George Davis, Founder & CEO at Lorum on Rebuilding Global Clearing, Why Dollars Are Broken, and Building a Payments Only Bank

0:00This episode is sponsored by Deck Dolphin. Fundraising can be tough. You build a deck, you send it out and you hear nothing back. You don't get enough feedback. Deck Dolphin changes that. Get honest, actionable feedback from real VCs within 48 hours. Submit your deck today, go to deckdolphin.com and start booking more investor meetings with a better deck. Hello and welcome to another episode of Riding Unicorns. Today we are joined by George Davis, who's the co-founder and CEO of Lorem, formerly Fuse, but now Lorem. It's great to have you on, George. You were head of product at Trulair, which our audience will know because we had Francesco on the podcast in 2022.

0:40Then you co-founded BVNK, which again, a lot of people probably will have heard of doing cross-border crypto payments. And now you're the founder of Florham Rebuilding Global Clearing from the Ground Up. So payments running through your veins. Can you tell us a little bit about that, George? Why is it that payments is a business that you want to be in?

1:02George Davis:Yeah, I mean, so I started out, I started my first business when I was 18, a machine learning business in London that had nothing to do with payments at all, but kind of taught me that I didn't really like working for anyone else. And I enjoyed doing my own thing. And I dropped out of university to run that business, ended up selling it in 2019. And knowing Fra, Trulia came on to really play around with payments when they were mostly a data business. And we ended up pivoting really the whole business onto payments. And I became super, super obsessive with core banking, central bank settlements, virtual accounts, ledgers, et cetera, just really, really intrigued by it.

1:43George Davis:I'm a very obsessive person. And so So if I'm into something, I'm into it 100 % or 0%. And payments became that. I became kind of equally as frustrated that it was really hard in an open banking ecosystem to monetize foreign exchange, cross-border flows, as really this is the area that you make most of your money as a payment company. And I think it really degrades open banking back to a feature when you can't support any of that kind of e-money ecosystem functionality that comes with being a payment business. and a big part of what I built at TrueLayer was not just open banking payments but also their e-money products so their pay direct and their ability to hold on to funds payouts refunds etc ended up leaving to co-found BVNK because it was so hard to really build out a cross-border business at all and we focused on cross-border crypto as people that know BVNK will know leveraging stable coin as an intermediary rail but I think really through building that to a massively global book of business, really discovered that there is no good partner bank, clearing bank for global markets.

2:48George Davis:You have had this kind of clearing evolution in Europe with ClearBank and Banking Circle, who are both still quite Europe-only businesses. They sit on top of a JPM multi-currency product, but that's really the extent of where their correspondent services go. And back in the day, you would have built these business lines on top of Citi, and their emerging market FX product on worldlink etc and their effects prime brokerage but these products these networks weren't really built for the scale they see today they weren't built for real-time payments and they weren't really built for the number of the sheer number of financial institutions that have to face off to that when city built that network e-money institutions weren't a thing psps weren't really a thing they just faced a small number of banks and it worked well and as such you'll just get sold that because that doesn't work so well now that crypto has to solve everything that the system's broken we need to build a new system completely outside of central banks etc and we believe that's fundamentally not true that actually the system is not broken the system actually works really well it's that the participants are broken they're wrongly incentivized you're clearing money through banks that are building big lending books they're holding on to your money for overnight rates, liquidity, and they don't really understand payments and their correspondent relationships are all a function of accruing deposits.

4:07George Davis:And that's really what got us to start Lorem was actually, what if we could be this clearing bank on both sides of the transaction, a payments only 100 % reserve backed bank around the world. And we started that in the Middle East because there was so much money moving to the Middle East, but so little infrastructure. I always love telling people it was the first payments we cleared. I used to have to print paperwork, wet sign it and courier it to a branch in Dubai. So we had to build all the infrastructure for our banks and with our banks. And today we still have a large monopoly on that. But as we're really the only way to clear money as an international financial institution into the Middle East without being present there.

