It's the best.

Stripe components were always, and Stripe Elements were always a differentiator. If you think about companies that have created what I would consider enablement is something like where Stripe operates, where they're providing a lot of those building blocks and Legos for you to go and deliver a best in class end user experience, but that often require abstracting away a lot of the underlying hard tech necessary to deliver that end user experience.

And so in that process, we quickly realized that owning compliance we've built our own compliance, you know, links for collection. So think, you know, we can go and send a link out to any customer. We can control what data attributes we're collecting. And this allows us to be very dynamic depending on the flow of funds and the use case as to what we're collecting upfront. The dynamism here is really important. I think a lot of people think compliance is deterministic and static.

But even as an industry, we've noticed over the last year how much the compliance requirements and controls even across all these partners has evolved. Yep. And often in the direction of collecting more information. Sometimes, maybe less, but very rarely. Yeah. We we were talking earlier

today with Charles from RAIN about the nuances of things like KYC for the amounts of certain payments. Like, hey, this payment is $2 for this espresso shot versus $2,000 for, you know, some NFT or digital good or, you know, luxury It's

it's it's very I think something I didn't appreciate. You you take a very probabilistic and portfolio risk approach when you think about financial services and how do you control for risk. Your goal is to stop most of the risk. It's Pareto optimal. You wanna get 80% of the risk. You'll have always find someone or something that's innovating beyond your controls. But the challenge is keeping up with that. Right? Those risks are always evolving.

I think for us, what we realized is if you're approaching compliance, you know, in a very accessible way, that can reduce a lot of the friction. It's the Stripe link experience. Being able to say we can onboard a customer in The US, and they can onboard international sub customers, and we can actually go and collect exactly what we need for both the on ramp and the off ramp. Makes that super seamless. That's And you can sort of message layer that information to inside. Exactly.

And as as the compliance requirements evolve, we can just progressively ping and ask for, here's a request for more information. It can be in app, it can be texted, it can be emailed, fully white label. But it's a big part of the experience. I think right now, at least the status quo that what we experience is often, there are so many different providers involved that there's almost a a a bit a bit of friction in the network effect that stablecoins offer.

You're stitching at different providers, you're but also inherently going through different onboarding experiences. Mhmm. That fragmentation does present a challenge when you compare it with the status quo, OTP, you know, kind of, you know Yeah.

Bring this into like, make this as dumb simple as you can for me with either an existing customer use case or a, you know, like a mental model customer use case that you think about Yeah. When you think about, like, the before and after of this. I love the idea of, you know, being able to sit on the collection and pay outside of of both sides. Because I'm imagining Yeah.

Like, if I'm if I'm doing the sandwich, if I'm sending and receiving in one flow, I'm just like, hey, I wanna send money, but I'm starting it here and I'm ending it here. And these two things are completely different. Like, the starting piece of bread on this side is not talking to the piece of bread on that Absolutely.

But you guys were like, hey, we can just collect, it sounds like, we we can collect information here, and because we're, you know, the cheese or the bologna in the middle, we'll just give that information over to this piece of bread. And we're not gonna like force the same thing to happen twice. Exactly.

Yeah. And I think that's I think that's the right idea. And I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that compliance is just as much, you know, a technical problem as it is program management. So a lot of this is like expectation setting with the partners. Everyone is trying to solve for the same problem, which is risk and risk mitigation. And really, every organization has a unique approach to compliance. They have their own controls.

Our unique approach is recognizing each organization and partner's unique compliance approach, what their requirements are, using technology then to make that very adaptable. So the classic example is many of our customers would try to orchestrate multiple, you know, stablecoin orchestrators or, you know, kind of build an end to end solution on top of that. Yes.

What they would often find, though, is that they were either KYC ing customers through different portals, through different user experiences, maybe the request for information, or, you know, sometimes there are follow-up questions that are asked when you're setting up some of these accounts. Those questions might often repeat themselves. So something that maybe one side, exactly how you described it, maybe, you know, the initial onboarding, that question was answered.

Why would the the next entity or partner need to ask the same exact question? And so being really smart about the visibility there and really building towards that is Mhmm. Something that we're we're very unique in. The second half of this is really what you also identified, which is there's an entirely different life cycle for our customers and then their end customers. Right? Which is we serve merchant developers. Our merchant developers are often doing third party payments, moving money between different people.

