Company: Block Infrastructure

Founders: Richard Beverley / Kurtis Wright / Joshan Mahmud / Suhumar Karur

*Answers provided by Richard Beverley

Headquarters: London, United Kingdom

Most Recent Valuation: Undisclosed

Employees: 7

Founded: 2024

In One Sentence: “Block Infrastructure builds coordinated identity, compliance, payment and settlement infrastructure to help regulated institutions move value across traditional and digital markets with greater control and certainty.”

Top quote: "...you see the costs being passed around the correspondent banking ecosystem and you just think, 'someone is paying for all of this, and nobody is
fixing it.’”

Who are you building your product/service for, and what painful problem are you taking away from their day?

We are building for regulated institutions, VASPs, and digital asset operations dealing with fragmented identity, compliance, payments and settlement processes. Today, organisations may repeat KYC and KYB checks and work across different Travel Rule
protocols, and apply sanctions, AML, or transaction controls in disconnected systems.

We are developing infrastructure that coordinates those processes so that verified participant information, compliance checks and settlement conditions can work together, rather than being repeatedly rebuilt for each transaction or counterparty.

If a top-tier VC is reading this, what would you want them to understand about your company in 30 seconds?

Block Infrastructure is addressing a structural problem in regulated finance: identity verification, compliance controls, payment orchestration, digital asset obligations, and settlement often operate separately.

We are building four coordinated infrastructure layers – BlockID, BlockPay, BlockTravel and BlockSettle – so institutions can verify participants, apply transaction controls, enable compliant movement, and settle with greater certainty.

We have demonstrated BlockTravel on Canton DevNet and are now validating the infrastructure with regulated institutions and digital asset firms ahead of wider availability later in 2026.

What are you doing differently than your competitors?

What we are doing differently is treating identity, compliance, payments, and settlement as coordinated infrastructure rather than separate operational steps. Our four layers, BlockID, BlockPay, BlockTravel and BlockSettle, are designed to connect verified identity, pre-execution controls, digital asset transfer compliance and conditional settlement.

In our BlockTravel demonstration on Canton DevNet, Travel Rule transmission, sanctions screening, and AML policy checks were executed before settlement, and Travel Rule data was exchanged across protocols without relying on a single messaging standard.

What was the “this has to exist” moment that made you start the company?

I was at ClearBank just before they became a fintech unicorn, working on their correspondent banking proposition and meeting banks all across the world. Every conversation was the same, with each counterparty saying we need X million sitting in an account to cover settlement timeframes, compliance holds trapping liquidity, and settlement risk. And then you see the costs being passed around the correspondent banking ecosystem and you just think, ‘someone is paying for all of this, and nobody is
fixing it.’

At some point I just thought, ‘this has to be solvable.' We are in 2024. The technology exists. The regulatory thinking is there. Why is nobody building the infrastructure to actually fix this properly? The original idea was born from trying to solve the cross-
border payments problem through better data sharing, to remove the compliance holds that lead to trapped liquidity and market exposure. But then I realised that if you can share data properly, you can re-engineer financial services from the ground up. That is a much bigger problem worth solving.

It was not a lightbulb moment. More a slow accumulation of frustration that eventually had nowhere to go except into building something. Block Infrastructure exists because that gap had no good reason to still be open. A few months later, after I had moved to another bank, I had a beer with Kurtis in Leadenhall Market and said the infamous words, "I've had an idea," and that is when this adventure really started.

How do you make money? Which part of your business model are you most excited about scaling?

We make money in two primary ways: software licence fees for access to our infrastructure, and per-transaction fees each time our products are used in a live flow.

Those transaction fees apply across four core services: Zero Knowledge screening checks, Zero Knowledge credit checks, Zero Knowledge verification checks, and data exchange.

The part I am most excited about scaling is the per-transaction model. Every time a financial institution verifies a participant, screens a transaction, or exchanges verified identity data across our infrastructure, that is a billable event. As transaction volumes grow, the revenue compounds without a proportional increase in cost. That is the infrastructure business model working as it should.