4:49George Davis:But now our business has become so much bigger. really about 60 % of our business is dollar clearing now because dollars are just so broken in this correspondent world. It's really hard to clear dollars outside of the US. You've got a lot of community banks in the US building these big lending books. And the problem just keeps getting deeper and deeper. And so really the obsession just continues. We now are present across Europe, Asia, Middle East, and the US. We have several banking licenses in progress. We have payment licenses around the world that we're using to clear today. We're building out really a wider cash management and treasury and trade platform.

5:26George Davis:And I think really no one is attacking this piece of infrastructure. Everyone is building this top layer, Neom and Toons, and then Neom and Toons with crypto. And they're never rebuilding the fundamental clearing stack at the bottom. And I think we've done really well now because we are building that piece that is still controlled by Citi, Barclays, JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, et cetera, and then this network of smaller mid-market banks. Everyone else is doing these more surface level changes. And this has just led to us being one of the only places to go and do this well. And so last year, we grew the business 55x in one year.

6:01George Davis:We grew over 50 % month-to-month every single month. So it was a huge year for us and really launching dollars as this global currency really was a net change for us. So it's just kind of led us further and further into seeing where this problem was. And it's not really just in emerging markets. It's everywhere. So, George, what have you built? Like, where does the money come from? What do you have to do with it? How are you using tech to do with it what was previously done manually? And then where does it go? Yeah, so we have built all of the local clearing and the correspondent clearing layer.

6:36George Davis:So we have built all of the ledgering, the actual money movement within. And then all of the interaction with Swift and through various different networks to achieve a more real-time payment. All of this is managed through a network of virtual accounts. So our customers can open thousands of virtual accounts in seconds in the name of their end customer. Their end customer does not need to be in-country. They can be anywhere in the world. All to clear what we call a high-quality payment, where you need a payment that's in the right name, that has a guaranteed settlement time and settlement finality and is in the correct currency.

7:11George Davis:And so we do a lot of import export payments through that. We always serve financial institutions. So we are always a correspondence service for other banks, payment companies, cross border businesses, payroll providers, et cetera. And we're really stitching together central bank connected payment systems everywhere around the world. and we're fully incentivized just to clear immediately. So because we are 100 % reserve backed. So we are not holding onto the cash for any reason for overnight rates, et cetera. And so we are just moving money as efficiently as possible. And this is that piece that really is mostly only owned by those tier one banks, especially when you start interacting with international dollar payments or even international euros, et cetera.

7:57George Davis:Whilst you get a lot of fintechs in Europe focusing on euro payments, when it starts to interact with euroswift suddenly you move away into a pool of four or five banks that offer that service and that's the piece that we're really going after and then we're now we've now built out full cash management platform as well so our customers can earn 24 hour interest through a tokenized money market fund they can access wholesale fx instruments so they can get amazing fx rates facing off against effectively an fx prime brokerage and um we will be launching very soon some effects derivatives as well so our customers in one platform can move the money manage the money manage their risk etc all in one place it's incredibly powerful and so and george you are you're a product guy really we've had we've had a lot of um sort of product obsessed founders on on this podcast and uh a lot of the most successful founders are product obsessed and sort of customer obsessed i mean i was i was speaking to um a ux designer at revolute last week and she was she was saying how nick has to still approve every new like product screen in the app it's insane and that's like a hundred billion dollar company like how do you think about building a great product would you call yourself a product obsessive yes and i think i fell into product because it's the at the early stage of a business it's the most entrepreneurial role you know it's like owning end-to-end really interaction and and what the company is doing other than the sales side and so I was always there because because I'm just naturally very independent and entrepreneurial and I enjoy kind of owning those things these days I spread across that and kind of the business what I'm very good at is flying in and solving a problem and kind of flying out like my my weakness is the BAU is like the operational running and so I always look for in the teams I hire, the people I hire, the execs in our team, people that can completely complement that.

9:59George Davis:Like if I can do the first 80%, they need to be someone that can do that harder, last 20 % of keeping kind of the machine running. And I'd say my strength is the ability to have many, many contexts in my head at all times and be able to think across the product, across the way the business is working, and then move on to another problem. And so strategy and product strategy is very much my area. We have an excellent chief operating officer who spent 10 years running ops and compliance for Paysafe and previously PayPal, etc., who really focuses on keeping the machine running underneath the hood at that same time.

