The $200 Trillion Market: Agentic Payments and Cross Border FX

Mason Nystrom sits down with Prabhakar Reddy, founder and CEO of OpenFX, one of Pantera's most recent portfolio companies, to explore why cross-border FX is still broken and how OpenFX is rebuilding money movement from the ground up.
The problem: $4 trillion is trapped in transit at any given moment due to pre-funding, SWIFT delays, and opaque FX spreads. OpenFX bypasses this entirely using stablecoins and real-time market-making, moving money across borders in single-digit minutes, 24/7.

Key Topics:
- Why cross-border FX is broken: opaque spreads, pre-funding requirements, and a stack built to keep money, not move it

- How OpenFX works: stablecoins replace SWIFT, real-time market-making on both sides, settlement in under 60 minutes

- $4 trillion trapped in transit at any given moment and how eliminating pre-funding unlocks it

- From zero to $40B+ annualized TPV in 18 months: the three factors behind OpenFX's growth

- 99.99% automation: three trade ops staff processing nearly $50B in volume

- Compressing FX spreads by 90-95% in every market OpenFX enters, including UAE from 50bps to single digits

- The postbox to SMS analogy: why spot FX could grow from $2 trillion to $200 trillion a day

- Agentic payments: why the timeline just collapsed from 7-10 years to 24-36 months

- Moats in the AI era: why licensing, compliance, distribution, and brand only matter together

- Lessons from co-founding FalconX: compliance first, culture by design, and why fiat still rules cross-border

- Culture at OpenFX: respect, velocity, and full ownership as non-negotiables

- Founder advice from a five-time founder: how you get there matters as much as where you are going


The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest. Please see additional important disclosures related to the content discussed in the podcast here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The world of payments is going through a complete upheaval. You know, what used to happen with 40 engineers and four PMs now can be done in four hours. I used to think we're gonna see agent tick payments take off probably like seven to ten years. I think we're gonna see that change happen in the next 24 to 36 months.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome back everyone. This is Staple of Pintera Podcast. I'm your host, Mason Nystrom. And today we have an amazing episode for you today. We have the founder and CEO of OpenFX, one of Pinterest's most recent portfolio companies and investments, leading their series Around. Welcome, Prabhupada Ready, founder and CEO of OpenFX. Prabhupamar, great to have you on the pod. Lovely to be here. But before we begin, a quick disclaimer. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial investment or legal advice. Please do your own research before making any investments. So, Prabhupada, I think most people don't have as in-depth of an understanding of foreign exchange as you do. Uh so maybe we should start with some level setting. The cross-border FX market is still a broken world today, even though much else in finance has modernized across the stack. And so help us expand on like why is cross-border FX still so broken today?

