visa-direct
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Visa
Visa is less a card company than a piece of global choreography - a network that turns a tap in a shop into a trusted conversation among banks, merchants and billions of credentials. Now it is extending that choreography to instant payouts, stablecoins and shopping agents.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Astra
Astra is a San Francisco-based fintech that gives developers a single API to move money instantly between bank accounts and debit cards. Built on rails like Visa Direct, RTP, FedNow and ACH, its platform lets fintechs, banks and enterprises embed instant disbursements, account funding and accelerated transfers without building their own payments stack - going live in about 30 days instead of six months. Founded in 2016 by Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan, Astra has processed more than $1 billion in lifetime payments and is backed by FPV Ventures, Nyca Partners and others.
Interchecks
Interchecks is a New York-based payments infrastructure company that moves money fast and safely for high-volume businesses. Through a single API and a no-code Payer Portal, it powers both funding (pay-by-bank deposits, account funding) and payouts (push-to-card, real-time payments, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, and checks), layered with built-in risk controls and 1099 tax compliance. Its platform is used across online gaming, prediction markets, on-demand payroll, and digital banking, and the company says it has processed more than $50B in transactions.