Amir Fardghassemi spent 15 years in finance, running a hedge fund and then building and selling companies, fixated on one question: a message crosses the world in a second, so why does money still take days, cost a fortune and break in the middle?
Jingle Pay was his answer: a consumer app for expats in the UAE sending money home, built as the world’s first remittance marketplace, where a sender could see every provider’s rate side by side and pick the best one. It has since moved more than US$4.5 billion for senders across the globe, reaching 150-plus countries and 99-plus currencies, and saved them over US$67 million.
The aha moment came from running that marketplace. To route each transfer to the best provider, Jingle Pay had to connect to all of them, hold liquidity across all of them, and screen and settle every transaction. It had built the plumbing of the industry, and the providers it was comparing began asking to use it. The consumer app had become an operating system for money movement, built for financial institutions. The app is live in the UAE, Pakistan and Bahrain, with Canada next, while the infrastructure beneath it runs 20-plus corridors across APAC, MENAP and Latin America, powering financial institutions over Jingle Pay’s rails.
“Information went global twenty years ago. Money never did,” Fardghassemi says. “It still crosses borders through a chain of intermediaries who each take a cut and none of whom talk to each other. We are replacing that chain with one system.”
Winning Pakistan, then everywhere else
Pakistan, one of the world’s largest remittance markets, is where Jingle Pay proved itself, becoming the leading player sending money into the country. That meant solving at volume every problem that makes cross-border payments hard: liquidity, settlement, compliance and the dozens of rails money can arrive on. Jingle Pay turned what it learned there into a platform that could be pointed at any market.