The Day I Shut Down an Entire Country: Front Lines Lessons That Sparked Innovation

The Moment I Realised the Global Payments System Was Broken

People think working at a fintech unicorn like Wise means you're already disrupting the system. But being responsible for managing its FX exposure globally, moving $150 billion annually, I gained a front-row seat to the fundamental constraints that plague the entire cross-border payments industry.

Wise had already done incredible work over 15 years, relentlessly driving down costs and improving the consumer experience. They'd built something remarkable. But even at the forefront of innovation, we were still operating within the constraints of a pre-blockchain world, forced to use a pre-funding model that created inherent vulnerabilities.

Here's how the industry works: to create the experience of instant transfers, you have to move massive amounts of money in advance. For instance, every week, we'd pre-position around $100 million to India, sitting on currency that could swing 5% in a single day. When markets moved against us, someone had to absorb those losses – ultimately, that cost gets passed to customers through pricing.

This wasn't a Wise problem; it was the only viable business model available. Every player in the space faces the same fundamental challenge: you can either pre-fund for speed or use correspondent banking for cost-efficiency, but you can't have both. It's a trade-off the entire industry has been forced to accept.

As the person responsible for FX exposure, I lived with the consequences of this model daily. That's where I met Mahendra, who joined as my tech lead after spending six years on the trading floor at Citibank. Think Wise's $150 billion in annual volume, but multiply that by orders of magnitude; that was the scale Mahendra had been operating at, building the technical infrastructure for massive trading operations. We became inseparable, attacking the same fundamental problems from different angles – me from product and risk decisions, him from technical architecture.

When markets went haywire, making pre-funding too risky – like Ghana’s rapid appreciation against the dollar in 2022– I had to make decisions that highlighted just how fragile this system really was. I had to shut down all payments to Ghana completely. One decision had the potential to affect thousands of families who depended on cross-border payments.. Mahendra and I would work through these crisis moments together, building systems that could tell us in real-time exactly what was happening to our risk exposure.

These weren't failures – they were necessary consequences of traditional payment rails. Mahendra and I built systems providing real-time risk visibility, but we were trapped by the same structural limitations, both feeling pain from different angles but the same source.

The B2C to B2B Revelation

After months of trying to solve these problems for consumers, we had our breakthrough moment. We realised that if this pre-funding model offering instant settlement was expensive and risky for B2C transactions – where the average person sends a few hundred pounds – it was completely impossible for B2B transactions worth millions.

Think about it: Wise could pre-fund India with $100 million to cover thousands of small consumer transfers. But if we wanted to pre-fund corporate transactions of $10 million each, we'd need to float $5 billion. The math simply doesn't work. No one's going to tie up that much capital and absorb that level of currency risk.

So while B2C at least had the illusion of instant transfers through pre-funding, B2B was stuck in the stone age. Cross-border corporate payments still move through SWIFT, bouncing between five or more banks, often for over four days. Call your bank during those four days asking, "Where's my money?" and nobody knows. The fourth bank in the chain can decide they don't want to process your payment anymore and send everything back. Meanwhile, your production line is about to shut down, costing you €50,000 per day, and your supplier is questioning whether they can rely on you for future orders. It's a complete mess.

That's when we realised: the B2B space is where B2C was 20 years ago, before Wise came along. Over 90% of corporate cross-border payments are still handled by banks. It's a market that's been completely forgotten.

The Real Insight: Convenience Over Cost

We started talking to CFOs and discovered that corporate cross-border payments had become accepted as a necessary evil. With banks holding strong positions in corporate relationships, these costs were simply standard operating expenses. The banks have created perfect opacity – CFOs know they're overcharged but can't quantify, benchmark, or justify changing it.

As one listed company CFO told me: "I know we're getting ripped off on FX, but I have no way to accurately report cost savings from lower FX mark-ups to my CEO and board, so I don't invest time in changing it."

What surprised us: while CFOs valued 25% cost reductions, what mattered most was predictability and convenience. The pain isn't just cost – it's reconciliation headaches, unpredictability, suppliers stopping work because payments don't arrive on time. Businesses get excited about predictability first; cost savings are the cherry on top.

Our Vision: The Dual-Rail Future

This insight led us to our core philosophy at Riva. We're not digital currency maximalists saying everything should run on blockchain. We're pragmatists who understand that different markets need different solutions.

If you're a German manufacturer moving money within Europe, fiat rails work beautifully. Instant transfers, reliable, efficient. But try moving that same money to Brazil or Nigeria, and you're back in the maze of correspondent banking.

Meanwhile, if you're a Brazilian company and your government just raised FX conversion taxes — pushing total conversion costs from around 1.5% to 5% — holding value in stablecoins and avoiding unnecessary conversion into local currency isn't about finding a workaround; it's about preserving capital and keeping the business running.

Our vision is simple: we handle the complexity under the hood. When a CFO wants to move money from Point A to Point B, they shouldn't have to choose between stablecoins or traditional rails. Our system automatically routes through the most efficient path.

We're not trying to replace banks entirely. We're building a surgical tool for cross-border payments while banks remain the sledgehammer for everything else. But in this specific vertical, we can be more precise, more predictable, and deliver higher quality results.

The future of global payments isn't about one technology winning. It's about having the right tool for each specific corridor, and the intelligence to use them seamlessly.

That's exactly what we're building at Riva. Learn more at https://rivamoney.com/.