Marcus Lim, Founder and CEO of PEXX – Interview Series

Marcus Lim is the Founder & CEO of PEXX, a borderless fintech startup launched in 2024 that offers USD-based accounts, stablecoin-backed interest, multi-country transfers, and a Visa-compatible card to enable seamless global financial access. He previously founded and led Oneflare to a successful exit and served as CEO of the crypto exchange Zipmex. With a background in management consulting and deep experience in fintech and crypto, Lim built PEXX around the vision of “money movement without borders,” using stablecoins and U.S. Treasuries to deliver modern, compliant banking alternatives.

PEXX is a borderless USD neo-bank founded in 2024 and based in Singapore, designed to serve a global audience of freelancers, digital nomads, startups, and expats. It offers instant digital USD accounts with no U.S. residency required, supports deposits in stablecoins or fiat, and enables transfers via SWIFT, ACH, Fedwire, or off-chain rails. Users can earn interest through tokenized U.S. Treasuries and spend globally with a Visa debit card. With strong regulatory backing and transparent FX fees, PEXX aims to simplify global money movement and modernize cross-border banking.

Let’s start at the beginning—what inspired you to find PEXX, and what gap in global finance were you most driven to solve?

After a decade working at the intersection of technology and finance, I kept running into the same road-block: moving US-dollar value across borders is still slow, opaque, and expensive. SWIFT wires take days; card networks add hidden FX mark-ups; and “multi-currency” neo-banks often trap you in their walled gardens. Meanwhile, the total capitalisation of USD-backed stablecoins has now surpassed US$240 billion, proving there is a 24/7, dollar-denominated rail that already clears hundreds of billions every month. PEXX was founded to marry that digital-asset rail with the safeguards, user experience, and regulatory rigour people expect from a bank—so anyone, anywhere can hold and spend dollars as easily as sending an email.

You’ve previously built successful ventures like Zipmex and Oneflare. How did those experiences shape your approach to launching PEXX?

1. User trust is earned, not assumed. Running Zipmex across five licensed jurisdictions taught me that security, treasury segregation, and live proof-of-reserves are non-negotiable when you handle other people’s money.
2. Regulation can be a competitive moat. Navigating licensing from AUSTRAC to MAS Singapore gave me the playbook for embedding compliance into engineering sprints instead of bolting it on later.
3. Consumer simplicity wins. Oneflare grew by making complex local-service procurement dead simple; I borrowed the same product discipline for PEXX—on-board with a passport, see the landed amount before you hit ‘send’, and track settlement in real time.
   

You’ve positioned PEXX as a ‘borderless USD neo-bank.’ What exactly does that mean in practical terms for a user?

It means you can open a fully-featured USD account from more than fifty countries on your phone, fund it with stablecoins or local currency, send dollars out via SWIFT, SEPA, FPS or to an on-chain address, and even spend through a virtual debit card—all without ever needing a U.S. residential address.

How does PEXX handle the process of off-ramping stablecoins into local bank accounts, and in what ways is this experience different from what users typically encounter with major crypto exchanges?

On PEXX you deposit USDT or USDC, we convert them 1-for-1 into fiat USD inside our ledger, then route that balance through our pre-funded nostro network and local clearing APIs. The result is cleared cash in, say, a UK Faster Payments or Philippine Peso InstaPay account in under a minute, with the FX spread shown up-front. A typical exchange forces you to sell the asset into USD, wait for funds to settle, then request a withdrawal that attracts an additional wire fee. We collapse those three steps into one.

You offer a daily interest account backed by tokenized U.S. Treasuries. How did you design this to feel both compliant and familiar to mainstream users?

We partner with a Singapore licenced vendor that wrap short-dated T-Bills in a bankruptcy-remote SPV, tokenise the interest entitlement on-chain, and display the yield as a simple dollar balance that ticks up daily—exactly the way a high-yield savings account does. Legally it is structured as a regulated cash-management trust, so customers receive the economic benefit of Treasuries without touching complex DeFi protocols.

Can you explain how PEXX achieves such fast settlement times—often under a minute—for global bank transfers?

We maintain pre-funded pools in fourteen currencies, use Fireblocks’ MPC network for sub-second stablecoin movements, and employ a routing engine that selects the fastest corridor for USD-to-PHP, SEPA Instant for USD-to-EUR, and so forth. Because we reconcile the crypto leg and the fiat leg simultaneously, users see finality in thirty to sixty seconds instead of the T+2 lag of correspondent banking.

PEXX uses stablecoins, blockchain settlement, tokenized T-Bills, and partners with firms like Fireblocks and Ripple. What’s the tech stack behind the scenes?

Think of PEXX as a three-layer stack. At the base sits an institutional-grade custody and key-management layer—using multi-party computation and hardware security modules—to keep digital assets and signing keys safe. Above that is our proprietary core banking engine, a cloud-native ledger that records balances in real time and can plug into several public blockchains as well as partner payment networks such as RippleNet. The top layer comprises our compliance and user-experience modules: automated KYC/KYT, real-time risk controls, and a GraphQL API that powers both the mobile app and third-party integrations. By abstracting these components behind a single API, we can swap or upgrade any element—custody provider, settlement rail, or analytics tool—without disrupting customers, keeping the architecture both resilient and future-proof.

How do you think about balancing speed, security, and compliance—especially as a regulated entity in both the U.S. and Australia?

We start with automated, third-party KYC: every new customer is onboarded through SumSub, which runs real-time ID verification, facial matching, watch-list screening, and adverse-media checks in the background. Because the entire flow is API-driven, most users clear compliance gates in under two minutes while we still capture a full audit trail for the regulators. Once an account is live, every transaction is scrutinised at two levels. First, on-chain analytics tools scan the blockchain leg for sanctioned addresses, mixer exposure, or other red-flags before funds can settle. Secondly, our internal engine examines the fiat side—profiling sender and receiver behaviour, jurisdictions, and velocity—to spot anomalies such as layering or structuring. 

What protections are in place for user funds—especially for those holding balances in USD or stablecoins? Are deposits insured or held with regulated custodians?

Fiat USD balances sit in ring-fenced client accounts at tier-one U.S. banks; stablecoins are held in Fireblocks vaults covered by a US $30 million crime policy; and the yield product’s underlying Treasuries are recorded in the name of a bankruptcy-remote SPV. While we are not FDIC-insured yet, every dollar liability is backed one-to-one—or better—by cash, Treasuries, or equivalent stablecoins that can be verified on-chain.

In a crowded fintech space, what does success look like for PEXX in the next 3 years?

Success is more than hitting growth targets; it is changing the way the world experiences money. By 2028 I want a café owner in Nairobi, a freelance designer in Manila, and a student in Bogotá all to treat PEXX as their default dollar account—opened in minutes, trusted implicitly, and used without ever thinking about borders. We will strive for a million monthly active users and more than ten billion US dollars in annual payment flow, yet the deeper ambition is to weave our rails so seamlessly into payroll, commerce and remittance platforms that blockchain settlement disappears into the background. We intend to operate under full electronic-money and virtual-asset licences on at least three continents, enable real-time payouts in over forty currencies, and run a carbon-negative footprint verified on-chain. If, within three years, sending value globally feels as effortless and ordinary as sharing a photo, then PEXX will have fulfilled its purpose.

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