UK Bank Griffin Raises $20 Million to Build Stablecoin Payment Rails

UK-licensed bank Griffin has raised $20 million in a Series B round to build stablecoin reserve services and onchain cross-border payments directly into its banking platform, the London-based company announced on Thursday.

Octagon Partners led the round, with participation from Notion Capital, A+ Ventures, Nordic Ninja and Breega. The investment values Griffin at more than $100 million — a milestone that places the company among the small set of fully licensed UK banks positioning themselves as infrastructure providers for blockchain-based payments rather than sidelines to them.

Griffin holds a full UK banking license, granted in 2024, and currently provides banking infrastructure to more than 80 companies. Its client base includes Uber and the rewards card platform Yonder, giving the bank a payments-heavy book that already moves substantial transaction volume through conventional rails.

What does the funding change for practitioners?

The core operational shift is consolidation. Griffin plans to develop reserve services that let businesses incorporate stablecoins, alongside onchain cross-border payment capability on the same platform that holds their conventional banking relationships.

For fintech companies, that means accessing traditional banking services and onchain payment rails through a single provider rather than stitching together a licensed bank, a stablecoin issuer and a separate settlement layer. The demand is not speculative: Griffin said some of its existing customers already use stablecoins as part of their cross-border payments business, and the new services respond to that usage rather than anticipating it.

The move reflects a broader pattern among traditional finance-focused firms. Companies with banking licenses are increasingly building bridges from conventional banking into blockchain-based payments, treating stablecoins as settlement infrastructure rather than as a trading asset class. A licensed bank holding stablecoin reserves changes the counterparty structure: reserve custody sits inside a regulated deposit-taking institution supervised in the United Kingdom, not with an unregulated intermediary.

The competitive position

Griffin's combination — a 2024 full banking license, an 80-plus company client base and now dedicated stablecoin reserves — compresses the integration work that fintechs would otherwise undertake across multiple vendors. For a payments company running cross-border flows, that translates into fewer contractual relationships, shorter settlement paths and reserve management inside one supervised entity.

The $20 million raise, set against a valuation above $100 million, signals investor appetite for regulated banks that treat onchain payments as core infrastructure. Octagon Partners' lead position indicates private-market conviction that the banking-to-blockchain bridge, executed inside a licensed wrapper, is where payment infrastructure margins will concentrate.

What follows now is execution: Griffin must build the reserve and cross-border services, migrate existing stablecoin-using customers onto its own rails and demonstrate that a single-provider model can handle both conventional and onchain settlement at scale.