Sometimes they're doing first party payments, right? Define merchant developers. Merchant developer, I would say, is like, you know, any customer of a fintech payments platform. So you are a business, and you're trying to expose financial services to your customers. I consider that a merchant developer. Okay.

And in that case, we're we're offering to these developers that wanna offer financial services to their customers the ability to have these Lego blocks not only for onboarding, but also for actually processing the payments. So that's like links that would include invoices. And so we can actually get the source of funds attestation as part of the life cycle.

That makes it a lot easier when you're a bank and you're reviewing a payment and you're trying to understand, like, what exactly the payment is for, we're able to use AI to analyze a lot of those documents and understand if those those attributes actually add up and make sense. Like, an example is our AI agent is able to look up, you know, typical pricing information, wholesale pricing rates, and make sure that we're act like, you know, the invoice is quoting the items correctly.

I think similarly, we we are able to use the AI to really process a lot more rich media than a typical compliance operation would. So if you're uploading documents that are, you know, requests for information

What would the ex what would a typical like, when when we were, I'm going back to this example Yeah. Because it's recent, but we we onboarded to Altitude Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we were like We're big fans of Altitude. They were like, hey, you know, what business are you in? Yep. Can you like send us, I think for me, we sent like a media sponsor contract to them. Yep. They required that to say like And that was via email, right? I think so.

Think And so that's one of the first things we solved, by the way, because we started signing up for all these different Sablecoin services,

and it was interesting because our customers were getting these RFIs. It was not the most like modern feeling thing in the world. It's like getting an email asking for a passport sometimes, cap tables

Yeah. You know, kinds of information that I've never emailed. Coinbase institutional onboarding. It was like, hey, can you like email me a picture felt your the same passport? Way. It's like, what? Like, it would really And so,

yeah. Exactly. I think it's the whole category of very, very manual operations around these these compliance processes something we noticed immediately when we entered the space. It felt very distinct, this Sablecoin space, because I don't remember sending any of my compliance information via email. But but I also had to, like, what's preventing me? Like, it was a real contract. I sent them a real one. I can vouch for that, but like, what's preventing me from like, just going and spitting up a fake one?

Well, it's manually reviewed. It is manually reviewed. So that's Yeah. I mean, part of the process is is is is whatever you're submitting is going through a very manual human review. Yes. And that is not gonna change overnight. I think it'll take a long time to remove the human from the compliance process. Okay. So that's still the case? That's still the case. Are humans reviewing all of these things. There is some degree of automation, right?

I think if it's, if the system, if these systems think the data matches very accurately, there's not gonna be a review. It's up to the business though, if it doesn't really meet certain confidence scores, to actually go in and staff that process effectively and efficiently. Now, what we noticed though is that our end users were struggling because they're not it's like our customers' end users, actually. So our merchant developers, they're onboarding users. Those users know nothing about our underlying fighters.

They don't really know why they're getting this email from an arbitrary link. Yep. It's not very branded. It doesn't really feel like part of the app experience. Sometimes they can say names of companies that are not you, and they're like Exactly. Who is this company? And so there's so much confusion that stemmed from that. When we were in YC, we made it a mission to actually solve that problem. So whether it's the initial onboarding, where we collect all this data Yeah.

It gave us the opportunity to replay that data instead of it being stuck on each of these links. Because often, actually, you can't get the data out of the link as a developer. So like purse like if persona or something is It really depends on how they're configured. Often, you know and everyone's asking different data, so you might not even wanna pull it out because you might not be getting, you know, exactly mapped data.

Like, one org might ask for some information, another org asks for something else for the same customer. And so there's a big part of this is controls mapping and really coordinating between these organizations to define what success looks like, what is, like, the best kind of controls for for compliance. The second, I would say, aspect to this is how the RFIs are handled. These are RFIs or request for information.

There are these follow-up questions that often get emailed or sent, and they're very specific to your company and your use case. And really due diligence is the best way to describe RFIs, and they happen at the beginning of the customer relationship. Crucial point in the customer. And so from our perspective, we not only made that something that can be white labeled and part of the app experience Cool. But it's also extremely progressive and dynamic.