But the deeper opportunity is the data exchange layer. Financial services has spent decades generating high-quality identity and compliance data and extracting zero return from it. BlockID changes that, turning verified KYC data into a reusable, auditable asset class that institutions can derive ongoing value from. That is the part of the model that I think has the most transformative potential at scale.

Which proof points matter most right now?

The proof point that matters most to us right now is demonstrating that the infrastructure can operate in a real transaction environment. At the Bermuda Digital Finance Forum, we demonstrated BlockTravel on Canton DevNet, with Travel Rule transmission, sanctions screening, and AML policy checks before settlement, followed by atomic settlement once the required controls passed. We are also working with a small group of regulated institutions and digital asset firms to validate the infrastructure in production ahead of wider availability later in 2026.

How does your product/service make the world a better place?

Financial activity increasingly depends on trust. This means knowing who is involved, whether a transaction meets relevant controls, and whether settlement can be completed safely. We are building infrastructure intended to reduce duplicated verification, make compliance part of the transaction lifecycle, and provide clearer auditability for regulated activity. That matters because more trustworthy financial infrastructure can help institutions participate in digital asset markets without treating control and innovation as competing priorities.

What’s been your biggest unexpected challenge so far, and what did it force you to learn quickly?

Honestly, the hardest part has been the adoption cycle at incumbent financial institutions. When you have built infrastructure that delivers a clear, demonstrable upside: reduced costs, entirely new revenue streams, embedded compliance, and settlement certainty, you assume the conversation will move quickly. But it does not.

The reality is that getting technology adopted inside a regulated financial institution is a slow, deliberate process. There are layers of stakeholders, internal procurement cycles, risk and compliance sign-offs, and many meetings before you reach the person who can actually make a decision. That is not a criticism; it is simply the nature of the beast and reflects how seriously these institutions manage operational and regulatory risk.

What does success look like in 12 months? What about in 5 years?

12 Months: In 12 months, success looks like real infrastructure in production with real institutions behind it. For BlockID, that means verified identity data moving securely between multiple financial institutions, streamlining customer onboarding, reducing duplication, and delivering tangible value to the end users of financial services. Not a pilot. Live.

For BlockTravel, it means pre-screening digital asset transactions for financial institutions and VASPs at scale and having demonstrated, with evidence, that pre-screening transactions using our infrastructure removes market exposure atomically. That proof point is what opens the next set of doors.

5 Years: In five years, Block Infrastructure is operating as a global trust and transaction layer, not a regional point solution. BlockID has an established, well-saturated network with counterparties across the UK, the Crown Dependencies, Europe, the United States and beyond. KYC data moves across borders without friction. Customers benefit from streamlined onboarding that follows them across institutions and markets. KYC tokens are a recognised real-world asset class on institutional balance sheets, acknowledged by global accounting standards. The return on identity investment is no longer theoretical.

BlockTravel has become the dominant compliance oracle for on-chain transaction screening, operating across all major chains and handling the full spectrum of digital assets: stablecoins, crypto assets, tokenised deposits, and tokenised funds. But the bigger milestone is what we have proven in TradFi. The same compliance infrastructure built for DeFi is now applied to fiat movement, reducing FX exposure and embedding regulatory controls into traditional payment flows in a way that was not previously
possible.

At that point, Block Infrastructure is not a fintech company. It is the infrastructure layer that compliant financial activity runs on.

What type of partner or collaborator would most accelerate your journey right now? (If relevant, which roles are you hiring for?)

We are looking to work with regulated institutions, VASPs, and digital asset operations as design partners. The most useful collaborators are those experiencing real operational fragmentation across identity, compliance, payments, or settlement and willing to test how coordinated infrastructure could resolve it. For design partners, we ask for genuine integration intent, a structured feedback loop with named compliance and technical counterparts, and a mutual NDA.

Finish this sentence: “We’ll know we’ve really made it when…”

… regulated institutions can move value across traditional and digital markets with identity, compliance, and settlement coordinated from the start, rather than managed through disconnected checks after the event.”

Website: www.block-infrastructure.com

Want to feature in Fintech Scout? Get in touch at [email protected], and let me know what you’re building.

Features are not endorsements unless stated.