I sat down with Myles Stephenson, CEO of Modulr, to talk through how the company evolved from powering early Revolut to building a full-stack payments automation platform serving lenders, payroll providers, and travel companies.
Modulr made a deliberate call two years ago to stop being a horizontal BaaS provider and go deep on specific verticals. They hold an EMI licence, settle at the Bank of England, and have direct scheme access and Myles argues that gives them everything they need without the overhead of a banking licence. The business model is flow, not storage, which means transaction revenue drives profitability, not interest margin.
We get into:
Why Modulr walked away from the embedded finance land grab to double down on payments automation
How their EMI licence gives them everything they need (and why they don’t want a banking licence)
The US expansion with FIS and what real-time payment adoption actually looks like across markets
Why the US is behind on real-time payments and what it will actually take to change behaviour
Commercial VRP and whether open banking can ever dent direct debit
Stablecoins vs. tokenized deposits — and how a non-bank positions for both
How Modulr built a compliance hub with Sardine and where AI fits into fraud and operations
How Modulr reached profitability, and why the answer is flow, not interest margin
What’s on the roadmap: ACH in the US, foreign currency, and commercial VRP as a collections layer
Modulr’s bet is simple: own the infrastructure, stay focused on payments, and let the applications follow. Whether that thesis holds in the US is the real test.
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