Former Stripe and Coinbase Employees Raise $8M for Stablecoin Payouts Startup Latitude

Hey Payments Fanatic!

Cross‑border payouts are one of those problems everyone in FinTech has felt.

Whether you’re a marketplace, a platform paying freelancers, or a payroll system trying to hit 100+ countries. 

That’s why the news that former Stripe and Coinbase founders have raised $8 million for Latitude, a stablecoin‑powered “Global Payouts” rail, is a whisper worth hearing: the next layer of international payments infrastructure is being rebuilt in USDC‑land.

Latitude is pitching a deceptively simple idea: automate the leap from USD → stablecoin → local fiat so that businesses can send global payouts without running their own FX or compliance machinery. 

In other words, it’s taking the same abstractions that Stripe and similar players built for card‑based payments and applying them to stablecoin‑settlement corridors. 

The three co-founders, Vivek Morzaria, Brian Wrightson, and Cyril Mathew, have worked at companies like Uber, Coinbase, Meta, and Stripe.

They say that this experience in crypto, tech, and payments has taught them the importance of moving money efficiently around the world. 

Latitude’s competition is traditional banks that still facilitate foreign exchange through legacy rails like SWIFT, charging high fees while the world quietly moves toward real‑time, stablecoin‑backed payout rails.

The payments world doesn't slow down. 👇 Back tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

INSIGHTS

📰 The Next Era of Payments: Agentic Commerce and Tokenized Money by Mastercard. Mastercard highlights the next evolution of payments, pointing to agentic commerce powered by AI and tokenized currencies like stablecoins as the two major paradigms set to reshape the industry. Read the full article here

NEWS

🇲🇾 Airwallex begins operations in Malaysia with the launch of payment services. Qualified Malaysian businesses will be given access to Airwallex's fast, transparent, and cost-effective foreign exchange conversions and payouts in more than 130 countries, empowering them to grow and operate globally.

🇬🇧 Checkout.com integrates with SAP’s Open Payment Framework to accelerate enterprise ecommerce payments. Through the integration, merchants can deploy Flow, Checkout.com’s customizable checkout solution that enables businesses to accept payments through a single integration.

🇺🇸 Former Stripe and Coinbase employees raise $8 million for Latitude, a startup whose core product is stablecoin-based Global Payouts. When a business sends money internationally, the process can be slow and expensive. Latitude aims to fill this gap by helping firms make fast, affordable international payments using stablecoin rails while abstracting away the complexity.

🇮🇳 Razorpay launches RBI-compliant biometric Passkey for online card transactions, allowing users to verify payments with fingerprint or facial recognition instead of OTPs.  Built in partnership with Mastercard and Visa, the solution enhances checkout speed, reduces fraud, and improves the overall user experience. 

🇺🇸 Ramp and Visa deepen partnership to power the next era of autonomous finance by deploying Visa Intelligent Commerce and the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol across its platform. The collaboration aims to help global enterprises streamline payments with real-time controls, automation, and reduced friction at scale.

🇮🇹 Nexi and PayPal expand European collaboration for integrated merchant payments. The integration embeds PayPal's payment ecosystem directly into Nexi's platform, enabling merchants to activate PayPal services through a single onboarding process and manage payments, funds, and reporting within a unified system.

🇮🇩 Bank of Korea launches QR payment link in Indonesia, allowing users to make purchases by scanning local codes with their existing financial apps. Using the system, Korean users can pay at more than 32 million merchants that support the country’s standardized QRIS payment network.

🇧🇪 Swift’s blockchain-based shared ledger progresses to MVP implementation. The MVP introduces a shared digital orchestration layer that will record and validate interbank payment commitments. The ledger enables payments to be executed using tokenised deposits as the underlying representation of value, leverages existing compliance processes, and supports multiple settlement options.

🇳🇱 Retailers and payment companies clash over iDeal successor Wero. The rollout of Wero is facing industry pushback, with payment providers like Adyen and Mollie raising concerns over higher costs, increased fraud risk, and more complex dispute processes.

