Ivy is building the world trade bank — instant global payments using stablecoins stitched to local real-time rails

Summary

Ferdinand, 30, is building Ivy out of Berlin with a pitch he frames as fixing the tariff no one talks about: cross-border payments that take five days and cost 5% of the transaction value for companies in emerging markets sending money to developed-world suppliers.

The core infrastructure bet is that two trends are converging. Real-time payment rails — Brazil's PIX, India's UPI, and now early moves in the US — are rolling out across every major economy. Stablecoins, meanwhile, are maturing into a regulated interoperability layer that can stitch those local rails together. Ivy's model is to sit bare-metal on the fiat side, deeply regulated and directly connected to local payment infrastructure, then use digital assets to bridge across borders. Ferdinand describes it as rebuilding correspondent banking from first principles with digital assets built in from the start rather than bolted on.

Customer base

Roughly 90% of Ivy's customers are financial institutions — PSPs, remittance companies, and crypto-native businesses. Ivy describes itself as the de facto payments platform for the European crypto industry, with a large share of European crypto volume flowing through its rails.

Regulatory strategy

On licensing, Ferdinand recommends the acquisition route over greenfield applications. Ivy bought a regulated institution in Europe last summer, describing the process as fast on time-to-license and manageable on cost. He flags the US as a different and more complex story, while noting that a reasonably liquid M&A market exists for regulated institutions being sold specifically to transfer their licenses.

Where the pain is asymmetric

Ferdinand is specific about where SWIFT actually breaks down: it's not the outbound dollar flow from the US that struggles, it's the reverse. Businesses in emerging markets trying to tap dollar supply and send money into the US face the hardest friction. That directional asymmetry is where Ivy sees its clearest near-term opportunity.

An L1 is not off the table — Ferdinand deflects the question with a "follow me on Twitter" — but the immediate commercial focus is B2B infrastructure, not retail or consumer rails.