Cross-border payments remain a pain point for many companies that find such money flows inefficient and costly.
Latitude Global has built a cross-border payments infrastructure using stablecoin rails, considering this the fastest way for global businesses to send money beyond international borders. The company offers payment settlement in less than two minutes, Latitude CEO Cyril Mathew said in a Sept. 21 interview.
Latitude also creates fiat currency on-and-off ramps for neobanks and other companies that want to use stablecoins for their financial apps’ money-transfer capabilities, he said.
The company’s network reaches about 50 countries, and Latitude aims to enter about 200 in the coming years. Latitude is focused on meeting “clear demand” for more emerging markets in Southeast Asia and Africa, Mathew said.
Latitude has 14 employees and is regulated in 45 states, with efforts underway for approval in the last five, said Mathew, who is based in Spring, Texas, a Houston suburb. The company has remote employees in various cities.
Mathew, a former Stripe cryptocurrency executive, established Latitude in January 2025 with Brian Wrightson, a former Stripe engineer who serves as chief technology officer, and Vivek Morzaria, a former executive with Zero Hash, a cryptocurrency infrastructure startup. Latitude has raised $43 million in equity funding, including $35 million announced last month.
PAYMENTS DIVE: Do you find that Latitude customers specifically want stablecoins used for their cross-border transactions? Or do they not really care how their funds are sent?
CYRIL MATHEW: My hypothesis was the latter, where the company doesn’t (care) as much. They want to know what the technology is, of course, to make sure it’s reliable, but besides that just get the value from A to B. That being said, there is a growing number of companies that, because they have global bases where maybe their (content) creators in the Philippines actually want to hold a dollar and the best way for them to hold a dollar is a stablecoin. So, they’re more opinionated. That’s probably where I’ve evolved a bit.
Dozens of the big names in payments just launched a new Open USD stablecoin and North Dakota has offered the Roughrider stablecoin. Are there too many coins in the market?
There doesn’t need to be 1,000 stablecoins or 1,000 blockchains, and I’m using a high number on purpose. I do think when you see brands using a stablecoin for a very specific reason, they’re not trying to get their stablecoin adopted by the masses, but it’s actually because they’re optimizing treasury on their backend and they get to keep most of the yield, whereas some of the stablecoin issuers won’t pass it on. And I think those sorts of white labeled or backend uses for stablecoins absolutely make sense. We’re trying to make sure (Latitude) can compete with the legacy or traditional financial rails. If you’re fragmenting liquidity across 1,000 stablecoins, then all of a sudden you’re not as competitive on the (foreign exchange) rate. I don’t think it’s (a case of) one stablecoin wins all or one blockchain wins all, but I do believe it consolidates more, and maybe that’s by vertical.
How many stablecoins does Latitude deal with in day-to-day business?
We support several: USDC (Circle), we support USDT (Tether). At the end of the day, there’s two or three. If I’m running a U.S.-regulated company in the U.S. trying to move value to, for instance Brazil, we can take dollars and convert them to a stablecoin. We get it to our bank partner in Brazil, who then needs to convert to Brazilian real. Again, the key point there for that bank and Latitude to choose which stablecoin I use is, ‘What’s most liquid? What is the user (base)? What is the trading activity, payment activity, user activity?’ And even if I’m a big company that just announced … a new stablecoin, if no one’s using that stablecoin, it’s not useful because the spread would be so wide that it actually doesn’t work to move money well. And so we’re already seeing just a handful of stablecoins work well. I would say two or three stablecoins make up 80-plus percent of our volume.
Given the influx of startups and new digital rails, will cross-border pricing become a commodity product with everyone charging the same?
Some of our pricing strategy has been to let us be a little bit of the Robinhood (Markets) of this space, like providing services at little expense like Robinhood’s free stock trading. It won’t go completely free. There’s compliance costs, etc. But we’re trying to go and pass on most of the savings to the customer. We still think we can make a healthy margin because we’re building in compliance (costs) and these sorts of things. I do believe, in the five- to 10-year horizon, you’ll see much more consistent pricing across the board, especially when there’s clear regulation and liquidity, and there’s other ways for a company like ours to monetize in that world, like other financial products you can build on top of the business.