10:33George Davis:And then a brilliant chief revenue officer, Yasmin, who really has kind of transformed our commercial machine properly. and so by surrounding myself with people that are really good executor operators, it means that I can kind of bring that magic of the product strategy and solving these problems on a micro scale and thinking about the strategy on macro scale whilst we kind of keep the business running and it's meant that we can move really, really fast and that's how we really last year have achieved that growth with balancing those two sides. And you raised from North Zone, so why did you pick them and any stories from your sort of fundraising journey?

11:13George Davis:Yes, so we've raised about$20 million total, just under. We went with Northstone. We actually had a really good, really strong experience with Northstone, actually. We were fairly late stage with a couple other funds and the team at Northstone just reached out and wanted to get involved. And I said, you've got like one week, really, because we are getting to this last stage. And we had a term sheet, I think, in three days. and they've been super collaborative. Like it's the first time we had interacted with a fund properly that has a lot of platform services to support the business versus the really early pre-seed kind of seed funds, which is all about just kind of supporting you to get moving.

11:52George Davis:We also brought on Flourish Ventures, which is the eBay founders fund. And they've also been very useful. Illuminate Financial is probably the highest net impact fund we've had to our business. Illuminate is excellent because specifically for our use case. They are a fund that all of their LPs are just the large clearing banks. That's Barclays, BNYM, JP Morgan, Citi, et cetera. And the operational impact they've had for us has been immense, kind of helping us sell to those banks that we now sell to in providing the Middle East clearing, but also buying services from them and partnering with them.

12:26George Davis:And Illuminate is probably one of the only funds I've met that truly understands what we do to a high level of depth. There's a distinction between clearing and payments. They're not the same thing. They're not the same part of the stack. And Illuminate really get that because they're so financial infrastructure driven. And then Northstone has been very good on the strategy front and supporting on that. Our first investor was actually George Shopecky at Raba in South Africa. He was a big investor in BVNK and we got to know each other that way. And he's been phenomenal for fundraising, for strategy as well.

13:01George Davis:And so we have a really good set of investors. We also have on our board the previous CEO of Morgan Stanley for EMEA, which has also been really helpful. And so we've been very blessed. Our fundraising stories have always been relatively easy. I think we thought we would have a much harder time when we started the business and it was quite Middle Eastern focused, but it's become so global. And now really the scale that we're operating at is very much a US venture capital game now versus the small and mid-leastern funds or etc. So we're getting quite a nice balance across European US venture capital.

13:35That's amazing. And George, what's been the most satisfying moment of the journey with Lorem so far?

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14:24I think last year's growth was

14:27George Davis:probably the most kind of proud and satisfying moment because when you're in the middle of it, you don't really feel like it's anything different. And we stepped back at the end of last year and just saw that we'd literally multiplied the business physically by 55 times. And it didn't at any point feel like that was really happening as we were as we were going our investors especially illuminate they're always telling me like expect it not to always do that um and make sure your mental health is protected because it can be quite fragile if i'm i'm used to that growth and it falls down a bit but at the moment 20x next year wouldn't that be awful yeah exactly dreadful uh what are we even doing it for but uh it so i think that was that was great and i think solving the dollar problem was just so huge for us like it just that product grew last year 200 percent month a month and so it really dominated our business very quick and to it was like instant gratification like instant satisfaction for customers like suddenly the market the addressable market just blew up for us because dollars are everything and so i always say it feels like we can't see the bottom of the pool like they we just don't know where that interest stops we we just have so much interest we don't have the sales team to really cope with it at the time and so that was also very satisfying and I think we'll see a lot more.

15:45George Davis:George can I ask a question on that was was was that always part of the roadmap to to do dollars or was it a kind of natural progression through sort of customer development that you needed to unlock that? I think we knew one day dollars were important but we'd also watched peers in the market like ClearBank state publicly that they'll solve dollars later, they'll probably buy a bank in the US. And it always felt out of our reach, especially because the banks that you need to work with to do it really well when you're not the US bank yet are really, really hard to work with because they are so large.

