Amara Okafor does not think of herself as someone in payments. She thinks of herself, on a good day, as someone who reduces the number of intermediaries between a dollar in Lagos and a euro in Madrid by one. On a great day, by two. "If I do my job well," she says, sitting in a glass-walled meeting room above Shoreditch, "nobody ever uses our product directly. It's the layer underneath the layer underneath the thing they actually open on their phone."
The opening question
The conversation begins where these always begin: with a number. Last year, stablecoins moved $27.6 trillion in on-chain settlement volume, more than Visa and Mastercard combined. Conduit — the four-year-old payments-infrastructure firm Okafor founded after stints at Adyen and Stripe — handled a small but growing fraction of it. Small, but growing fast enough that she now spends more time in front of regulators than in front of customers.
Fintechly: The number that everyone keeps quoting — $27.6 trillion — feels almost made up. What does it actually measure?
Okafor: It measures gross settlement volume across the major chains, mostly USDC and USDT. The honest answer is that a chunk of it is wash, market-maker activity that nobody is calling "a payment". But strip that out and you're still left with something on the order of $4 to $5 trillion of real payment flows — corporates paying suppliers, marketplaces paying creators, fintechs settling between themselves. That is a Visa-shaped business that did not exist five years ago. We talk to its plumbing every day.
On building rails, not products
Conduit does not have an app. It has a single, very boring API endpoint that lets a regulated counterparty in one country take money in their domestic currency, hold it briefly as a regulated stablecoin, and pay it out to a regulated counterparty in another country in their domestic currency. The whole edifice exists to make those four steps cost less than a card-network interchange. So far, in their largest corridor, it does — by about 70 per cent.
"We didn't set out to build a stablecoin company. We set out to build a settlement company. The stablecoin is just the thing that happens to be cheapest, fastest, and — finally — legal."
The product roadmap she sketches on the whiteboard — without naming names — is essentially "go after every corridor where a Western Union margin still exists". There are, she tells me, more of those left than people think.
The MiCA inflection
For the first eighteen months of Conduit's life, every conversation with a European bank ended the same way: "we love this, but we cannot touch it until our regulator says so." MiCA — the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation — has, in Okafor's telling, ended that conversation. Not because the rules are perfect. Because the rules exist.
Fintechly: What did MiCA actually unlock for you?
Okafor: It unlocked compliance officers' inboxes. Pre-MiCA, the answer to "can we use a stablecoin for B2B settlement" was always "probably, eventually, ask again next year". Post-MiCA, the answer is a 200-page checklist — but it is a checklist. Checklists you can solve. Ambiguity you cannot.
What every operator gets wrong
We turn to the question I always ask in these conversations: what is the most over-rated and under-rated thing in your part of the industry? Okafor thinks for an unusually long time before answering. "Over-rated: the chain you settle on. Under-rated: the regulated entity you settle through. Founders spend ninety per cent of their time on the first and ten per cent on the second. The math should be the other way around."
The five-year view
Five years out, Okafor expects two or three companies that look like Conduit — quiet, B2B, regulated in a dozen jurisdictions — to be processing more cross-border value than the largest correspondent banks. She is not certain Conduit will be one of them. "The boring answer is that whoever wins this will look more like a bank than a fintech, and more like a fintech than a crypto company. We are trying to be the thing in the middle that is hard to copy."
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Conduit is a private company; revenue figures are based on Fintechly’s reporting and were not confirmed by the company. Disclosures: Fintechly’s editor-in-chief is a limited partner in a fund that holds a small position in Conduit.
EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Marcus Chen
Marcus writes Fintechly’s long-form interviews on payments and infrastructure. He was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times and a payments product lead at Adyen.
