Hesab has chosen DFNS to power the wallets behind HesabPay and its new global self-custody bank. Hesab issues wallets to people for whom that wallet may be the only reliable account they have ever held: aid recipients in conflict zones, workers sending money home, families whose banks froze or whose currency collapsed. When that is the product, the layer that creates, secures, and governs millions of self-custodial wallets is not infrastructure in the background. It is the promise itself. That layer is DFNS.
HesabPay, banking born where banking failed
Hesab’s story starts where most fintech stories would end. After the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country’s financial system collapsed: sanctions halted international transfers and the central bank unraveled. Sanzar Kakar, the Afghan American entrepreneur who had run the country’s leading payroll processor, responded by building HesabPay, named after the local word for account, a phone-based app moving money instantly between digital wallets, without passing through the banks that no longer worked. The Afghan government has since licensed the business as a financial institution, and the platform now counts more than 650,000 wallets in Afghanistan moving roughly $60 million a month in afghani-backed stablecoins.
What happened next made HesabPay one of the most consequential fintechs in the world. The UN refugee agency adopted the platform to support more than 86,000 families in Afghanistan, one of the largest public blockchain aid initiatives anywhere, delivering nearly $25 million through 80,000 digital wallets since February 2025, with the agency’s treasurer citing lower fees, shorter waits, and real-time traceability. The World Food Programme, a partner since 2023 through its Innovation Accelerator, has helped 49,000 people open digital accounts, including 20,600 women under the World Bank-supported Mother and Child Benefit Programme. Mercy Corps extended the platform into Syria, where $500 dollar-backed cards are helping farmers restart after fourteen years of war, with programs for Sudan and Haiti in development. And running underneath it all is a real-time compliance dashboard that tracks wallet activity against international databases and flags suspicious transactions the moment they appear, the kind of oversight donors rarely get in fragile states.
The global self-custody bank
This month, Hesab opened its next chapter. Founded in 2018, the company now processes $160 million a month across more than a million transactions for users in over 160 countries, and it is turning that reach into something more ambitious: a global self-custody bank, launching across the Global South, starting with corridors in Africa and the Middle East.
The problem it targets is the oldest one in remittances. $685 billion flowed to low and middle-income countries in 2024, most of it through correspondent banking that takes two to five days and charges an average of 6.36% per transfer, with the people sending the smallest, most frequent amounts paying the highest effective rates. Hesab’s answer runs on a twenty-dollar handset with no branch and no paperwork. Users fund an account through more than twenty channels, including bank transfer, card, and Apple Pay. The balance is held as dollar stablecoins, USDC or USDT, in a wallet only the user controls. They can send it anywhere, spend it on a global card, or cash out through a local agent, and the keys live on their own device. Leave tomorrow, and the money is still yours.
Where DFNS sits
DFNS provides the core wallet infrastructure so Hesab can issue millions of non-custodial accounts at scale. Wallets are created programmatically and invisibly, with each user’s assets secured by DFNS’ key infrastructure and controlled by the user. No seed phrase to lose, no custodial balance sitting on the company’s books. Transaction lifecycle management, real-time webhooks, and policy and governance controls run underneath, supporting exactly the screening-and-auditability posture Hesab’s humanitarian partners built their trust on.
The rest of the stack fits just as cleanly. Hesab’s bank settles on Movement, the stablecoin settlement layer DFNS added as a fully supported Tier-1 network in June, and moves USDC across chains through Circle’s CCTP, which DFNS also supports natively. Tether supplies USDT liquidity where it is the preferred dollar. One coherent stack, and the operating layer extends across all of it.
Banking people can actually own
There is a reason this partnership means something beyond the integration. Hesab serves people whose defining financial experience is accounts that freeze, currencies that get controlled, and institutions that cannot be trusted with the balance. Its answer is structural: a bank the user fully owns. DFNS was built on the same conviction, that control should be provable and that the infrastructure should make betrayal impossible rather than merely policed.
From aid disbursements in Afghanistan and Syria to a self-custody bank spanning 160 countries, Hesab is building financial access for the people the system was never built for. DFNS is proud to be the platform those wallets run on.
Start building on DFNS today: app.dfns.io/get-started