Making the Money Earn While the Cargo is in Transit
An interview with Jordan Lawrence by Sean Murphy
One of Damisa's customers is a Polish business with around 120 million a year in turnover, most of it flowing between Poland and Africa. It moves physical goods, in trade where trust between the two sides is limited, and for years it protected itself the way exporters usually do, through its bank, with escrow arrangements, letters of credit and bank guarantees. A shipment from Poland to Ghana can take a long time to arrive, pass through the ports and be signed off at the other end.
The company now holds those funds in stablecoin escrow wallets with Damisa, where the money can earn a return while the goods are in transit.
Jordan Lawrence, Damisa's co-founder and chief executive, says the routing behind that escrow depends on how long the money will sit there. For a shipment that will take six months, Damisa advise holding the funds in a stablecoin chosen for safety and liquidity. For a short transaction, two or three days by air freight, they route through a coin that pays a higher yield and that they expect to stay liquid for at least a week. The customer does not choose the coin. Damisa’s AI engine makes that recommendation, in the way smart routing picks the path for a card payment, and the customer sees an ordinary payment at the front end.
Lawrence has spent almost 20 years in fintech. He started PCN, the Payments and Cards Network, in 2007 as a consulting busi ness with staffing, recruitment and media arms, and grew it to offices from Atlanta to Hong Kong. In 2019, while still running PCN, he co-founded Volt, a London-based account-to-account payment gateway, which raised a $60 million Series B in 2023.
He sold PCN to a large UK advisory firm that same year, left Volt in 2024 and founded Damisa that December, having come to see stablecoin infrastructure as the future of account-to-account payments, moving the digital equivalent of money between accounts across borders and around the clock, faster and at lower cost.
Damisa work entirely business to business, helping companies in established markets such as the US, UK, Europe and Australia trade with emerging markets across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Their customers fall into two groups: payment service providers that use Damisa's technology to serve their own clients, and companies moving physical commodities, from oil and gas to sugar and coffee, alongside import and export businesses. Payments are one part of the stack, which also includes escrow and treasury vaults and bank accounts issued under Damisa's own licences in some countries and partners' licences in others. Lawrence's ambition is for Damisa to become a bank for commodity and import-export firms that need the full range of services.
The company are chain and stablecoin agnostic, which Lawrence puts down to time spent in the markets they serve. In many emerging economies stablecoins are a lifeline against sharp currency swings, with USDT dominant in some places and USDC in others. "It's about just accepting what people want to pay in," he says. Damisa collect local currency through partners or under their own licences, convert it into stablecoins and pay out wherever the customer needs. He describes Damisa as the interoperability layer between stablecoins, able to accept a South African rand coin on one chain and pay out USDC on Base or USDT on Tron.
For finance teams, Lawrence finds the case easier to make than the one he made for open banking in a past life. Money sent through correspondent banking into and out of Africa can go missing for days. "Either the money is in your bank account or it's in the Damisa environment; it cannot be anywhere else," he says. He has seen counterparties pay 12 per cent to move money into Europe through correspondent banks, against around 1 per cent on stablecoin rails. The World Bank's latest figures put the global average cost of sending $200 at 6.36 per cent and rank Sub-Saharan Africa as the most expensive region in the world to send money to.
The corridors growing fastest are those with the most fragmentation between local currencies. In Southeast Asia, Damisa's PSP customers serve large enterprises that want to collect money in a market such as Thailand without holding baht, so Damisa collect it and convert it immediately into a US dollar stablecoin, removing the currency risk. Between Singapore, New York and London, he says, Swift works well and stablecoins do not yet have a strong use case.
Looking three to five years ahead, Lawrence expects the world's financial infrastructure to be underwritten by stablecoins or other digital asset collateral, with trade finance moving on chain and lenders writing loans against Bitcoin. He expects banks to respond by acquiring companies already active in the space, bringing a wave of consolidation with them.
The Polish exporter’s goods still take as long to reach Ghana as they always did. In its bank’s escrow, the money simply waited out the journey. Held with Damisa, it sits in a stablecoin product that earns a return until the goods are signed off at the other end. “If the money is going to take 10 days to get into your account, well, at least do something with it in those 10 days,” Lawrence says.
