Tom Borgers, CEO and Co-Founder of Walapay – Interview Series

Tom Borgers is CEO and co-founder of Walapay, which he built with his brother Dimitri to address the friction they experienced moving money across borders. Before Walapay, he worked at ConsenSys, initially alongside Joe Lubin in a chief of staff capacity and later in corporate development on investments and acquisitions. His experience across Ethereum infrastructure, stablecoins, and traditional financial systems informs his focus on combining modern payment rails with the regulatory and banking foundations needed to scale.

Walapay provides global money movement infrastructure that connects traditional banking rails and stablecoin networks through a single API. Its platform supports multicurrency accounts, collections, foreign exchange, and payouts, with a focus on local payment connectivity in emerging markets. The company serves fintechs, payment service providers, and other platforms that need to collect, hold, and send funds across borders while managing liquidity, compliance, and settlement.

What did you see that convinced you to build Walapay, and why rebuild rather than improve?

My brother Dimitri and I grew up moving between Belgium, the US, Japan and elsewhere in Europe, so we ran into cross-border payment friction early, both personally and professionally. Sending money home from the US to Europe, or from Europe to Japan, was a minor inconvenience for us. But it showed us how broken the underlying system is. That curiosity pulled us toward Bitcoin around 2013, then Ethereum, and eventually into stablecoins through my years at ConsenSys.

What became clear over time is that the problem isn’t the front end. Most global payment platforms stop at the correspondent bank and never touch the last mile, where money actually lands in a local account, in a local currency, through a local bank. That gap gets filled with rented licenses, aggregator partners, and margin taken in the middle. Those layers exist because of path dependence. They accumulated over decades because of how the banking rails were originally built. You can keep putting a nicer API on top of that, but you’re still inheriting every handoff underneath. We believed the better approach was to own the licensing and the bank relationships ourselves and connect them with modern rails, rather than rent someone else’s access.

What were investors responding to, and what milestones will this capital fund?

What I heard most consistently from our investors was the depth of the infrastructure. Lex at Generative Ventures focused on the fact that payments break down at the last mile and that we’re building that full stack ourselves, owning the licensing and banking relationships instead of renting them, and using whichever rails move money fastest and cheapest. Commerce Ventures pointed to our local rail coverage across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and to the measurable speed and cost improvements they’ve seen our customers get from putting volume through the platform.

The capital goes into three areas: licensing, banking, and people. Concretely, we’ll expand our licensing footprint, deepen our banking partnerships, and grow the team as we work toward bringing more banks and financial institutions directly onto modern payment rails.

What has driven $2.5 billion in volume so early, and which segments are strongest?

One quick clarification: the $2.5 billion is annualized TPV. That’s what we’re currently processing, across 180+ countries and 60+ currencies.

A big part of it comes down to where we started. Our first use case was helping companies in the US and Europe pay contractors and freelancers in emerging markets. Those payments often took four to seven days and carried meaningful FX costs. We started with the Philippines, then expanded into Southeast Asia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Asia, Latin America and Africa. That gave us real coverage in markets that are hard to reach through traditional rails.

Today, the strongest demand comes from platforms rather than individual businesses. On one side, fintechs like remittance companies, neobanks, and dollar-access apps serving users in volatile-currency markets. On the other, PSPs and merchant acquirers who want instant settlement into multi-currency accounts and real-time repatriation of funds into emerging markets. We work with customers including Kast, Nuvei, and Bastion. Early on, coverage was what won deals, things like CNY and competitive Mexico rates. Increasingly, as customers get more sophisticated, it’s API reliability and flexibility.

What does “from the rails up” mean, and how is it different from aggregators?

It means we go deeper into the stack than most platforms. A lot of global payment APIs hide an infrastructure maze. Underneath one clean endpoint there may be dozens of providers, each adding handoffs, dependencies, and margin. Even large cross-border providers are often stitching together point solutions underneath.

Operationally, “from the rails up” means investing directly in licensing, banking relationships, compliance infrastructure, liquidity, and local payment connectivity in the markets that matter most, and owning our API down to the metal. Technically, it means one API endpoint that lets customers move money across currencies, from fiat to stablecoin and back, with local rail integrations behind it. The difference for customers is control. When something goes wrong, there are fewer layers between them and the fix, and less margin being extracted along the way.

How much do you control directly versus through partners, and how does that affect cost, reliability, and speed?

We’re deliberate about where we go deep. In strategic markets, particularly emerging markets, we invest in our own licensing, direct banking relationships, compliance, and liquidity. We also work with banking and digital asset infrastructure partners, for example to support flexible custody models, because different customers have different regulatory and operational needs.