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So to understand why it's broken, first let's understand the entire stack of a cross-border payment. We should understand that FX is just one of the components of a multi-layered stack. So when a cross-border payment and the money has to move from country A to country B, often there's usually collections, which is the first step. So any fintech company is usually collecting money from some party, then that collected money goes to a bank account. Once that goes to some bank account or banking vendor, then there's an FX piece conversion. Then there's another bank account for the new currency. Then maybe that currency can either set and earn some yield on it or it's getting paid out by a third-party payment vendor to someone else. So there's collections, banking, FX, earn payouts, multiple components to a cross-border payment. Now, each stack has multi-billion dollar companies built in the last 20 years. Now, FX is one of the most complicated pieces in this entire thing. Why? Because A, it's completely opaque. You don't know what you're paying oftentimes in terms of FX spreads or fees. And two, most of the legacy fintech companies who've been built in the last 15, 20, 25 years have just built the entire FX component as a wrapper around existing infrastructure, whether that's an OTC desk or market maker or one of the top nine banks in the world, which is JB Morgan Edges, Bisparkles, et cetera. All right. So no one actually goes down to understanding, okay, why am I paying 70 basis points of spread for a BRL transaction? What exactly is happening here? Right. So if you actually unpack all of that and do it for 150 currencies in the world, you realize, you know what, the spread doesn't need to be that much. You can actually really bring it down. But bring it, building that infrastructure from ground up requires a very different muscle. So open at OpenFX, we started with the most complex piece and said, let's unpack and solve that. Because the existing players that have existed in the market, starting with banks to the legacy of Integ players, there's misaligned incentives. No one wants to basically make FX completely transparent. Nobody wants you to know that, hey, money can actually move from country A to country B in here instantly because every player that exists makes money from keeping money with them. And if you look at it, banks are in the business of keeping money, not moving money. So the existing infrastructure is kind of broken in that sense.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Yeah, you'll never convince a bank to give money at a better rate. They always want to keep it. And so that's a I think a great framing. And so as OpenFX tries to build this uh unified API layer for money to move freely cross-border, maybe you contrast a bit like you just explained kind of that multi-layer flow of how uh money today operates now, like contrast that with how OpenFX creates this better solution for money movement.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Great. Let me explain that with an example. Let's say without OpenFX, what does a financial institution do? Let's say a transaction is getting moved by a remittance cut player from UK to Mexico. Without OpenFX, what would they do? They'd collect money from their retail customer, they'll collect all of that by middle of the day or the end of the day, give it to Barclays and say, let's convert all of these pounds to MXN, and they will send that MXN over to their Mexican bank account. Oftentimes, like today, it's Wednesday that we're recording this podcast. The money, if they send it out today, may reach by Friday, very likely it's by Monday. So now this remittance company, they cannot wait to pay the retail consumers MXN four days later. They'll have to actually send it out the same day or the next day. So what they end up doing is pre-funding MXN ahead of time and keeping it on their balance sheet so that they can pay to their customers and wait for this MXN from uh their banking provider to reach their bank account three to four days later. With OpenFX, what we do, and I'll just lay the entire stack of the transactions. From the fintech standpoint, they gave us GPP. We collect the GPP using FPS Rails, which is DR instant. We convert that GPP for them into MXN. They click withdraw an MXN, they receive that MXN into their bank account 247, 364, doesn't matter what time of the day, they receive their MXN uh in within 60 minutes, right? So that is a magical experience for them. But behind the scenes, let's unpack what happens. We collect that GPP, we convert GPP to USD, we make markets for pounds to dollars. So that's extremely low cost, extremely liquid market. That's a G3 currency. So we make the markets for that. Now, once we collect converted that to dollars, we convert those dollars to multi-dutal stable coins in real-time algorithms, whichever is the most fastest, cheapest stable coin, those stable coins are moved from UK to Mexico and then converted back into dollars. And then we again make markets for dollar MXN markets. We are the market picker for that. So we've gone from pounds in UK to MXN in Mexico, all of this in single digit minutes. Because what has happened in this equation is we've made markets on both sides and we bypassed the entire Swift trail ecosystem by using stable coins. What would usually happen via Swift now has happened via stable coins, and the pounds from the country A has converted to Mexican pay, so in country B. And now within Mexico, we have something called SPA, SPEI, which is basically their local RTP rails. Money within Mexico moves 247365. Money within UK moves 247365. Things break when you have to move them across borders. So what we do is we just leverage the RTP reels of the country A and country B, can use stable coins, use our market big infrastructure. The sum of all parts, seamlessly done programmatically, is what gives the customers a magical experience via Old Effects.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

You know, it's easy to say like this is magical, but like what people may not understand, the listeners, is that when you talk about these pre-funded accounts, like that's a massive working capital cost, right? Because you have to keep money all over the world. But when you're able to bridge into this unified API layer, you know, do real-time settlement, you know, versus you know, T plus two or even more time settlement, then that increases the amount of capital that can flow through the system, faster turnover, which is a massive unlock for any type of institution or enterprise.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

That's correct. And actually, if you put that into numbers, there's been a study that about four trillion dollars are trapped in transit at any given point in time because of this pre-funding Swift wire ecosystem. Imagine you don't have to have that capital just stuck in transit and you can just move currency A to currency B like you did via index message, right? It just reaches the other place. World gets a lot more efficient, and that's what we're enabling.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yeah, absolutely. And you've you've seen obviously a massive traction in growth over the past year. You know, in 18 months, you've gone from zero in total payment volume to ending you know last year over 40 billion in annualized uh TPV. What has you know been kind of the the core unlock that has resulted in this inflection, or what do you attribute this like growth towards?

