Emerging markets have no shortage of growth potential — but they have a massive shortage of something else: USD liquidity. Without it, even the most promising businesses struggle to scale. Joining me to break this down is Berhan Kongel, Co-Founder and CEO of Keyrails. Berhan, thank you so much for joining us.
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Why is USD liquidity so critical for emerging markets and what happens to businesses when they cannot access it?
A lot of things happen in a chain reaction. Take a business selling car tires in Lagos, Nigeria — business is good, they are importing from China. They have money in Nigerian naira, but they need USD to pay their Chinese suppliers. The lack of USD causes delays in payments. And on the other side, the Chinese suppliers may be dealing with working capital shortfalls of five to ten million dollars, forcing them to apply for credit lines just to continue operations. The system generates cascading delays and fees for all parties. That is how critical USD access and USD clearing access is — especially in emerging markets.
Why is this liquidity so scarce in the first place? What is actually broken in the current system?
The most fundamental problem is underwriting. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, there is a trade financing shortage of $140 billion. It is not that we do not have $140 billion to deploy. The problem is that we cannot underwrite at reasonable risk levels. Most emerging markets do not have companies like Equifax where you can connect via API and get a creditworthiness score. You have to build your own underwriting from scratch, which takes time and experience. And most transactions in emerging markets are still paper-based — or at best a PDF, which has no digital context outside of the document itself. That is what creates the liquidity shortage.
How does Keyrails actually solve that problem?
We start with payments. We build direct access to Swift and USD clearing in the United States for emerging markets — starting in Africa and now expanding to Latin America, South Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. That gives us enormous visibility and data collection across all the transactions originating from emerging markets and ending in export hubs like China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. We use that data to streamline underwriting — giving lenders the information they need to fund transactions they previously could not reach. That is how we connect outside liquidity from the United States to emerging markets that have a liquidity shortage, which creates a significant opportunity for both liquidity providers and originators.
What role do stablecoins play in closing this gap?
Do not think of stablecoins as currencies. Think of them as a different type of rail. In traditional finance, payments are completely separate from liquidity, which is completely separate from underwriting — all siloed, all requiring enormous plumbing and connectivity to get anything done. In stablecoin infrastructure, all of these can be merged into the same programmable protocol. It is much easier to build, and you can construct far more customised solutions for complex problems. That is where the real opportunity is. We are using stablecoins primarily for treasury movements, but the infrastructure also allows us to connect currencies to tokenised money market funds backed by T-bills, which can hold collateral for lending. That is the power of the model.
Where does Keyrails go in the next five to ten years?
What we see is bank accounts slowly evolving into wallets. A bank account fundamentally holds the liability of a single bank. A wallet can hold the liability of multiple issuers — and also the liability of all tokenised assets. Tokenised T-bills, tokenised real estate, tokenised logistics ships. We are connecting these wallets to Tier 1 Swift clearing, Tier 1 clearing houses, and most recently trade financing as well. Our clients — importers and others — no longer need to hold multiple bank accounts in multiple jurisdictions. They only need a wallet with USDC or other stablecoins, and we connect them to the rest of the correspondent banking system and to all the money market funds and assets inside the United States. That is where we see the world going.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
You are welcome. Thank you.
