Noah founder and CEO Shah Ramezani on why stablecoins are a payments story rather than a crypto one, and why the real prize is making the technology invisible to the businesses that use it.
In this week’s Five Minutes With…, Fintechly speaks to Ramezani about why the real challenge is making stablecoin technology invisible to the businesses that use it, why the settlement layer deserves more attention than the app layer, why stablecoins are a payments story rather than a crypto one, and why the next year will be less about whether banks adopt the technology than how fast they do.
Can you tell us about yourself and what brought you to this point in your career?
I’m Swiss, born and raised. I studied business there and started out in banking before moving to London. I have therefore seen the inside of the financial system; the part most people never look at.
What pulled me toward Noah was a simple observation – money still moves the way it did fifty years ago. When you send a payment across borders, it doesn’t actually go anywhere fast. It hops through a chain of correspondent banks, which each take a fee for the transfer and a day to complete it. For example, for a business paying a supplier or a contractor on the other side of the world, this creates friction that doesn’t have a reason to exist.
The technology now exists to fix this issue. Stablecoins settle transactions in seconds, around the clock, and without the correspondent chain. I started Noah to build payments infrastructure on top of that.
What problem or opportunity are you most focused on right now?
Fundamentally, it’s trying to get incumbents to adopt these rails, not just the digital-native companies.
The early adopters were obvious. Companies that already lived in digital assets understood the value instantly. The bigger prize is the traditional business that has never touched a stablecoin and doesn’t want to think about one. They just want their cross-border payments to land faster and cost less.
The problem I’m focused on is making the underlying technology invisible. A business shouldn’t need to understand stablecoins to benefit from them, the same way you don’t think about TCP/IP when you load a website. We sit underneath the payment, handle settlement in local currency on both ends, and the customer never has to learn anything new. Getting that experience right is what unlocks the much larger market.
What do you think deserves more attention than it is getting in your part of the industry?
The settlement layer. Everyone talks about the front end, the apps, the cards, the wallets etc. But far fewer people pay attention to the plumbing underneath that actually moves the money. That plumbing is where the cost and the delay live.
You can build the slickest interface in the world, but if the payment still routes through correspondent banking behind the scenes, you haven’t changed the economics for the customer. The interesting work right now is rebuilding the layer nobody sees. It’s less glamorous, which is probably why it’s underrated.
What do you think people still misunderstand about your part of the industry?
That stablecoins are a digital asset story, when they’re really a payments story.
A lot of people still file anything involving digital assets under speculation and volatility. A stablecoin pegged to the dollar isn’t a bet on price, it’s a settlement instrument. The point isn’t to hold it, but rather to move value through it and out the other side in local currency in seconds.
The other misunderstanding is that this is on the fringes. The regulatory frameworks are arriving in the UK, US, UAE, and around the world, with serious financial institutions also making moves. This is becoming infrastructure, not an experiment.
What do you expect to rise up the agenda over the next year?
Regulation will turn from theory into operating reality. We’ve spent a couple of years talking about frameworks and now they’re landing, and businesses have to actually build them.
I also expect the conversation to shift from whether incumbents adopt stablecoin rails to how fast they can do so. Once a few large players move and don’t break anything, the rest will stop asking whether it’s safe and instead start worrying why they’re behind. That trend tends to play out quickly once it starts.
Bonus: What’s the one question about your company we should have asked, and what’s your answer?
Correspondent banking is a messaging and settlement system between institutions, and it’s slow and expensive. We’re replacing a layer of how they talk to each other and rebuilding it with stablecoins.
The banks, the businesses, the contractors all stay. What changes is the rail underneath them and we’re not here to tear down the system. We’re here to set money free from the part of it that stopped making sense.
