#187: He Left Visa to Build Caliza with Ezra Kebrab

Hey everyone! I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month. We sat down to discuss how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US.Kebrab’s path ran through a peer-to-peer wallet startup sold to Square in 2013, then Visa, where he watched Pix and real-time payments take off in Brazil.🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversationThat experience exposed a gap: domestic rails kept improving while cross-border payments stayed stuck, which became the founding insight behind Caliza five years ago.* Caliza started as a traditional payments company, and the model has always been to marry stablecoin rails with traditional banking infrastructure rather than replace it.* After the 2023 banking crisis, Caliza decided to build its own licenses and banking partnerships rather than rely on intermediaries.* The company has grown consistently above 40% month over month, with 60% growth last month.* Customers range from customs and FX brokers without engineering teams to global API clients like Flutterwave, Skydo, and LianLian.* Kebrab pushes back on framing stablecoin players as “the Swift killer.” Swift has built strong standardization for supplier payments, and the real differentiation in cross-border isn’t the rail, it’s the workflow: tax codes, payment messaging, and local compliance criteria that determine whether goods clear customs.* On agentic commerce, Kebrab sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation, not consumer payments, helping treasury teams abstract away the work of tracking cash across a dozen markets and currencies. He argues“If you do not have any form of agentic commerce in how you think about building your company, you’re becoming a relic very fast.”Caliza is expanding further into Africa and building out collections to Asia in the coming months.I really enjoyed this conversation with Ezra and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on LinkedinHave a great weekend everyone,-AWSRecent Episodes Get full access to Bits and Borders at bitsborders.substack.com/subscribe