My name is Faisal Khan.

I am a banking, payments, and licensing consultant. My work focuses on cross-border money transfer, payment systems, banking access, regulatory licensing, compliance, remittances, fintech infrastructure, crypto payments, stablecoins, and private deal flow.

I work through my own company, Faisal Khan LLC, where I advise clients on the practical side of moving money, getting licensed, finding banking partners, structuring payment systems, and solving difficult regulated financial services problems.

I have been involved with internet and technology since 1996, and since 2010 my professional life has been centered around banking, payments, money transfer, and financial infrastructure.

I live in Istanbul, work internationally, and spend much of my time thinking about how money moves across borders, why it gets stuck, and what kind of structure can make a difficult transaction possible.

What Do I Do?

At work, most of my time is spent on strategy, sales, operations, deal structuring, and advisory.

In practical terms, that means I help companies create, design, develop, deploy, and structure specialized payment systems and financial services arrangements.

Most of my work is in areas such as:

• Cross-border money transfer and remittances
• MSB, EMI, API, SPI, and payment institution licensing
• Banking access and correspondent relationships
• Payment rails and settlement models
• Fintech market entry
• Compliance, KYC, KYB, AML, and risk review
• Crypto, stablecoins, USDT, USDC, and digital asset payment models
• License acquisition and sale opportunities
• Private deal flow, introductions, and strategic placement

My work usually starts where simple answers stop.

A company may need a license but not know whether to apply, acquire, or partner. A fintech may have payment volume but no banking relationship. A money transfer company may have demand in a corridor but no payout capacity. A crypto company may have liquidity but no compliant fiat access. An investor may want exposure to regulated financial infrastructure but not know where credible opportunities exist.

That is the kind of problem I like.

Easy problems attract everyone. Difficult problems are where the value hides.

My Approach

I think of my work as deal-making, but not in the shallow sense of merely introducing two parties.

Real deal-making requires understanding the structure behind the problem.

Who has the license? Who has the banking? Who has the volume? Who has the risk appetite? Who has the jurisdiction? Who has the compliance tolerance? Who has the operational capacity? Who is pretending, and who can actually perform?

The answer is rarely obvious at first glance.

My job is to find the commercial sweet spot, the regulatory path, the counterparty angle, and the sequence of moves that can turn a difficult position into a workable deal.

I believe difficult does not mean impossible. Difficult usually means the answer is hidden behind regulation, timing, incentives, risk, trust, or poor structuring.

The work is to rethink the problem.

Digital Money

I have long been an evangelist for digital money.

Years ago, that meant talking about Bitcoin when most people still treated it as strange, fringe, or irrelevant. Today, the conversation has expanded into stablecoins, tokenized settlement, crypto liquidity, programmable money, digital wallets, compliance-heavy fintech, and new forms of cross-border value movement.

The labels change. The core question remains the same:

How will money move tomorrow, and who will control the rails?

That question has shaped much of my professional work.

Deal Harbor

I am also the founder of Deal Harbor, a marketplace and private deal-flow platform for regulated financial services.

Deal Harbor exists because the market for banking, licensing, payment infrastructure, compliance support, FX capacity, crypto settlement, and regulated financial services opportunities is fragmented, opaque, and heavily relationship-driven.

There are buyers looking for licenses. There are sellers looking for credible acquirers. There are fintechs looking for banking. There are banks looking for controlled opportunities. There are payment companies looking for corridors. There are investors looking for regulated assets. There are operators who can solve problems, but nobody knows where to find them.

Deal Harbor is my attempt to structure that chaos.

Hire Me?

If you are interested in hiring me, whether for 30 minutes or for a longer engagement, the best starting point is usually my LinkedIn profile.

I work best with clients who have a serious problem, a real opportunity, or a transaction that requires more than a standard answer.

That may include licensing strategy, banking access, market entry, payment infrastructure, cross-border corridors, crypto-to-fiat models, compliance positioning, deal flow, or strategic introductions.

If the problem is straightforward, you may not need me.

If the problem is difficult, layered, regulated, commercial, and somewhat messy, then I am probably more useful.

My Alma Mater

My alma mater is Florida Tech, located in Melbourne, Florida, on the Space Coast.

Melbourne is a small town with an interesting claim to fame: Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, was born there.

I studied engineering, but I also had a strong interest in Arts and Architecture. Florida Tech did not officially give me a minor in it, but I always considered it part of my education.

If you are curious, Marc Chagall is one of my favorites.

Aesthetics and balance matter to me. They matter in design, writing, architecture, typography, product structure, and even deal-making. When something is off-balance, I tend to notice.

