OpenPayd CEO Says Global Payments Need Less Plumbing and More Intelligence

OpenPayd CEO Iana Dimitrova is making a fairly practical argument: the hard part of cross-border payments is no longer access to rails, it is deciding which rail, system, or network should carry each transaction. For PSPs serving high-risk verticals, that matters because every extra rail usually means another integration, another compliance layer, and another place for operations to go sideways.

1. During a recent conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Dimitrova said businesses are now “stitching together banks, FX providers, payment rails, now crypto on and off ramps,” with each piece bringing its own integration and compliance burden. Her point is that the infrastructure puzzle has become too complicated for merchants to assemble on their own.
2. OpenPayd, based in London, is pitching a single integration that connects payment accounts, foreign exchange, local and cross-border payments, treasury services and digital asset capabilities. The company’s thesis is that orchestration is now a business problem, not just a technical one.
3. “It’s not the job of businesses to think about the infrastructure payment and to think about regulation,” Dimitrova told Webster. “They have to focus on what they do best, which is developing and selling their products and services.”
4. Dimitrova said orchestration used to mean routing payments through different providers to improve authorization rates or reduce costs. In her view, the definition has widened: businesses now use orchestration to access multiple payment types without managing each one separately. “We choose, dynamically and in real time, the most appropriate channel for that money movement,” she said, adding that the deciding factor can be speed, cost or acceptance rate.
5. In practice, that can mean one payment moves through a local clearing system in one market, traditional banking rails in another, and stablecoin infrastructure in a third. That is the kind of setup high-risk operators are already dealing with, whether they like the extra complexity or not.

Dimitrova also pushed back on the idea that one model will simply replace the others. As major banks evaluate tokenized deposits and stablecoins keep finding a role in cross-border commerce, she argued that interoperability is the real issue. “We are all, in a way, competing with each other for a share of the global money movement, but we are equally complementary to each other,” she said.