What Every Ecom Founder Should Know About Banks & Payments (with Hurupay)

You obsess over CPMs and creatives. Then a processor freezes your balance, or a transfer quietly eats 15% in fees, and a month of revenue is gone. The banking layer under your store stays invisible until the day it breaks. So we sat down with the founders of Hurupay, a neo-bank that has moved 70M+ in volume for founders in emerging markets, to unpack what every ecom operator should actually understand about moving, holding and protecting money.

Think of this as a companion to our conversation on the Unlimited Scaling podcast. The short version. Getting paid reliably across borders is harder, and more expensive, than most founders realise. And the fixes are knowable.

Who we spoke to

Hurupay was started in 2023 by Alan O (chief product officer) and James Mugami (COO), among others. It began as a peer-to-peer money app, then pivoted into a stablecoin-powered neo-bank. Since then it has processed more than $70M in volume and onboarded 50,000+ users, helping businesses and remote workers in emerging markets receive USD, EUR, GBP and AUD. Most of what follows comes straight from operators who built the fix because they lived the problem.

The two problems every cross-border founder hits

1. The “getting paid” tax. Sell or operate across borders and moving money quietly bleeds you. Transfers that take three days. Fees running 6–15% (sometimes 20%). Brokers who can vanish with a month of revenue. None of it shows up in your ad dashboard. All of it comes straight off your margin.

2. Frozen funds out of nowhere. The line that opened the whole conversation. “having your money frozen out of nowhere, when you’ve already done the work.” Processors and banks hold balances for risk, compliance or verification. And if your cash sits in one place, one freeze can stall the whole business. It is the same reason a frozen processor balance is so dangerous when rent, or ad spend, is due.

How the money actually moves

Understanding the plumbing is what lets you stop being at its mercy.

Three things worth internalising from the founders. Licences are the real barrier. Kenya requires $300k+ to legally hold user funds, and the US needs separate state-by-state licences, so most fintechs “rent” a licensed partner rather than owning one. The rails are layered. Visa and Mastercard, with Stripe on top, plus 3DS, OTP and KYC verification. And stablecoins (USDC/USDT) have become the fast bridge. A US client pays in USD, it gets converted and settled into a wallet or local account, no forex bureau eating the rate.

What it means for you as an ecom founder

• Don’t keep all your cash in one processor or account. A single freeze should never be able to stop your ads, your restocks or payroll. Diversify where money lands.
• Use licensed rails, not brokers. The convenience of an informal broker is not worth losing a month of revenue to a scam or a hold.
• Understand the verification layer. KYC, 3DS and OTP are not friction for its own sake. Being fully verified is what stops holds and speeds releases.
• Plan for cross-border early if you sell or pay teams internationally. Retrofitting banking after a freeze hurts far more than setting it up right the first time.

General information from our conversation, not financial advice. Check what’s regulated in your own market.

Why this is also an ads problem

Watch the full conversation

The full episode goes deeper on frozen-fund stories, licences, and how stablecoins are reshaping payments for emerging-market founders. Watch it above, and learn more about what the team is building at Hurupay.

The redundancy stack operators actually run

The article above says “don’t keep all your cash in one account.” In our conversation the reality went further than diversification as a nice-to-have. It looked more like a permanent operational habit. Based on our own experience running an agency, no single bank does everything, so the money ends up spread across a rotating fleet of accounts, each doing one job well.

A few patterns worth stealing from that discussion.

• One account per weakness. In our experience some banks are excellent for collection but lack a maker/approver control. Others have the controls but settle slowly. So operators keep several live and route each flow to whichever account is strongest for it, rather than hunting for one perfect provider that, in our experience, doesn’t exist.
• An “army of backup accounts.” That was the literal phrase used on the podcast. The point of a spare, already-opened account is not convenience. It’s that when a working account goes cold, the way a frozen processor balance or a sudden restriction can, you switch the same day instead of scrambling for weeks.
• Currency chains are normal, not a red flag. One operator described in the episode routes UK client money through a UK account, then to a challenger bank, then to a transfer service, then into local currency, then a local wallet. Five hops just to spend it. It’s clumsy, but it’s what “keeping money moving” looks like in practice when no single rail spans the whole journey.

