Teymour Farman-Farmaian, Co-founder and CEO of Higlobe – Interview Series

Teymour Farman-Farmaian, Co-founder and CEO of Higlobe, is a seasoned technology and fintech executive whose career spans leadership roles across some of the most influential digital platforms of the past two decades. Prior to founding Higlobe in 2020, he held senior positions at Google, where he led international operations and partnerships, and later played key roles at Zynga and Spotify, helping scale revenues and drive user growth during critical expansion phases, including the launch of Spotify in the United States. He also led U.S. operations at Xapo, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin custodians prior to its acquisition by Coinbase, giving him deep exposure to digital assets and global financial infrastructure. With a foundation that combines growth strategy, partnerships, and fintech innovation, Farman-Farmaian has focused Higlobe on solving one of the most persistent challenges in the global economy: efficient cross-border payments for the modern remote workforce.

Higlobe is a fintech platform designed to simplify and reduce the cost of international payments, particularly for contractors and businesses outside the United States receiving funds from U.S. clients. The platform provides users with dedicated U.S. receiving accounts, allowing them to get paid via ACH or wire transfers and withdraw funds to their local bank accounts with near-instant settlement and low foreign exchange fees. By leveraging stablecoin-based infrastructure, Higlobe enables faster, more transparent transfers compared to traditional banking systems, while operating within a regulated framework. Positioned at the intersection of fintech and digital assets, Higlobe reflects a broader shift toward programmable money and global financial accessibility, helping freelancers and businesses move funds across borders with significantly reduced friction, delays, and costs.

What lessons have you learned from your past experiences, including living in Iran, Venezuela and your involvement at Google, Zynga, Spotify, and Xapo?

I have been called “two-revolution Teymour.” I was born in Iran, had to leave, immigrated to Venezuela, and was expropriated there again too, and ended up in the USA. So, I understand the problems having to do with loss of wealth and due to inflation. You need three things to have financial security:

• Protection from inflation
• Portable
• Private

What we’ve created with Higlobe provides these three pillars. The global savings account protects users from inflation of their sovereign currency. The currency is portable, meaning you can spend the money where you want. Finally, it’s compliantly private.

Additionally, while at Google, Zynga, Spotify, and Xapo, I was working with a lot of overseas contractors, as was my co-founder Jeff Bolton. Between the two of us, we understood the problems with this side of the payments industry. Namely, transferring money from one country to another and from one currency to another was expensive and time-consuming. This is the global and fast-growing problem that Higlobe solves for.

Higlobe is launching a regulated global payments platform that blends traditional banking infrastructure with stablecoin rails. How does this hybrid model work at a corporate and infrastructure level, and what advantages does it offer over legacy banking systems and crypto-native alternatives?

Higlobe pioneered what is now known as the “stablecoin sandwich” back in 2020. Bank-in, bank-out, stablecoin in the middle for settlement. Let me detail this:

Our users are not crypto experts. They do not want to fiddle with wallets, drives, blockchain seeds. They just want their money transferred, in the same way as they have wanted it for thousands of years. They care about getting the funds fast, inexpensively and securely.  Whether it is by camel, telegraph, or stablecoin is irrelevant.

So Higlobe enables users to receive funds in cash into a US account. From there, we convert it into stablecoin and then, with our clients’ authorization, we will deliver the funds to our users’ local bank instantly (less than a minute in most cases) at the lowest cost guaranteed.

On top of that we offer the security of an audited Soc2 Type2 process so our users can sleep well knowing that we run an institutional-grade operation.

Cross border payments remain slow and expensive, often relying on multiple intermediaries. What are the key inefficiencies you are removing, and how does Higlobe enable near instant, low cost transfers in practice?

There are two traditional ways to move funds internationally.

First is SWIFT. SWIFT is a messaging network used by banks that tracks funds as the funds move bank-to-bank until the funds reach the destination. The problem with SWIFT is that it is expensive and slow. It takes 3-5 days, and each bank on the way takes their pound of flesh.

The second is what is known as “netting.” With netting you hold cash in 50 banks in 50 countries and you move funds in and out of these accounts as needed. At the end of week you do one big settlement payment (“netting”) to close-out everyone’s debit and credits. This system allows near instant transfers, but is expensive as you have to hold a lot of cash balances.

What is amazing about stablecoin is that it allows us to be in the money movement business, without moving any money! Stablecoins enable Higlobe to move not the money, but the ownership rights to the money. It works in the following way.

We tie up a user’s USD in a regulated US account and issue stablecoin to that user. The stablecoin is nothing more than digital tokens representing their funds. It costs us nothing to issue the tokens. When the user wants to move the funds home…say to Mexico, we transfer his/her tokens onchain to the wallet belonging to our local partner. The ownership rights to the cash have been moved from our user to our local partner. Our partner has now been settled and can cash in those tokens for the USD in the USA. Then, our local partner transfers the appropriate number of MX Pesos from Mexico City to our clients account in Guadalajara.

