Episode
#187: He Left Visa to Build Caliza with Ezra Kebrab
- Podcast
- Brazil Crypto Report
- Published
- Jun 26, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 948
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Summary
Hey everyone! I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month. We sat down to discuss how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments , with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US. Kebrab’s path ran through a peer-to-peer wallet startup sold to Square in 2013 , then Visa , where he watched Pix and real-time payments take off in Brazil. 🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts 🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation That experience exposed a gap: domestic rails kept improving while cross-border payments stayed stuck , which became the founding insight behind Caliza five years ago. * Caliza started as a traditional payments company, and the model has always been to marry stablecoin rails with traditional banking infrastructure rather than replace it. * After the 2023 banking crisis, Caliza decided to build its own licenses and banking partnerships rather than rely on intermediaries. * The company has grown consistently above 40% month over month, with 60% growth last month. * Customers range from customs and FX brokers without engineering teams to global API clients like Flutterwave, Skydo, and LianLian. * Kebrab pushes back on framing stablecoin players as “the Swift killer.” Swift has built strong standardization for supplier payments, and the r eal differentiation in cross-border isn’t the rail, it’s the workflow : tax codes, payment messaging, and local compliance criteria that determine whether goods clear customs. * On agentic commerce, Kebrab sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation, not consumer payments ,…