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Great question. And actually, it's been a lot of fun watching this growth happen from the inside. Um I bet. Let me put this in context, right? Like today is April 1st that we're recording this. We actually went live with a product exactly two years ago. And on our first month, we did about$500,000 of transactions the entire month. About eight weeks later, we were doing about$500,000 of transactions a week. A quarter later, we're doing about$500,000 of transactions, I believe, a day. And now, two years later, we're doing$500,000 of transactions. By the time I finish the sentence, I'm sure there's a$500,000 transaction that that's happened in the system. That's the pace at which the company has grown, and it's been phenomenal to watch it. And to add another layer of dimension to it, we were in stealth for the first 12 months of our operation. We actually came out of stealth in May of 2025. So the first year we were in stealth. We grew because the customer segment that we were going after actually just love the product experience. So if you have to answer your original question, what caused this inflection? I attributed to three things. One is extreme focus. Rather than trying to be everything for everyone in this entire cross-border payment stack, we decide to pick the most challenging part, which is FX. And within FX, creating deep liquidity for some of the most complex currencies and making sure that the settlement time for those currencies is robust. And again, for a very specific customer segment. We don't touch retail consumers, we don't go after every enterprise, we go after fintechs in a specific category, and we ensure that we do a fantastic job for them. That relentless focus actually helped us make sure that we nailed it for that customer segment. Now, to even just put that in context, most of the flow for these customer segments happens through us for whatever currencies that we are live at. The second variable that I would attribute it to is automation. A good chunk, say 99.99% of all transactions that happen through OpenFX are completely end-to-end automated. No human is involved. In fact, for almost the$50 billion of volume that we process, we only have three trade ops folks in the entire company. They're usually there to handle exceptions. In other companies, usually they have an army of folks. Like, again, to put things in context for you, uh, TransferWise, which is a 15-year-old company, processes$250 billion of transactions a year. We process about 20% of what they do in the last two years. They have 6,500 employees on their payroll. Right? So we have three on trade-ops, mostly engineering and quantity and team. Everything is on. Insane. Right? That's the only way we can actually bring it down from days to hours to minutes. Um and even in within that, let me give you a little bit more context on automation. A lot of third world countries and currencies that we are live with, their banks don't have APIs. So what our team has done is create robotic process automation systems where we created our own custom EPIs for those banks. Because otherwise, we'll have to log in manually into their portals, crave the banking information, data, you know, send the payment, do all of that. Nope, we just do everything.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

That's where the head count balloons.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Right? So all of that has helped. And third factor for why we received this kind of uh inflection point, it's a little cliche answer, but the honest answer is because just the team, right? The core focus of this caliber of a team has just been amazing. I am actually not involved in most of the day-to-day things. The team is just able to execute relentlessly without me, which has been fascinating to see.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

As you think of you know, moving towards this real-time network where money can can move kind of at the speed of light, there's still a lot of things that we don't have yet. For example, like most stablecoin adoption uh is early and we it's all pretty much USD denominated. A lot of companies, you know, to your point, so rely on legacy rails or even like RTP networks today, or a lot of banks uh in emerging markets like aren't super automated. How do you think the payments like stack and landscape transforms over the next you know five to 10 years? What is what is the future of money movement look like?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

