While most fintech executives talk about payments as a growth story, Iana Dimitrova talks about them as a matter of national security.
“Payments infrastructure is now critical not just to economic growth, but to national sovereignty, to national security,” says the chief executive of OpenPayd, the B2B infrastructure provider that lets businesses offer banking and payment services across fiat and stablecoin rails without becoming licensed financial institutions themselves.
The company recently announced a Nasdaq listing via a SPAC merger at a $1.14 billion valuation.
“This is why we all need to work together in order to drive the regulatory agenda, the technical standards to ensure that infrastructure is actually independent and sustainable.”
At IFGS at London’s Guildhall this year, Tech Funding News sat down with Dimitrova to unpack what it takes to build that kind of infrastructure, and why she believes the UK has a time-sensitive opportunity to turn its fintech strengths into lasting global leadership.
Antler partner Adam French, also speaking at IFGS, argued that AI has made one founder trait non-negotiable, a view that echoes the urgency Dimitrova brings to the payments conversation.
Trust as infrastructure
Having spent nearly a decade with OpenPayd, first as General Counsel before becoming CEO in 2018, Dimitrova seems to have a clear understanding of what trust looks like in an industry that now sits at the crossroads of regulation, technology and geopolitics.
“As any infrastructure provider within the financial services space, it is our responsibility to build trust in the industry,” Dimitrova says. “Trust is ultimately built through adherence to the highest standards of regulation, and also through adherence to the highest standards of technical security and technical interoperability.”
Project Nemo founder Joanne Dewar, also interviewed at IFGS, made a similar case for inclusion as infrastructure, arguing that financial services cannot claim to have built trust if they are actively excluding one in four people with a disability.
A clear focus on automation and its impact is where Dimitrova gets specific about the next five years. She sees AI applied across the full transaction cycle, whether that be onboarding, transaction monitoring, or fraud checks, now layered within the ecosystem OpenPayd has already built.
The combination of automation and human expertise, however, is what Dimitrova argues is needed to secure trust and certainty for clients. “I’m definitely not one of those advocates for slashing your workforce by half,” she says.
Interoperability, Dimitrova adds, is also central to what she considers a success story. She wants full movement across fiat rails and stablecoins, in whatever combination a business needs, arguing that what businesses actually want is faster, more transparent, and more cost-efficient payments.
Looking ahead, she is anticipating the market will reward whoever gets that right, on both the licensing and the technology side: “I think the leaders are going to be those companies that can deliver that seamless experience.”
Move fast or be left behind
“How can we move faster?” This is the question Dimitrova believes the UK’s fintech scene should be asking itself now more than ever.
“What’s really important is that we drive that regulatory agenda across both the adoption of stable coins and digital asset-related regulation, as well as agentic payments, to ensure that the UK is not left behind the US, Europe, or other jurisdictions,” Dimitrova says.
This interview is the fifth and final in TFN’s IFGS 2026 video series, produced in partnership with Native Teams and Innovate Finance. The series also features Skerdi Sino, CMO of Native Teams, on why getting global hiring wrong can cost a company €500,000 and why the infrastructure behind cross-border work is becoming just as critical as the infrastructure behind cross-border payments.
