Denis Spasibo, CEO and Co-Founder of SquareFi – Interview Series

Denis Spasibo, CEO & Co-Founder of SquareFi, is a fintech entrepreneur focused on simplifying the complexity of global financial infrastructure through scalable, API-driven solutions. Since founding SquareFi in 2022, he has led the development of a platform that enables banks and enterprises to rapidly launch modern financial products, including multi-currency accounts, payment cards, and cryptocurrency integrations, all under their own brand. Based in Dubai, he brings a strong background in Banking-as-a-Service, fractional ownership models, and cross-border financial systems, with additional leadership experience spanning B2B SaaS through UP2U and real estate investment via ARX. His work centers on making sophisticated financial operations more accessible, adaptable, and efficient across diverse markets.

SquareFi is an international financial solutions platform designed to streamline the deployment of modern financial services for institutions and businesses. Through flexible APIs and white-label infrastructure, it allows clients to integrate multi-currency banking, card issuance, and crypto capabilities into their offerings without the need for complex in-house development. By abstracting regulatory, operational, and technical barriers, SquareFi positions itself as a foundational layer for fintech innovation, enabling faster time-to-market and greater customization in an increasingly fragmented global payments ecosystem.

Your career has included work across fintech, real estate investment, and B2B SaaS platforms before launching SquareFi. How did those experiences shape your understanding of the problems in global payments, and what specific gap in financial infrastructure ultimately led you to build SquareFi?

I believe each of those areas taught me more about how money actually moves, or sometimes fails to. In real estate investment, you’re dealing with large, slow, cross-border transactions where every intermediary adds time and cost, and where a significant amount of bureaucracy still exists. Initially, we believed this would be the right market to disrupt by leveraging tokenization, and that’s how we first approached it. But we quickly realized that, at the core of our clients’ needs, was something much simpler: the ability to process payments and transactions seamlessly in both crypto and fiat.

That specific gap led to SquareFi: businesses couldn’t connect crypto and fiat through a single compliant channel. Not a workaround, not a grey-zone solution, but an actual legal, reliable path.

Once we moved into fintech, a lot of time was spent understanding why the current financial infrastructure is the way it is: who built it, when, and what assumptions shaped it. What those experiences ultimately gave me was a very practical understanding of where the system breaks. We would hit a wall, and then build the solution.

SquareFi connects traditional banking rails such as SWIFT, SEPA, ACH, and wire transfers while also using stablecoins internally for settlement. What advantages does this hybrid model offer compared to systems that rely entirely on traditional banking infrastructure or fully crypto-native payment networks?

Neither pure traditional banking nor fully crypto-native systems work truly well for global business payments today because each has a fundamental limitation that the other solves.

Traditional banking rails are slow and expensive for cross-border settlement. The rails themselves were built decades ago, with no concept of programmable money or digital assets. They weren’t designed for the speed and flexibility modern businesses need.

Fully crypto-native networks solve the speed and cost problem, but they create a different one: regulatory uncertainty and limited access to the fiat systems where most business actually happens. Payroll, supplier payments, taxes, these still run mostly through traditional currencies. A business that operates purely on crypto rails often hits a wall when it needs to interact with these.

We use stablecoins for internal settlement, which gives us the speed and cost advantages of blockchain, while connecting out to traditional rails for the endpoints where businesses actually need to land money. You get the efficiency of the crypto layer without losing access to the banking infrastructure that global commerce still depends on.

Cross-border payments remain one of the most inefficient parts of global finance. From your perspective, what are the biggest technical or regulatory barriers that still prevent businesses from moving money quickly and seamlessly across jurisdictions?

On the technical side, the core issue is that the global payment system isn’t actually a system: it’s a collection of systems built independently, in different eras, with different standards, that have been patched together over time. SWIFT, local ACH networks, card schemes, SEPA, none of these were designed to interoperate cleanly. Every cross-border payment is essentially a translation problem, and every translation introduces potential for delay, error, or cost.

On the regulatory side, the challenge is jurisdictional fragmentation. What’s compliant in one country isn’t necessarily compliant in another. Licensing requirements differ, and while AML standards are generally aligned, their implementation varies widely. What you’re allowed to do with stablecoins in the EU is different from what you’re allowed to do in the US, which is different again from Singapore or the UAE. For a business trying to operate globally, navigating that is genuinely hard, and most infrastructure providers are built around one or two jurisdictions and then try to extend outward (or not).

Stablecoins are increasingly being used as part of financial infrastructure. Do you see them becoming a permanent settlement layer for global commerce, or are they more of a transitional technology as the financial system evolves?

I think they become more of a permanent infrastructure, not just a transitional step toward something else. The reason is that stablecoins solve a genuine structural problem that traditional settlement rails can’t easily fix: they allow value to move at internet speed, with programmability, without geographic constraints. That’s not a feature that becomes obsolete as the financial system matures. If anything, it becomes more valuable as global commerce becomes more complex.

We’re now in the period where stablecoins are doing real work but the regulatory and institutional frameworks are catching up. Once those frameworks are fully established, the question of whether to use stablecoin rails for settlement becomes much simpler for most institutions.

SquareFi enables companies to launch financial products such as accounts, cards, and crypto wallets through a single platform. How do you see embedded finance evolving over the next five years, and what role will infrastructure providers play in enabling that shift?

