Stablecoins were supposed to cut out the middleman in cross-border payments but a working paper published by the Bank for International Settlements last week finds they do not remove intermediaries — they replace them. But who captures the value and who gets to play? Anyflo is betting the value sits in the orchestration layer. Backed by Mist and Labs, the team behind the Ethereum blockchain, it came out of stealth this month and is now testing with selected customers. Founder and CEO Lola Oyelayo-Pearson joins us now. Lola, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
You have just come out of stealth and started testing with selected partners. What are those businesses actually trying to fix?
The number one problem they are trying to fix is B2B payments across borders. We think of payments as a solved problem — there are very big companies like Stripe that drive a lot of transaction volume. But when you are a small business operating across multiple countries, moving money between you and your counterparties is still really hard. The biggest issues are limits — businesses cannot trade in tens of thousands — and speed. It can take multiple days to send and receive, which is the difference between being able to deliver a service quickly or making a profit. Stablecoins offer a genuine fix because they fundamentally shift the rails that payments happen on.
The BIS paper argues stablecoins swap old middlemen for new ones. Where does the real saving come from?
It is replacing the rails. Old payment rails — even the more progressive remittance companies that make payments feel faster — still operate on infrastructure that is decades old. The money does not actually move quickly. Blockchain rails are instant. A typical dollar in the traditional system might travel 60 to 80 times around the world through various transactions. Within stablecoins you can multiply that significantly simply because it is not sitting in accounts waiting to settle. Yes — there are new middlemen. But they operate with tech that is instant, fast, reliable, and infinitely scalable. That is why stablecoins will dramatically alter the landscape.
Visa and Coinbase have both moved deeper into stablecoin payments. What stops them from doing what you do?
Even with Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe, there are still hundreds of payment companies doing very specific jobs. What we see is that B2B payments need specific use cases — you are not paying a supplier with a credit card, you are moving money between invoicing systems, sometimes large transactions, sometimes payroll. Those use cases are not satisfied by a centralised exchange like Coinbase — an employee is not trying to hold cryptocurrency, they just want to get paid. There is a huge gap in the vendor supply space for businesses that understand these use cases — not consumer plays, not card plays, but business payments, micro markets, emerging market requirements. That is where Anyflo steps in.
The UAE requires central bank licensing for payment services using virtual assets. Does that help Anyflo or narrow its room?
Both are the same thing. Regulatory clarity means a specific set of rules you can follow — you are either in or out of compliance. A lot of our potential customers want to operate within the rules and hold other licences that require them to stay compliant. The more governments that provide regulatory clarity, the more they enable businesses to access these new payment rails. The UAE did a great thing by maintaining sovereignty around stablecoin use. We need more regulatory clarity across MENA and globally — it is good for us and good for our customers.
Anyflo does not hold client funds. If a payment goes wrong, who is accountable?
We are. Always. We are accountable to our customers to make sure any operations that run through Anyflo are governed under the rules they require from us and that we set for ourselves — a very high bar for a payments business. We hold the same expectation from all our partners and vendors. You will never hear us say it was not us. If we are onboarding customers and we care what happens to them and their money, we will chase it down and address any issues as they occur. That is what it means to be a payments business.
Lola, thank you very much for joining us. We wish you a lot of success.
Thank you for having me.
