About

Monabit is a fast-growing Colombian fintech that gives Colombians something their local banking system rarely offers: a real USD account, paired with a stablecoin-backed card accepted worldwide. With thousands of active users and a product that competes on speed and simplicity, Monabit's growth depends on one thing working flawlessly behind the scenes: turning stablecoin liquidity into real dollar balances, instantly and at scale.

The challenge

The traditional path to offering USD accounts to Latin American non-residents runs through correspondent banks. Every conversion leg settles in 2 business days, every operation carries an FX markup that typically exceeds 3%, and the provider is forced to keep days of transaction volume parked in a pre-funded FBO account just to keep balances usable while money is in transit.

For a company growing as fast as Monabit, each of those frictions compounds. Capital locked in pre-funded reserves is capital that cannot fund growth. A 2-day settlement lag means every spike in demand strains the float. And a 3%+ FX markup on the backend is margin that either erodes the business or gets passed on to the very users the product exists to serve.

The strategic question was clear. How could Monabit give every Colombian user a genuine, fully backed USD balance in real time, without carrying the cost, delay, and capital burden of the correspondent banking model?

How Lumx solved it

Monabit plugged the dollar leg of its operation into Lumx. Lumx now powers two critical capabilities behind the product. First, the stablecoin to USD conversion leg: stablecoin liquidity is converted into real dollars and settled in seconds, replacing the 2-day correspondent banking cycle entirely. Second, USD account creation for Monabit's end users: each Colombian customer gets a dollar account whose balance is backed by stablecoin and converted in real time.

The division of responsibility is clean. Lumx absorbs the regulatory and operational complexity of conversion, settlement, and account infrastructure. Monabit keeps what it does best: the customer relationship, the card experience, and the product roadmap. Because settlement is instant, there is no longer any need to hold days of volume in a pre-funded reserve waiting for money in transit.

Results

The stablecoin to USD leg now settles in seconds, against the 2 business days of the traditional correspondent banking model. The pre-funded FBO reserve was eliminated, releasing working capital that previously sat idle covering settlement gaps, capital Monabit now deploys directly into growth. And the manual FX spread disappeared from the backend, against the 3%+ markup that traditional cross-border operations charge to open USD accounts for non-residents.

In practice, a Colombian user opens a USD account through Monabit and the balance is backed and converted in real time by Lumx. No hold, no banking bureaucracy, no days of waiting. The dollar account behaves the way users expect a dollar account to behave, and the economics behind it finally scale with the product instead of against it.

Key takeaways

For a consumer fintech offering dollar products in Latin America, the correspondent banking model is not just slow, it is a structural tax on growth: it locks working capital in reserves, adds days to every settlement, and takes 3%+ off every conversion. By moving the conversion and account layer onto stablecoin rails with Lumx, Monabit turned those constraints into advantages while keeping full ownership of its customer experience. It is a repeatable pattern for any LatAm platform whose USD product is throttled by the cost, latency, and capital requirements of traditional cross-border banking.