Stabledash Live · May 5 · 23 min

What CFOs Actually Want from Stablecoin Rails (Velocity, $10M Pre-Seed)

With Eric Queathem

Key takeaways

Velocity came out of stealth in May 2025 with a $10M pre-seed led by Activant Capital, with Fuel Ventures, Triton, Fabric Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Digital Space and Preface participating.
Eric Queathem says the back end of payments never got purpose-built technology, and that stablecoins now give builders a new platform to enhance it.
Queathem expects intermediaries like Velocity to choose which networks see volume, and says much of the economics could sit with them.

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Summary

Former Worldpay strategist Eric Queathem says stablecoins finally make the back end of payments worth rebuilding, and that CFOs are the buyers to build it for.

Velocity, a stablecoin treasury and payments company, came out of stealth in May 2025 with a $10M pre-seed led by Activant Capital. Fuel Ventures, Triton, Fabric Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Digital Space and Preface also took part. Co-founder Eric Queathem started the company with Tom Greenwood, who founded and runs the open banking firm Volt.

Lessons from Worldpay

Eric Queathem spent close to a decade at Worldpay, leading global strategy and growth. He joined when it was still called Vantiv, which he describes as a "sleepy little Cincinnati, Ohio based payments company" that had quietly become the largest merchant acquirer in the world. He says Worldpay sold to FIS in 2019 for $43 billion, and that by 2024 close to 25,000,000,000 of value had been destroyed by the deal. The spin-off was announced in 2023 and took place in 2024.

Over the same period, Queathem says, Stripe, Adyen, Toast and Square took large amounts of market share from legacy players. In his view the capital went into front-end APIs and fraud tooling, while no one rewired the banking back end because it was too complicated to improve.

“I learned very early in my tenure at McKinsey is, like, you're putting the situations at companies that you know nothing about other than the 10 k you read. And by the way, AI didn't exist, and so, like, it was it was a lot of, like, heavy lifting to try to figure out what a company was doing. But if you ask really good questions, you could gain credibility super quickly. And so it was not about what you knew. It was about the questions you were asking.”

Eric Queathem

The product

Velocity sells the Stablecoin Payment Account, a single interface where enterprises move and manage capital across banks, blockchains and borders. It works with Fireblocks for wallet infrastructure and with Agora and other stablecoin issuers. Queathem says the company has an internal rule: "if we have to swift the payment, we're not doing it," while he says most of the market prefunds or uses SWIFT for payments that end up on chain.

He points to foreign exchange as a target, saying even top 10 companies in the world pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year in FX fees. He also says $180 billion sits in UK business banking accounts earning 0% interest.

Selling to skeptical CFOs

Eric Queathem says the sale is consultative and rarely starts with a deck. Conversations often open with a CFO saying he has held the job longer than Queathem has been alive. Queathem says he learned at McKinsey that good questions earn credibility quickly. Discovery turns up problems such as one treasurer prepositioning $6,000,000 a day to handle Filipino peso flows, and companies with tens of thousands of bank accounts that cannot simply add stablecoins without thinking about the operational complexity.

Eric Queathem argues there is not enough crypto experience in the world to staff every company that moves value on chain. That, he says, leaves room for providers like Velocity to make routing decisions for enterprises and to hold much of the economics that come with them.

Velocity, Worldpay, FIS, and Agora come up most.

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