# #187: He Left Visa to Build Caliza with Ezra Kebrab

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab.md
Podcast: [Brazil Crypto Report](https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676)
Published: 2026-06-26T19:22:43+00:00
Episode link: https://bitsborders.substack.com/p/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/203739228/d5623b5309ba8926206e5592c5252f89.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/brazil-crypto-report-5342676/episodes/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab
Duration seconds: 948

## Resource

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 ,…

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