OpenFx noted that just five months back, they came out of stealth at $8B in annualized payment volume. And this past month, they claim to have crossed $20B. Somewhere along that process and journey, the customer conversation fundamentally changed, the OpenFX team claims. At $8B, enterprises asked about just how much cheaper are they than their current service provider. At $20B, they question how fast can you settle, and how fast can they migrate everything to OpenFX.
According to the firm, that shift—from simple cost comparison to settlement speed—is the “inflection point.” At $8B, they competed on price. At $20B, they compete on “speed.”
OpenFX says that it delivers sub-60-minute settlements on the majority or about “90% of transactions.”
Meanwhile, legacy or more traditional FX providers “take 2-7 days.” According to the service provider, the differences between settling in 60 minutes vs 7 days are monumental, enabling businesses to “eliminate entire categories of operational overhead.”
According to a blog post by OpenFX, when you wait 2-7 days for FX settlement, you need:
- Treasury teams managing float risk across multiple currencies and time zones
- FP&A resources forecasting cash availability 48-72 hours in advance
- Working capital locked up in transit, creating opportunity cost
- Hedging strategies to protect against currency moves during settlement windows
- Reconciliation processes that span multiple days and systems
OpenFX added that when settlement happens in under 60 minutes, all of that actually becomes “unnecessary.”
Their recent customer, a fintech reportedly moving billion dollar volumes, told them that they thought they’d save on fees with OpenFX.
Instead of that, they went further and actually eliminated an “entire treasury headcount dedicated to managing 2-day float volatility across 7 currency pairs.”
The ROI wasn’t in the pricing—it was actually found in “the speed eliminating work that shouldn’t exist.”
When clients begin calculating and assessing value in eliminated headcount rather than basis points saved, you’ve crossed into “a different category of infrastructure.”
Legacy FX providers can’t replicate real-time settlement.
Their infrastructure was simply not built for it.
Correspondent banking relies on batch processing, multi-bank intermediation, and “sequential workflows across time zones.”
To lower settlement speeds on these legacy rails, users would have to rebuild them from scratch – “banking relationships, compliance workflows, treasury operations, risk systems.”
OpenFX was reportedly built for real-time settlement. And each component was developed with speed as the “primary constraint.”
That’s why they are able to process $100M+ volume days multiple times per week with the “same settlement speed as $100K or $1M transactions.”
Outdated legacy providers slow down under load, because their architecture requires significant human intervention.
Their solution scales because speed is described as being structural, “not operational.”
Their early adopters were crypto-native startups where “speed was culturally expected.”
Customers are now said to be more established Fintechs—with “billions in annual volume, switching from legacy providers they’ve used for years.”
They’re not switching for “marginal cost savings.”
They’re switching because their business models “increasingly require real-time settlement.”
Use cases that only work with sub-60-minute settlement:
- Real-time FX for marketplaces: Platform takes a transaction in GBP, pays out in MXN within the hour
- Dynamic treasury optimization: Finance teams rebalancing currency positions multiple times per day based on real-time rates
- Embedded FX in SaaS products: Companies offering instant cross-border payments as a product feature, not a 2-day delay
These use cases just don’t work in a world “where you have to wait a week for settlements to clear.” They have achieved near-full automation of currency trading and banking operations “across all the markets they’re active in.”
This matters because speed without scale is “a demo.”
According to OpenFX, speed at scale is infrastructure.
They process 90% of transactions in “under 60 minutes regardless of volume—whether it’s a $100K or $100M transaction.”
Their largest legacy competitor requires “700+ treasury operations staff for what we handle with 4 engineers in our settlements unit.”
They are able to scale 10x in volume without scaling 10x in headcount, while maintaining the “same settlement speed.”
According to the firm, that’s the infrastructure “moat.”
OpenFX introduced key corridors in Q3 2025: MXN (Mexican Peso), BRL (Brazilian Real) and Argentinian Peso (ARS).
They have also now become some of their “highest-traded currencies within six weeks, making LatAm the fastest growing region.”
This is because speed matters “exponentially more in high-volatility environments.”
OpenFX predicts that in 10 years from now, CFOs will look back at 2-7 day FX settlement the same way we now “look at dial-up internet: technically functional, but absurdly inefficient.”
The infrastructure exists, OpenFX noted while pointing out that the actual question isn’t whether you’ll move to real-time settlement. It’s whether you’ll “lead the transition, or explain to your board why your competitor moved first.”
To fintechs building the so-called “next generation” of financial services: Real-time settlement enables business models “that don’t work with 2-day delays.”
According to OpenFX, the question really is how “fast you’re willing to move.”
To enterprise teams handling billions in cross-border volume,, they’re processing $20B for institutions who have now made the switch.
OpenFX claims that they are paying them because sub-60-minute settlement eliminates “operational overhead that costs more than our fees.”
