Laurent Descout is building a corporate payment platform for global companies

His Barcelona company Neo already clears billions in cross-border payments. Now Descout is betting the account itself becomes the intelligent core of corporate treasury, for the companies it serves directly and the fintechs that build on the same rails.

A company that operates across borders keeps hitting the same wall. It has to collect, hold and pay in several currencies, quickly, and clean through compliance, and the ordinary bank account was never built to do it. Most finance teams end up stitching the job together across banks and providers that were never meant to work together.

Laurent Descout’s Neo is an attempt to rebuild that account from scratch. The Barcelona company he founded in 2017 began in foreign exchange and, in 2020, became a full multi-currency payment account: collect in one currency, hold in several, pay out through the right networks, with the FX and the compliance built in. It clears billions in cross-border payments and, unusually for a company its age, is already profitable.

The idea came out of his last company. Descout co-founded Kantox in 2011, an FX business later bought by BNP Paribas, and the lesson he took from it was that cheaper foreign exchange wasn’t the whole job. “It was clear that FX alone wasn’t sufficient, and that payments had to be attached to it,” he says.

Clients didn’t just want to convert money; they wanted to collect it, store it, hold accounts in the right structure and move it through the right networks. “I want to reinvent the account experience,” he says. “The global account for global companies.”

Neo sells that account two ways: directly, to companies that operate globally, from scale-ups to football clubs; and, increasingly, to other payment firms that run their own customers on Neo’s rails.

The fintechs that run on Neo

The second channel is the one growing fastest. Many payment firms are strong in their home market but lack the currency coverage, the banking relationships, the SWIFT expertise or the compliance framework to move money globally. Some don’t even have an API, or the infrastructure to do so for global payments. Neo supplies the missing parts and lets each firm keep its own brand in front of its clients.

Every PSP that plugs in also brings its own market with it: its merchants, its corridors, its verticals. Descout says that gives Neo exposure to a spread of industries it could never have won account by account, and it compounds as those firms grow. “If we had to build it ourselves, I think we’d still be starting,” he says.

Narrow on purpose

Neo’s edge is focus. Descout is as deliberate about what Neo won’t do as what it will. It concentrates on the fiat payment and account layer, the part he wants to own outright, and partners out the rest so the team can keep its effort there.

That’s how it added stablecoins, now live with a first client. Neo has partnered with licensed global payment institution Triple-A to embed regulated stablecoin acceptance within Neo’s platform, with collections automatically converted into the relevant fiat currency. 

What the narrow model buys is room to scale without weight. Descout wants to triple or quadruple Neo’s volume over the next three years without materially adding headcount, leaning on automation and, increasingly, on internal tools he says are already delivering real efficiency. His case is that the infrastructure Neo has built can carry far more than it moves today before the team needs to grow into it.

The football desk

Football is one of Neo’s more unusual markets. Neo is Wolverhampton Wanderers’ official foreign-currency partner and runs the same service for Club Brugge, and Descout talks about the sport as a near-perfect fit for what Neo does.

A club is global but structured like a small company, he says: modest treasury teams, players sourced anywhere in the world, and contracts that stretch payments over years, sometimes past the point a player has been sold on. The banking relationships tend to be decades old and, in his telling, unchallenged.

“A traditional bank that has been the bank of the club for 20 or 30 years doesn’t necessarily feel it has to offer the best pricing,” he says. The sums are large enough that a tighter spread shows up immediately.

Where the payments are scheduled, Neo can lock a rate across 6, 12, 18 or 24 months to fix the cost of a signing. Where they aren’t, Descout is more cautious. Asked how he hedges the contingent add-ons and sell-on clauses that make a transfer so messy, he draws a line at speculation. “Do you hedge something you’re not really sure is going to materialise?” he says. “I’m not a big fan of that.”

Make the account think

Underneath the products is a view about what a bank account is for. Descout thinks the passive one is finished.

“The bank used to be an ignorant box where money arrives, and from where you order money to go out,” he says. His argument is that new payment-message standards change that. The move from legacy SWIFT MT messages to the richer ISO 20022 format means a payment now carries structured data: where the money came from, who sent it, which bank, against which contract.

Read properly, he says, the account becomes a source of information a company can automate against, reconcile from and plan on, rather than a place that simply holds cash. “The account needs to be intelligent,” he says, and he wants Neo’s to sit at the centre of the treasury stack that other software plugs into.

He is honest about scale. Neo is a fraction of the size of the largest cross-border players, such as Convera, the former Western Union Business Solutions, which moves many times its volume. Descout’s answer is to pick his battles and argue that the giants have hit a ceiling their infrastructure can’t grow past, while Neo still can.

It’s a confident read, and an unproven one. What’s not in doubt is that he’s built in this market before and sold the result to a global bank, and that Neo, this time, is already turning a profit. On that record, the second act is worth watching.