Company: Lorum
Co-Founders: George Davis (Founder and CEO), James Smith (Founder and CTO)
Website: www.lorum.com
About Lorum
Lorum is a full stack correspondent, the infrastructure that financial institutions use to move, hold and convert money across markets. It provides multi-currency clearing, named accounts, cash management and FX through a single API, operating as neutral infrastructure for financial institutions globally.
Founded in 2023 by George Davis and James Smith, Lorum exists because access to this infrastructure has narrowed. The global financial system works well, but the treasury and clearing services that financial products depend on have concentrated in a handful of the largest institutions, built to serve other large institutions. Everyone below that tier, the mid-market banks, fintechs and platforms, is left with higher costs, slower access and shrinking banking relationships.
Nowhere is that gap clearer than in MENA. As global banks pulled back, the correspondent relationships that move money in and out of the region were among the hardest hit. When the Arab Monetary Fund, the IMF and the World Bank surveyed banks across the region, clearing and settlement and trade finance were the services most affected. Worldwide, active correspondent banking relationships fell by around 25% between 2011 and 2020, and the institutions left most exposed are the ones MENA relies on for trade, investment and digital asset activity.
Lorum was built to close that gap, and it started in the UAE. When the company began, the market had no client money products, and payments were still being moved by hand, what George Davis calls wet inking payments. Lorum built the infrastructure to replace that from the ground up, the account issuance, the ledgering and the connections into local clearing schemes, becoming one of the few specialist providers able to clear AED into and out of the Gulf. Instead of sitting buried inside a chain of intermediary banks, each client gets its own named account and a direct line to the clearing, and the money Lorum holds is held in full rather than lent back out.
From that UAE base, Lorum expanded into USD clearing, which overtook its original AED business within the first month and now lets the same institutions move dollars into and out of the region. The institutions relying on this are largely international, many of them European, that need to settle into the Middle East without a local presence or a patchwork of regional banking relationships. For them, Lorum replaced a chain of correspondents and counterparties with a single clearing relationship.
For MENA-linked fintechs, payments companies, payroll and EOR platforms, trading and investment platforms and marketplaces, that means one counterparty instead of a stitched-together stack of banks, FX providers and custodians, with money moving through multi-currency clearing, held through Named Account Custody and managed through cash management.
George Davis is a co-founder of BVNK, the stablecoin infrastructure business Mastercard has agreed to acquire, and led product at TrueLayer. With Lorum, he is applying that experience to a harder structural problem, giving financial institutions the correspondent infrastructure they need to clear, hold and manage money reliably across markets.
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