So we believe that it's almost better to constantly be, like, stepping up these requests for information and really closing the loop on some of these compliance questions in a single profile. Instead of like, hey, here's another step. Here's another step. Like, deep deep. And the audit trail is is important, but the context being unified and centralized is also very important. So, yeah, that's a long winded way of describing, basically, one way that we're approaching tackling some of these compliance problems.

As a payments company, we're fundamentally a global b to b payments provider. We go up against the d locals, the transfer wises. We're helping people move money internationally. The use cases are are very much looking for how do you get access to these USD accounts and exposure to US dollars. And then at the right time, how do you also get access to local currency liquidity? Yep. The industry calls it stablecoin sandwich, but we found that often there's very specific routes that people are looking for. Yeah.

The sandwiches look pretty similar. So we're very focused on finding some of the the most exciting, repeatable kind of patterns and quarters and routes, and solving the compliance for those routes. It's really hard to I would find it hard to believe a company has solved compliance to an equivalent degree in every market overnight. This is a problem that you have to think about strategically in terms of coverage,

in terms of the depth and breadth. What is the okay. So so I'm I'm kind of looking at this at a global scale. We've met with a ton of these throughout the journey. And I'm, you know, just thinking on the top of my head, you have what seems to be like very obvious, interesting businesses in the local stablecoin landscape. You have the Trace Finances in Brazil. You have the Monteos in LatAm. The Conduits in Yep. You know, APAC and Yellow Cards. Like, you you have all these different, like, regional powerhouses.

Is it, like, a good mental framework to say like, these might be some of the partners that you would wanna work with? Absolutely.

That's a great way to think about it. We see ourselves as allies to most of these stablecoin processors today. Bitso's in Mexico, like, guys. We we we see the fact that there's so much local compliance required. There's so much depth to establishing a successful compliance program locally. Which they're focused on probably already. That we see the network effect of stablecoins actually allowing winners in every market to coordinate with each other. It's efficient market hypothesis.

We have a couple providers in each major market, and they're all able to provide us with different capabilities to different

They also need each other as well. And so like like, you know, Bitso in Mexico really needs to, you know, they need to focus on Mexico and what, you know, what are the laws of the land there and users, Mexico is very different than I

think you're hinting at something that we've noticed. There's a lot of bidirectionality. The network effect is really strong in this space. I think you'll notice a lot of customers are also partners with each other. It's a lot of cross selling. I do think the market structure is such that it's emerging. I think a lot of the partnerships exist because they're able to find market efficiencies in certain corridors that are that are sought after in that market.

And we're almost seeing as, like, all of these different routes and local regions bootstrap the local currency liquidity against US dollar stablecoins almost, like, naturally, like, through market like, efficient market forces. Yeah. Which I think is the most exciting thing. It's forced us to, you know, really think differently about how we build our platform. We're very generalized to the to support any of these different providers.

It's a lot similar to what we were doing at Coinbase to generalize the platform to support different block chains, maybe with even different accounting models. Say, like, the account based ledgers versus UTXO.

I don't know if this might be a bad way to say it, but it's kind of like an interoperability layer for compliance across a lot of these types of different local players. Like, if I'm if I'm mentally thinking about this, like, let's just say that I'm based in Brazil. I'm a importer exporter there. I'm I'm gonna likely use maybe I use Trace Finance or or a platform that's, like, very local to that part of the world, and, you know, there's gonna be really great benefits because I'm I'm going direct to them.

But then there's, like, a ton of need for me to have a global by nature business, but I'm onboarded there. Is it a good is it a the right way to think about it where, like, Infinite could be a really great they're behind Trace to Exactly. Connect all these other things. And then maybe thinking about it opposite, like maybe I don't start there. Maybe I can go to Infinite first and also the backward backwards compatibility is also there too. Are you thinking of Infinite in like that bidirectional way?

Or are you more focused on being that kind of direct relationship layer first? I think it's bidirectional

because what we've found is stitching together these various providers has enabled us to unlock a lot of unique capabilities or fund flows that otherwise wouldn't be possible. So the network effect, in my opinion, really lies in being able to coordinate all the exciting partners and companies that are really solving for the depth of liquidity in local currency against these US dollar stable coins. Yep.