🇦🇺 Australia to ban credit, debit card surcharges in a hit to banks. The move aims to simplify payments, increase transparency, and align Australia with global markets, while potentially reducing bank revenue and saving consumers billions annually.

🇸🇦 FinTech unicorn Tabby reports $387M in revenue from Saudi unit. Revenue increased by 42% year-on-year from $267 million in 2024, while net income rose by 82% from $30 million, marking the company’s second consecutive year of profitability.

🇦🇺 Zeller launches Terminal 1x. The new Zeller Terminal 1x (T1x) combines payments and point-of-sale (POS) into a single device, priced at a low one-time price of $199 with no ongoing monthly software or hardware fees, positioning it as one of the most affordable end-to-end checkout solutions in Australia.

🇻🇳 Cake Digital Bank launches GlobalX international remittance solution. GlobalX international money receipt service nationwide enables users in Vietnam to receive overseas funds quickly, securely, and at a lower cost, marking a new step in expanding cross-border financial solutions on a fully digital banking platform.

🇨🇱 FinTech Mendel joins BICE and Visa to launch a business credit card in Chile. The product integrates a digital platform that allows customers to manage corporate expenses in real time, with tools to assign limits, monitor transactions, and centralize information in one place.

🌏 BigPay restructuring impacts senior leaders across three markets. The changes come amid a broader strategic shift at Capital A, with BigPay no longer listed among its core business priorities. Continue reading

🌍 Polish FinTech Zen buys PINbank, and Ukrainian Asvio Bank buys motor-bank at auction. ZEN has won the auction to acquire insolvent PINbank, while Asvio Bank secured Motor-Bank, marking continued M&A activity in Ukraine’s banking sector. The transactions remain subject to regulatory approval before completion.

🇺🇸 Block’s Jack Dorsey outlines AI-powered vision to cut middle managers. Dorsey outlined his thesis for the future of organizational structures in a blog post co-authored by Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, arguing that AI could replace layers of management that traditionally coordinate work across companies.

GOLDEN NUGGET

🚨 Checkout.com 𝐢𝐬 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐲𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐞𝐫𝐚 👇Created by Arthur Bedel 💳 ♻️

And almost no one is connecting the dots. 3️⃣ moves that matter, and why they compound:

1️⃣. 𝐁𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒

Checkout.com’s MALPB charter was accepted by Georgia’s Department of Banking and Finance.

→ Direct access to Visa & Mastercard (no sponsor bank)

→ Full control over settlement, risk, onboarding

→ Dedicated leadership with Jordan Reynolds

Only Stripe and Fiserv have taken similar steps.

This is infrastructure-level vertical integration: more margin, more control, more scale.

2️⃣. 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫

“Remember Me” is now live in 194 countries.

Results:

→ 70% faster checkout

→ 22% fewer auth challenges

→ 30% fewer timeouts

→ Up to 7% acceptance uplift

But the real asset = identity network effects.

More merchants + users → richer identity graph → better fraud detection + personalization.

This becomes foundational for agentic commerce:

a persistent, trusted consumer profile AI agents can act on.

3️⃣. 𝐓𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

AI-powered dashboard:

→ “Which region had highest declines?”

→ “Which setup minimizes cost?”

→ “What changed after our new flow?”

No exports. No manual analysis.

Speed to insight = margin advantage.

𝐍𝐨𝐰 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐭𝐬...

Checkout.com is contributing to Google’s AP2 Protocol and working with Visa/Mastercard on agent-ready infrastructure.

Agentic commerce requires:

→ Universal connectivity

→ Trusted identity + consent

→ Actionable consumer data

Checkout.com is building all three — simultaneously.

Not just a PSP.

But the “brain + rails” behind AI-driven transactions.

The winners won’t be the best AI models.

They’ll be the ones controlling identity, payments, and data.

Checkout.com is making a serious play for all three.

Source: Jas Shah — Fintech: Under the Hood

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