We recently spoke with Iana Dimitrova, CEO of OpenPayd, at Paris Blockchain Week to discuss how her team is solving this massive pain point by building an infrastructure that connects fiat and digital assets seamlessly. Iana leads OpenPayd’s global operations across six offices, setting the strategic direction for one of the leading Banking-as-a-Service platforms. She joined the company in 2017 as General Counsel and later became CEO. With deep expertise across fintech and payments, she previously helped scale operations globally at Paysafe. In this interview, she explains why digital asset businesses should never build their own payment infrastructure, the reality of Europe's MiCA regulation, and why the convergence of fiat and stablecoins is driving a major structural shift in global finance.
For years, digital asset businesses have struggled with a major bottleneck: connecting securely and efficiently to traditional banking infrastructure. Without reliable fiat on- and off-ramps, scaling globally is nearly impossible.
In 2017, you joined as General Counsel and became CEO. Since then, the company has changed a lot. What is the thing about OpenPayd today that would surprise the version of you from 2017?
Our founder started the business in late 2016 in the payments space, and we have been on a transformation journey ever since. We laid the foundations of OpenPayd in 2019 and have been building towards becoming the global infrastructure provider we are today.
What would surprise me the most is the incredible depth and quality of the team we have built. OpenPayd is successful today because we have great people. We built an incredibly strong, diverse, and complementary team with a real sense of camaraderie. That teamwork enabled us to weather the storms, face challenges, and emerge stronger.
We always say there are three pillars to our business. The first is our global licensing infrastructure, which supports payments and digital assets across jurisdictions. The second is our proprietary technology, which enables us to move quickly. The third, and most fundamental, is our team.
OpenPayd is often described as rail-agnostic infrastructure. What does that mean for a digital asset business that is choosing between building its own partnerships or using a platform like yours?
I would never recommend that a digital asset business try to build its own payments infrastructure. What we have built is genuinely hard to replicate. Building the licensing infrastructure and connecting to various payment rails and banking providers requires significant time, investment, and expertise.
Digital asset businesses should focus entirely on building their product and solving consumer problems. They should partner with infrastructure providers such as OpenPayd to take the heavy lifting of payments completely off their plate.
Being rail-agnostic means businesses using OpenPayd can move and manage money globally across any rail they choose. That could be a local payment rail, such as SEPA in Europe, an international rail, such as SWIFT, or a major blockchain network using stablecoins and digital assets.
As a business, you do not need to worry about how the money moves behind the scenes. You simply instruct us on the currency and settlement location, and we handle the plumbing.
OpenPayd is now handling fiat settlement for the FDUSD ecosystem and multi-currency settlement for LMAX. Both deals were secured within a few months. What do these partnerships tell us about the sources of demand today?
For more than 24 months, we have seen steadily increasing demand for stablecoins in treasury management and cross-border payments. That demand is exactly why OpenPayd invested in obtaining digital asset-related licences. We want to offer an equivalent level of service across both fiat and digital assets.
Companies are increasingly using stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure to improve payment speed and reduce costs. This trend is not driven solely by digital asset-native businesses. We now see massive adoption across payroll, cross-border trade, and retail.
You said in the First Digital announcement that digital asset businesses need strong, reliable infrastructure to scale globally. How close are we to on- and off-ramping becoming standard, and what happens to those businesses when we actually get there?
Smooth on- and off-ramping across multiple jurisdictions is simply not there yet. We face significant jurisdictional complexity in regulations and technical standards. That complexity directly affects settlement timelines and transaction costs. Global harmonisation remains quite far off.
This is precisely why providers like OpenPayd are building rail-agnostic infrastructure. We connect to a broad network of banks, payment rails, liquidity providers, and stablecoin issuers. When a business instructs us to make a payment, we orchestrate the process behind the scenes to select the most efficient channel.
When that infrastructure is fully in place globally, it will remove a major barrier to economic growth. Ultimately, what matters is the sustainability and security of financial services infrastructure. In the current geopolitical environment, that resilience is critical to both economic growth and national security.
MiCA has created a clear category for EMT tokens in Europe, which should make it easier to build compliant stablecoins in the EEA. How has that worked in practice, and has MiCA changed what your clients are asking for?
MiCA demonstrated excellent regulatory leadership from a European perspective. It established an early regulatory framework for the development of various digital asset products.
However, practical adoption has not been fully harmonised across the European Union. Some countries have not yet transposed the legislation into national law. This creates a barrier to growth for businesses in those jurisdictions and adds friction for payment providers like us who serve clients in countries such as Hungary or Poland.
Our clients remain consistently focused on stable fiat on- and off-ramps and interoperability. They want a single API, seamless transactions across fiat and blockchain, real-time settlement, and operational reliability. MiCA has not fundamentally changed that core demand. However, we do see a higher level of maturity among clients regarding operational resilience, redundancy, and compliance.
You started in legal, moved into operations, and are now CEO. How does a legal background shape the way you think about running the company? How do you maintain operations amid near-constant regulatory uncertainty?
Most people assume a legal background makes you more conservative. In fact, a deep understanding of the legal and regulatory landscape is a genuine advantage. It enables you to assess risk more effectively, take well-calculated risks, and innovate faster. It gives you the confidence to move decisively.
We navigate overlapping regulatory frameworks by building deep in-house expertise. Our experts cover payment services regulation, AML, and digital assets. We draw on that expertise whenever we encounter a new framework.
For us, a traditional fiat-regulated provider moving into the digital asset world, the lift was fairly small. Companies attempting the opposite transition face a much steeper learning curve.
Euro-denominated stablecoin volumes are roughly 200 times smaller than those in USD. Is that a structural problem or a timing issue that MiCA and similar frameworks will eventually resolve?
I think it is both. The US has heavily led the way in innovation, and most significant stablecoin issuers are US-based or pegged to the dollar, as it remains the global trading currency.
We need a combination of factors, including regulation that does not stifle innovation. MiCA provided useful clarity, but it may also have discouraged some projects that might otherwise have emerged. This conversation now extends far beyond our industry. Regulators and governments are actively discussing this, given growing interest in alternatives to the dollar as the dominant global trade currency.
OpenPayd processes 225 billion annually for over a thousand institutional clients. At that volume, you have a uniquely useful view of where the friction lies. Where is it right now between fiat and digital?
For digital asset-native customers, gaining access to fiat rails has traditionally been very difficult. Over the past five years, reliable fiat on- and off-ramps have remained a major barrier to growth. The situation is improving, but challenges remain.
The second major friction point is the lack of providers that seamlessly integrate access to both fiat rails and blockchain rails. Providers with the licensing infrastructure and technology for true interoperability are the ones genuinely solving the problem.
Businesses do not care about the “how”. They just want to move money efficiently from one jurisdiction to another. They do not care which stablecoin or payment rail we use. They care exclusively about speed, efficiency, and cost.
How do you see the world evolving between fiat, crypto, and DeFi over the longer term?
It is a fantastic time to be in this space. Stablecoins and programmable money movement are reshaping the market. We are witnessing a massive structural shift that is redefining expectations around speed and accessibility.
We are seeing multiple technologies converge to create a new foundational infrastructure layer. This layer enables accessible, seamless experiences across fiat and blockchain, supporting near-instant two-way payment flows. It represents a structural shift in payments infrastructure, the likes of which we have not seen in many years.