LemFi, the financial platform for people living and working across borders, has partnered with BVNK, an enterprise-grade stablecoin payments infrastructure company, to rebuild the rails beneath the diaspora economy.
The partnership moves LemFi’s cross-border settlement onto BVNK’s regulated stablecoin payment infrastructure, delivering near-instant value transfers between markets at a fraction of the cost, without changing anything about how customers experience the app.
For the two million people who rely on LemFi to move money between the UK, Europe, Australia and North America and their beneficiaries across Africa, Asia and Latin America, the rails have always been the real problem. International payments still move through correspondent banking and SWIFT chains that can take days to settle and add cost at every hop.
LemFi’s answer is to rebuild those rails on the fastest infrastructure available: with BVNK, settlement is routed over stablecoin rails behind the scenes, then paid out in local currency at the destination. The economics matter for the communities LemFi serves.
According to the World Bank, the global average cost of sending remittances was 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025—more than twice the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% by 2030. Meeting the 3% target alone would return roughly US$20 billion a year to families worldwide. Faster, cheaper settlement is one of the most direct levers for closing that gap, and it is exactly the layer LemFi and BVNK are rebuilding.
The move rides a broader shift as stablecoins expand from the margins of crypto into mainstream payment infrastructure. Real-world stablecoin payment volumes reached US$7.4 trillion over the last 12 months, and analysts expect stablecoins to grow from around 3% of the cross-border payments market today to as much as 20% within a decade. For LemFi, the BVNK partnership operationalises the stablecoin settlement strategy it set out in May 2026, when Tether made a strategic investment in the company to power stablecoin-driven remittances across emerging markets.
Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO of LemFi, said: “The money that crosses borders still moves on rails built decades ago— slow, expensive, and quietly taxing the people who can least afford it. We’re rebuilding those rails. Stablecoins let us settle near instantly and take out cost; BVNK gives us the infrastructure to do it safely and at scale. It’s the start of something bigger that the financial system and the diaspora economy should have had all along.”
Crucially, the upgrade is invisible to the people who use it. Customers never touch a stablecoin, hold a crypto balance, or leave their local currency; the technology does its work in the background. By design, it is modern infrastructure under a familiar experience; this is what lets LemFi capture the efficiency of stablecoins while keeping the trust, simplicity and compliance its customers depend on. For LemFi, the partnership is as much about trust as it is about speed.
BVNK operates a compliance-first, enterprise-grade platform with 25+licences and regulatory approvals across the UK, Europe, and the US as well as coverage in more than 130 countries. Its infrastructure already powers stablecoin payments for some of the world’s leading global enterprises.
Chris Harmse, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK, said: “Stablecoins are becoming the base layer for how the world moves money, and remittances are one of the clearest places that this shift changes lives. LemFi has built deep trust with the communities it serves across Africa, Asia and beyond. Powering their settlement with our infrastructure means that faster, cheaper transfers reach real families – exactly the kind of impact we built BVNK to deliver.”
The partnership is the latest step in LemFi’s evolution from a remittance specialist into a full-stack financial platform for globally mobile communities, spanning payments, credit, savings, and connectivity. It builds on a year of momentum that includes LemFi’s selection of London as its global headquarters, backed by a £100 million UK investment commitment, and a widening regulatory footprint across the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and key corridors in Africa and Asia. Stablecoin settlement will roll out progressively across LemFi’s corridors and its broader product suite on a market-by-market basis, only where local central bank and regulatory frameworks support it.