Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO and Founder of Borderless.xyz – Interview Series

I have spent years working and building in stablecoins and described them as a solution to global payments while the actual plumbing stays broken and fragmented. When I was working on TrueUSD, we had a great asset – dollar-denominated, redeemable, and on-chain. But the moment you needed to get that value into or out of a local bank account in specifically emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, West Africa, or Latin America, you hit a wall. There was no clean path. Every corridor was its own project: a new legal entity, a new banking relationship, a new compliance framework, months of integration work.

The insight was simple but uncomfortable: stablecoins are inherently global instruments trapped inside a fragmented, locally-licensed infrastructure. The asset travels instantly. The rails don’t. Every company that wants to use stablecoins for payouts, collections, or treasury has to independently negotiate and integrate with dozens of local providers – each with different APIs, different KYC requirements, and different failure modes. They’re rebuilding the same infrastructure over and over. That’s the problem Borderless exists to solve: one connection into a network ofvetted, licensed local providers, so a company can move money in 95+ countries without rebuilding the stack every time they enter a new market.

Every week seems to bring new announcements about stablecoins transforming payments. From your perspective as both a builder and operator, how much of the current narrative matches reality on the ground?

The narrative is ahead of the reality, but not by as much as the skeptics say and in a different direction than most people think.

The hype focuses on speed and cost: stablecoins settle faster and cheaper than SWIFT. That part is largely true and real companies are capturing that value today. Where the narrative breaks down is in the last mile. Moving USDC from a wallet to a licensed local provider who can then pay into a Nigerian bank account or a Brazilian Pix account – that handoff is still messy, fragmented, and compliance-heavy. The stablecoin leg is solved. The fiat leg is not.

The other gap is reconciliation. Companies that have launched stablecoin payment programs come to us with serious operational pain: they can’t easily see balances across providers, they’re manually matching transactions, they’re getting surprised by provider outages mid-corridor. The asset is elegant. The operations around it are still early. We have built automated reconciliation and incredibly more intelligence tools for these gaps.

So the opportunity is real and I’d argue it’s bigger than the market currently prices but the companies winning will be the ones who treat the fiat infrastructure as a first-class engineering problem, not an afterthought.

You’ve argued that many founders underestimate the complexity of launching in new markets. What are the most common surprises companies encounter when they begin integrating local payment, banking, and compliance partners?

First, licensing is not portable. A company signs with a provider who lists ten countries and assumes they’ve “solved” a region. Then they discover the license in Colombia doesn’t cover their specific use case – payroll disbursements and merchant settlements are often treated differently – or that Nigerian coverage runs through a sub-partner with its own SLAs. The map looks covered but the actual capability is more nuanced than the sales deck suggested.

Second, reliability requires active management. The providers we work with are genuinely capable and many are building real infrastructure in markets that are hard to operate in. But local payment infrastructure is complex, and even the best providers have moments where a corridor slows down or a banking partner does scheduled maintenance at an inconvenient time. That’s not a knock on the providers – it’s the nature of operating across dozens of jurisdictions with local banking dependencies in each one. The mistake founders make is treating provider selection as a one-time decision rather than an ongoing operational discipline. You need visibility into what’s happening across your network, benchmarks to know when something is drifting, and qualified backup options per corridor so you’re not scrambling during an incident.

Third, banking relationships are the hidden constraint. This one surprises almost everyone. The licensed provider you’re working with often sits on top of a single local banking partner. If that bank tightens its policy on stablecoin-related flows, or exits the space entirely, the corridor can go dark with limited warning. Founders don’t see the banking layer because it’s upstream of the provider relationship. But it’s the layer that ultimately determines whether money moves. The companies that scale well start asking about banking dependencies early but because understanding that structure lets you build redundancy in the right places.

Borderless.xyz now connects stablecoins, FX providers, wallets, and local banking rails across more than 90+ countries. What have you learned about the biggest bottlenecks preventing truly global, seamless money movement?

The stablecoin layer is largely solved. Assets move on-chain with speed and finality that legacy rails can’t touch. The bottlenecks live in three places: liquidity depth at the local level, provider interoperability, and data standardization.

Liquidity depth is the quiet one. A corridor can be technically open but operationally thin. A provider can handle $50K transactions smoothly but starts slipping on $500K because their local float isn’t sized for it. You don’t discover this in a sandbox. You discover it when a client tries to scale and suddenly the corridor that worked perfectly at low volume starts producing delays and failed settlements.

Provider interoperability is the structural issue nobody has fully solved. Every provider has its own API design, its own status codes, its own retry logic. When you’re orchestrating across 14+ providers, every inconsistency becomes operational overhead. We’ve spent enormous engineering effort building a normalization layer so clients don’t inherit that complexity, but that work shouldn’t need to exist if the industry had common standards.

Data standardization is underrated. Payment status reporting, balance visibility, reconciliation data – every provider reports differently. Treasurers at scaling companies are stitching together spreadsheets across providers to get a single view of their positions. That’s not a technology failure, it’s a standards failure, and it’s fixable.

Stablecoins are often promoted as a way to eliminate friction from cross-border payments. Where do you believe the remaining sources of friction actually exist today, and what still needs to be built?

Compliance is the first friction point. Every jurisdiction has its own KYC/AML requirements and none of them talk to each other. Fully verified in Brazil means unverified in the Philippines. Routine in Singapore means enhanced monitoring in Nigeria. There’s no global identity layer, so every corridor re-runs its own verification stack and compliance stays a per-market tax.

Settlement finality is the second. On-chain settlement is fast, but the fiat leg still runs on local clearing timelines. Pix is near-instant. Some African corridors take 24-48 hours. Instant settlement is real on one side of the transaction and irrelevant on the other.