Control matters in a few concrete ways. On accounts, we can offer named accounts held under the customer’s own name at the bank, not just FBO-style virtual accounts. Many businesses prefer that for ownership and compliance reasons, and the Synapse situation showed the risks when reconciliation and compliance expectations between a bank and a fintech aren’t aligned. On cost, every intermediary you remove is margin you don’t pay. On speed and reliability, fewer handoffs means fewer points of failure, which is how we can offer instant settlement and same-day repatriation into markets that traditional rails struggle to reach.

Where do stablecoins beat correspondent banking, and where do bank rails still win?

I think of stablecoins as a financial instrument, not just a payment token. Their advantages are clearest in a few places. Speed is the obvious one, since settlement can happen in real time instead of days. Cost is another, because they collapse FX and intermediary layers. And access matters a lot. Stablecoins give people and businesses in volatile-currency markets access to dollars, and they give platforms access to emerging markets that are hard to reach through correspondent banking. They also open up capital efficiency, since idle balances can be converted into yield-generating digital dollar instruments, with the yield shared back to the customer.

But the banking system isn’t going away anytime soon. Roughly 90% of B2B payment flows globally still run through banks. Most payments still start or end in a bank account, in a local currency. Many financial institutions are only now getting the regulatory clarity to use these rails directly. So our view is that the transaction should determine the rail. We use banking rails, stablecoins, and multiple liquidity sources based on what delivers the best combination of speed, cost, reliability, and compliance for each payment. Stablecoins are part of the infrastructure, not the product identity.

What are the biggest barriers to international expansion, and how do you choose jurisdictions?

The biggest barrier is that every new market can become a new infrastructure project. Licensing requirements, banking access, FX liquidity, account structures, payment rails, and operational expectations all vary dramatically from country to country, especially in emerging markets. The second is compliance. Payment companies that outgrow their compliance programs eventually hit the limit of what banks and regulators will support. That’s why we build KYC/KYB, transaction monitoring, and bank-partner requirements into the platform from the start, so compliance scales with volume instead of becoming the ceiling.

The regulatory landscape is also moving. Europe moved first with frameworks like MiCA, and we’re now seeing real change in the US. In some ways that adds obstacles, but mostly it clarifies the rules so financial institutions can get comfortable. On choosing markets, we’ve always worked back from customer demand. We entered the Philippines because a customer had real flows there, and we expanded from there based on where our customers needed us.

Where are the largest inefficiencies, and what’s most vulnerable to replacement?

The biggest inefficiency is intermediation. A single cross-border payment can pass through four or five banks and PSPs before it settles, each adding fees, delays, and points of failure. The second is trapped capital. Of roughly $190 trillion in cross-border flows, about $4 trillion sits locked up in pre-funded accounts at any given time just to make cross-border trade work. That’s value that should be freed up.

The parts of the stack most at risk are the intermediaries providing narrow point solutions along the chain, the layers that exist because of how banking rails were historically built rather than because they add real value. Hidden FX margin is another. But I see this as much more of an opportunity than a wreckage story. When you collapse those layers, you open up room to build entirely new financial products on top.

How has ConsenSys shaped your thinking?

I joined ConsenSys around the end of 2017, initially working closely with Joe Lubin in a chief of staff capacity. That gave me a view across the whole portfolio, including MetaMask and Infura. I was part of the team that restructured ConsenSys from an incubator into a technology company, and then spent time in corporate development on investments and acquisitions.

That period shaped me in a few ways. First, I saw early stablecoins like DAI emerge and understood the potential. But I also saw that building scaled stablecoin payment systems wasn’t yet possible, both technologically and, more importantly, from a regulatory standpoint. That taught me that technology alone doesn’t win. You need the regulatory and banking foundations too. Second, it made me pragmatic about blockchains. We’re largely agnostic, and we use Ethereum and its layer 2s, Solana, and Stellar depending on the use case. What matters is whether it works and whether the supporting ecosystem exists. The person getting paid in an emerging market doesn’t care which chain is underneath.

What does the payments stack look like in five years if your thesis plays out?

I think the distinction between fiat rails and blockchain rails will matter less and less to the people using them. Next-generation rails will become first-class financial infrastructure alongside the banking system, and businesses should be able to move money globally without having to think about the rails underneath.

The biggest shift will come when banks and financial institutions start using these rails directly, rather than relying on companies like us to bridge the two worlds through layers of abstraction. As that happens, a lot of the intermediation we’ve had to build can collapse, and the cost, speed, and access benefits flow through to the people actually sending and receiving money. We’re also preparing for new kinds of demand. Rather than building a separate agent-specific product, we see AI-driven money as another market our infrastructure is already built to serve, so autonomous agents won’t enter as second-class citizens. Today we’re still working with early adopters, so there’s a lot of road ahead.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to explore cross-border payment infrastructure, local banking connectivity, and the role of stablecoins in global money movement should visit Walapay.