Rapid growth is often seen as a sign of success in fintech. But as transaction volumes increase, weaknesses in payment infrastructure, fraud prevention and risk management can become harder to spot – and more costly to fix.
Shaun Heng, Chief Product & Growth Officer at Banxa, a global crypto payments infrastructure provider, knows these challenges firsthand. Before joining Banxa, Heng held product and growth leadership roles at MoonPay and CoinMarketCap, gaining experience across two major players in the digital asset space.
In this interview with DailyCoin, he discusses why rapid growth can expose hidden vulnerabilities in fintech, what it takes to build payment infrastructure that works at scale, and how stablecoins could reshape the future of global payments.
Growth, Risk and the Challenges of Scaling
– When does rapid growth become a risk for fintech companies?
Our total transaction volume (TTV) grew 76% from January to August. Stablecoins increased by 117%. Great numbers. The first thing I asked was where they came from?
Growth becomes a risk signal the moment it outruns the systems underneath it. That happens more often than people admit.
When volume doubles, every weakness doubles with it. That could mean fraud attempts, chargeback exposure, reconciliation breaks. Just to name a few. So you’re always looking at a great number next to problems that may not have appeared yet.
The second challenge is that fast growth is almost never evenly distributed. It could be one particular partner, region, digital asset, or payment method. That concentration is invisible on a topline chart, so we always look deeper to understand the drivers and future success.
And team culture is real. In a quarter everyone has worked so hard and exceeded targets, nobody wants to be the one asking hard questions.
The discipline I would push for is simple: break down the growth before you celebrate it. Where is it coming from? Which rails is it riding on? And what happens if one of those rails is withdrawn next week?
Growth becomes a risk signal the moment it outruns the systems underneath it.
Building Payment Infrastructure Users Never See
– What does a payment infrastructure provider need to deliver to make the crypto on-ramp experience seamless?
For a long time the industry shipped widgets, and a widget is a visible admission that someone else is handling this.
Banxa Native is headless by design. The partner owns the interface, the brand, the pricing presentation, the whole journey. We simply sit behind their stack. Users never
have to leave the app.
Returning users never verify twice, because existing KYC can be reused through token sharing. So, everything the user shouldn’t have to think about. That’s the definition of invisible.
In practice, it means the provider owns licensing, or a licensed local partner, in every market where money actually moves, local payment methods, not just cards, because users pay the way their country pays.
Vietnam is the example I keep reaching for. We launched VietQR there in Q3, and it is already our top payment method in that region at roughly 42% of all transactions — driving a conversion rate close to eight times higher than cards. Same users, same product, same pricing. The only variable was letting people pay the way they already pay.
Then provider also need identity and KYC, including the ability to accept verification the partner has already done. Settlement, in and out, with money arriving where it is supposed to on the day it is supposed to.
And it has to run in both directions, not just the buy flow. On-ramp, where a user pays with a local method and receives crypto. Off-ramp, where they sell and cashout to their own bank account.
A lot of products ship the first and treat off-ramp as a secondary problem, and that is precisely the moment a user discovers the money only moves one way.
For a European fintech, Banxa collects the local payment, exchanges and settles the fiat leg where the partner needs it. We carry the MiCA licence that passports across the EU — so they don’t have to build a crypto licensing and payments stack country by country.
One partner, one compliance review, one integration, both directions. That speed to market is usually why partners choose us.
The Infrastructure Challenges Behind Stablecoin Payments
– Banxa’s infrastructure supports stablecoin payments across B2B settlement, consumer payments, and cross-border transactions. What is the most overlooked challenge in making stablecoin payments work at scale?
Nobody has ever been excited about reconciliation, and it is the thing that decides whether you have a business.
A stablecoin transfer settles in seconds. That part is genuinely solved.
What is not solved is everything around it. The fiat leg still moves on banking hours and local scheme rules. You have a bank partner on one side, a chain on the other, and a treasury position sitting between them that has to be funded, hedged and accounted for.
Every transaction has to be matched across those systems, in the right currency, on the right day, with the right fee breakdown, in a form an auditor and a regulator will accept.
The second unglamorous thing is failure handling.
At scale, the interesting work is not the happy path. It is the payment that half-completes.
The most common example is card decline and for many reasons – bank limit, 3D Secure step that timed out etc. In most checkouts that ends the order and the buyer needs to start again, or more often leaves.
Then there are bank transfers that arrive three days late with a truncated reference. The refund that has to go back to a card when the crypto has already left.
Users judge you almost entirely on how those cases are handled, and those cases are where most providers quietly fall over.
We recently shipped Payment Method Switch, which lets the buyer change how they pay without losing the order. It separates the order from the payment, so a buyer can move from card to Google Pay without losing the order or redoing verification, and so they see the new method before confirming.
The third challenge is payment method coverage, which sounds like a commercial checklist and is actually an engineering and licensing dependency.
