The Future of Cross-Border Payments | 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.

In this episode:

• Why cross-border money still takes three to five days—and what that delay costs when a currency drops 5% in a week
• How OpenFX uses stablecoins as invisible infrastructure to move money in minutes, without clients ever touching crypto
• The growth story: from $2 billion to roughly $50 billion in volume in about a year, and the internal target of $1 trillion
• Why the durable moat is solving the whole puzzle—compliance, licensing, market making, collection, and payouts—not just one leg of the trade
• Prabhakar's biggest worry as a CEO: not security or regulation, but staying fast enough to avoid becoming "another slow company"

Chapters: 

• 00:00 — The longest journey to Montana: meet Prabhakar Reddy 
• 01:40 — Fifth company, an $8B exit, and why he keeps going 
• 02:55 — Why cross-border money movement is broken, and what it costs 
• 04:40 — Moving money in minutes: stablecoins as invisible rails 
• 06:50 — 20x in a year: the growth story and the Wise comparison 
• 09:25 — Picking investors as a former VC, and why M13 got the exception 
• 12:25 — The moat: why banks, not fintechs, are the real competition 
• 16:00 — The Amazon-esque model: wholesale FX and 90% cheaper rails 
• 17:55 — What stablecoin regulation could (and couldn't) break 
• 20:05 — From security threats to the fear of becoming a slow company 
• 22:40 — Operating leverage: keeping opex flat while volume explodes

Follow The Flywheel on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for more conversations with the founders building at the structural shifts that create new markets. Learn more about OpenFX at openfx.com and M13 at m13.co.