Family

I have two children, both grown up now.

They remain the most important part of my life.

I am also a dad to two cats. Like most cat owners, I am not fully sure whether I own them or they own me.

Istanbul

I call Istanbul home.

It is a city of layers, contradictions, history, food, movement, trade, memory, and constant negotiation. In that sense, it suits me.

I work across time zones, often with clients and counterparties in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Istanbul gives me a useful vantage point: close enough to several worlds, but not fully trapped inside any single one of them.

Oddities

I stopped watching television and reading newspapers in 2006.

I have never regretted it.

I felt happier, calmer, and probably saner. I still read constantly, but I prefer books, long-form material, source documents, regulatory filings, old references, essays, manuals, archives, and obscure corners of the internet.

I like information. I do not like being programmed by noise.

Interests

I am an avid lover of old bookstores, old books, flea markets, antiques, and collectibles.

I can spend an unreasonable amount of time in places that smell of paper, dust, wood, brass, vinyl, leather, and history.

I like postcards, old cameras, walking sticks, vinyl records, type, typography, and objects that seem to have lived a life before they reached me.

Books are a weakness. I could drown myself in them. I cannot name one favorite author or one favorite book because the list would keep changing. If it has writing on it, there is a reasonable chance I will read it.

Over the years, I have also become increasingly interested in history and geography. These were subjects I did not properly appreciate when I was young. Now I find them indispensable.

Maps explain incentives. History explains behavior. Geography explains constraints.

Together, they explain far more than most people realize.

Music, Food, and Other Things

I enjoy vintage jazz, opera, deep house music, 80s music, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Yes, some of that is contradictory. I am fine with that.

Two jazz stations I used to enjoy were Martini in the Morning and Bop City Vintage Jazz. Even the names are beautiful.

I am also a die-hard foodie. I enjoy Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Lebanese, Italian, French, and almost any kind of seafood.

I enjoy cooking, black-and-white photography, movies, astronomy, audio/video gear, trivia, and stand-up comedy.

I am also an Apple person. Some may say fanboy. I will not fight the charge.

Quora, Writing, and Platform Dependency

For many years, I contributed heavily to Quora.

I was selected as a Top Writer for six straight years and wrote more than 5,000 answers, mostly around banking, payments, licensing, money transfer, fintech, compliance, and related subjects.

Then Quora decided I was spamming.

I requested a review. Their position remained the same. My view was simple: if I had been spamming, it was strange that the same platform had repeatedly selected me as a Top Writer.

So I removed my answers.

That experience taught me something useful: if the content is yours, but the platform controls the rules, then the content is not fully yours.

Now I am building independent homes for my writing, including my own websites and projects where my content can live on my terms.

Platform dependency is convenient until it is not.

AI, Vibe Coding, and Small Projects

I have always liked building things on the internet.

Recently, AI and vibe coding have made that habit far more dangerous, in the best possible way.

I now build and experiment with smaller web projects, content platforms, niche marketplaces, publishing systems, regulatory information sites, and tools connected to banking, payments, licensing, compliance, crypto, and financial infrastructure.

Some projects are serious. Some are experiments. Some are content engines. Some are market probes. Some are simply ideas that refused to leave me alone.

AI has changed the speed at which a person like me can go from idea to working prototype. That has opened a lot of doors.

Babushka99

Many people who know me online also know the handle babushka99.

The backstory goes back to college in the early 1990s.

At the time, I was fascinated by CIA and KGB books. So much so that I enrolled in a Russian language class. I can still speak some Russian, though it is very rusty now.

Around the same time, the movie Sneakers came out. One of the characters, a lead hacker, was called “Mother.”

“Babushka” means grandmother in Russian. It is also associated with headscarves and has other cultural references, including the Kate Bush song “Babooshka.”

When we were first plugging into the internet, BITnet, FidoNet, CompuServe, and other early networks, I chose the handle Babushka.

The “99” was added to make it almost certain that the username would be available wherever I signed up.

So the handle is a mixture of CIA/KGB fascination, Russian language, hacker culture, early internet history, and the movie Sneakers.

It made sense at the time.

It still does, at least to me.

Contact

If you need to get in touch with me, you can reach me at:

faisal /dot/ khan /at/ hey /dot/ com

You can also find me on LinkedIn and across my various websites, projects, and publishing platforms.

If you are reaching out about banking, payments, licensing, money transfer, crypto, compliance, deal flow, or regulated financial services infrastructure, be specific.

The more clearly you describe the problem, the faster I can tell whether I can help.