The Fintech OG's from TWIF
00:26:36 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Jack Zhang
[00:26:36] S0: It's way cooler than saying it was some then you met him at the poker table and your life changed. [00:26:41] S1: Now we're talking. There you go. Yeah, definitely need more drinks to to to to get around the lows. And I think the some of the low points will be like the first couple years that when we go to the new market, that gets full airwallet to build a global network. We always need to expand it to new markets. And basically every new market we went to, we never succeeded the first time. We we even in our home country in Australia, we tried the third time, we succeeded. And I remember we were at Hong Kong and we we failed miserably the first time, and we went to the UK and we failed twice. And basically we have to rebuild the team the third time to succeed. And we we're raising money that never that easy, and it's always challenging. We always have to explain why you you guys in so many different markets and how you're able to take a significant share in that market, and many, many basic lessons that just give you a lot of doubt on whether you're doing the right thing. But at the end of the day, I think as a founder, you just have to really stick on the mission of the company and and just keep moving on until my my my co-founder used to see that building a startup is almost like driving in in fall. You're just never really seeing anything beyond two, three meters. That's like the destination quite far away, and then that's the right direction. The only way to reach the destination is keep driving. I like that logic.
00:28:07 路 Leif Abraham, Jack Zhang, Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:28:07] S2: Yeah, exactly. I think like talking about achievements is always a little strange because I think the the curse of the founder is that you might always have a little bit of like imposter syndrome, and especially once you reach a certain stage and like you get the unicorn stamp and blah and whatnot, and you jump on podcasts, and it's always like, oh my god, so successful, blah blah blah, and you're like, cool, cool, cool, and it feels nice at the time, but then you turn around and you like you cry in your bat, realizing that everything is not as great as you would love it to be because you see all the issues and that other people don't necessarily see. And so there's a little bit of like I think a little bit of like call it healthy pessimism that comes with being a founder that you feel like nothing is ever really good enough. And I think that is also again what kind of keeps it driving in that sense, right? So I think it's I think it's tough to talk, I think it's tough to talk achievements in that in that way because it always feels like you're not really there yet. [00:29:06] S1: I think when we I think when we build a bigger business than Citibank, I will I will call it achievement. [00:29:11] S0: How close are you? [00:29:12] S1: I think we we uh we should be able to get that done in the next decade. [00:29:15] S0: There you go. All right, I'll have you back on in 2035 and be like, so how does it feel? [00:29:21] S1: I hope it's sooner than 2035, but let's see.
00:29:21 路 Jack Zhang, Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Leif Abraham
[00:29:21] S1: I hope it's sooner than 2035, but let's see. [00:29:24] S0: All right, well, that's within the next decade, 2035 or before. We'll we'll put it there. [00:29:29] S2: Um you will come back and be like and be like, I don't feel good enough yet. [00:29:33] S0: Or you'll be like, I I'm not talking to you anymore. No, I I'm what do you think? Okay, switching gears just a little bit. Other than the areas that you guys are in right now, what areas do you find most interesting in fintech at this point? [00:29:46] S1: The biggest topic in fintech is stablecoin. [00:29:49] S0: And you have a very interesting take on stable coins too. [00:29:52] S1: Yeah, and the biggest sort of interest the most interesting is is stablecoin AI, and obviously, which is happening right now, and another thing that's coming up is agente commerce, which is impacting payments a lot, right? So we can we can dive into either topic. And I know live have a lot of interest in tokenized stock trading as well. So we had a debate a couple of weeks ago on why why why not? [00:30:16] S0: And I'd love to hear your thoughts on those two things, and then I would love life's thoughts on on tokenized stocks since Robinhood obviously launched that recently. Jack, that you brought them up. You you go first.
00:30:28 路 Jack Zhang
[00:30:28] S1: Okay, I think stable coin, I think people think stable coins to moving money around the world. I obviously publicly disagree with that point, and the the kind of speed and cost on on-ramp and off-ramp is still significantly higher than the traditional rails. We're moving about $200 billion annualized right now, and it's still growing close to 100% year on year, right? So, and we're already moving 95 of the transactions, 95% of the transactions using our own infrastructure, and most of that is near instant or instant. And it's we don't charge anything for our customers, it's actually free to move money in our network. I don't really know how you can innovate something that is already instant or near instant or free. So I would say that it most of the people using the stablecoin is cheaper and faster and free and instant, all that. They talk about what happens on-chain, on this, on the on the blockchain, right? They do not talk about the the on-rep and off-rep. They do not talk about the complexity in the middle, the the tree free management between the exchanges, the the liquidity providers, and all that. And then and then most of the people just try to avoid talk to talk to about the reality just because they everyone have a personal agenda in the crypto world, right? And I I I just don't really understand why they created so much vibe on stablecoin just because of money movement. I don't get it. I think the future of stablecoins to able to build an a sort of internet native sort of financial ecosystem. But that's gonna take a long time, right? That you can you if to say you already processed the payment on the internet and provided the money is clean, that provided the platform has distribution, you can issue financial service product that without doing the offering. That you can issue stablecoin back card, you can do stablecoin deposit product, you can use stablecoin to do treasure management, et cetera, et cetera. But that requires adoption, a wider adoption, far more beyond the scale of what's happening today. And I don't really see that happening yet. And that might take an extra three, five, or ten years to ultimately happen.
00:32:43 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:32:43] S0: Which comes first, that or you being bigger than city?
00:32:47 路 Jack Zhang
[00:32:47] S1: I I I think we we definitely hedging our bats, and I could possibly get entirely wrong, and it does take three to 12 months instead of three to five years, right? So I'm not suggesting I'm 100% right all the time, and I'm I'm just saying that's my prediction. And obviously, there's use cases of dollar addition, there's use cases of moving money in those global south countries. Like people need to sending money to Africa countries or Latin America countries, where SpaceX or other sort of American corporations need to start linked that need to collecting the revenue from these emerging markets where they do not do not have a very effective way of moving the money back to the United States, but now they can net it off with the remittance providers. But the the challenge is like, how do we know the remittance providers from these crypto exchanges the money is clean? I don't really know how they solve this issue, but today I couldn't solve it. And the the there's still, and obviously now we have Genius Act Pass and we have regulatory clarity now, which is which is great. And that doesn't build the entire ecosystem in one day. That you still need time for adoption, which is similar to how mobile internet or AI get adopted. The other big use case is dollar redation, but that doesn't that to me is more of a regulatory object file, right? You regulate in the United States, but you're offering a financial service product which is dollar bagged in Argentina. The Argentina central bank definitely not gonna be happy about that. But that's just how the world rolls right now. And as a global payments entity, we are regulating a lot of the art in our country like Mexico and Brazil. So we're definitely not gonna do that because the central bank will shut our core business down if we do that. But for startups that have nothing to lose, that might be okay. And they might never need to do business in Argentina, which they would take the risk to offer the product without regulating Argentina, which is which is totally fine, right? And if they want to take the risk, that's that's that's entirely their core. But from Airwallet's point of view, compliance is the number one thing that we need to think about, not just in the United States, but globally.