George Davis, Founder & CEO at Lorum on Rebuilding Global Clearing, Why Dollars Are Broken, and Building a Payments Only Bank

The global dollar clearing system is fundamentally broken, and most people building fintech companies don't even realize it. While entrepreneurs obsess over user interfaces and customer acquisition, the actual infrastructure moving money around the world operates like a Rube Goldberg machine held together with wet signatures and courier services.

George Davis figured this out the hard way. As founder and CEO of Lorum, he's built what might be the first payments-only bank designed specifically to fix dollar clearing outside the United States. His thesis is simple but radical: the correspondent banking system that moves dollars internationally is so dysfunctional that the only solution is to rebuild it from scratch.

The scale of the dollar clearing problem becomes clear when you understand the mechanics. "Really, about 60% of our business is dollar clearing now because dollars are just so broken in this correspondent world," Davis explains. "It's really hard to clear dollars outside of The US. You've got a lot of community banks in The US building these big lending books. And the problem just keeps getting deeper and deeper."

This isn't a minor inefficiency. Dollar clearing underpins global commerce, but the infrastructure hasn't meaningfully evolved since the 1970s. When a business in Dubai wants to pay a supplier in Singapore using dollars, that transaction typically bounces through multiple correspondent banks, each taking fees and adding settlement risk. The system works, barely, but it's slow, expensive, and opaque.

Davis stumbled into this world through an unconventional path. "I started my first business when I was 18, a machine learning business in London, that had nothing to do with payments at all," he says. After selling that company in 2019, he joined Trulia when it was primarily a data business. "We ended up pivoting really the whole business onto payments, and, I became super, super obsessive with core banking, central bank settlement."

That obsession led to a counterintuitive insight: instead of trying to optimize the existing correspondent banking system, why not bypass it entirely? Davis realized that if you could become a properly licensed bank on both sides of international transactions, you could eliminate the correspondent banking layer altogether.

The solution Lorum built is elegant in its simplicity. "What if we could be this clearing bank on both sides of the transaction, a payments only, 100% reserve backed bank around the world?" Davis asked. Instead of lending money or offering traditional banking services, Lorum focuses exclusively on moving money. They hold 100% reserves, meaning every dollar deposited is backed by an actual dollar, not leveraged into loans.

This model solves multiple problems simultaneously. Traditional banks make money by lending out deposits, which creates complex regulatory requirements and balance sheet constraints that make international payments a side business at best. By staying payments-only, Lorum can focus entirely on speed and efficiency. The 100% reserve backing eliminates settlement risk and simplifies compliance across multiple jurisdictions.

The early days reveal just how broken the existing system really is. "I always love telling people it was the first payments we cleared. I used to have to print paperwork, wet sign it, and courier it to a branch in Dubai," Davis recalls. In 2024, moving money internationally still requires physical paperwork and courier services. That's not a technology problem; it's an infrastructure problem.

Lorum started in the Middle East precisely because the infrastructure gap was so obvious. "There was so much money moving to The Middle East, but so little infrastructure," Davis explains. The region has enormous capital flows but relies heavily on the same creaky correspondent banking networks that serve the rest of the world.

The rapid growth in dollar clearing business validates the thesis. When 60% of your payments volume is dollars being moved outside the US, you're solving a real problem that existing players can't or won't address. Traditional banks see international payments as a necessary evil. Lorum sees it as the entire opportunity.

The broader implications extend beyond payments. As global commerce becomes increasingly digital and real-time, the financial infrastructure needs to match that speed. You can't build a modern economy on 1970s clearing systems. The companies that rebuild this infrastructure from the ground up, rather than trying to optimize legacy systems, will capture disproportionate value.

For entrepreneurs and investors, the lesson is clear: look for infrastructure problems that everyone assumes are solved but actually create massive friction. The global payments system is one example, but similar opportunities exist wherever digital products rely on analog infrastructure. The question isn't whether these systems will be rebuilt, but who will do it and how quickly they can scale.