Yellow Card announces $40 million funding round to expand its stablecoin infrastructure

Maurice, a former Pokémon card seller, told CoinDesk in a 2024 podcast interview that he and Justin Poiroux, the firm’s chief technology officer, founded Yellow Card to take on big banks and Swift, the interbank service that processes over 53 million secure messaging instructions a day for nearly 11,500 financial institutions. Swift facilitates trillions of dollars in global bank transactions and said last month it was testing its first blockchain ledger.

Yellow Card, which focuses mostly on emerging markets, will use the new capital to expand Global USD Accounts, its dollar account product for businesses, and add stablecoin and local payment mechanisms in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

The accounts allow businesses to hold dollars, hold and swap stablecoins, manage treasury operations and collect or disburse local currencies through domestic payment rails in more than 50 countries, Yellow Card said.

Maurice said the company’s flows have historically been split roughly evenly between corporates and large financial institutions using its treasury-management and payments infrastructure. Bank volumes are now growing faster as large institutions adopt the company’s system, he said.

Yellow Card kicked off its operations in Africa, said Maurice, where it built operations across fragmented country-by-country regulatory jurisdictions. The firm said that since its founding in 2016, it has facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions and holds licenses, authorizations or registrations in 22 jurisdictions.