Julián Torres still laughs about the first time he watched a cross-border payment crawl from the United States to Argentina. The money moved at the speed of a glacier. Six days if you were lucky, 20 days if you weren’t. That delay stuck with him. It made no sense to him that remote work had gone global but the money flowed like the dial-up era.
That irritation helped fuel Ontop, the Miami company Torres co-founded to fix the messy, scattered process of hiring and paying teams across borders. The TL;DR: Hiring and paying international talent should not require 10 tools and a prayer.
“Hiring and paying global talent is very fragmented,” Torres told Refresh Miami. “Companies have to juggle dozens of tools for contracts, for compliance, and for payment.” Ontop began by pulling all of that into one auditable flow. No more extra platforms. No mix of steps that didn’t talk to each other. Just one line from contract to payout.
It worked. As Ontop grew, something unexpected took off: workers started storing their earnings inside the Ontop USD account and using the linked Visa card.
Torres explained, “We launched what we called the Ontop Wallet, which is a global wallet that people can use anywhere. They can keep what they make in US dollars and use it without fees.” The wallet and card soon became a major part of the business.
That pushed Ontop deeper into financial tech. The team built its own ledger, became an authorizer of transactions, and created a system that moves money worldwide in minutes instead of days.
Torres noted the contrast clearly: “If you were going to send a wire from the US to Argentina, that could take anywhere from six to twenty days. Right now, Ontop is settling transactions worldwide in less than fifteen minutes.”
So far, the company has processed more than $1 billion in global payroll and reached profitability in January 2025. The hiring space has big players, but Torres sees a clear difference.
“Most platforms offer features,” he said. “We offer orchestration.” Ontop also directs more attention to the worker. “We really shine a light on remote workers,” he added. Contractors can hold funds, spend with the card, and access perks that help with daily needs.
The next step is AI. A contract that once took 10 minutes now takes only a few seconds. “You can just prompt our system, and our system has five years of training,” Torres said. “It can craft a contract, payment flows, everything.” AI also decides the best route for money transfers, cutting cost and shortening delays.
Miami sits at the center of the story, in Torres’s view. “Miami has a very unique mix. Almost everyone I talk to has something to do with Latin America or some kind of business. And we are the platform that helps them bridge that gap.” The city gives Ontop access to US rules, Latin American talent, and founders who depend on smooth cross-border hiring.
Torres sees the next phase more as a union of tools than a single leap. “The future is the convergence,” he said. “Workers will have one platform for everything: payroll, wallet, FX, spending, analytics.” To him, the analogy is clear. “We’re building the PayPal or Payoneer of the future. A financial system on top of the system.”
If that vision holds, the long waits, stalled wires, and broken steps that sparked Ontop’s creation may soon feel like another ice age.
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