The Fintech OG's from TWIF
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.
00:34:55 路 Jack Zhang
And I think on the other topic on AI, I think unlike stablecoin, there's still a lot of uncertainties on the future of the building the native internet native ecosystem. AI is changing the how humanities live on this planet and operating and then live their lives, right? So I think ChatGBT or OpenAI have already had over a billion dollars, a billion DEUs already. So that's clearly shaping our industry. If you're looking at how banking or financial services is done in the last 30, 40, 50 years, and it's really focused on regulatory infrastructure and then financial product. And in the last sort of decade or slightly longer, there's a lot of fintechs like Revolut and Stripes and Robin Food, et cetera, that they they try to build a better UI on top of the existing financial infrastructure so that to provide customers a better experience that's significantly better experience to help the customer to do payments or trading or moving money, whatever. But what hasn't been done is really moving to that kind of agentic AI world where the bank almost already lost the race right now by this point. Because to building AI application, organic finance, organic payment, you need that operating system, that kind of application layer, that business operating system, business operating system beyond on top of this financial service product. If you don't have the application layer, there's no way you can use AI to trigger the financial instrument or the trigger the financial instrument through the workflows through the operating system. Because the cycle innovation is getting smaller and smaller over the last decades. Whether if you think about internet, mobile internet, cloud, and now AI, it's just getting taken shorter and shorter so that the incumbents just have less and less time to catch up. And they haven't really catched up the application layer and or they haven't done anything in the application layer, the business operating system layer. They haven't really moved everything to the cloud. They haven't catched up on that yet. Just no way for them to catch up on the AI race.
00:36:53 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Jack Zhang
[00:36:53] S0: At this point, it's going so fast it's hard for even startups to keep up, let alone the incumbents to keep up with that. [00:36:59] S1: Correct. I mean, that I I I was talking to to live a couple of weeks ago. I have a lot of anxiety in the last two years, simply because I I just couldn't keep up on how fast AI is racing right now. And and just think about how the incumbent is gonna be building with dealing with that, right? So I think by this time, I think it's more of a fintech race. It's no longer a race between the incumbents. [00:37:20] S0: Totally. Like, let's close it out with you talking about tokenized assets. I feel like that's a good way to wrap this up since we're coming up on time too.