00:59:58 · David Senra
[00:59:58] S0: I hear the trusting was actually one of the most interesting insights. And you said a lot of interesting shit today. But like, I think there's something about the ubiquity of it. It's not just one sign saying, you know, this is Revolut and this is what we do. It's like entire hallways. Like you're just walking and I'm being surrounded by this. It's like, I'm telling you, I can't think of another company. This is before I even thought of having you on the show. Was just like, this is actually a really good idea. I'm not gonna walk past this and not know this company exists. One of last things I wanna talk to you about goes back to this grandiose ambition you have. I think people that may have not known you before this pick up on your super competitive. Mean, I love the fact that you were like, kind of got pissed off at VCs. All well now I have to compete with you because you made me so mad. But I've never heard anybody else building a bank. One, you said there's really no true global bank and you want to be the first one. So I like the level of ambition. But then you compare just like, we want to be a global technology company. And I think you might have mentioned a few companies, but the one I remember was like a global technology company like Meta. Explain that. The connection between what you're building, which may... People think maybe like even a boring, you know, business has been around for... Banks have been around for a long time, but that's not the way you're you're you're viewing what you're building.
01:01:10 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[01:01:10] S1: Yeah. Basically, our idea and our goal is to generate enough cash flow from this business to be able to fund, like, really big bets which can consume a lot of capital. Right? Like, for example, I would love to go into LLMs as well to build our own models. We in fact, you know, build our own transactional model called Pragma. So it's LLM, but all transformer based on transactions relevant words. But I would love even to go deeper, right, to kind of build our own data centers, to train our own model, all the models to kind of, [01:01:48] S0: you know, [01:01:48] S1: to do a lot deeper tech compared to what we do now. But then, you know, it it it requires a lot of investments. Right? And a lot of cash flow. So basically, to build a large business so that it produce so much cash flow, there it is possible to fund some kind of moonshot bets, which might not necessarily produce P and L in the next, you know, three, four, five years. [01:02:13] S0: Are these moonshot bets unrelated to, like, financial services?
01:02:13 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[01:02:13] S0: Are these moonshot bets unrelated to, like, financial services? [01:02:17] S1: Yeah. Most likely. Yeah. Because I mean, financial service, I mean, what else can we do? I mean, almost everything is invented already. So we just, like, ultimately, we're just rewriting legacy products. Right? So we're building the same financial products, but we're building them much cheaper and much nicer compared to older ones. Plus, we are putting them under one umbrella in one app. So it's all very convenient. Plus, also innovate on top. So they're all kind of interconnected with with each other, talk to each other. But ultimately, it's it's the same old banking but done in a new way. Right? So what I really love to do is to to to go out of it and then do something that was never done before. Inside the industry? In all industries, yeah. All industries? [01:03:04] S0: More like in my tech industry. Have you like shared publicly like some of these like moonshot ideas or you're like keeping inside the company?
01:03:04 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[01:03:04] S0: More like in my tech industry. Have you like shared publicly like some of these like moonshot ideas or you're like keeping inside the company? [01:03:11] S1: For now, all these ideas I just have, you know, in my head. And then I just know that we don't have enough resources and time to to to build them. But I hope, you know, in three, four, five years time, we might have enough resources to to build them. PRAGMA is a foundational model trained on our transactional data. As I said, we have 30,000,000 transactions every day. So we have billions and billions of transactions. And then it is possible, effectively, to train a transformer based model on transactions and then use it in, like, almost any aspect of financial services. So it can be anti fraud model. It can be credit model. Potential can be investment model and so on. When you [01:03:58] S0: launch here, why would I want to use your bank as opposed to, like, JPMorgan?
01:03:58 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[01:03:58] S0: launch here, why would I want to use your bank as opposed to, like, JPMorgan? [01:04:04] S1: So JPMorgan is very local. It gives you US bank account plus u... US based products. If you ever have exposure outside of US, we're a banking partner because we do everything what JPMorgan does for you in US. Plus, on top of it, we provide all the global assets. You can have global accounts with us. So being in The US, you can open an account in Europe or Australia. You can send money instantly between all countries and so on and so forth. So instead of giving you local based financial products, local based benefits with points, we give you effective global exposure. So that's a proposition. Plus, on top of it, it's much nicer in terms of interface, plus much cheaper compared to JPMorgan. [01:04:48] S0: What's the difference where you... That you make money compared to the way they make money? [01:04:52] S1: They are much more credit focused compared to us. We are much more subscription focused plus transactional business plus commission focused. [01:05:00] S0: What are doing on the credit side? [01:05:01] S1: Are you just selling all that off? Credit is just standard products, credit cards and loans. Selling them off or not yet. No. Okay. Because it's still very small portion of our balance sheet. [01:05:10] S0: So you think your advantage relative to the legacy banks is you're more of a technology company?
01:05:10 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[01:05:10] S0: So you think your advantage relative to the legacy banks is you're more of a technology company? [01:05:14] S1: Our advantage is tech. And then if you think about banks in the past, when they expanded country to country, just bought other banks. As a result, they have many systems in many countries. They don't really control anything to produce any report. It takes months to extract data from different systems. Our advantage is that we have just standardized one system, one ledger across many countries. As we go from one country to another country, we do not need to write things from scratch. We just adjust configuration of our software. And now, for example, onboarding UK, we adjust certain configs to change onboarding to US or to change onboarding to Mexico and and so on. So it becomes, you know, one product which is highly configurable. We do not need to build another bank, another country from scratch. As you do it, you obviously need much less people to maintain it compared to 10 banks in 10 countries. As a result, is an economy of scale so we can sell products much cheaper compared to other banks. Plus, the whole institutional knowledge, how you build product, how you do marketing, and so on. So you reply the same knowledge in in in any new country. And I think, you know, over time it can become almost unstoppable machine. Right? Because it provides much better products and services at a much better price compared to local banks.