Pay, send, and receive money anywhere. Life doesn't wait, neither does Pana.
The buddy in your pocket: a passport, a phone, and a dollar account that treats a border like a suggestion. Photographed here as its own logo - the one thing a family in Guatemala and a worker in Miami both recognize.
Pana is a neobank - a bank-shaped app that is not itself a bank - aimed squarely at Latinos and immigrants in the United States and their families across Latin America. You download it, photograph your passport, and a few minutes later you have a US dollar account, a virtual Mastercard, and the ability to move money to another Pana user instantly, for nothing. No SSN. No branch. No teller deciding whether you count.
That last part - "for nothing" - is the whole trick, and it is worth sitting with, because remittances are one of the strangest products in finance. A remittance is the only transaction where you pay a fee to give away your own money. The global average cost of sending money home hovers around 6 percent. On a $300 transfer that is $18 skimmed off the top, every time, forever, largely because the pipes between the US and Latin America were built by companies that profit from the pipes being narrow.
Pana's answer is a closed-loop network. When money stays inside the system - Pana user to Pana user - there is no correspondent bank, no wire counter, no toll. It simply moves. The company describes it as a single dollar balance that "can't wait," and the tagline, life doesn't wait, neither does Pana, is doing more work than most taglines. Rent doesn't wait. Medicine doesn't wait. A transfer that takes three business days is a design choice made for the bank's convenience, not yours.
The average migrant pays roughly 6% to send money across a border. Inside Pana's network, that number is zero. Here is the same $300 transfer, two ways.
Illustrative. Off-network cash-out and FX may carry costs; in-network Pana-to-Pana transfers are free.
Now for the part that would ordinarily send a marketing team into a spiral of blockchain buzzwords. Pana runs on stablecoins - specifically USDC, the digital dollar - and settles transfers on-chain to more than 5,000 banks across 27 countries. And the single best decision the company made was to hide all of it.
Pana's users do not see crypto. They see dollars. A unified ledger syncs traditional US banking rails with stablecoins behind the scenes, so a sender in Miami tops up a balance and a recipient in the Dominican Republic cashes out at a local bank, and neither of them ever thinks the word "wallet." The infrastructure - built with non-custodial wallet provider Privy, using account abstraction to handle keys and gas - is genuinely complex. The product is a dollar sign. That is the correct ratio.
Photograph a passport. A US dollar account exists in minutes - no SSN.
Direct deposit, or receive from PayPal, Cash App, Deel, Airbnb, Patreon.
Instant free transfers to any Pana user; USDC settles invisibly.
Pana Mastercard online and in stores, or cash out at 5,000+ banks.
A US dollar account opened from a phone with a passport - direct deposit, biometric security, one unified balance.
A virtual Mastercard debit card for online and in-store spending, plus local cash-out.
Zero-fee, instant peer-to-peer transfers - versus the ~6% average of traditional remittances.
Send and cash out across 5,000+ banks in 27 countries, USDC settling behind the scenes.
Personal links plus support for PayPal, Cash App, Deel, Airbnb and Patreon inflows.
Rails that let banks, platforms and creators serve US-based diaspora communities.
Plenty of fintechs are built by people who have never lost money to a wire fee. Pana was not. Its founders came from inside the machine and left to build the bank their own families needed.
Second-time fintech founder. Former Head of Scotiabank's Digital Factory for the Caribbean and Central America, with 15+ years across fintech, banking, wealth management and insurance. A member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Second-time fintech founder and former tech lead at Rover, with 10+ years building software and consumer products at scale.
Here is the plot development that makes Pana more than a nicer money-transfer app. The company is expanding from a consumer product into infrastructure - SDKs that let banks, platforms and creators plug in and serve US-based diaspora customers directly. And the banks are buying.
In the Dominican Republic, six local institutions have signed on to fund customer acquisition for Pana. Read that twice. Banks that might once have competed with a challenger neobank are instead paying it to reach their own diaspora customers, because the diaspora is the distribution channel and Pana already owns the relationship. This is the familiar arc of good infrastructure companies: build the product, earn the trust, then sell the rails underneath. The app was never the finish line.
Seed round (Jul 2022): $2.6M led by Y Combinator, with Pareto Holdings, TampaBay.Ventures, Leonis Investissement, Edward Lando, Nadav Ben-Chanoch, Jon Oringer and Diverse Angels.
Facts drawn from public sources including joinpana.com, Y Combinator, Crunchbase, Business Wire and the Privy engineering blog. Metrics are company-reported and approximate.