Customers, whether individuals or businesses, increasingly want to operate globally without stitching together a dozen different financial providers, and that demand creates a clear role for unified infrastructure platforms. But I think the most important shift over the next five years is that embedded finance is moving from finance inside apps to finance inside agents.

So the primary customer of embedded finance infrastructure is no longer just the human developer, but an AI agent. We’re already slowly seeing this. When someone spins up an agentic workflow and needs to accept crypto payments, they don’t want to evaluate providers, read documentation, and write integration code. The agent does it. It identifies the best-fit solution for the project’s tech stack, integrates it, and delivers a working result, and you just see the outcome: “You can now accept crypto payments.”

This shift means infrastructure providers need to think differently about how they position themselves because the API isn’t just a developer tool anymore, but something an agent will discover, evaluate, and invoke autonomously.

Operating across more than 150 countries introduces significant regulatory complexity. How does SquareFi approach compliance while still maintaining the flexibility needed to support global payments and financial products?

We didn’t try to solve all of it ourselves, and I think that was the right call. We work with a network of licensed partners who have the regulatory standing in their respective markets. That allows us to offer genuine global coverage without trying to hold licenses in 150 countries.

What we do own is the architecture that makes those partners interoperable, the logic that routes a payment through the right rails, applies the right compliance checks, and presents a consistent interface to our clients regardless of which jurisdiction they’re operating in. That’s where the real engineering challenge is.

The fintech infrastructure space is becoming increasingly competitive, with companies offering banking-as-a-service, payment APIs, and crypto integrations. What differentiates SquareFi’s platform architecture from other providers in the market?

Most providers in this space have built deep in one direction. Strong card issuing. Good on-ramp and off-ramp. Solid API for payments. What they haven’t done (what’s genuinely hard) is integrate all of those layers into a single coherent system where the components actually work together.

That’s the architectural bet we made: build the integration natively with accounts, cards, wallets, settlement, and on/off-ramp, all run on the same underlying infrastructure at SquareFi. A client doesn’t need to manage separate API relationships or reconcile data across systems. It’s one layer.

And we were built global-first. You may be strong in one or two markets and are extending outward. We designed for multi-jurisdictional operations from the beginning, which shows up in how we handle compliance routing, currency conversion, and rail selection. For clients operating across many countries, that architecture matters more than it might seem from the outside.

SquareFi originally explored tokenization use cases before pivoting toward global payments infrastructure. What lessons from that earlier phase influenced the direction of the company today?

The main lesson was about the difference between what sounds interesting and what people actually need. Tokenization is a genuinely compelling technology: the idea of representing real-world assets as digital tokens, making them more liquid, more accessible, and more programmable. But when we were working with clients, none of them were excited about tokenization for its own sake. They were excited about what they thought tokenization meant: the ability to accept payments from anywhere, in any currency, through a compliant channel. The infrastructure connecting crypto and fiat was the actual gap.

The second lesson was about staying close to what clients are actually doing versus what you think they should be doing. We could have pushed forward with tokenization because it was technically interesting and fit the vision we’d articulated. Instead, we paid attention to what people were asking us for. The discipline of being willing to hear what clients actually need and respond to it is something we’ve carried into how we build SquareFi. The infrastructure and features didn’t come from hypotheses alone, but from real clients hitting real walls.

The company has already processed significant transaction volume through its platform. What have been the most surprising insights or challenges that emerged from early real-world usage?

In terms of challenges, I’d say how much of the friction wasn’t technical at all. When you’re operating between traditional banking and crypto, both sides tend to look at each other with suspicion. Banks see crypto and think risk. Crypto-native clients see banking requirements and think of bureaucracy. Early on, a significant part of our work was simply bridging that perception gap: explaining to bank compliance teams what stablecoins actually are, and helping crypto-native clients understand that KYC isn’t the enemy. The only way to understand where the real walls are is to start building and hit them yourself.

As for a surprising insight, it was how quickly demand came from industries we hadn’t specifically targeted. Marketing agencies, travel companies, payroll platforms, and other businesses with no direct crypto connection began reaching out because they needed international banking infrastructure, and traditional options weren’t meeting their needs. That told us the problem we were solving was far bigger than the crypto-native market and became one of the reasons we’ve decided to launch Mosta, which is a modern account for global payments, built for business and individuals operating internationally. It’s our customer-facing banking platform built entirely on SquareFi’s infrastructure.

Looking ahead, what developments in global financial infrastructure do you believe will have the greatest impact on how businesses move money internationally over the next decade?

The first is the establishment of stablecoin infrastructure at the institutional level. The next decade is about regulatory clarity consolidating globally, which will unlock a wave of adoption from financial institutions that have been waiting for the framework before committing. Once that happens, stablecoin settlement rails become a standard infrastructure.

The second is the collapse of the correspondent banking model for most cross-border payments. The current system, where a payment hops through multiple intermediary banks before reaching its destination, exists because there was no better option. But over the next decade, I expect direct settlement rails such as stablecoins to displace a significant portion of correspondent banking volume.

The third is the emergence of financially autonomous agents operating at scale. We’re moving toward a world where AI agents will start managing treasury positions, routing payments across jurisdictions, negotiating settlement terms, and optimizing for cost and speed in real time, all without human intervention at each step. Infrastructure will slowly become more about what agents need.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit SquareFi.