#cross-border-payments

#cross-border-payments

Gabriele Sabbatini notes that, even in an age of instant communication, moving money around the globe is often slow and expensive. That's why he started Hercle, a firm that uses stablecoin technology to make global transactions more efficient. On Wednesday, Hercle announced it has raised $10 million in an equity round led by F-Prime, a global venture capital firm. It also raised a $50 million credit facility to support global expansion. Sabbatini declined to disclose Hercle's valuation.

Zelle, the bank-owned service that facilitates consumer money movement, said it plans to expand its services internationally. Zelle will rely on stablecoins to enable cross-border money movement, according to a statement Friday from Early Warning Services LLC, Zelle's parent company. All Zelle network banks will have the option to provide the service, according to the statement. Financial-technology firms such as Wise Plc have long operated in the cross-border money-movement space, but the banks' scale gives them an advantage in the crowded market.

Ripple is a goofy business. For more than a decade now, the company has held vast quantities of magic beans known as XRP, which it dumps onto the market at regular intervals. It's not clear why anyone needs these magic beans, but people buy them anyway, and that has made Ripple very rich-so rich that this week it casually spent $1 billion to buy a treasury management company called GTreasury.

Founded in 2024 by Anthony Jacob (pictured), a former Taptap Send executive, Nila was born from Jacob's personal struggle to coordinate vaccines and care for his elderly parents in Sri Lanka during the pandemic. "We face an ageing population of huge proportion," Jacob said. "Younger professionals working abroad often shoulder the responsibility of caring for ageing parents remotely. At Nila, we bridge that gap - providing smarter, more efficient, cross-border eldercare that keeps families connected and informed every step of the way."

Traditional banks rely on legacy systems that were never designed for the speed and scale of global business today. This is why Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs) are currently changing the market. An EMI is a licensed financial entity that can issue electronic money, provide IBAN accounts, process payments, and hold client funds in safeguarded accounts. Unlike banks, EMIs cannot offer traditional loans or credit, but they can do almost everything else when it comes to facilitating digital payments.

Rollups represent a form of L2 scaling that offloads calculations from Ethereum, compressing and storing results to reduce gas fees while ensuring transaction correctness.