Hey everyone!
I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month.
We sat down to discuss how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US.
Kebrab’s path ran through a peer-to-peer wallet startup sold to Square in 2013, then Visa, where he watched Pix and real-time payments take off in Brazil.
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That experience exposed a gap: domestic rails kept improving while cross-border payments stayed stuck, which became the founding insight behind Caliza five years ago.
* Caliza started as a traditional payments company, and the model has always been to marry stablecoin rails with traditional banking infrastructure rather than replace it.
* After the 2023 banking crisis, Caliza decided to build its own licenses and banking partnerships rather than rely on intermediaries.
* The company has grown consistently above 40% month over month, with 60% growth last month.
* Customers range from customs and FX brokers without engineering teams to global API clients like Flutterwave, Skydo, and LianLian.
* Kebrab pushes back on framing stablecoin players as “the Swift killer.” Swift has built strong standardization for supplier payments, and the real differentiation in cross-border isn’t the rail, it’s the workflow: tax codes, payment messaging, and local compliance criteria that determine whether goods clear customs.
* On agentic commerce, Kebrab sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation, not consumer payments, helping treasury teams abstract away the work of tracking cash across a dozen markets and currencies. He argues
“If you do not have any form of agentic commerce in how you think about building your company, you’re becoming a relic very fast.”
Caliza is expanding further into Africa and building out collections to Asia in the coming months.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Ezra and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin
Have a great weekend everyone,
-AWS
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