Rebuilding Global Payment Rails with Stablecoins: Rain on Latitude Capital’s Escape Velocity Podcast
Rain co-founders Farooq Malik and Charles Yoo-Naut joined Latitude Capital founder and long-time investor Ansaf Kareem on the Escape Velocity podcast to talk about why money is getting tokenized, how Rain is rebuilding payment rails from first principles, and what this shift means for companies building global products.
You can listen to and watch the full episode here.
From Rain’s early bet on stablecoin-backed cards to today’s full-stack platform for accounts, cards, and payouts, the conversation zooms out on how to make onchain dollars usable for real-world businesses at scale. Below are five key takeaways from their discussion:
1. Money Is Getting Tokenized and Every System Has to Catch Up
Farooq puts it simply: money is moving onchain, and that means every system that moves, holds, or touches money will need to be upgraded. That includes banking cores, SWIFT terminals, and the countless internal tools enterprises use to run payouts and treasury.
For founders and enterprises, the opportunity is about both cheaper payments and always-on, programmable money.
2. Stablecoins Are the Primary Rail, Not an Add-On
Rain was built stablecoin-first. Transactions post onchain 24/7, and Rain then connects that settlement layer into Visa, banks, and local payout networks.
For customers, the UX feels familiar—swiping a card, seeing an account balance, receiving a payout—while the underlying rails are global, instant, and programmable.
3. One Global Platform Instead of a Patchwork of Local Partners
Before Rain, “going global” meant stitching together different banks, processors, and card programs market by market, each with its own contracts, fees, and technical quirks. Many teams never tried, because the integration and maintenance burden was too high.
Rain replaces this patchwork with a single API and a single global partner. Companies can embed dollar accounts and cards for users in dozens of countries with the same look, feel, and unit economics, without rebuilding their payments stack in every market.
4. Turning Payout Cost Centers into Profit Centers
One of the biggest near-term opportunities is payouts: insurance claims, creator payouts, marketplace disbursements, royalties, vendor payments, and more. Today, these flows are slow, expensive, and often treated purely as a cost of doing business.
By settling in stablecoins and issuing card- or account-based access to those funds, Rain helps companies move from “mailing checks and waiting days” to instant, programmable payouts that can actually generate margin and improve customer experience.
5. Building for the Next Wave of Enterprise Adoption
Farooq and Charles are clear that we’re still early. Regulation is moving in a more constructive direction, and stablecoin supply has already grown meaningfully.
Rain’s focus now is on being the infrastructure partner that helps those enterprises upgrade: giving them compliant, stablecoin-native rails for accounts, cards, and payouts, so they can serve a global customer base without a global rebuild.
If you’re building a neobank, wallet, exchange, payroll product, or any platform that moves money across borders, the episode is a deep dive into how Rain thinks about the future of payment rails and how stablecoins are reshaping what “global by default” can look like.
