nsave’s Quest to Build a Fairer Global Financial System

In this Founder's Hustle edition, Amer Baroudi, co-founder and CEO of nsave, takes us through how a journey shaped by displacement, resilience, and lived financial exclusion led to building one of the most ambitious fintech missions today: a global financial platform designed for people the system routinely overlooks; those born into fragile economies, shut out by compliance walls, and denied the basic right to protect and grow their earnings.

From Survival to Purpose

Amer's journey began in Damascus, shaped by the Syrian revolution and a path that carried him beyond home. "Becoming a founder was never planned, I stumbled into it initially because I needed to survive," he explains. He launched small ventures simply to fund his studies, support his family, and rebuild his life. These early ventures taught him resilience and planted the seeds of a deeper purpose.

That purpose crystallized years later at Oxford, where Amer arrived as a Rhodes Scholar. For the first time in years, he had stability, and room to confront the structural barriers that defined his own life. "Like millions of Syrians, and hundreds of millions globally, I was inherently excluded from the financial system," he says. Coming from a sanctioned and fragile economy meant being labeled "high-risk," unable to open a global bank account, receive a salary, or protect savings from hyperinflation. At Oxford, he began researching this problem: systemic financial exclusion affecting hundreds of millions across the world. This research became the foundation for nsave.

Turning A Paper Into Reality

The idea took shape when Amer met his co-founder, Abdallah AbuHashem, at Oxford. A fellow Rhodes Scholar from Palestine, Abdallah combined strong engineering credentials from Stanford and roles at Robinhood and Microsoft with a deeply personal understanding of the problem they were trying to solve. Together, they transformed the policy idea into an operational mission: build compliant, secure, global platform for people unfairly excluded from the system.

The task ahead was daunting. "We had an audacious claim and a very ambitious idea," Amer says, and most experts told them it could not be done. Yet they pushed ahead, applied to Y Combinator, and entered the S22 batch, effectively launching the company. YC gave them structure, momentum, and the early validation needed to begin building partnerships and compliance infrastructure.

Why Offshore Banking Has Remained Exclusive

Offshore banking has long been accessible only to a small global elite, and Amer's research showed this wasn't because of regulation, but because traditional institutions had no incentive to change. "They've been operating on the same model for hundreds of years," he says, pointing to private banks in Switzerland that remained profitable, unchallenged, and uninterested in expanding access.

Banks often cite high compliance costs as the reason they exclude people from certain regions. Amer calls out how outdated that logic is. Processes like "a six-eyes policy on every transaction" may have made sense decades ago, but technology has since transformed onboarding, monitoring, and risk assessment. The deeper issue, Amer argues, is that few people ever cared to solve the problem. For him and his co-founder, financial exclusion is personal. "We are building for ourselves and our communities," he says.

Today, digital onboarding, automated compliance tools, and increasingly powerful AI systems make democratized offshore banking not just possible, but efficient and scalable. nsave combines these advancements with a mission-driven approach and a commercially viable model.

Global Accounts for People From Fragile Countries

The central pillar of nsave's mission is serving users traditional banks ignore. While the product may resemble traditional players at first glance, Amer is clear: "nsave is fundamentally different". Its infrastructure is built specifically for people from distressed or emerging economies, individuals the financial system routinely sidelines.

Amer highlights the systemic issue: "It is very unfortunate to see an industry where your nationality is a decisive factor on your risk assessment." Beyond being morally problematic, he notes, "it's also illegal to deny services based on identity".

nsave takes a radically different approach. Instead of treating nationality as a blanket risk indicator, the company evaluates users holistically. "If your passport is a certain identity, that doesn't mean you're inherently a higher risk profile," Amer says. The key is understanding context. This is where nsave's proprietary compliance stack becomes essential. "We have the edge of understanding these regions and users," Amer explains. The team knows what documents are realistically available, what normal financial behavior looks like, and how to distinguish legitimate activity from actual risk.

Who nsave Serves Today

nsave was built to be borderless, "it's truly a global account," Amer says. Two groups in particular became early adopters: the diaspora and individuals from countries with unstable or restrictive banking systems who earn from employers abroad.

For the diaspora, nsave solves a generational problem: sending money back home quickly and affordably. Users can remit funds "at the best FX rate, swiftly and quickly." This replaces slow, costly remittance channels that erode both time and earnings.

The second group includes people living in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, or Nigeria who earn from foreign employers. These workers often lose 30% or more of their salaries to fees, poor FX rates, or inflation. By allowing users to "receive payments in hard currency", meaning stable global currencies like USD rather than volatile local ones, with no receiving fees, the platform preserves the full value of their income.

For millions of people across emerging markets, nsave is not just an app, it's a financial equalizer. It ensures they don't lose value simply because of where they were born or where they live.