So here's the thing. I think I've told you this before, and it's a famous saying in crypto, and I think it's true in most of FinTector, but or generally in the world, I'd say whatever you think happens will happen in one year often takes 10 years to happen. And whatever happens in 10 years usually happens in one year. So, in my view, the world of payments is going through a complete upheaval, especially specifically because we are entering this new world of AI where pretty much anything can be wipecoated out. You know, what used to happen with 40 engineers and four PMs now can be done in four hours with one full stack, full you know, PM who can do the entire thing. So most of these things can actually go to production much faster, which means AI agents, which we thought maybe like eight to ten years away for doing payments, are gonna actually get fast tracked. So if you're asking me where is the world of payments going, we're gonna see a lot faster payments happening. We're gonna see the world of effects and the spreads in effects really compressed down. OpenFX has actually been a strong player or a proponent of why this is happening in every geography to give you data that we've entered. We've compressed spreads in those geographies by 90-95%. To put that again in very quantifiable terms, UAE, which is one of our larger markets and one of the first three markets that we entered because it's a very large remittance corridor. We power a lot of remittance copies in that region. Before we entered, the spreads in that region were like 50 basis points. And it's a pecked currency. Uh United are remembered thereems there's a pecked currency to the dollar, and still the spreads were 50 basis points. In about the last 12 to 14 months, just purely with the kind of work that we've done, we've brought the spreads down across the board to single-digit basis points for the entire industry, which means now money is a lot cheaper for folks to move and a lot faster for folks to move. So, point is FX spreads are really gonna compress in the next year, almost down to zero. And we really want that to happen because money can monitor you can monetize elsewhere in the stack. Um, money's gonna move a lot faster. Money, because AI agents, as they come in, they're not gonna wait for three to five days for money to move. They're gonna wait, you know, send from point A to point B and expect that money reaches near instantly. The scale of infrastructure required for payments is gonna be at a different scale altogether. Everything that was built in the last 50 years was built for human timescales in the world of payments, right? You are built for batch processing, end of day. You're built for doing two transactions of a million dollars each. A agents are gonna do a million transactions for two dollars each every minute or every second. Their infrastructure required for that is very different. So that's where the world is headed, might be.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Maybe talk about like a correlated point to that. I think everyone obviously looks at FX as this massive market, but I think what people maybe fail to also comprehend is like that market, like what you're doing is expanding that market by enabling money to move faster. That creates new types of businesses. It you know enables new types of of parties to like pop up or fill roles that were previously like untenable because you know you had to be a certain scale to kind of like process FX or or you know, accept or need enough scale to have like that working capital. And so, how do you imagine OpenFX kind of expanding the TAM for FX payments?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Look, what you're doing is off in a very simplistic manner, giving JP Morgan's wholesale FX rates infrastructure to every fintech company out there, right? What is available only to the Fortune hundred is now going to be available to a YC startup or a legacy fintech company wants to basically compete with that mighty startup, just leveling the playing field for everybody. That's what we're doing. But to use an analogy of what that does to the market, it's like going back to 1970s and saying, you know, we are operating in a post box infrastructure ecosystem, and now suddenly we're operating to an SMS infrastructure ecosystem. When you go from post box to SMS, let's just say in the 1970s, people were sending a million posts a day. It's not gonna go from 1 million to 1.2 million. We're gonna go from a million messages posts a day to a trillion text messages a day. That's exactly what's gonna happen with the world of payments, too. I think today, spot FX movement is about$2 trillion a day. I think we're gonna go from$2 trillion to roughly 200 trillion as a result of the entire circumference of the pipe increasing. And that's what we're enabling in the power bank.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

As you think about building a company in the space, you're building on open rails in on blockchains. Uh, you know, you're talking about kind of like compressing the moat that a lot of the incumbents have. How do you think about the motes in fintech that are still going to exist with the broader adoption of AI and stable coins? And like to maybe give you a like a head start, like there's a few modes that have like historically existed in fintech. One is the regulatory moat, one is economies of scale, and then the other is kind of brand and distribution. Um, you know, but how do you think about the motes that are still gonna be persistent? And and where does that uh lead you to push FX to ensure that you have a defensibility of the business?

