99% Faster, 100% Reliability: How Para helps Coala Pay Transform the Humanitarian Aid Industry

Coala Pay is a blockchain-based payment platform designed to solve a persistent challenge in  the aid industry: moving funds into restricted corridors where traditional banking is slow, unreliable, or unavailable. Founded by experienced humanitarians, the platform uses stablecoins and smart contracts to deliver instant, cross-border liquidity for institutional organizations managing budgets between $500 million and some upwards of $3 billion.

While humanitarian aid demands strict public-fund accountability, it also requires capital to move rapidly through these fragile environments. As an early mover bringing blockchain to the sector, Coala Pay achieves this by focusing on the large-scale transfers between headquarters, regional and local field offices, implementing partners, and vendors that make up 80% of all aid spending.

By targeting these large B2B flows, the platform ensures vital funds completely bypass legacy banking delays, cutting out the multiple currency conversions and volatile exchange rate fluctuations that typically drain aid value before it reaches the field.

The Hidden Costs of Moving Aid

Moving public sector funds to crisis zones through traditional banking networks is often slow, costly, and inefficient. 

→ Delays and Risk: Using traditional legacy banking, it can take up to 30 days to reconcile payments and reimburse local FSPs and cash agents. Even sending funds between an aid organisation’s own bank accounts can take several weeks. During these delays, funds are often exposed to extreme foreign exchange (FX) fluctuations, and lose significant value to fees and intermediaries. 

→ Strict Budget Constraints: This volatility is especially risky because public sector aid funding typically allows only about a 10% margin for unexpected budget changes before lengthy approval processes must begin again. As a result, aid managers sometimes revert to fixing FX rates to reduce accounting burden, resulting in money being left ‘on the table’.

→ The Scale of the Problem: In 2025, global aid reached $175 billion, with $24 billion earmarked for humanitarian assistance. Half of that, around $12 billion, was spent in restricted financial corridors where local banking systems are inaccessible or broken.

Instant Liquidity Through Digital Payment Rails

Coala Pay focuses on B2B through these large institutional funding flows by operating as a non-custodial software platform. The company never holds or controls the aid money itself.

Instead, it enables organizations to move funds instantly from headquarters to field offices, implementing partners, or vendors, using stablecoins and automated payment rules.

To connect digital payments with local markets, Coala Pay works with a vetted network of off-ramps such as local cash agents and FX brokers, mobile money providers like M-Pesa, or licensed blockchain off-ramps such as Pretium and Yellowcard, allowing digital funds to be converted into local currency.

Coala Pay's V2 platform runs live on Stellar, a fast, low-cost network built for the real-world payments scale that aid delivery demands. Funds reach local markets through a vetted network of onramps that convert digital value into spendable currency, landing where they're needed in minutes rather than weeks. Across that flow, Para keeps the wallet experience familiar, giving treasury teams secure, self-custodial wallets they open with a simple social login. The result is institutional-grade payments on crypto rails that field teams can use like any everyday treasury tool.

Removing Technical Barriers with Para

One of the biggest barriers to using blockchain technology in humanitarian settings is its complexity. Coala Pay addresses this by keeping the technology in the background and working with Para as a key infrastructure partner.

Para powers the social login system for digital wallets on Coala Pay’s V2 platform. When organizations create their hub wallets, they can sign in using familiar login methods instead of managing complex crypto credentials. This allows aid workers to use the platform like a standard treasury tool without needing to understand blockchain, crypto, or private keys.

Delivering More Aid, Faster

By replacing fragmented legacy banking systems with a single platform, Coala Pay is already demonstrating what faster aid delivery can look like:

100% Success Rate: End-to-end payments from digital wallets to local currency have been completed without failure.

99% Faster Delivery: Settlement times from a treasury account in Europe and the US, to markets such as Darfur, take less than 30 minutes, compared to the 30 days it can take through traditional banking systems, skipping currency fluctuations and hidden fees along the way. 

In Kenya, Coala Pay enabled an international NGO to execute 2,000 direct household payments into local M-Pesa accounts in just 30 minutes, without recipients needing to use digital wallets.

"Choosing a wallet infrastructure partner wasn't a decision we took lightly. We ran a months-long benchmarking exercise before selecting Para as the primary backbone of our treasury hubs for Coala Pay — and they came out on top on every single metric.

Working with them has only confirmed that decision. Their documentation is clear and genuinely useful. When we've needed support, they've jumped in fast. When we asked them to enable a new blockchain rail, they delivered in weeks, not months.

But the impact we're most proud of is what this means for our users on the ground. Para has made it possible for us to offer the full security of multi-sig, self-custodial wallets through nothing more than a social login. For INGO workers and first responders in the field, people focused on delivering life-saving aid, not managing crypto complexity, that simplicity is transformative.

Para helped us build something we're genuinely proud of."

-- Melyn McKay, CEO/Founder of Coala Pay

What's next?

This year, Coala Pay has won competitively tendered, multi-year framework agreements with some of the world’s largest aid implementers - demonstrating that blockchain payment solutions can outperform traditional financial services providers. As adoption grows and the need to move away from broken legacy systems continues, Melyn, the Founder and CEO of Coala Pay, predicts that within the next three to five years, most people using cross-border payment systems will not even realize their transactions are running on blockchain rails behind the scenes.