At Web3 Hub Davos 2026, industry leaders discussed how PayFi is enabling real-time liquidity, compliance and on-chain settlement in live cross-border payments.
At Web3 Hub Davos 2026, during the World Economic Forum, leaders from Arf, LuLu Financial Holdings, and the Stellar Development Foundation came together to discuss a shift underway in global payments. Moving beyond pilots and proofs of concept, the panel explored how programmable liquidity, embedded compliance, and on-chain settlement are now operating inside live payment networks through PayFi—a finance and execution layer co-developed by Arf and its partners, already powering real cross-border payment flows.
The panel, ‘The PayFi Shift: Agentic Payments, Compliance & Liquidity,’ hosted by Arf, examined how payment networks are moving from pre-funded, corridor-based models to real-time payment execution, where liquidity, compliance, and settlement operate as a single system
For Adeeb Ahamed, managing director of LuLu Financial Holdings, PayFi represents the next evolution of the global payments layer built on massive cross-border flows. “The global shift in payments is moving toward faster settlement and smarter liquidity management. By co-developing PayFi use cases with Arf, we’ve been able to move beyond local treasuries and embed programmable liquidity directly into our payment flows. This is not a future roadmap—it’s a practical model already improving how cross-border transactions are executed today.”
“Stellar was designed to support enterprise-grade financial infrastructure,” said Raja Chakravorti, chief business officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. “What we’re seeing with PayFi is liquidity and settlement executing directly within the payment flow itself. Operating this in live corridors with Arf and LuLu Financial Holdings shows that on-chain infrastructure can support agentic payment logic at institutional scale.”
“Global payments are being rebuilt around three core pillars: real-time liquidity, agentic payment execution, and embedded compliance,” said Ali Erhat Nalbant, co-founder and CEO of Arf. “When these capabilities are natively integrated into the transaction itself, payments can fund, execute, and settle autonomously—without prefunding or manual orchestration. That model is already live today through PayFi. Looking ahead, this same foundation enables a new generation of payment networks where treasury, risk, and execution logic continuously adapt in real time, allowing payments to optimise themselves as conditions change.”
What began as an innovation in cross-border payments is quickly becoming a shared set of principles for the industry, with banks, payment networks, fintechs, and infrastructure providers, all converging on PayFi as the foundation for the next generation of global payments.
About Arf
Arf is a Swiss-regulated global treasury platform providing liquidity and same-day settlement for international financial institutions. Arf, along with Huma, is also a co-developer of PayFi, an industry alliance working to unlock mass adoption of stablecoins in cross-border payments through scalable liquidity and same-day settlement. https://arf.one/ | https://huma.finance/
About LuLu Financial Holdings
LuLu Financial Holdings is a leading global financial services provider, offering a wide range of services including cross-border payments, currency exchange, and financial technology solutions. With over 350 customer engagement centres across 10 countries in the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, and APAC, and a commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction, LuLu Financial Holdings continues to set benchmarks in the financial services industry. https://www.lulufin.com/.
About Stellar Development Foundation
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a non-profit organisation that supports the development and growth of Stellar, an open-source network that connects the world’s financial infrastructure. Founded in 2014, the Foundation helps maintain Stellar’s codebase, supports the technical and business communities building on the network, and serves as a voice to regulators and institutions. The Foundation seeks to expand equitable access to the global financial system by leveraging the Stellar network to unlock the world’s economic potential through blockchain technology. https://stellar.org/