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Very good question. Let's just do two parts to that question. Let's talk about the first one, right? So I think a lot of those core components are still gonna be true: licensing, compliance, distribution and brand, product and itself. But I think individually, none of these are gonna be sound modes any longer. It's gonna be sum of all parts. And actually, if you look at the meta picture, what is gonna be a real mode is have you delivered an outcome to the customer? In general, for any business in this world of AI that we're entering, just offering a tool is no longer gonna be a mode. You'll have to basically deliver the end-to-end outcome for any customer. Now that means you'll have to basically own the distribution, create the brand, have the licensing in compliance, have the infrastructure, and then deliver it. And what we are doing at OpenFX is just creating infrastructure that's equal for all. Almost like the aid what AWS did for the world of computer infrastructure. We're building the AWS Rails for Finance, saying anybody who wants to basically collect, bank, convert, or pay money, there is no reason to basically go rebuild this infrastructure again. Just use ours and go build whatever distribution infrastructure that you need to get the customer, do your marketing, and ensure that you're basically getting all of that done, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Rabakar, one of the things that some people may or may not know is that you previously co-founded a massive business in Falcon X, which now is a large prime brokerage in the space. Uh, what are some of the lessons that you took from Falcon X to building OpenFX?

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Very different lines of business, but lots of takeaways, right? Falcon X is doing very well in the world of prime brokerage and the world of crypto. But I realized while building that company that I could move Bitcoin or digital assets from country A to country B, like$100 billion worth of it, right, in 10 minutes and it reaches. But if I try to move dollars to Japan, it would take five days, right? We could feel this pain over and over again. And that's where like the ideation for or seeing the pain points came from, right? Just understanding that the world of money movement across the world, especially with fiat, it's extremely painful. One day, yes, maybe the world moves to digital assets across the world. But today we live in the world of fiat. And that was one big realization. Two is how important getting compliance and licensing and regulation right is was also very key learning. We were able to see in the last five years, in fact, a lot, lots and lots of crypto companies wither away without getting their licensing and regulatory framework right. So doing a good job of that, front loading the efforts was a very important lesson. And third thing is just getting the team, the culture right. Spending a lot of time upfront thinking through how do you define culture for a company has been a very key learning for me as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Yeah. I guess a quick follow-up there. How do you define culture? What do you think truly matters in building a great company culture?

SPEAKER_01 20:20

My personal take, and this is my opinion, so take this with a pitch of salt. In the early days of any company, the culture for a company is often the personality and character of that founder personified. That is the culture of the company. If there are two founders or three founders, it's going to be the personality of the dominant founder that's going to become the dominant culture in the company. So, in fact, before I started OpenFX, I realized that look, whether I'm selling pizza, burgers, money, it doesn't matter. There's a certain way I want to build my organization that has been a key learning for me. So I started writing a very long culture talk. What are the values that I want to hold myself to? What do I hold myself true to? What are the values that I want everyone else in the company to hold themselves to as well? Because for me, I realized the end destination is important, but how I get there is equally as important to me. So the three values that we hold ourselves accountable to at OpenFX very dearly, and it's almost like a fireable offense is number one, we can argue all day online about anything, but ensuring that we do so with respect is very important. That's one. Especially in the world of finance, it can get very elbowy very quickly. So that's why respect is a very important uh aspect or pillar of OpenFX. Second is velocity. Velocity is not the same as speed. Velocity means front loading a lot of the thought process in terms of the direction that you want to go into and then executing with extreme high speed. That's what velocity is, right? Speed and direction at the same time. Because if you just run blindly with speed without any upfront thought process, you'll have to spend the same amount of time coming back and rethinking and just going out front. You just waste a lot of time. And the third thing is just empowering everything. Single person with trust in ownership, right? Because we don't like micromanaging here. Make sure that anything that's assigned to any single leader or any person in the company, they take full ownership of it. They're able to stand up and say, hey, look, I don't understand it. Go to the manager. If not, take ownership and just drive the outcomes. Those are three foundational pillars. There are a lot of other things in terms of how we work, how do we make decisions, everything else that's just written, that's how we work as a company.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

That's amazing. All right. I want to move on to uh quick uh quick fire where I ask a question, you give me your immediate response. What's something you've changed your mind on over the past six to twelve months?

