EBM EXPERT ANALYSIS BY Shah Ramezani, Co-Founder and CEO of stablecoin payments infrastructure provider, Noah
The Real Problem With Cross-Border Payments
Noah raised $22 million in seed funding last June — a significant round for a payments infrastructure play. The problem it set out to solve, however, is not the one most people assume.
“The cross-border problem isn’t speed,” Ramezani says. “That’s the symptom people talk about because it’s visible. The real problem is that the existing system is built on correspondent banking, which means every dollar moving from country A to country B passes through a chain of intermediaries, each one taking a fee, holding the money for a day, and applying their own FX spread. You don’t see most of that cost — it’s hidden in the rate.”
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SubscribeA faster version of the existing system doesn’t fix that. It just moves the same friction more quickly. SWIFT GPI is faster than legacy SWIFT, but it still rides on the same nostro accounts, the same correspondent relationships and the same opacity. Different rails were needed.
“Stablecoins solved a specific thing: settlement,” he explains. “Once value is denominated in a regulated digital dollar with audited reserves, it moves on internet infrastructure rather than banking infrastructure. That collapses the chain from five intermediaries to roughly zero. The pricing becomes transparent because the FX leg is a market transaction, not a hidden margin. And the money is programmable — which matters more than people realise, because it lets you build orchestration on top, things like conditional payouts and automated treasury rebalancing, that you simply can’t do on top of SWIFT.”
The choice of stablecoins was not ideological. “We didn’t pick them because we are proponents of digital assets. We picked them because they were the only thing that actually changed the underlying physics of how money moves.”
What Actually Changed in the Last 18 Months
Stablecoins have been discussed as a payment solution for years. Adoption always seemed to stall. The question worth asking is what changed — and Ramezani’s answer goes well beyond technology.
“The biggest shift, and the one most people downplay, is that the US government changed its mind about what stablecoins are,” he says. “For a long time, the assumption in Washington was that stablecoins were a crypto problem to contain. That view has flipped, and the reason is structural.”
The numbers make the policy logic clear. Tether alone holds around $120 billion in US Treasuries. Circle holds roughly $30 to $40 billion more. Together, the stablecoin sector holds close to $150 billion in short-dated US government debt — placing it ahead of Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Germany on the list of foreign holders.
“Once you see that, the policy logic becomes obvious,” Ramezani says. “Every dollar of stablecoin issued is a dollar of demand for short-dated Treasuries and a dollar of dollar dominance extended onto the internet. The US government realised that regulating stablecoins to scale, rather than regulating them to die, is directly in the national interest. That’s what the GENIUS Act is really about — not crypto policy. It’s Treasury policy and monetary policy dressed up as crypto policy.”
As we have examined in our coverage of how the CLARITY Act is reshaping the stablecoin regulatory landscape in the US and Europe, the regulatory shift is not incidental to the commercial story — it is the commercial story. The virtuous cycle Ramezani describes — clearer regulation producing institutional adoption, adoption pushing more dollars into stablecoins, those dollars buying more Treasuries, making the sector more strategically important, producing more supportive regulation — is already in motion.
The institutional signals are unambiguous. Visa is settling on stablecoins. Mastercard has published its roadmap. Stripe acquired Bridge and is building its own settlement layer with Tempo. “When the biggest payment companies in the world tell their boards they’re moving onto stablecoin rails,” Ramezani says, “that’s the institutional permission slip everyone else was waiting for.”
Who Actually Benefits
Noah operates across 70-plus countries, serving fintechs, neobanks and crypto exchanges. The end-user question — who actually benefits from better cross-border infrastructure — is more nuanced than it first appears.
“We’re a B2B infrastructure company,” Ramezani says plainly. “We don’t onboard end users. We power the companies that do. Our customers are the fintechs in São Paulo, the neobanks in Lagos, the payroll platforms paying contractors in 40 countries.”
The first benefit is cost. Moving money into and out of emerging markets has always carried a meaningful fee — often a multiple of what the same transfer would cost domestically in a developed country. Stablecoin rails compress that significantly. “The saving doesn’t accrue to us, and it usually doesn’t all accrue to our customer. Most of it gets passed through to the freelancer or the family member receiving the money. The marginal beneficiary is almost always the person at the end of the chain who used to be the one absorbing the friction.”
The second benefit is more consequential. “Most of the world doesn’t have a stable currency,” Ramezani observes. “People in Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil have watched their savings get eaten by inflation for years. The dollar is the asset they want. It has the strongest brand in financial history. Everyone understands it, everyone trusts it — and almost no one in those countries can hold it freely.”
Stablecoins change that equation. A digital dollar in a wallet on a phone is, for the first time, accessible to anyone with internet access. “Someone in Lagos can be paid in dollars, save in dollars, transact in dollars, without ever touching a US bank. That’s not a remittance use case. That’s an entire population getting access to a store of value the rest of the world has taken for granted for decades.”