Integrated Global Investments

In the early days, after launching global accounts, the team noticed something unexpected: users were sending money from nsave to Interactive Brokers. Curious, they reached out, and the insight was immediate. Before nsave, many users couldn't even open or fund an investment account. With nsave, a new door had opened, and users wanted a simpler way to invest directly inside the app, with no extra fees or complicated transfers.

The result became one of nsave's most successful features: integrated global investments. This was not born from theory, but from watching, listening, and understanding the lived realities of its global community.

This user-driven evolution directly serves the company's day-one vision. nsave is not a local spending wallet or a day-to-day payments app. Instead, it is democratizing global payments and wealth financial services, giving ordinary people access to tools that were historically reserved for the wealthy.

This is where investing matters most. For millions, the reality is stark: preserving the value of their earnings is a challenge, and building wealth feels out of reach. nsave was built to break that cycle.

Unlocking Global Markets

Bringing investments to nsave required significant effort behind the scenes, and Amer hints that "a lot of exciting announcements" are coming as partnerships with major financial institutions expand. But the core offering is already live: users can open real investment accounts and genuinely own the assets they buy.

Today, nsave offers three essential investment categories: U.S. equities, ETFs and gold and silver indices. But access alone isn't enough. For many users, this is their first experience with global markets, and that carries responsibility, so nsave started building knowledge hubs, resources, and community support to help users understand investing and its risks.

nsave prioritizes building only what meaningfully serves users. Not every request becomes a product; the team looks for "patterns of behavior you can back with data." When many users display the same need, nsave investigates deeply, talks to customers, and if the opportunity aligns with the mission and genuinely improves financial lives, they build it.

Building Trust Through Compliance

From day one, nsave chose the hardest but most necessary path: compliance by design. "We invested in our infrastructure and doing things right," Amer says, and that early discipline is what allowed nsave to partner with major financial institutions and operate in highly regulated markets.

The early days were slow and difficult. Securing banking partners "takes forever," especially when many doubted whether nsave's mission was even feasible. To break through the skepticism, the team adopted radical transparency: "We told our first partner, come and audit what we do." That mindset built trust, and as the company matured, it began securing its own regulatory authorizations across key jurisdictions.

Today, nsave is pursuing an "aggressive regulatory expansion plan," with more geographies on the horizon. The aim is clear: build a regulatory foundation capable of supporting millions of users worldwide.

Building Through Partnerships While Owning the Core Infrastructure

In global banking, no company operates alone. "You're part of a network," Amer says. Partnerships give nsave reach, resilience, and redundancy across markets. But the company's real strength lies in what it builds internally. "On the compliance side, we own most of the journey," Amer explains, from risk assessments to transaction monitoring. Developing proprietary systems allows nsave to remain "the masters of our destiny," especially when serving users from high-risk environments.

This hybrid model, external partnerships plus internal control, shapes every strategic decision. "Banking is about risk," Amer says. Managing that risk thoughtfully is what enables nsave to scale safely while preparing for its long-term plan: becoming a tech-driven fully licensed bank.

Amer also addresses the practical side of scaling: early reliance on vendors isn't a weakness, it's normal, "it's a natural trajectory" he says. More users lead to better partner terms; more funding allows nsave to internalize critical infrastructure. In short, partnerships help nsave move fast. Proprietary systems help it move with conviction. Together, they form a structure built for resilience, control, and long-term independence.

Securing Global Top Investors

During Y Combinator, nsave caught the attention of Sequoia Capital through George Robson, "an incredibly thoughtful partner; ex-Revolut, he really knows fintech and understands banking very well." Amer recalls their first meeting vividly: "I loved just how sharp, professional and thoughtful he was." As Amer explained their mission, George's reaction was immediate and decisive: "what you're saying makes perfect sense, this could be huge."

Sequoia quickly moved to lead nsave's seed round. Amer approached the decision with care, "every thoughtful founder thinks about the partner they're going to work with", but the alignment was undeniable. That conviction only deepened over time. When nsave raised its Series A, Sequoia, TQ Ventures, Y Combinator, and other early backers all returned. "We were incredibly privileged to have our investors double down on us," Amer says.

The Grit Behind the Journey

Amer doesn't romanticize the journey. "Building a startup is tough," he says, especially for founders who come from difficult backgrounds. The highs are exhilarating, the lows are sharp, and the emotional weight is real.

His advice is direct: "you must deeply care about what you're building. Make sure what you're working on is something you wholeheartedly want to pursue, because when things get hard, and they will, only conviction keeps you going. There will always be moments where quitting seems logical, you'll have a million reasons to say, why am I doing this?"

In his view, many early-stage startups fail because founders give up. Pushing through requires discipline, alignment with co-founders, supportive investors, and a mission you believe in. With those in place, Amer says, "the sky is the limit".