OpenTrade Names Ex-SWIFT CEO Campos Chairman With TVL at $300 Million

Campos Takes the OpenTrade Chair

OpenTrade, the London-based stablecoin yield infrastructure firm, has appointed former SWIFT chief executive Lázaro Campos as chairman of its board. The company announced the appointment on Friday, nearly six months after closing a $17 million funding round to expand operations. Alongside the move, OpenTrade disclosed operating figures that have moved sharply since spring: the platform has cleared more than $1 billion in transactions across the past year, and assets deposited across its vaults, the firm's total value locked, now stand at $300 million. In May, when that round was announced, the company reported just over $200 million locked and $250 million in volume processed over the preceding year. Chief executive David Sutter said Campos will help expand the firm's services as more financial companies adopt stablecoins. Mercury Fund and Notion Capital led that May round, with a16z crypto, AlbionVC and CMCC Global also participating; cumulative funding has reached $32 million. OpenTrade, founded in 2023, sells a product that lets fintechs, exchanges, digital wallets and internet banks offer dollar- and euro-denominated returns on stablecoin balances without assembling their own investment and custody systems, connecting through an API. The returns are backed by real-world assets and blockchain-based strategies held in separate vaults, a structure distinct from an ETF; each vault carries its own underlying assets, withdrawal conditions and a variable APY. Some vaults require a withdrawal notice period, processing can take up to two business days, and the company states that past performance does not guarantee future returns. TVL and volume are measures of operating scale, not of revenue or profit.

Career on the Payment Rails

Campos joined SWIFT in 1987 and led the network as chief executive from April 2007 until June 2012. SWIFT is the member-owned cooperative that carries financial messages between more than 11,000 institutions worldwide and moves up to $1.5 quadrillion a year; under Campos, its transaction volumes nearly doubled. The organization operates as a messaging layer rather than a settlement layer: it transmits payment instructions between banks, and the distinction matters because stablecoins collapse messaging and settlement into one tokenized rail. His wider record sits in the same territory. He served on the Bank of England's RTGS infrastructure board and on the board of CHAPS, the Clearing House Automated Payment System, held a seat at digital bank Starling and currently chairs Payoneer Europe. Payoneer Europe, which he now chairs, sits in the cross-border payments business that stablecoin issuers are entering. “I've spent most of my career on the infrastructure the world uses to move money. Stablecoins are the next chapter, and yield is what makes them useful to businesses and the people they serve,” Campos said in the announcement. The chairmanship was not a complete surprise: OpenTrade's chief executive had already described Campos as the firm's incoming chairman in an interview published on September 17, so the formal confirmation arriving today follows that earlier disclosure. The May funding was earmarked for permissioned and permissionless infrastructure, tailored vault services and staffing, giving the new chairman a mandate over an expansion already in progress. Tokenized dollar balances sitting in yield vaults compete for the same working capital that today idles in nostro accounts, which is where a career spent optimizing bank messaging becomes commercially relevant.

Deposit Growth Since May

The deposit curve matters more than the title. Deposits rose roughly 50% in six months, from just over $200 million to $300 million, while annual processed volume climbed from $250 million to more than $1 billion, a pattern that suggests existing clients are routing additional balance through the vaults rather than arriving in a single wave. The firm's vault information page displays over $1.5 billion in processed trading volume, but that figure carries no stated aggregation window, so the 12-month number is the cleaner read. For a company that has raised $32 million and sells yield access through an API, the test is whether institutions that settle over SWIFT-style rails keep stablecoin balances in yield-bearing form at scale. Campos's regulatory and clearing-system history is aimed at exactly that buyer, and the trend since May supports the pitch.