Last-mile rails are the third. Cash-out infrastructure in high-growth markets is still fragmented: mobile money, agent networks, local banks, cash pickup points, all separate integrations. A payment that settles in stablecoin still has to reach a farmer in rural Kenya or a supplier in rural Indonesia. Blockchain innovation alone doesn’t solve that.

What still needs to be built is shared compliance infrastructure, wallet-to-fiat conversion at scale, and more licensed local operators capitalized to handle serious volume.

Many emerging markets are experiencing rapid stablecoin adoption. Which regions are currently the most underestimated by investors, and what trends are you seeing there that aren’t receiving enough attention?

Our Borderless FX Benchmark keeps surfacing as the real opportunities:

West Africa, particularly Nigeria and Ghana. The narrative fixates on volatility and regulatory friction, both real, but misses the demand underneath. Nigerians already use stablecoins for dollar savings, payroll, and cross-border trade. Behavioral, not speculative. The Benchmark shows the NGN corridor running some of the widest spreads we track, which is exactly why alternative rails gain traction. When traditional FX is that expensive, people route around it. And regulation is clarifying, not contracting.

Southeast Asia ex-Singapore. Everyone covers Singapore because it’s easy. The real opportunity is Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines: massive remittance flows, young populations, underpenetrated banking. The Benchmark surfaces high spread volatility across these corridors, exactly the inefficiency of stablecoin rails arbitrage.

Latin America outside Brazil. Brazil has Pix and the spotlight. But Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador are building real B2B trade finance and supplier payment use cases without that infrastructure. Our USD/COP and USD/PEN Benchmark reports show 50-100 bps spread differences across providers on the same trade. That delta is the business case.

We’ve seen major financial institutions increasingly embrace stablecoins. What do traditional banks still misunderstand about the opportunity, and what do crypto-native companies misunderstand about the realities of financial regulation?

Banks look at stablecoins and see a threat to deposit bases and correspondent relationships. Some of that is legitimate. What they underestimate is the demand signal from their own corporate clients. Treasury teams at mid-market companies are already using stablecoins for cross-border payments because the bank alternative is too slow and too expensive. Banks aren’t losing this to crypto companies, they’re losing it to inaction. The ones moving fastest see stablecoins as a settlement rail to build on, not a product that competes with them. The institutions that reframe “how do we defend against this” into “how do we offer this” are the ones that matter in five years.

Crypto-native companies make the opposite mistake: they treat compliance as friction to minimize rather than infrastructure to build. But that infrastructure layer, licensing, banking relationships, regulatory engagement, is exactly where both sides converge. It’s what banks already have and undervalue, and what crypto-native players need and underbuild. You can’t serve real enterprise volume without it.

Investors often focus on stablecoin market caps and transaction volumes. What metrics do you believe provide a more accurate picture of long-term adoption, utility, and network health?

Market cap and transaction volume tell you what’s happening but don’t always tell you why or whether it lasts. The signals I find more revealing are behavioral. What are stablecoins actually being used for?

The metrics I pay attention to: corridor-level spread compression over time — are the costs of moving money in specific markets actually declining as stablecoin rails mature? Settlement success rates, not just whether transactions initiate but whether they complete, on time, at the quoted rate. Provider redundancy per corridor – how many qualified, licensed operators exist for a given market? A corridor with one provider is fragile regardless of volume. Enterprise retention are the companies that launch stablecoin payment programs still running them 18 months ater, or did they quietly revert to SWIFT? Retention is the real signal of whether the operational reality matches the promise.

What I’d tell investors: find the companies that are publishing corridor-level performance data. The ones who can show you settlement rates, spread benchmarks, and uptime by market are the ones who’ve actually built something. The ones who only show you aggregate volume are still in the narrative business.

As governments around the world move toward clearer stablecoin regulations, how do you see the competitive landscape evolving between fintechs, crypto-native firms, and traditional financial institutions?

Regulatory clarity is a forcing function most of the industry underestimates. When rules are ambiguous, incumbents can afford to wait. When rules are clear, they have to act, and they have the distribution, balance sheets, and client relationships most fintechs don’t.

I would also expect a wave of acquisitions as banks and payment networks buy their way into stablecoin infrastructure rather than build it. The more interesting move, and we’re already seeing early signals, is crypto-native companies going the other direction: pursuing their own banking charters and payment licenses. It’s expensive, slow, and operationally demanding, but a company that holds its own licenses isn’t at the mercy of a partner that can reprice or exit.

Looking ahead five years, do you believe stablecoin-powered payment networks will complement existing systems such as Visa and SWIFT, or are we heading toward a more fundamental restructuring of global financial infrastructure? What milestones should investors be watching for over the next 12 to 24 months?

For the next 12 to 24 months, the milestones I’d watch: regulatory passage in major jurisdictions (the EU’s MiCA implementation, US federal stablecoin legislation if it moves, and how major emerging markets respond. First large enterprise stablecoin payment programs at scale). Complement vs. replace is not necessarily the right framing. The real question is which parts of the stack get displaced first, and by whom.

Correspondent banking, the network of bilateral relationships that makes cross-border SWIFT payments work,  is the most vulnerable. It’s expensive, slow, and the value it provides is increasingly replicable with stablecoin rails and licensed local partners. I don’t think SWIFT disappears, but I think the volume that flows through correspondent networks shrinks meaningfully over the next decade as stablecoin alternatives prove themselves at scale.

Visa and Mastercard are different. They’re consumer-facing networks with brand trust, chargeback infrastructure, and merchant acceptance that stablecoins don’t have a credible answer to yet. The more likely outcome there is integration, stablecoin settlement running underneath card network rails, rather than displacement.

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