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.
00:32:45 · Oliver Smith, Doug Ricket, S2
[00:32:45] S0: I I don't even know the magnitude. I mean, uh it was some sort of USDC, you know, USDC. [00:32:50] S1: I mean USDC, the other, I think these things are like many billions, if not into the trillions yet, right? I mean, I don't know if they're 50 billion or 500 billion, but I think they are massive. Yeah. And when we looked at uh Mexico, the biggest uh Mexican peso stablecoin was order magnitude, like five million dollars. I'm like, this is crazy. This would be like one project for us. We could spin up and we could fund, you know, our our Pedro Asset Fund, it's not a giant financial vehicle, it's half a billion dollars today. We could go spin up a hundred million, you know, stable coin for Mexico or Brazil or India, and and no one has. So that was really interesting. Like, why have stable coins not taken off there? And there has been progress even in the last year, and my number may be out of date or maybe off by a factor of three or something, but it was kind of order of magnitude. Uh, it just it shocked me because I was used to thinking of USDC and Tether and like, yeah, it's fully up there. But so that was the one other side we looked at is could we be part of helping set up a stable coin for all these countries that we operate in, the names you've heard me mention, and enable them to transfer to each other. But I think um, you know, some of what's going on there, uh most of the remittances that we would want to do have USD on one side. [00:34:07] S2: Yeah.
00:34:07 · S2, Doug Ricket
[00:34:07] S2: Yeah. [00:34:07] S1: And so that one has already been well solved. And there are amazing companies. I know uh Remittly uh did some amazing work there. Transfer wise, uh right. There are people working on the remittances who have you know made huge progress, uh, sometimes using stable coins on the back end. Uh but that was that was the one that I had in mind was like, could we help set up the uh you know Colombian peso stable coin? Uh Colombia actually has some interesting like regulation that's that would be favorable for this thing. Um but you know, can we go set up Colombian stable coin, Brazilian stable coin, uh, you know, Peru, Mexico, Philippines, all these things. Um I think there's still an opportunity for innovation there.