So, Higlobe can now deliver funds near-instantly, 24X7X365 at near zero cost.

Stablecoins are central to your model. What role do they play behind the scenes, and how do they improve settlement speed, cost efficiency, and transparency compared to traditional fiat based systems?

The “stablecoin sandwich” that enables us to offer the fastest, lowest-fee transfers globally happens completely under-the-hood, invisible to the end-user. Essentially, a user deposits cash, which is converted into a regulated stablecoin like USDC. The stablecoin is sent instantly to a local bank partner, who then converts the stablecoin to the recipient’s local currency. This system eliminates the need for pre-funded accounts, driving marginal costs to zero and allowing us to offer a solution that is ten times faster than incumbent options.

Regulatory uncertainty continues to be a barrier for many enterprises considering stablecoin adoption. How have you approached compliance, and how important is regulation in building trust with global businesses?

Compliance with regulations is incredibly important. I’ll point to the music industry as an example. In the age of illegal music downloading, Spotify still became dominant. They did this by forming partnerships with the music studios that legally owned the rights to the music and then offered music streaming to users via an easy-to-use platform that was subscription-based. This was in stark contrast to the Apple model, which charged users to download individual songs, the expense of which led savvy users to download music illegally with options like LimeWire. Spotify disrupted the industry by offering users a solution that was low cost, easy, and totally legal.

This is exactly what we are doing in the context of the money transfer industry. We partner with regulated local banks and use an under-the-hood stablecoin model to give users a way to convert money into their local currency instantly at virtually no cost.

We prioritize compliance and are unique in our space, having submitted to periodic Soc2Type2 audits.

Higlobe introduces the concept of a global account rather than a simple multi currency wallet. How does this shift change the way freelancers, contractors, and businesses manage cross border payments?

A multi-currency wallet is a place where you store “travel money.”

A Global Account is where you run your life. The shift is psychological and functional. By giving a contractor in Argentina or a developer in India a legitimate US receiving account, we are giving them a “financial home” in the world’s largest economy.”

They can receive payments, hold balances in USD to hedge against local inflation, and choose exactly when to move money into their local currency. It transforms them from a “remote worker” into a “global entity.”

This is a new product category, addressing the financial insecurity of 7 billion people who live in the Global South.

You helped scale consumer platforms like Spotify during its US expansion. How does building and scaling a fintech infrastructure company differ, particularly when dealing with liquidity, compliance, and global operations?

When you scale Spotify, if a song doesn’t play, it’s a nuisance. In fintech, if a payment doesn’t land, it’s a crisis. The “blast radius” of an error is much higher.

The biggest difference is the complexity of the “moving parts.” In consumer tech, you mostly control your stack. In global fintech, you are dancing with local regulators, liquidity providers, and banking partners in dozens of jurisdictions. You have to be comfortable with “extreme reliability.” You can’t just “move fast and break things.” You have to move fast and build things that are unbreakable.

Partnerships appear to be a key part of your strategy. How do regional integrations and local financial ecosystem partnerships accelerate global adoption and improve the user experience?

We don’t want to replace the local financial ecosystem, we want to supercharge it. By partnering with local instant-payment rails (like Pix in Brazil or SPEI in Mexico), we ensure that the “last mile” of the transaction is as fast as the “middle mile.”

These partnerships are vital because trust is local. A user might trust Higlobe with their USD, but they need to know they can pay their electricity bill or buy groceries in their local currency instantly. Integration with local players makes that seamless.

Stablecoins are increasingly being explored by major financial institutions. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for stablecoins in mainstream finance, and what risks still need to be addressed?

The biggest opportunity is the death of the “T+2” settlement cycle. There is no reason in 2026 why it should take two days for a trade or a payment to settle. Mainstream finance will eventually move entirely to “atomic settlement,” where the payment and the asset change hands at the exact same time.

The risk is “reserve quality.” For stablecoins to be mainstream, they must be backed by the highest-quality, most transparent liquid assets. That’s why we exclusively use USDC, which is 1:1 backed by cash and US Treasuries because our users’ livelihoods depend on that stability.

You have a track record of working with category defining companies. What do you look for in founders today in fintech and crypto, and what traits separate those who succeed from those who struggle?

I look for ‘Infrastructure Thinkers’ who prioritize ‘Product-Compliance Fit.’ In the early stages of a tech cycle, people build toys; in the mature phase, they build tools. The winners today aren’t the ideologues ignoring regulation, they are the ones with the audacity to improve the financial system while respecting its complexity.

Success in fintech belongs to those obsessed with the ‘boring’ stuff: compliance, unit economics, and security. It’s easy to build a flashy app, but incredibly hard to build a regulated bridge between the old world and the new. The best founders don’t get lost in the ‘coolness’ of the blockchain, they stay focused on the user, like the developer who worked 60hr/wk and just wants to get paid without being robbed by a 4% fee. If you solve for the human first, the technology will follow.

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