From Startup to US$5 Billion: How Amir Fardghassemi Is Scaling Jingle Pay into a Global Money Movement Powerhouse

Amir Fardghassemi has spent more than 15 years in finance, first running a hedge fund and then building and selling companies. Somewhere along the way, he became fixated on a simple question: a message gets from Dubai to Lahore in a second, so why does money still take days, cost a fortune and break in the middle?

Jingle Pay was his answer. It started life as a consumer app for expats in the UAE sending money home, built around an idea nobody had tried: the world’s first remittance marketplace, where a sender could see every provider’s rate side by side and pick the best one. The company 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 along the way.

The aha moment came from running that marketplace. To show every provider’s price and route each transfer to the best one, Jingle Pay had to connect to all of them, hold liquidity across all of them, and screen and settle every transaction itself. Without quite meaning to, it had built the plumbing of the entire 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 itself is still growing, live in the UAE, Pakistan and Bahrain, with Canada next. The infrastructure underneath it now runs 20-plus corridors across APAC, MENAP and Latin America, moves money between Web2 and Web3, and handles mostly volume from other companies. Fardghassemi calls it an AI-first operating system for global money movement. The Pakistan corridor is the best place to see what that means.

Winning Pakistan, Then Everywhere Else

Pakistan is one of the largest remittance markets in the world, and it is where Jingle Pay proved itself. The company became the leading player sending money into the country, which meant solving, at volume, every problem that makes cross-border payments hard: liquidity, settlement, compliance, local banking rules and the dozens of rails money can arrive on.

Each new corridor brings the same problems in a different shape. A corridor into the Philippines does not work like one into India. Rather than rebuild the plumbing every time, Jingle Pay turned what it learned in Pakistan into a platform that could be pointed at any market. That platform is the operating system.

What the Operating System Actually Does

Think of it as the layer that sits between a company that wants to move money and the messy reality of how money actually moves. A bank, a money transfer operator or a wallet plugs in once. On the other side, Jingle Pay handles the currencies, the liquidity, the screening and the payout, whether the money is going to a bank account in Karachi, a wallet in Manila or a cash counter in Casablanca.

The AI does the heavy lifting on the parts humans used to do slowly: screening names, pricing corridors, forecasting where liquidity needs to be, and catching transactions that look wrong. The result is that adding a corridor is now a configuration job rather than a build. That is why the network has grown to 20-plus corridors and why some of the largest names in the industry run their money through it.

“Information went global twenty years ago. Money never did,” Fardghassemi says. “It still crosses borders the way it did in the 1970s: slowly, expensively, and through a chain of intermediaries who each take a cut and none of whom talk to each other. We are not building a faster version of that chain. We are replacing it with one system.”

Fiat on One Side, Stablecoins on the Other

The second thing the operating system does is treat different kinds of money as interchangeable. Most of the world still runs on bank accounts and card networks. A growing share runs on stablecoins and digital wallets. Jingle Pay is built to sit between the two.

In practice, that means a partner can send dollars in and have pesos arrive in a wallet. Or send a stablecoin in and have rupees arrive in a bank account. Or fund a corridor with a stablecoin because it clears on a Sunday when the banks are shut, and pay out in cash on Monday morning. The sender never needs to know which rail was used.

Fardghassemi is careful not to oversell the crypto side. Stablecoins, in his telling, are not a replacement for the banking system but another rail that happens to be fast and always on. The point is interoperability: fiat and stablecoins, Web2 and Web3, moving through one system and reaching wallets, bank accounts and cash pickup alike.

Who Is Already on the Network

Jingle Pay’s partner list says a lot about where the company sits now. MoneyGram made a strategic investment in 2022. Mastercard followed with a partnership that put physical and virtual cards into the product. Western Union and BOTIM, the UAE’s largest messaging app, both run flows through Jingle Pay’s infrastructure. Together, they put Jingle Pay’s rails behind some of the largest money flows in the industry.

For the end customer, a transfer still looks like a transfer. Underneath, it may cross three currencies, two regulated entities and a settlement mechanism that did not exist five years ago. Jingle Pay’s job is to make that invisible.

Licensed to Do It

None of this works without the licenses, and Fardghassemi treats them as part of the infrastructure rather than a box to tick. Jingle Pay is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority, with permissions covering money transmission, issuing payment instruments, issuing stored value and arranging money services. It is licensed in Canada, which takes the business into North America. And it holds regulatory approvals in Bahrain and Pakistan, the two markets where its consumer app runs alongside the UAE. Four jurisdictions, each with its own regulator, each one a door that had to be opened before a single transaction could cross it.

As the stablecoin side has grown, so has the regulatory footprint. The company holds virtual-asset permissions, which is what allows it to connect fiat and digital-asset flows under a regulated framework from day one.

“Everyone wants to be the bridge between banks and stablecoins,” he says. “Very few are licensed to stand on both banks of the river. We spent years getting that right. Technology you can copy in a quarter. Permissions you cannot.”

From Five Billion to Ten

The company is now processing roughly US$5 billion a year in payment volume from its base in Dubai, a city that gives it a front-row seat to some of the busiest corridors in the world. At that scale, liquidity, settlement and compliance stop being support functions and become the business itself.

Fardghassemi’s next target is US$10 billion. The route there is already in motion: a treasury-as-a-service product that recently went live, B2C and B2B payments rolling out across the expanded corridor map in APAC, MENAP and Latin America, and more corridors being switched on. Each one adds endpoints to the network without adding a new system to run.

He is not sentimental about the number. “Five billion is a receipt, not a trophy,” he says. “The question I care about is whether a dollar, a dirham or a stablecoin can enter our system anywhere and come out as cash, a wallet balance or a bank credit anywhere else, without anyone having to think about how. When that is true for every corridor we open, we are done. We are not done.”