And I do imagine that's gonna the market structure will quickly evolve, but right now, it does seem like that's the most exciting thing. It's it's really just seeing how many how much flow is moving towards the stablecoin. At some point, some leg being denominated in stablecoins. Yeah. As part of the b 2 b flow. Okay. So talk talk a little bit about

when you think about 2026. We're we're still early in the year. You guys are about a year in. It seems like a crucial time. What can you share around yeah. Like, what what are some of these, you know, public bullet points that you can share that are like whether that be clients, volumes,

like, what are the things that, like, you're able to disclose in terms pretty how we're still pretty stealth. I'll say I'll share that we're our product is very is much more mature. We're one year in, so we have a v one that we're very excited to share with the world. That product is being used by, you know, tens of customers. We have hundreds of customers that are actively, you know, onboarding and and trying the product.

And this new version, I think, is a culmination of our experiences from Coinbase, from Sardine, from Socure. It really for us, it's it's been like the vertically integrated experience Mhmm. In Stablecoin that we've been looking for as developers.

And we're starting to notice that it does solve a very very real user experience pain point. Yeah. What what is different about so I wanna ask about this v two or whatever whatever you're gonna but call what is different about Infinite today than what you expected? Like what have you learned in the last twelve months that has shaped what the product maybe this v two is The best. Versus what you expected? One of our YC partners, Tom, who started Monzo,

and gave us really great advice when we started the company. Go bare metal Mhmm. In every way possible. If you're building a fintech, you're not gonna avoid the ability to go bare metal.

I think what we've been uniquely able to do is take a vertically integrated approach and find the, you know, kind of bare metal sources or low level sources for compliance data or fraud prevention data, know, bank sponsor banking relationships to really stitch together something that we think looks and feels better in a pretty competitive market. So a lot of our learnings has been really trying to think critically about the end user experience even though we're building a developer product.

And that's that's really our whole thesis around enablement. It's thinking about, like, our customer's customer, first and foremost. And it's given us a very different perspective on how this product should look, feel, and the quality of service too. I think if you interview a lot of customers in the stablecoin space, I think one thing they'll call out is there's inconsistencies because there's so much fragmentation.

And so our hope is you can benefit from the network effect that does sometimes feel like fragmentation. Fragmentation in what sense? Like, identity wise? I think in in every sense, you're you're working with a lot of different partners, and you're trying to coordinate a lot of different technologies. Mhmm. And you're introducing a lot of room for, you variants and quality of service. That could be SLAs.

That could be how long it takes to settle payments, it could be, know The quitting onboarding Yeah, there's just so many different things, and it's Yeah. That's probably a topic that you can interview all the founders on this podcast about, but each of us have horror stories about, like, the plumbing requires a lot. And that's why we're very grateful to be built on the shoulders and the foundation that the industry has kind of, like, built over the last couple years. Mhmm.

Didn't quite exist ten years ago, but it does exist today. Yeah.

So you sold you you've exited a company before. You sold the company to Coinbase, which is like, you know, an amazing slam dunk to be able to say that. What as a repeat founder do you feel like you have, like, the approach with this?

What what is different due to being a repeat founder that you think is, like, uniquely advantageous to Infinite that maybe if if this was, the first if Infinite was, like, the first startup you had right out the gate, if this was the first one, what are you doing differently because this is not the first rodeo, do you think? I think you'll appreciate this. It's something that Brian

was a big fan of teaching us at at Coinbase, which is this space. Ton of founders out of that place. I think that was intentional. When I was there, there were 50 founders. Crazy. You know, ex founders getting together for dinners and whatnot. I think one thing, though, that we all took away was that what makes Coinbase such a Lindy company, in my opinion, is the fact that they've survived every crypto wave and cycle. Crypto is cyclical in nature.

And I think the perspective I bring after working at Coinbase is, you know, I think when I joined, Bitcoin was trading at like $3,000, and people were extremely concerned about the post twenties kind of crash. Yeah. I think you learn a lot about what you can build in a bear market. Mhmm. I think you learn about being very long term. Right? I think that's a unique approach we take.

