Payments on Fire™ Episode 278 - From Prefunding to Flow: Rethinking Global Settlement, with Mouloukou Sanoh, MANSA
Nov 5, 2025
Mouloukou Sanoh, CEO and co-founder of MANSA, dives into the intricacies of cross-border payments and liquidity challenges in emerging markets. He discusses how pre-funding hinders global flows, locking up $4 trillion and creating significant opportunity costs. Mouloukou reveals MANSA's innovative use of stablecoins, particularly USDT on Tron, to improve liquidity and reduce costs. He also explores the potential of local stablecoins to enhance on-chain FX and describes a forward-looking vision for a more efficient payment infrastructure.
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Pre-Funding Locks Up Global Liquidity
- Pre-funding ties up capital in many correspondent accounts and prevents instant cross-border liquidity.
- True liquidity would let funds flow on demand rather than sit locked in dozens of pools.
$100M Deal Turned Down For Lack Of Dollars
- Mouloukou Sanoh describes an African fintech that had to turn down a $100 million trade because it lacked US dollar liquidity.
- That incident sparked MANSA's mission to remove pre-funding bottlenecks for emerging-market payments.
$4T In Pre-Funded Accounts Enables Cross-Border Payments
- About $4 trillion sits in pre-funded correspondent accounts to enable cross-border payments.
- SWIFT is only a messaging layer and cannot move value, which creates multi-day settlement delays.