The Future of Cross-Border Payments with OpenFX CEO Prabhakar Reddy

What if moving $100 million across borders took 60 minutes instead of five days? OpenFX founder Prabhakar Reddy is rebuilding the world's cross-border payment rails to make real-time the default.

On this episode of The Flywheel, recorded live at M13's annual meeting in Montana, M13 Managing Partner Latif Peracha sits down with Prabhakar Reddy, co-founder and CEO of OpenFX. OpenFX is Prabhakar's fifth company. He's been a founder since 19, spent a stint as a VC at Accel, and previously built FalconX into a profitable $8 billion company where he's still a large shareholder. Now he's taking on a $2-trillion-a-day problem: moving money across borders in real time.

Prabhakar breaks down how OpenFX settles 98% of transactions in under 60 minutes, why the real competition is legacy banks and not other fintechs, and how the company grew more than 20x in a year while staying profitable with roughly 100 employees.

Key insights 

Why do international bank transfers still take three to five days?

Money moves 24/7 inside a country on local real-time rails, but crossing a border still runs on decades-old banking infrastructure with nightly, weekend, and holiday cutoffs. That this lag can quietly cost millions when a currency drops 5–10% during the settlement window.

How do stablecoins make cross-border payments faster than traditional banks?

OpenFX programmatically converts local currency into dollars, then stablecoins, moves it across the border, and converts it back into local fiat, settling 98% of transactions in under 60 minutes, with clients never touching crypto themselves.

Why are legacy banks still the biggest obstacle to real-time cross-border payments? 

Banks are in the business of keeping money, not moving it, so transfers stop after 5 p.m., on weekends, and on holidays, compounding into three-to-five-day delays across borders. Earlier fintechs like Airwallex, Nium, and Currencycloud mostly built API wrappers on the same nine banks, while OpenFX rebuilt the underlying rails and owns every leg of the process including compliance, licensing, market making, collection, and payouts.

Founder lessons on the international benefits of cryptocurrency

Prabhakar reflects on watching crypto go from an existential regulatory risk in 2018 to established infrastructure by 2026, and argues that stablecoins are now doing to cross-border payments what real-time rails already did domestically by collapsing five-day settlement into minutes and expanding the size of the market rather than just splitting it.

Related topics 

What is OpenFX?

OpenFX is an infrastructure company that helps institutions move money across borders in real time, settling 98% of transactions in under 60 minutes, 24/7/365.

What are stablecoins?

A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value by being pegged to a reference asset, usually the US dollar. Because they can move across borders in minutes rather than the three to five days a traditional bank transfer takes, stablecoins are increasingly used as behind-the-scenes infrastructure for global money movement. 

What is cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is digital money that runs on decentralized blockchain networks rather than being issued by a single government or central bank, allowing value to be transferred and settled online in minutes, 24/7. Bitcoin was the first; stablecoins are a category of cryptocurrency pegged to stable assets like the US dollar, which makes them practical for payments.

What is cross-border payment infrastructure?

Cross-border payment infrastructure is the network of banks, currency-exchange systems, and settlement rails that move money between countries. Traditional infrastructure depends on correspondent banks with cutoffs for nights, weekends, and holidays, so international transfers typically take three to five days; a newer generation — like OpenFX — combines stablecoins with full automation to settle the same transfers in under an hour, 24/7, at near-wholesale FX rates.