And we have a ton of conviction that these problems do take intentionality, time, and conviction to I think it's very hard to go into this space without that sheer conviction that this is definitely a future model of reality that needs to exist. I think many of us on our team would fully banquet stablecoins if we had all the capabilities figured out, and there was parity with the status quo. Yeah. I think that definitely deserves to be celebrated about the Coinbase culture. I've never heard it said that way, but

that almost like desensitization to Yeah. Price action. Most of my tenure at Coinbase was was through the post 2021 crash and FTX and like Yep. All of that stuff was like an extremely Challenging. Volatile moment. Yeah. But like they because you you have to. And the stock Yeah. Even now, like, when I was there with a publicly traded company, the stock price has gone all over the place.

Any publicly traded company maybe has that a little bit, but imagine like Coinbase is publicly traded and the markets are like so embedded in like Yeah. That company and the momentum of it all, you are forced to detach from all of it.

You can't wake up and and it's I actually genuinely believe that like, you know, obviously people check the stock every now and then, and like it's important, whatever, and like more institutions are gonna be knocking on the door if Bitcoin's crushing it, but there's genuinely a sense of like, we're here because we believe, and it has nothing to do with like how much Bitcoin's trading.

And to be around people like that who are like not actually paying that much attention to the the news or the prices, and there's something about that that, like, it creates defensibility and survival, and

I think it's necessary. I think the other the other thing I would I would say that's different as a, you know, repeat founder is you you definitely appreciate when the market the timing of the market. I think at Coinbase, we learned a lot about trying the idea at the right time. We attempted a lot of idea ideas again and again, and when we nailed the timing, you know, we crushed it.

And so I think that perseverance required to kind of consistently chip away at the problem, while also taking into account, like, you know, there has to be that market pull Yeah. In order for it to be a success. You know, everything from like you know, we I I don't know if you remember the bundles experiment where Bundles? Yeah. Or we had, like, you know, a a product at Coinbase where you could almost buy, like, little groups or indexes of of assets. Really? Yeah.

There's a lot of cool products that we tried, but I think the timing of it matters. And I think you could try those products again at a different time coinbase wallet went through many iterations. Toshi, I remember our team, half of our team was building the Coinbase wallet Yep. From Toshi migration.

Coinbase Commerce has had seasons of life.

Better and better and better Yep. And I and you just see how much of the market penetration that you're able to compound over time. So that's something I really appreciate. Yeah. The thing that keeps me up at night is we are experiencing absolute disruption right now with AI. I think Mhmm.

You know, as a company that's going vertically integrated in a payment, a very regulated industry, it does give me confidence that, you know, that is a moat in a period where, like, AI is disrupting a lot of the, you know, foundational drivers of of fundamental value. But I think at the same time, you have to think about it from the perspective of AI probably will be the biggest consumer of these technologies, irrespective of if they're regulated or not. So interplay compliance look like compared to,

you know, we are going to probably continue to talk more and more about all of these ideas of a theme for the show is, like, ideas on the frontier. What is on the frontier? And Agenza Commerce is just gonna with stablecoins natively is gonna become such a key theme of the show, I'm realizing. And compliance, as we've talked about, agents are extensions of people, and there still needs to be high regard for compliance, maybe even more of a regard in some ways guardrail wise over agents doing commerce.

What what is the difference and maybe approach or the things that you're up at night thinking about when you compare a human based commerce experience that maybe is is more common in the last ten years of fintech versus the next ten years of agentic commerce. Like, what is what is the compliance? It's how are you thinking about those two things differently? What are the maybe unique challenges that an agentic commerce world brings that you're excited to go solve?

Like, this is kind of the problem that will, I think, make a company like Infinite

win or not, you know? This how do you think about that? It's a great question. I think we we think about it in a lot of different ways, in the sense that I think any company that's becoming AI native is almost taking an AI first approach to to solving the problem. So the one of the first things we've done, and we did this from day one, is design our compliance review process around agents.

So we've always had native integrations with all the top models that are actually looking and reviewing, and, you know, also persists in memory, our decisions on every onboarding or transaction monitoring case. Even though we rely often on other partners that make the final decision, we're still actively building our own competency around visibility of compliance data, our opinion on it, and, like, how we can truly inform our AI to like help us streamline that process. Mhmm.