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Here's the thing the world has gotten very chaotic lately. I just I used to live in Dubai until very recently. And uh some my take is that the world order is changing. The next three to four years, in my view, this year and the next three to four years will have a huge impact on the next 40 to 50 years of humanity. That is my personal take. And I did not have this thinking before I don't know, before 2026 started. I think my thought process there, Sharing, that's just a general take on the world itself. When it comes to the world, you know, payments specifically, uh I would say in the last six months, I've started basically rethinking timelines in terms of how quickly AI is gonna get adopted in the world of payments. I used to think we're gonna see agentique payments take off probably in like seven to ten years. I think we're gonna see that change happen in the next 24 to 36 months.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

What uh what led to that change of thought? Or or where do you see agentic payments being adopted first?

SPEAKER_01 23:41

That's a good question. I think it's gonna be more like every new company that's gonna get found by founders, they're gonna just whitecoated themselves a lot of it. And they're gonna basically assign a clot bot to go do one task for them. And when they assign that, that clot bot is gonna try to figure out a way to basically send money, store money, convert money, do whatever it has to, right? That is gonna be the origination of it. It's not gonna be like, oh, I need to build some agentic framework to do X, Y, or Z. It's just people are assigned tasks, and that AI bot that is basically assigned the task has to find a way to complete the task end-to-end. Outcomes are important, right? So that is how the origination of AI or adoption of agentic payments is gonna happen, in my view.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Yeah, I think that a lot of founders that we see in the space that are building uh agenc payments or trying to build standards when I think uh the correct approach is the one you're talking about, like find the pain point, focus on just solving it from the payment perspective. Next question. So you were once a venture capitalist uh like myself. Let's say you have to become a VC again and invest in uh any area of the payment stack outside of obviously FX uh specifically. Where do you invest today?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

It's a good question. Yes, I've been a VC, I'd invest in OpenFX, which I have. Uh, but outside of OpenFX, I'd say, look, with jokes aside, as I was saying earlier, I think the biggest opportunity is in delivering end-to-end outputs. There's no value anymore in building software and tooling that's literally getting wipecoated away. I'm seeing my own team. Any software that we used to think about signing contracts for a year, we're like, wait a minute, the amount of time it'll take for us to integrate that software will just build our own stuff, right? And have have Claude just maintain it. So that's where the infrastructure is getting to. So I don't think there's any modes in that, and there's not enough of a time or a meat there. I think the full stack, let's just say you want to build a remittance application, thinking through the entire end-to-end outcome for what is the outcome that you deliver for your customer. Thinking through that is I think where in the world of payments, the meaty opportunities are. Otherwise, it's it's very hard. It's going to get very hard.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

Yeah. And then finally, as a two-time founder, what's the number one piece of advice you give to new founders?

SPEAKER_01 25:55

It's not I am a fifth-time founder, just if I. It's my it's my fifth journey uh running uh running a startup.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

I guess two-time two-time unicorn founder.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Look, I'd say there's one thing you learn, having been an entrepreneur for a very long time, is there's no one advice that's generic enough or applicable enough to everyone out there. Everyone has a unique way of building company, finding their own PMF and success. And that maturity has come for me after many years. I used to give a lot of useless generic advice before, but I don't think that's applicable anymore. I think there's many different ways to build unicorns. Every founder has a different way. But again, as I was saying earlier, one thing if I have to tell myself, if I was to do this again, is think a lot about culture and how you want to build the company. A lot of founders don't put a lot of time into that. They think about where they want to get to and the vision piece, which is great. I strongly believe, having done this five times, how you get there and who you get there with is equally important, or in fact, more important than where you get to. So that would be one advice I'd give to myself and to everyone out there.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Excellent advice. And I love the nuance of there's many great ways to be a good founder. Um, Prabhupar, thank you for coming on the pod and sharing the wisdom. Uh, if you enjoyed this episode, please like, share, and subscribe. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Thank you for having me, Miss.