16:21George Davis:And so we always thought it was maybe a later stage problem that we would solve. We actually thought we'd spend a lot more time on the Middle East. We thought in the beginning that it would go global, but we'd take longer and we would spend more time building up Middle East than currency, but we just got so much demand for dollars in particular, but even for Asian currencies, Europe, I was so surprised when we got a huge demand for euros because it feels like a very saturated market, but we really underestimated a customer's propensity to put all of their volume with one platform as a primary when it can solve the harder problems, i.e.

16:55George Davis:dollars and markets that aren't available. And we really didn't think that we would end up building euros right now or anything like that because of that. Whereas dollars, I think we always knew. And I think we also underestimated how much impact dollars into emerging markets would have. So instead of clearing INR in India, clearing dollars to India is actually become a huge part of our business, dollars into Asia, dollars into Africa. And I think we always thought we would need to build more local currency to achieve those roots and actually dollars just completely dominate. and so I think it was always coming we just didn't realize the size and the speed super interesting and what have been some of the harder parts of the journey I mean early stage we underestimated how difficult banking in the Middle East would be we overestimated difficulty of licensing so we actually achieved our our license in the UA in seven weeks which was very very quick and we were only five people and so that was a total shock but then it took nine months to operationalize that license because banks just don't have client money products they don't understand really payments at all and so when you have this requirement to hold funds overnight in a client money account and there's no client money product in the market that's quite difficult and we spent a long time chasing routes that gave no reward really and we in the end got to a great place but that was really really tough I think scaling the business has happened quite naturally outside of the banking piece but that banking part was probably the highest stress most difficult part of that journey for us and it meant that things were just a lot more delayed like we we actually tried to raise that round that we were raised with Northstone nine months earlier or so um and we tried to do it with Middle Eastern investors and we were still aligning on the banking and things like that and it was just impossible to do and uh we found Middle Eastern funds quite unreliable as well to work with and so um that was also difficult and that was all kind of linked to this view that no one would get banked in this market and so this business probably can't grow and so that was quite a hit to morale actually um especially when we were small and everyday kind of counts and we had two million dollars in the bank and we were probably at the time burning 90 ,000 a month 100 ,000 a month now how do you um how do you keep sort of morale up in those in those scenarios like full transparency with the team or sort of limited information flows or what we are we are super transparent um we're very direct and very blunt i'm not a very diplomatic person and i don't enjoy when i have to be diplomatic like we are very very direct as a culture but also very casual as a culture because of that directness as well so we don't have a lot of formality with these things and i always have felt when i've worked for someone else the more information i have the more ought in and involved i feel and we can we try and treat all of our team as really owners of of law and generally anyway because everyone obviously has options and everyone is is kind of building to the same big vision like i think we can't build an 80 billion dollar business line that's the same value as citibank's version of this is 80 billion dollars without having a huge amount of transparency to move at the speed that we move at um and so i think that really helps on the other side i've also had this quote recently that i really agree with that actually when I can't remember the exact quote, but it's when things are growing, nothing matters.

20:38George Davis:Basically, everyone's happy because actually the right people will always feel energized, even when things aren't going right. But if they're growing aggressively and they feel like they're having impact, you know, your culture can really be anything. And it's when things are going wrong, that it really matters how you how you treat people. And so I think also we benefit from so much kind of aggressive growth that people feel like they're having high impact. And then in those moments where things are going down and we're very transparent, we're very honest and open, I think that really helps people remain bought in at all times.

21:09Yeah. And a more personal question, because we love getting to know founders on a personal level. What advice would you give to your 18 year old self?

21:18George Davis:I think when I started that business, I got lucky that we had an IP sale, but I wasn't chasing a problem. I was building a solution for something that we didn't really have a problem statement for. And that was really hard because it's really hard to then kind of retrofit product market fit onto that. And I always tell people now that are thinking about starting a business, don't just start a business because you want to start a business. Like you need to feel so passionate about what you're solving. And now, I mean, for James, my co-founder and I, we are payments obsessed. We love this. This is really not about money.

21:53George Davis:at this stage we're fine for money this is so much about passion and really wanting to solve this problem well and really truly believing this can be a massive public business and it needs to be to do well and I think when you're just trying to get a business or make some money you can't solve those problems super well and I think you build bad cultures you build bad products when you're just chasing money when it's just I want to have an exit or be a founder do my own thing And so with my first one, it was very much kind of, I just, I started that business out of a hackathon at my university.

