00:25:37 · Doug Ricket
[00:25:37] S1: Yeah, I mean, it's it's exactly like you said, which is uh, you know, one foot in the US, the Pedro Asset Fund is in US dollars. And so we and we're a US headquartered company. Uh, but there's some cool things that come out of this. You know, we offer this USD investment. You don't have to think about currency. Oh, I should mention we hedge that currency exposure. So if we're lending in Mexican pesos and borrowing in dollars, we hedge that principle always. That is our policy. We don't want to be speculating in the currency market. I don't want our company to do that. I don't want that for investors. So the result is you get this really cool asset, which is hey, you can invest your million dollars USD that you have sitting around in your pocket, and you're getting diversified access to Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, India, South Africa, you're getting this great diversified portfolio uh with no currency risk. Like we hedge the currency risk, and that's a cost of operating that we've already taken. Uh so you get this really cool asset on the investor side. And then, yes, because we're US and uh we have to follow US security law and reporting and everything, uh, we do that compliance on the US. And then in the local market in Ecuador, uh, knock on wood, we're applying. We could be one of the first uh uh fintech lenders approved under a new fintech law uh that that's come through recently. That's really exciting. Uh in India, we got our uh non-bank financial company uh approval that we're set to launch in India in the next year. Uh so we do the local piece uh with one hand, we do US SEC regulation with the other, and we connect uh in the middle with with currency hedging so people don't have to take the currency exposure. Interesting, interesting.
00:27:24 · Oliver Smith
[00:27:24] S0: So I've got to ask, you've got a two-sided marketplace, and I want to ask what the kind of obstacles are for growth. Um is it the tech? Is it regulation? But also with this market, is it is it convincing more investors to get on board, or is it getting more borrower demand on board? What where's the kind of um where's the room for growth really?
00:27:46 · Doug Ricket
[00:27:46] S1: Yeah, so right now we have uh a waiting list on the fund, which is good. That's how we like it. I was talking with our head of capital and our CFO, like, don't we want to perfectly balance it and be able to take all that capital? And if we have if we have excess demand, we should bring down the price and balance it, right? And the answer is so straightforward, I I felt like I shouldn't have realized this. No, we want to be on one side of that curve where we have some extra capacity at all times, so that if Philippines or India takes off faster than expected next year and we need another couple hundred million dollars, we have those people lined up. We know where it's coming from, we just do a capital call, and within a week, we can fund Philippines for the next quarter. So we keep a waiting list on the fund side and then on the uh individual customer side, uh, that's where life is is pretty complicated. So, you know, we work with uh mobile phone retailers, and that is how um, you know, for for selling the phone, and then our customers now get a payroid credit card on that same day when they get the phone, which is really cool, and they can use the credit card for anything. Uh and because a million people walk into a phone store every day looking to buy a phone around the world, um we don't have a huge cack. Our our cost of customer acquisition is, you know, it can be 10% of if you were just a regular credit card company and trying to figure out how do we attract customers to come use our credit card? Oh, we're gonna have to do newspaper ads and TV ads and direct marketing and all this stuff. Uh your cost might be 10 times what it is for us because we're meeting customers at the point of sale in a phone store. And they they want to buy a good smartphone, but they don't quite have the money for it. We can finance it and we get them a card at the same time. Uh so we get to ride on that huge wave of of phones. Uh but that is certainly the more complicated side. Uh, you know, deploying this in uh nine different countries, going on 10, uh managing the operations, the logistics, the regulatory compliance, the collections, the wire transfers back and forth with us and the mobile phone retailers and and all of that.
00:29:58 · Oliver Smith
[00:29:58] S0: Um and we we've we've moved beyond the blockchain conversation that we started off with. But I want to ask, is the journey there ended? Have you have you deployed it? Are you happy with it? Or are there other parts of the business where you're looking and thinking, actually, we could take blockchain a little bit further here? Um or or is that is the is the is it just gonna stay on that one side of the business, do you think?
00:30:23 · Doug Ricket
[00:30:23] S1: Uh well, I mean, thank you for having me on here today. Uh this is really kind of the launch announcement for this thing that is launching this month. Uh as we speak, I think the attestation, they've already done it. I don't know if it's live posted on our website yet, but that's coming out this month. The blockchain liquidity side, that's also uh scheduled for this month, which is we're in October 2026. Uh and uh I think that is the first step. So I want to take it one step at a time, run that thing for a year, see how it goes. Uh there may be other aspects in the future, but I want to take one bite from the Apple and uh and show that that's a success and something useful on both sides. But the other side we've talked about um the closest would be stable coins. So this is amazing. Uh I guess I'm being recorded, so I don't know if I'll make a mistake saying this. But what I recall from looking at this thing a year ago, we were saying, uh, you know, what are all the financial services we could do for our customer? Like we know who our customer is. It's the underserved in emerging markets, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, India. Like these people, uh they're still significantly behind all the things we have today in the US. Uh in a few cases, they're ahead. You know, India launched uh uh UPI and and bank accounts for all and demonetization or not moving from cash to digital. Uh Brazil has picks. So there's some interesting innovation, but there's still a lot to be built. And so one thing we looked at was stable coins. We do a deposit account and stable coins to help our customer uh transfer money international with remittances, uh, store money. I found uh in emerging markets, uh people will like to store things in US dollars sometimes as a hedge against local inflation and and uh or devaluation. Uh and the amazing thing, this is what I uh I should double check, but what I recall is we looked into international stable coins. Yeah. And I think we were looking at Mexico, it's our biggest market. And uh we found in the countries we operate and including Mexico, like would you guess what is the biggest stable coin? Uh like what's the market cap of uh the biggest stablecoin in Mexico?
00:32:34 · Oliver Smith, Doug Ricket
[00:32:34] S0: Gosh, I'd have no idea. I have no idea. Tell go on, tell us. [00:32:37] S1: How about how about uh US? What are the US stable coins? Any guess? I mean, order of magnitude. I don't even know, but I I have a sense of order of magnitude. [00:32:45] S0: I I don't even know the magnitude. I mean, uh it was some sort of USDC, you know, USDC.