We’ve partnered with BVNK, an enterprise-grade stablecoin payments infrastructure company, to rebuild the rails beneath the diaspora economy. The partnership moves our cross-border settlement onto regulated stablecoin rails, delivering near-instant value transfers between markets at a fraction of the cost, without changing anything about how customers experience the LemFi app.
The Bigger Picture
For the two million people who rely on LemFi to move money between the UK, Europe, Australia and North America and their beneficiaries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, the rails have always been the real problem. International payments still move through correspondent banking and SWIFT chains that can take days to settle and add cost at every hop. Our answer is to rebuild those rails on the fastest infrastructure available. With BVNK, settlement is routed over regulated stablecoin rails behind the scenes, then paid out in local currency at the destination.
This move rides a broader shift as stablecoins expand from the margins of crypto into mainstream payment infrastructure. Real-world stablecoin payment volumes reached US$7.4 trillion over the last 12 months, and analysts expect stablecoins to grow from around 3% of the cross-border payments market today to as much as 20% within a decade. For us, the BVNK partnership operationalises the stablecoin settlement strategy set out in May 2026, when Tether made a strategic investment in us to support the integration of USD₮ as a settlement layer across its corridors.
Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO of LemFi, said:
The money that crosses borders still moves on rails built decades ago, slow, expensive, and quietly taxing the people who can least afford it. We're rebuilding those rails. Stablecoins let us settle near-instantly and reduce costs; BVNK provides the infrastructure to do so safely and at scale. It’s the start of something bigger; the financial system the diaspora economy should have had all along.
Why BVNK?
The partnership is as much about trust as it is about speed.
BVNK operates a compliance-first, enterprise-grade platform with 25+ licences and regulatory approvals across the UK, Europe, and the US, and coverage in more than 130 countries. Its infrastructure already powers stablecoin payments for some of the world's leading global enterprises.
Chris Harmse, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK, said:
Stablecoins are becoming the base layer for how the world moves money, and remittances are one of the clearest places that shift changes lives. LemFi has built deep trust with the communities it serves across Africa, Asia and beyond. Powering their settlement with our infrastructure means faster, cheaper transfers reach real families — exactly the kind of impact we built BVNK to deliver.
The economics matter for the communities we serve. According to the World Bank, the global average cost of sending remittances was 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025 — more than twice the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% by 2030. Meeting the 3% target alone would return roughly US$20 billion a year to families worldwide. Faster, cheaper settlement is one of the most direct levers to close that gap, and it is exactly the layer that we and BVNK are rebuilding.
Crucially, the upgrade is invisible to our customers who never touch a stablecoin, hold a crypto balance, or leave their local currency; the technology does its work in the background. By design, it is modern infrastructure under a familiar experience; this is what lets us capture the efficiency of stablecoins while keeping the trust, simplicity and compliance our customers depend on.
What’s Next
The partnership is the latest step in our evolution from a remittance specialist into a full-stack financial platform for globally mobile communities, spanning payments, credit, savings, and connectivity. It builds on a year of momentum that includes our selection of London as our global headquarters, backed by a £100 million UK investment commitment, and a widening regulatory footprint across the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and key corridors in Africa and Asia.
Stablecoin settlement will roll out progressively across our corridors and broader product suite on a market-by-market basis, only where local central bank and regulatory frameworks support it.
