Guest Article by George Davis, CEO and Co-founder of Lorum
From open banking and stablecoins to correspondent banking and clearing infrastructure, few leaders have worked across as many layers of the financial services stack as George Davis. In this guest article, the Lorum CEO and co-founder shares his perspective on the challenges and opportunities shaping global money movement, and why the future of financial services depends on rethinking the infrastructure that sits beneath it.
- Before founding Lorum, you led product at TrueLayer and co-founded BVNK. What led you towards building infrastructure focused on correspondent banking, clearing and treasury operations?
Each step took me one layer deeper into the stack. At TrueLayer, I led product during the early open banking years, and you learn quickly that the experience at the interface is only as good as the infrastructure underneath it. At BVNK I went deeper into settlement itself, using stablecoins in markets where traditional rails struggled. That taught me something important: stablecoins solve an access problem, not a structural one. The friction was never really about technology.
Lorum was launched as Fuse, building AED clearing. Every new market meant new banks, new controls, and new operational risk, because the friction sits in the structure of correspondent banking itself. So rather than working around correspondents, we became one. Lorum is a full stack correspondent: clearing, custody, and cash management for financial institutions, built as the core business rather than an afterthought.
- You’ve previously suggested that correspondent banking has an incentives problem. What do you believe is driving that issue, and what impact does it have on financial institutions today?
The system works really, really well. It is the incentives and the participants that are wrong.
Banks are lenders. Their model is yield, and they make money by holding funds. Clearing is logistics. It requires moving them. You cannot optimise for yield and velocity at the same time, and inside a lending institution, velocity loses.
The largest correspondents built their networks decades ago, with branches that operate independently. It costs them roughly the same to execute $100 million or $100 billion, so they de-risk and withdraw from the mid-market. The banks that filled the gap are lending businesses, funding mortgage portfolios and loan books with institutional money that is inherently transient, while managing their balance sheets to stay below regulatory thresholds.
The impact lands on mid-market financial institutions: fragmented setups, duplicated compliance, trapped capital, and no certainty about when settlement will actually happen.
- Many people see payments as a solved problem. What are some of the operational challenges happening behind the scenes that most businesses never see?
The front end is largely solved. What sits behind it is not.
The most persistent myth is that SWIFT is the bottleneck. SWIFT is not broken. All it does is tell an institution to rebalance a nostro account. The lag lives in the chain of custody: the number of hops between intermediaries, and the manual execution inside each of them. Every hop reduces visibility into where funds sit and adds uncertainty about when settlement occurs.
For treasury teams, that uncertainty is a real cost. They pre-fund to compensate, which traps capital. And none of it is visible to the businesses on top, because payment infrastructure is invisible right up until it breaks. Then it is the only thing anyone can see.
- Lorum focuses on areas such as clearing,custodyand cash management. Why do these parts of the financial ecosystem deserve more attention from the wider FinTech industry?
Because they decide whether everything above them works. Fintech has spent fifteen years innovating at the interface while the plumbing stayed the same. We sit low in the stack, and from there you get a clear view of what is real and what is a glossy demo.
Clearing, custody, and cash management are fiduciary functions. They should be 100% reserve-backed, and they should be someone’s core business, not a loss leader to gather deposits for lending. That is why we built Lorum around Named Account Custody, a structure that gives each account holder a legal and operational relationship with the custody framework, reducing the opacity and chain risk of nested clearing models. No intermediary chain, no lending book in the way.
For a mid-market institution, that means the infrastructure the largest banks reserve for their largest clients.
- Building infrastructure businesses isvery differentfrom building customer-facing FinTech products. What does that look like operationally, and what are some of the unique challenges involved?
Infrastructure is excessively local. Every market means its own licensing, scheme access, and controls, and the timelines are set by regulators and central banks, not your product roadmap.
Second, you either own the process end to end or you inherit someone else’s fragility. Most of the industry rents its infrastructure and discovers the limits at the worst possible moment. Building the full stack ourselves is slower and harder, but when a client asks where their funds are, we answer from our own systems.
Third, the bar is resilience, not novelty. A consumer product can iterate in public. You cannot do that with other institutions’ client funds. Trust is the product, and it compounds slowly: licensing, governance, audit trails, a track record of settlement certainty. None of it can be rushed, and all of it is the moat.
- You’ve built across the UK, theGulfand the US. How do the opportunities differ across those markets, and why is the GCC becoming so important within global financial services?
The UK is where I learned the craft: deep talent, mature regulation, and a crowded market that forces discipline about what you are actually building.
The Gulf is where Lorum started. In the early days we were literally printing payment orders one by one for wet-ink signatures. That gap between ambition and operational reality is where infrastructure businesses get built. What makes the region matter now is that it is building rather than retrofitting. The trade and remittance corridors running through the GCC to Asia and Africa are among the most active in the world, and regulators there want to be clearing hubs, not spokes. Leaders who still treat the region as an afterthought are reading an old map.
The US is the centre of gravity, because the dollar is. We have filed with the OCC for a national trust bank charter, which would bring us under direct federal supervision and allow direct participation in core dollar clearing. If you want to serve financial institutions globally, you earn that in the US.
- Looking ahead, how do you see correspondent banking and international money movement evolving over the next five years?
Correspondent banking does not die. Correspondents that refuse to innovate do, and the most exposed are regional banks running clearing as a sideline to a lending business.
We are rail-agnostic about how value enters the system. Whether a transaction arrives via stablecoin, tokenized deposit, or SWIFT, the job is the same: direct access to central bank clearing and interoperable accounts. I do not believe stablecoins will become the default rail for major currencies; for G7 flows they mostly swap a highly rated correspondent for a crypto exchange in a local market. Tokenized bank deposits are the more interesting story, combining instant settlement finality with the regulated institutions that already hold the money.
Within five years, both get consumed into correspondent infrastructure as silent rails, the way SWIFT is today. You will not know what moved underneath. You will just know that money moved, with certainty, in real time. Settlement will still end at central banks, and the institutions that win will be the ones built to provide that access as their entire business. That is the bet we have made with Lorum.
Image provided from Lorum