The reason I bring this up, even though you asked about agentic commerce, is what keeps me up at night is actually machine to machine transactions. So I actually think like It's like third party transactions. I actually I'm not I'm not worried about like, I I don't think I think we're gonna 10 x like the market for digital commerce for sure through ChatGPT and Claude. I think at the same time, the much bigger opportunity is actually imagine an agent shopping with another agent.

And where where does that agent live even? I think there's an argument, an assumption that the foundation model providers would own all these agents. What do you mean when you say live? Like this agent has to like, you know, run somewhere. And that environment has to constrain this agent's capabilities in some way. I think today, we define a lot of, like, you know, constraints around, okay, we can give the agent a wallet, and we can have session based keys, and we can give it, like, limits.

I think there's another world where the agent is almost just given its wallet and an environment with a lot of constraints up front. I think, like, those two things it wouldn't be crazy to me if if some of the biggest payment processors are hosting agents. And, like, really, a lot of the regulatory value, a lot of the the compounded commerce value comes from, like, deep integrations with, like, the payment stack. It's just something that keeps me up at night.

If if truly most payments will be between multiple agents, then I do think PSPs have a very important role in enabling agents to actually go to market and deliver value. And the alternative is also true. I think the foundation model companies may become payment companies in the process. What do you mean foundation model companies? I think the commerce element of like an anthropic or an open AI is so important. You think they will kind of be evolving into payment? Yeah.

I think there's a natural kind of market structure kind of forming where Any thoughts on x money? I've been kind of looking at what they're doing. I think Elon is a great leading indicator for how, you know, the macro or the market structure is evolving. And I think the fact that he has x AI and x money in the same 12. It's it's you're you're solving a lot of problems, whether it's like the data training problem, like scale.

Like, you can tap into million millions of people and give them capture their attention and help them train the AI. Right? You can make that feel like you're part of the user experience. There's no reason why you clicking, like, isn't part of their AI training process. And so these RL environments that they're creating, you introduce money into the RL environment, now becomes real.

You're introducing a very, very real incentive, both for the human that's coordinating those agents, as well as for the agents themselves. Yeah. And the human, which is already identified,

already onboarded, already, like, put through some sort of, like, KYC But process, which is so

maybe that's where I started thinking about when you say the identity problem, I think everyone's talking about, like, okay, cool. How do we get this, like, identity on chain, or how do we get, like, something to the agent standard on identity or something to that effect? I do think you can solve a lot of these problems by thinking about basic roles and, you know, kind of RBAC within enterprise. And that's where it excites me that payment processors may end up running the agent itself.

Because why wouldn't you have, like, you know, an agent scaffolding that just gives it a wallet, gives a virtual account, gives it cards,

Yeah. Because I don't know. Because am interfacing with that, you know, I'm interfacing I'm already there. Yeah. I'm already, you know, talking with Anthropic or whatever. Like, they're they're gonna be the ones in the position to issue the rain card Yeah. Or issue the like And I think someone I don't know who mentioned it today or are on Twitter, but Visa's going into this with the commerce AI commerce

kinda specific product

that they have. There's so many things to follow. It's such a wild like, right this week is like a wild week. So excited for a very stable conference. I think there's a ton of other events happening this week. Okay. So as as we close here, thank you so much for taking the time and energy. I know it's been a long day. Thank you for having me. Yeah. This is It's been a blast. I don't know how long we've been rolling. It could be like forty minutes or like two hours. I'm kind of at that Same.

Where like time doesn't exist. What does something that I'm kind of thinking through anytime you're selling something or delivering a product, you wanna hear pain. Wanna know what pain sounds like. What what is the pain what does pain sound like for Infinite, and who is typically feeling that pain

at the organizations you're selling to? Sure. If you're listening to this and you're a fintech or a payment processor, and you're struggling with your global payouts and FX, come talk to us. I think what we've found is dealing with the traditional solutions requires a ton of manual operations. And if done right, a solution like Infinite not only streamlines the economics, the efficiency on cost, and and speed, but it's also an internal process improvement.

I think we can really cut down the programmatic element of stablecoin payments to something, I think, our customers have told us is in a huge, you know, boost. It's just like fewer humans involved,

you know, you're able to process more transactions with less people. Mikael, thank you for this. Yeah. We'll do this again, man. So fun.