Payments (2025)

1. Interview with Jordan Lawrence, cofounder, Damisa

   Last week, UK-based fintech startup Damisa announced a £2.25m pre-seed funding round, led by London’s Fuel Ventures, as it prepares to launch its stablecoin payment service.

   Damisa’s cofounder is Jordan Lawrence, who previously started the UK open banking platform Volt. After building Volt, Lawrence had intended on taking a career break for a year or maybe two. “But I couldn’t let this stablecoin idea go,” he said. “I went to a conference in San Francisco to learn some more about it and I thought: I'm going to do it.”

   Many international payments still rely on legacy infrastructure, often resulting in high fees and slow settlement times. “People are ‘forward selling’ so much in the payments space — in reality, there is still a huge amount of friction for cross-border payments,” says Lawrence.

   Stablecoins are seen as a potential payments option for emerging markets as an alternative to local banks, particularly in commodities, agriculture and shipping. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for example, has used stablecoins to repatriate funds from selling Starlink satellites in Argentina and Nigeria (the space company used Bridge for this; soon after, Stripe bought the company).

   These digital assets are designed to hold a steady value, in contrast to the price volatility seen in bitcoin and other crypto tokens. Startups are growing increasingly confident pushing into the stablecoin industry as regulations emerge. A handful of European stablecoin ventures have been awarded banking licences, including StablR in Amsterdam.

   Damisa — west African dialect for “cheetah” — has four customers already, one of which is shipping goods from Ghana to Europe. Damisa will hold funds for the shipping company in a new type of escrow arrangement involving stablecoins, which will allow the customer to earn passive interest for the duration of the trip, which can take up to six months.

   Lawrence’s previous venture Volt has raised over $90m from VCs. How different is the experience of building this company? “The big new thing is how AI helps us keep our costs down”. And with Volt, “we had to do so much education — we had to help people understand what open banking was. Now, many people are already using stablecoins. Even the US Federal Reserve is using stablecoins to send money abroad — which is crazy.”

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