Our Story
Built by operators, not observers.
We've been in the trenches — co-founding companies, securing central bank licenses, shipping payment platforms, and navigating the regulatory gauntlets that come with handling real money.
Where we come from
Llama Research was founded by two operators who have spent a combined 40+ years building and scaling fintech companies together. We co-built Carta Worldwide — a MasterCard-certified digital payments platform that grew across Canada, the UK, and Morocco. We then took that playbook to the Caribbean, where we launched Island Pay and secured the Bahamas' first payment service provider license and MasterCard principal membership. We've lived the full lifecycle — from founding through hyper-growth, regulatory scrutiny, and successful exits.
What we've done
We've built prepaid card platforms, stablecoin wallets, cross-border remittance infrastructure, mobile payment apps, and digital asset custody systems. We've secured central bank licenses, built AML/KYC compliance programs from scratch, negotiated banking partnerships across multiple jurisdictions, and scaled organizations from zero to thousands of active users. Our work spans governance, risk, compliance, treasury operations, and the engineering infrastructure that makes it all run.
Why AI consulting
We saw the same pattern we'd lived through in fintech: a transformative technology arriving faster than organizations can adapt. Companies don't need another AI demo — they need operators who understand how regulated businesses actually work, how to restructure for a new paradigm, and how to deliver measurable outcomes without breaking compliance. That's what we built Llama Research to do.