It is, as we noted in our analysis of how BlackRock’s private credit expansion is reshaping access to capital in emerging markets, a structural shift in who gets access to the financial instruments that developed-world investors treat as default. “B2B is the business model,” Ramezani says. “Cheaper cross-border is the obvious benefit. But the bigger story — the one that will look most consequential in ten years — is that stablecoins are quietly giving billions of people a way to hold and use dollars when their own currency is failing them. That’s not financial inclusion in the soft sense. That’s financial empowerment on a scale the old system was never going to deliver.”
Terra Luna and Why the Category Comparison Is Wrong
The early stablecoin era was defined by legitimate security concerns and high-profile collapses. Terra Luna remains the obvious reference point. Ramezani’s response to the institutional scepticism that lingers is to separate the categories.
“Terra wasn’t a stablecoin in any meaningful sense. It was an algorithmic experiment that pretended a token could hold a dollar peg through maths and incentives, without any actual dollars backing it. When confidence broke, there was nothing to redeem against. That isn’t what USDC or USDT are. Those are fiat-backed, with reserves you can audit, held with regulated custodians, redeemable one-for-one. It’s the difference between a savings account and a Ponzi.”
Crucially, the regulatory frameworks now in force would prevent a Terra-scale collapse from recurring. “The GENIUS Act in the US and MiCA in Europe both require stablecoins to be fully backed by high-quality liquid reserves, to publish attestations, and to operate through licensed entities. Algorithmic, undercollateralised stablecoins are effectively excluded from the regulated perimeter. We couldn’t work with something like Terra today even if we wanted to. It wouldn’t qualify as a stablecoin under any of the jurisdictions we operate in.”
Once that distinction is established, the conversation with traditional institutions becomes straightforward. “A traditional institution doesn’t need to believe in crypto to use stablecoin rails. They need three things: clear regulatory treatment, a credible issuer with audited reserves, and a counterparty that’s licensed and operationally serious. All three exist now.”
The credibility question, Ramezani argues, is largely already answered by who is in the market. “When BlackRock is issuing a tokenised money market fund and Visa is settling on USDC, institutions aren’t being asked to be pioneers anymore. They’re being asked not to be late.”
How Regulation Became a Competitive Advantage
The GENIUS Act is moving through the US Senate. MiCA is in full effect across the EU. Ramezani’s assessment of what regulatory clarity means for Noah is counterintuitive.
“For years the bigger problem wasn’t strict regulation. It was regulatory ambiguity. Under the previous SEC posture in the US, nobody knew exactly what was permitted, what was a security, what kind of stablecoin activity was going to invite enforcement next quarter. That kind of uncertainty makes everything harder.”
The consequences were tangible. Customer onboarding slowed because compliance teams couldn’t approve counterparties whose legal status might shift. Banking partnerships stalled because ambiguity is a reason for conservative institutions to say no. Even hiring was affected — senior people don’t join companies whose regulatory ground might shift under them.
“Clarity changes the conversation,” Ramezani says. “With MiCA in force and the GENIUS Act moving, our customers’ compliance teams can finally answer the question ‘what is this thing and how do we treat it.’ That unlocks deals that were sitting on the table for months.”
The second effect is structural and harder to replicate. Getting licensed in the US, Canada and Europe took 12 to 18 months and significant capital. “That’s a real moat. A well-funded competitor can replicate our API. They can’t replicate the licensing stack overnight.”
The compliance burden is real. MiCA is not a trivial lift. The GENIUS Act, depending on its final shape, will likely require stablecoin platforms to meet bank-like standards on reserves, audits and reporting. “For a two-person team trying to launch a stablecoin product out of a garage, it’s probably the end of that ambition. That’s not necessarily bad. Payments is not a category where you want garages.”
The risk Ramezani watches most carefully is regulatory capture. “Where the rules end up shaped to favour the largest incumbents and lock out infrastructure-layer companies like us — that’s a fight we’re paying close attention to in Brussels and Washington.” As we explored in our examination of how Europe’s tech sovereignty gamble is reshaping the regulatory landscape for financial infrastructure, the risk of incumbents shaping the rules in their own image is not theoretical. “So far the shape of the legislation has been reasonable. But it’s not done, and I wouldn’t take a victory lap yet.”
PULL QUOTE
“Every dollar of stablecoin issued is a dollar of demand for short-dated Treasuries and a dollar of dollar dominance extended onto the internet. The US government realised that regulating stablecoins to scale is directly in the national interest. The GENIUS Act is Treasury policy dressed up as crypto policy.”
Displacing SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard — Or Not
Noah’s mission is to set money free. The global payments incumbents — SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard — have decades of trust, regulatory relationships and network effects behind them. The question of how a seed-stage infrastructure company displaces that is one Ramezani reframes entirely.
“Displacement isn’t quite the right verb. Look at what happened with the telecom companies when the internet arrived. AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom didn’t go bust. They controlled their networks, had decades of customer trust, and the obvious prediction was that the open internet would destroy them. It didn’t. They adapted. Their business model changed, the network became open, voice and data became commoditised — but the incumbents repositioned around the parts of the stack that still made sense for them.”