The takeaway from the founders was blunt. Open the backup before you need it. Onboarding takes days you won’t have when a live account is already frozen.

Why USD is easy and EUR is the account that keeps breaking

Here’s one of the more useful, rarely-stated points from the conversation. Not all currencies are equally fragile. In the founders’ experience, USD collection is “98% always smooth,” while EUR accounts are the ones that appear one week and vanish the next. It largely comes down to how strict European regulators and their banking partners are on the funds they’ll hold.

What that means in practice, based on the reports shared on the episode (not official guidance from any bank).

• Expect to treat a EUR collection account as temporary infrastructure, not a permanent home. Have a replacement ready.
• Several operators noted they deliberately avoid basing the company in the EU to sidestep some of that friction. Whether that’s right for you depends entirely on your own tax and regulatory situation, so take advice before restructuring anything.
• When a EUR account degrades, the “replacement” a bank offers is sometimes a worse product. For example a UK-style global account with a sort code instead of a proper IBAN. Read what you’re actually being downgraded to.

General information from our conversation, not financial or legal advice. Check what’s regulated in your own market.

What actually triggers a hold, and how to pre-empt it

The article mentions KYC, 3DS and OTP as the verification layer. The more actionable insight from the episode was about the sender, not just you. In the founders’ experience, most compliance friction comes down to a bank wanting proof that you and whoever paid you genuinely have a business relationship.

Practical points raised in the conversation.

• The first payment from a new client is the scrutinised one. Have an invoice ready, and ideally a signed contract, to hand over. Once a bank is satisfied you and that sender know each other, in the founders’ experience subsequent payments from them tend to clear smoothly.
• Some partners re-verify every single transaction. One operator described a bank that demanded an invoice, agreement and payment screenshot for every payment, even repeat payments from the same client. It worked, but the admin load was, in their words, closer to being an accountant than an entrepreneur. Weigh that cost before committing volume to a provider.
• Vet the client before you route their money. One tip shared directly. After a clean-looking account was reportedly restricted over a payment tied to a questionable source, the fix was adding a step to check the paying client’s business and website first, and steering anything sketchy away from the main collection account. It’s a cheap habit that protects your best rail.

Freeze-proofing, reserves and the agency card play

Two more mechanics came up that connect banking directly to how you actually scale spend.

Self-custodial settlement can’t be frozen, by design. In the founders’ explanation, once funds settle into a self-custodial stablecoin wallet (where you hold the private keys), even the provider that sent them can’t freeze, hold or claw them back. That’s a genuinely different risk profile from a processor balance. It comes with the obvious flip side, though. Self-custody means you are responsible for those keys, so it’s not automatically “safer,” just differently exposed.

Rolling reserves are the other frozen-funds trap. Separate from an outright freeze, several stories described processors releasing revenue on a delay. For example, paying out part of a balance quickly and holding the rest for up to 90 days as a reserve against chargebacks. If your restock or ad budget assumes 100% of revenue lands immediately, a reserve like that can quietly starve your cash flow even when nothing is “wrong.”

Segment cards by vendor. For agencies, one concrete recommendation was issuing a separate virtual card per spend category. One card for Meta, one for other subscription tools, one for expenses. That way a single compromised or disputed card doesn’t take down your whole ad-spend rail. If that spend rail stalls and you’re forced to pause winners, you’re back in the same doom loop that dents delivery and pushes up cost. See how a cash shock feeds a low feedback score and why founders watch for CPMs increasing suddenly. Keeping every card and account redundant is, ultimately, ad-account insurance.

Figures and mechanics above are drawn from our podcast conversation and the reports we’ve seen. They’re not published terms from any specific bank or processor, and reserve, fee and freeze policies vary by provider.

Related: how top brands handle ad spend financing instead of paying out of pocket.

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Written by Mouss, founder of Unlimited Scaling, an agency that has helped 1,000+ e-commerce brands scale and protect their Meta ad assets. This piece accompanies his podcast conversation with the founders of Hurupay. Follow him on Instagram @mouss_unlimitedscaling.