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This week Simon Taylor & Cuy Sheffield are joined by -
Nick van Eck, Co-Founder & CEO, Agora
Shivani Siroya, Founder & CEO, Tala
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We cover:
Agora’s zero-fee off-ramp raises the question of who bears conversion costs
Agora’s conditional OCC approval expands the services its bank could offer enterprises
Tala’s credit engine supplies purchasing power that stablecoin wallets lack
Viva Bolivia’s live Iris deployment puts telco distribution to work
MiCA’s proposed reserve changes test whether one stablecoin can serve two jurisdictions
SoFiUSD’s seven-day settlement exposes the acquiring challenge across card networks
Agora Wants the Off-Ramp. Tala Wants to Lend.
Agora has conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank. Nick van Eck, its co-founder and CEO, says the bank would offer custody, stablecoin issuance, transaction services, investment advice and treasury work on opening day. Enterprises, he says, resist paying 5-10 basis points to convert stablecoins back into fiat. Agora wants to offer a zero-fee off-ramp while sharing stablecoin economics with distributors. Those proposed terms put the cost of conversion at the center of its enterprise pitch.
Viva, operated by Nuevatel in Bolivia, shows where that pitch could find distribution. The telco is live on Iris, settling transactions and holding operating reserves in USDi, a dollar stablecoin Agora issues. Nick says customer-facing dollar wallets are planned. A carrier brings the accounts and customer relationship. Agora supplies the monetary infrastructure.
Shivani Siroya, Tala’s founder and CEO, picked up on the telco point. Tala says it has served 14 million customers across 15 markets, experience it is now offering to partners through its credit engine and liquidity. Shivani’s concern is what a customer can do after opening the wallet.
“What we’re still missing is giving consumers purchasing power and liquidity.”
Cuy Sheffield described the division as an unbundling of payments and credit. Nick hears demand from business clients for card-backed receivables financing, settlement liquidity financing and pre-funding. Shivani sees unsecured consumer credit missing from mobile-money marketplaces. They are different loans, with different underwriting needs, even if both arrive through a stablecoin-enabled account. Shivani and Nick floated working together.
For Agora, the boundary is deliberate. Nick wants access to credit providers without funding the loans himself.
“We wanted to remain capital light, not take balance sheet risk, and work with a really wide array of credit providers for our customers.”
An issuer can waive its off-ramp fee. A lender still has to price the risk of extending purchasing power to a customer, and the distribution partner would expect a share of the value that credit creates.
MiCA Wants Reserves Out of Banks and Stablecoins Kept Apart
In a September 22 consultation response, European central banks proposed replacing MiCA’s fixed bank-deposit reserve requirement with liquidity-based rules that could accommodate short-dated government securities. They also opposed arrangements that treat tokens issued inside and outside the EU as interchangeable. The existing rule still requires 30% of reserves in bank deposits, or 60% for significant issuers.
Nick expects GENIUS Act and MiCA stablecoins to remain incompatible. He described the concern EU regulators have raised with him. If a US off-ramp charged 10 basis points during a run while an EU exit charged nothing, redemptions could move toward the cheaper route and draw liquidity from EU banks. Cuy added a disclosure problem. The same token brand could leave holders with different reserve backing depending on where it was minted.
“Just as we have data residency, you can imagine reserve residency.”
Nick envisages customers moving between separately regulated US and EU products while the provider handles the conversion behind the interface. An enterprise treasury team would still need to identify its issuer, reserve location and redemption terms for each balance. Simon later compared payments pricing to a pin cushion: press down a fee in one place and a cost appears elsewhere. Free conversion for the customer leaves the issuer with those liquidity and compliance costs to manage.
Seven-Day Settlement Has to Work Across a Merchant’s Card Mix
On September 22, SoFi and Mastercard said SoFiUSD settlement was live across SoFi Bank’s debit and credit card program. SoFi is migrating a program it expects to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume. That is expected program volume, rather than stablecoin volume already settled. SoFi says merchants banking with SoFi can receive funds in a bank account without holding SoFiUSD.
The conversation moved from the issuer’s ability to settle on weekends to the merchant’s ability to receive a usable balance. Cuy sees strong issuing-side demand from fintechs. Acquirers face a different task because a merchant accepts cards from multiple networks. Nick noted that merchants already buy early cash through factoring by accepting a haircut.
“If you’re a merchant, you’re getting paid with cards from multiple networks. It’s kind of a weird outcome if you’re getting settled seven days a week for the Visa volume that you accept, but not the Mastercard volume.”
SoFi has demonstrated live settlement for its card program. The acquiring test is broader: whether providers can turn faster settlement on separate networks into one reliable merchant payout, at a lower cost than the haircut merchants already pay to get their money early.
The Fee has to Land Somewhere
Agora’s pricing test comes after the charter. Nick wants to waive the off-ramp fee while sharing stablecoin income with distributors, leaving Agora to absorb conversion costs or earn enough elsewhere to cover them. Credit providers and card partners will need margins of their own. As Viva’s customer wallets roll out, funded balances and redemptions will show whether Agora can keep the exit free on terms its partners are willing to support.
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