The same transition is underway in payments. SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard are extraordinary pieces of infrastructure built to solve specific problems well. Card networks at point of sale. SWIFT for interbank messaging. “They aren’t going to disappear, and trying to replace them head-on would be a bad strategy. What’s happening is more interesting. A new layer is forming underneath and alongside the existing ones.”
Stablecoin settlement is that layer — handling B2B cross-border, treasury rebalancing, agent and machine payments, payouts to emerging markets. Things the card networks were never designed for, and that SWIFT does poorly. The incumbents see it. Visa is settling on stablecoins. Mastercard is integrating. SWIFT is piloting tokenised settlement. “They’re doing exactly what the telecoms did: noticing the shift, repositioning around it, figuring out how to be part of the new system rather than a casualty of it.”
For Noah, the advantage is not trust — it will never be trusted more than Mastercard. “Our advantage is that we’re built natively for the new substrate, we have licences in the markets that matter, and we’ve already moved real volume across 70-plus countries. Every transaction we settle adds to a flywheel they don’t have — data and routing intelligence specific to stablecoin corridors.” As we noted in our analysis of how Visa and Mastercard are navigating the stablecoin transition in Europe, the incumbents who move early are likely to emerge larger on the other side. Those who don’t will lose share in the corridors that matter most.
What Payments Looks Like in Ten Years
If Noah succeeds at what it is trying to do, global cross-border payments in 2036 feel like sending a WhatsApp message. You stop thinking about it. No pre-funding, no three-day settlement, no hidden FX. It just moves.
“If we’ve done our job right, billions of people use Noah-powered rails every week and have no idea who we are. That’s the goal. Nobody knows which network is carrying their WhatsApp messages either, and nobody cares.”
Three things change underneath. Money becomes genuinely programmable — a container clears customs in Singapore and the supplier in Vietnam gets paid the same second, the rules baked into the payment. An AI agent buys compute on its owner’s behalf and settles in real time, no human in the loop. Payroll runs in seconds, in whatever currency the contractor actually wants. “Most of the interesting use cases in the next decade haven’t been invented yet, because nobody could build them on top of SWIFT. They’ll look like software, not banking.”
The dollar goes internet-native. A worker in Lagos or Buenos Aires or Istanbul who can hold and spend dollars from her phone will. “Her local currency has been failing her for years. For the first time, weak currencies face actual competition. Central banks in those markets are going to have a very interesting decade. Some will modernise. Some will try to clamp down and find out you can’t put the internet back in the box.”
And the cost stack collapses. Hidden FX spreads, correspondent margins, wire fees, multi-day float — all of it. “That value doesn’t disappear. It just stops getting skimmed off the top.”
The losers are structural: correspondent banks, which are the toll booths on a highway that no longer needs them; the hidden-FX-spread business, which transparency eliminates; payment networks in B2B cross-border and treasury, where stablecoin rails are simply better suited. “Consumer point-of-sale is theirs to keep for a long time. The rest is up for grabs.”
Central banks of countries with weak currencies face the most profound challenge. “The monopoly they’ve had on the unit of account inside their own borders gets challenged for the first time. Nobody’s really talking about this yet. In five years it’ll be the story.”
The winners are the people the current system treats worst. The freelancer in Manila waiting five days for her invoice. The Kenyan business paying more in bank fees than it earns in margin. The migrant worker whose transfer takes 7% off the top. “These are the people quietly subsidising the old system. They get most of it back.”
The telecom parallel is the one Ramezani returns to. Carriers organised exactly the way banks are today — Brazil to the US to the UK to India, each one charging, each one slowing things down. “Then Skype showed up. Two people talking directly, peer to peer, no carriers in the middle. The whole relay model collapsed in under a decade.” Payments are at the Skype moment now. The relay model is identical. Stablecoins collapse the chain.
As we examined in our coverage of how AI agents are transforming financial services and what hedge funds are already doing about it, the convergence of programmable money and autonomous systems is the combination that makes the next decade in financial infrastructure genuinely unpredictable — and genuinely consequential. “This isn’t ‘we win, they lose,'” Ramezani says. “It’s a re-organisation. Our job is to be one of the companies that defines the new layer — and to make sure the value of the change actually reaches the people it was supposed to reach, not back into the pockets of the intermediaries it was meant to route around. That part isn’t automatic. It’s the harder half of the work.”
RELATED READS:
- The CLARITY Act: What the New Stablecoin Regulation Means for Crypto, Banks and European Fintech — Washington has stopped trying to contain stablecoins. Understanding why changes everything about how you read the next five years of payments regulation.
- Visa, Mastercard and Europe: The Payment Giants Navigating a Stablecoin World — The incumbents are moving. The question is whether they move fast enough to define the new layer before infrastructure players like Noah do it for them.
- AI Agents Are Coming for the Call Centre. Hedge Funds Are Already Positioned — The convergence of programmable money and autonomous AI systems is the financial infrastructure story most analysts are still underweighting.