22:26George Davis:And I just known I wanted to carry on doing that sort of thing, just left to do that. And I think ultimately that was never going to work out super well because of that. And is it, is the, where do you find that kind of drive and obsession for payments? Is it like solving people's problems? Is it the sort of like, you want to dislodge the bank's position because they're taking advantage? What is the driving force there? I think what got me interested is just I asked why a lot, very obsessively. And so I look at why does money move how it moves and how it's like when money really moves between two people, how does that actually work?

23:04George Davis:How is physical money? I remember that was the first moment when I thought I really love this one, looking into like central bank money and central bank settlements and how a central bank clears money between participants in the market. That really got me into it. and then it's just kind of looking at inefficiencies and I'm not someone that's very good at sitting back when I think something's done wrong or even like I have a very strong moral compass as well and so I'm always kind of trying to fix a problem at all times and so sitting and seeing it done inefficiently and thinking I can do this better I know how this should be done better is really what drives that but in general I'm just very obsessive as a person and we try and only hire very obsessive people I don't actually necessarily care what you're obsessed with I just care that you have the the ability to be super obsessive and really care about something and and I think that drives a lot of things and I'm very obsessively kind of emotional about what I'm into it's very it's a passion not just a not just like an area I like to learn about and we always look for people that do that same thing and I think that's really helped us build a business full of people that really really care about solving this problem yeah amazing well I think George, that's a great moment to move on to our final two questions.

24:16So the first one is a future unicorn prediction. So obviously, you've been involved in the fintech space for a while. But are there been any other businesses that you've spotted recently that you think could go all the way?

24:26George Davis:There is one. Now they're in stealth. So I don't have a name to share with you. But they they are one of the founders is an angel investor in in law and actually and they recently sold a business and they're looking at the fixed income space and changing that in the same way that we're changing clearing really in changing the fundamental rails that fixed income works on say bonds and US treasury securities etc and I think that is a huge and untouched space the same way clearing and cash management is not really touched by anyone outside of these big banks fixed income is the same deal it's very inaccessible it's very slow it's very over-the-counter OTC it's very manual um it actually has more kind of systemic issues than than clearing does really the u.s bond market especially and so um i think that's very exciting and i love infrastructure businesses that are going right down to the metal because i think that's where the value add is i think the things i believe in the least are the things that are adding a nice ui on top of the same old experience and um this i think is one of those huge huge areas the same net change you find when people, well, evolve the clearing, evolve stock trading, etc.

25:41George Davis:All of these core financial market pieces of infrastructure, I think are huge markets to attach that are just left with stagnant incumbents today. It sounds like a great one. We're gonna have to get the name off you. I'm private. We're in. We're in. So and then our final question is our dinner party guest game. So if you could have dinner with any three people, who would they be? So I think the The Collinson brothers are a big one for me because I think they did to card payments, what we're trying to do with the clearing rails. And they built this big platform around that. I also love how obsessive they are about learning.

26:16George Davis:They seem like two of the smartest people in fintech ever. And so those two are very high up my list. And then I also think Vlad from Robinhood, same reason as the fixed income thing, is that these people have rebuilt the way these archaic industries work and then done it at really, really aggressive scale. And so I think it would be John and Patrick and then Vlad from Robinhood. All in on FinTech. Absolutely. That's all my brain can really work on. Love it. Fully optimized to the end. Well, George, it's been great to hear more about Lorem and the journey you've been on. Incredible 2025 that you had and hopefully a lot more growth and success to come.

27:00so yeah thank you so much for coming on and telling us a bit more and sharing some insight into how you've developed your career through fintech and now scaling a very very exciting business yeah thanks for having me that's it for this week thanks very much for listening to stay up to date with the latest episodes please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform we also have a newsletter called reading unicorns which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox. Please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media. And we'll see you on the next episode.

27:34This episode is sponsored by Deck Dolphin. Fundraising can be tough. You build a deck, you send it out and you hear nothing back. You don't get enough feedback. Deck Dolphin changes that. Get honest, actionable feedback from real VCs within 48 hours. Submit your deck today. Go to deckdolphin.com and start booking more investor meetings with a better deck.