LemFi Partners with BVNK to Accelerate Cross-Border Payments with Stablecoin Settlement
The collaboration is designed to enable near-instant value transfers between markets at significantly lower cost while maintaining the same user experience for customers on the LemFi app.
LemFi has partnered with BVNK , an enterprise-grade stablecoin payments infrastructure company, to modernize its cross-border payment infrastructure by moving settlement onto regulated stablecoin rails. The collaboration is designed to enable near-instant value transfers between markets at significantly lower cost while maintaining the same user experience for customers on the LemFi app.
The partnership aims to address long-standing challenges in international money transfers, where payments often rely on correspondent banking networks and SWIFT systems that can take several days to settle and incur multiple intermediary fees. Under the new arrangement, settlement will take place over regulated stablecoin infrastructure behind the scenes, while recipients continue to receive funds in their local currencies.
The initiative comes as stablecoins increasingly gain traction as mainstream payment infrastructure. LemFi noted that the partnership builds on its stablecoin settlement strategy announced in May 2026, when Tether made a strategic investment in the company to support the integration of USD₮ as a settlement layer across its payment corridors.
“The money that crosses borders still moves on rails built decades ago, slow, expensive, and quietly taxing the people who can least afford it. We’re rebuilding those rails. Stablecoins let us settle near-instantly and reduce costs; BVNK provides the infrastructure to do so safely and at scale. It’s the start of something bigger; the financial system the diaspora economy should have had all along.”
– Ridwan Olalere, co-founder and CEO, LemFi
BVNK brings a compliance-focused payments platform to the partnership, supported by more than 25 licences and regulatory approvals across the UK, Europe, and the United States, with operations spanning more than 130 countries. Its infrastructure already supports stablecoin payments for a number of global enterprises.
“Stablecoins are becoming the base layer for how the world moves money, and remittances are one of the clearest places that shift changes lives. LemFi has built deep trust with the communities it serves across Africa, Asia and beyond. Powering their settlement with our infrastructure means faster, cheaper transfers reach real families — exactly the kind of impact we built BVNK to deliver.”
– Chris Harmse, co-founder and Chief Business Officer, BVNK
The companies said the collaboration is expected to help reduce remittance costs, which remain significantly above global targets. According to World Bank data cited by LemFi, the average global cost of sending remittances stood at 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025, more than double the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% by 2030. The companies believe faster and lower-cost settlement can help narrow that gap and return more money to families receiving remittances.
LemFi emphasized that the infrastructure upgrade will remain invisible to customers, who will continue using the app as usual without holding stablecoins, managing cryptocurrency balances, or changing how they send and receive money. The stablecoin technology operates entirely in the background, allowing the company to improve settlement speed and efficiency while maintaining a familiar, compliant, and user-friendly experience.
The partnership also marks another step in LemFi’s broader expansion from a remittance provider into a full-stack financial services platform offering payments, credit, savings, and connectivity solutions for globally mobile communities. Stablecoin settlement will be introduced gradually across LemFi’s markets and products, with deployment taking place only in jurisdictions where local regulatory and central bank frameworks permit its use.
