The clearing house: rebuilding the bottom layer of global finance
George Davis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lorum, and he has spent his career going deeper than most founders dare – past the payment layer, past the messaging rails, all the way down to the infrastructure that moves money between nations. At Lorum, he’s building what he believes the global financial system has always been missing: a 100% reserve-backed clearing bank for international markets. After a 55x growth year in 2025, we asked him how he got here, what he got wrong, and why he thinks everyone else is building in the wrong place.
You spent years inside payments before founding Lorum. What did that journey actually look like?
I started my first business at 18, a machine learning company in London, out of a university hackathon. I dropped out to run it and ended up selling it in 2019, before AI and machine learning were actually cool.
From there, I joined TrueLayer, knowing the CEO well. When I arrived, it was mostly a data business, and we ended up pivoting the whole thing onto payments. That was the moment I became completely obsessed. Core banking, central bank settlements, custodian accounts, ledgers. I’m a very obsessive person. If I’m into something I’m into it 100% or 0%, and payments became that.
I left to co-found BVNK as Chief Product Officer, focused on cross-border crypto and stablecoins as an intermediary rail. And it was really through scaling that to a global book of business that I discovered there is no good clearing bank for global markets. That discovery is what led directly to Lorum.
Global payments get described as broken. Is it?
The system actually works really well. It’s the participants that are broken. They’re wrongly incentivised.
You will be sold this myth that SWIFT doesn’t work and is broken, and that you need stablecoins or an intense amount of treasury netting to solve that problem. We believe that isn’t true. The problem with the SWIFT network really isn’t the system. SWIFT is just a messaging layer. It’s that lending banks are everywhere within it, settling your payments and holding on to your money for overnight interest rates. They are using it for liquidity, for lending. That creates a slower, lower-quality payment.
And it goes deeper than that. The largest global banks have such a high cost to serve that mid-market institutions simply cannot work with them directly. So everyone turns to smaller regional banks instead. But those banks are building lending books underneath. They need your money to stay long enough to lend it out. That means they are not really incentivised to help you move it efficiently, earn interest on it, or hedge your currency risk. Clearing, custody, and liquidity are a fiduciary service. We believe they should be run by 100% reserve-backed institutions.
You started in the Middle East deliberately. Why, and what did building there actually teach you?
The Middle East had no infrastructure and an intense amount of monetary flow. That combination is rare.
The reality of building there was harder than we expected, in ways we hadn’t anticipated. The first payments we cleared, I used to have to print paperwork, wet-sign with ink, and courier it to a branch in Dubai. We ended up having to build a lot of the infrastructure for our banking partners, things you would just take for granted in Europe.
We got our DFSA licence in seven weeks. We were only five people. But then it took nine months to operationalise that licence, because banks just don’t have client money products. When you have a requirement to hold funds overnight in a client money account and there’s no client money product in the market, that is quite difficult.
At one point we had $2 million in the bank and were burning $90,000 to $100,000 a month, chasing banking relationships that kept going nowhere. We tried to raise our round nine months earlier with Middle Eastern investors and couldn’t close it. The view in the market was that no one would get banked in this region, so the business probably couldn’t grow. That was quite a hit to morale, especially when we were small and every day counted.
What was the moment Lorum changed from a regional business into something much larger?
Launching dollar clearing.
We always knew dollars were important, but we assumed it was a later-stage problem. The banks you need to work with to do it properly are very large and hard to access. We thought we’d spend much more time building out Middle East currencies first.
When we launched dollar clearing, it grew at 200% month on month. It quickly became 60% of our entire business. Dollars are probably the most locked off they have ever been. We can settle into markets in an hour or two when usually those markets sit on top of one, two, sometimes three days.
What we also completely underestimated was a customer’s propensity to put all of their volume with one platform once it can solve the harder problems. Dollars into Africa. Dollars into Asia. Suddenly the addressable market just blew up. I always say it feels like we can’t see the bottom of the pool.
And those same institutions then wanted to manage their dollars in one place, not just move them. That is what really pushed us to build out the full cash management platform alongside clearing.
You grew 55x in 2025. What did that feel like from the inside?
When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t really feel like it’s anything different. You are just solving the next problem, hiring the next person. We stepped back at the end of the year and saw that we had literally multiplied the business 55 times. It didn’t at any point feel like that was really happening.
A big part of what made it possible was building the right leadership team around the vision. My strength is strategy and product: flying in, solving a problem, thinking across the business at a macro level. So I was very deliberate about bringing in people who are exceptional at the things that drive growth at scale. Our COO spent ten years running ops and compliance at Paysafe and previously PayPal. Our CRO Yasmin built out our commercial machine. That combination, product and strategy at the top, strong operators keeping the machine running, is really what allowed us to move as fast as we did.
What did you get wrong about the market early on?
Almost everything about the sequencing.
We thought we’d spend much more time on Middle East currencies before going global. We assumed dollars were a later-stage problem. And I was surprised when we got huge demand for euros, because it feels like a very saturated market.
We also underestimated how much impact dollars into emerging markets would have. Instead of clearing INR in India, clearing dollars to India became a huge part of the business. We thought we would need to build more local currency coverage to achieve those routes. Dollars just completely dominate. We just didn’t realise the size and the speed.
How would you describe the culture at Lorum, and how does that shape who you hire?
Very direct, and very casual because of that directness. We don’t have a lot of formality. I’m not a very diplomatic person and I don’t enjoy having to be diplomatic. I always felt, when I’ve worked for someone else, that the more information I have, the more bought in and involved I feel. So we try to treat the whole team as owners, because everyone is building toward the same vision and everyone has options.
On hiring, I don’t actually care what someone is obsessed with. I just care that they have the ability to be super obsessive and really care about something. That intensity is what matters. It transfers. And we try to only hire people who have that.
What is next for Lorum?
Deepening and widening the clearing network. More licences, more direct rail connections, more markets. Institutions should be able to expand globally without rebuilding their clearing infrastructure each time.
But the bigger shift is from moving money to managing money. What we’re building really ends up starting to look more like what Citi calls treasury and trade services, what JPMorgan calls JPM Payments. Customers want to do everything within their treasury on one platform. That means earning interest on funds through tokenised money market funds around the clock, managing wholesale FX and currency risk, accessing FX derivatives. All in one place.
Everyone tends to build on the top layer, the payment layer. People are missing the treasury and trade opportunity underneath. Even when you’re using a stablecoin today, you are still leveraging the same underlying treasury and trade infrastructure. That bottom layer is what we’re rebuilding.