Supporting the way people pay in the US, Nigeria, Australia and Germany means four different integrations, four different fraud profiles and four different regulatory conversations. A switch only works if the alternative payment method is already connected and live for that buyer.
It matters because this is the layer the user is trusting without knowing it. When the plumbing is right, the experience feels effortless. When it is wrong, it does not feel like a backend issue. It feels like the product lied to them.
Compliance as a Competitive Advantage
– Can KYC be more than compliance — can it actually become a growth advantage in crypto payments?
Yes, and I would go further. KYC is one of the highest-leverage product surfaces in payments. Most teams just never treat it as one.
Look at where users actually drop. It is rarely pricing. It is the verification step.
Someone has decided they want to transact, they have intent, and then they are asked to photograph a document on a screen that does not match the app they were just in. A meaningful share of them never come back.
That is not a compliance cost. That is a conversion problem.
So the advantage comes from three things.
First, verify once. If a partner has already verified a user to a standard we can rely on, that user should not be asked again. Banxa Native supports exactly this through token sharing, so returning users go straight to payment.
Second, verify proportionately. Not every transaction carries the same risk, so it shouldn’t carry the same friction.
Third, verify natively. No redirect, no third-party screen, no moment where the user wonders who they just handed their passport details to.
There is a trust argument too. In most of the world, people are more willing to move money with a platform that looks regulated, not less. Verification done well signals that this is a real financial product. Done badly, suggests the opposite.
My advice is to instrument it. Measure drop-off by step. Iterate. Most teams hand it to engineering once and never look again.
– Crypto payments come with a lot of risk, from payment disputes to fraud. Do you the industry underestimates the value of having someone else take on that risk?
Badly, yes. And the reason is that the cost of carrying it yourself does not show up as a line item until it is already a problem.
The fiat leg is reversible. The crypto leg is not. A card payment can be disputed months after the asset has left. That gap is where fraud lives.
So when a platform decides to run its own ramp, they’re usually pricing the integration work. What they are not pricing is the loss rate, the rules engine that has to keep up with it, the team watching it at three in the morning, the bank relationships that get withdrawn when your chargeback ratio crosses a threshold, and the capital you have to hold against all of it.
Those costs are lumpy and they arrive late.
The real value of transferring that risk is not just the losses avoided. It is focus.
With Banxa Native, the partner owns the experience end to end. We carry the regulated rails and the settlement behind it. They get to spend their engineering time on the things their users actually chose them for.
Risk you have not priced is still risk. Someone is carrying it.
– What’s one thing Web3 companies still see as “just compliance” that should really be treated as a product or growth issue?
Market access. Which licences you hold, and therefore which countries you can actually serve, is usually filed under legal. It is the single biggest determinant of your addressable market.
Teams spend enormous effort on acquisition and then discover the funnel is geographically capped. Users arrive, get to the payment step, and find out their country is not supported or their local payment method is not available.
From the user’s point of view, the product simply does not work. From the growth team’s point of view, the conversion rate is mysteriously bad in half the world. Nobody connects that back to a licensing decision made two years earlier.
The same is true of regulatory readiness ahead of a regime change. MiCA is the clearest recent example.
The companies that treated it as a legal deadline scrambled. The ones that treated it as a product decision kept serving European users without interruption while others paused service. Continuity of access is a growth outcome.
This is also why we think about our licence footprint as product surface area rather than paperwork. Banxa services users across North America, Europe, the UK, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, and is MiCA-authorised as a CASP in the Netherlands. For a partner building on Banxa, that footprint is not a compliance appendix in the contract. It is the list of countries where their product works.
My general rule: if a compliance decision changes who can use your product or how easily, it was never only a compliance decision.
What Comes Next for Crypto Payments?
– What development in crypto payments could have the biggest impact on the industry over the next few years?
Stablecoins becoming the default settlement layer for ordinary businesses that have no interest in crypto.
That is the shift. It isn’t necessarily about more people buying digital assets. It’s about companies moving money across borders faster and cheaper, with the stablecoin being an implementation detail they never discuss.
The future isn’t crypto payments. It’s better payments.
The numbers say it is already happening.
Stablecoin supply has actually contracted since May, from around $310 billion to roughly $286 billion. But payment volume went the other way. Allium reported it at $482 billion in the first nine months of this year, up 45% year on year.
Banks, card networks and large fintechs are integrating this into their products right now.
What makes it transformative is the disappearance, not the technology.
Consumers will keep using the apps and currencies they already trust. The rails underneath will change. Identity handled once, not repeatedly. Settlement in minutes instead of days. Fees people can actually see.
In many emerging markets, this will go further and faster than people in Washington or London expect, because the alternative is genuinely slow.
Digital dollars become the practical choice for savings and cross-border flows, not a theoretical one.
Most users will never know a stablecoin was involved. That’s the point.
