00:27:03 · Jack Zhang
[00:27:03] S1: So I think the um in the off sort of typical sort of office of the CFO that you would have um a dozen sort of verticals, right? And each of these verticals have a software provider that's uh been around uh for a long time or decades, right? So you have FPA, you have account receivable, revenue recognition, you have um uh uh sort of account payable expense management, reimbursement, uh, you have general ledger. Um you just have so many of these verticals um that does different things. Where the nature of a genic finance or genetic banking that is is horizontal, right? Because all these agents sort of have the context, have the data, and they can work together uh to create an outcome. You don't really need these vertical disciplines anymore. So everything emerging to this horizontal operating system for the company essentially sort of become in the intelligence layer, but also the action layer to not only to you know understand the data, uh understand the contact, then creating action, but eventually move the money and complete the task, right? So if you can only do the first part of that and not able to actually create the instrument of financial services, then that is just the agent is not able to create an outcome and they can't verify the outcome. And that is like very inefficient way of thinking about uh using agents and and sort of the way Airwall is built it from the infrastructure layer first and all the way up, uh, with APR-first approach and now sort of agent-first approach that just give infinite possibilities for the companies and entrepreneurs and finance team to create this horizontal operating system layer to essentially automating as much as you can uh and creating this deterministic layer that to uh essentially creating company outcome.
00:28:57 · Cameron McLain
[00:28:57] S2: So I have a spicy question. I mean, Revolute, Stripe, Airwalls, uh Ramp all kind of started in different spots, you know, with different initial go-to-markets. But that version of the future you describe, it seems like everyone's gonna end up competing for a similar prize. So if you took Airwalax out of the picture, which of those companies do you think is is gonna be the domin the dominating force?
00:29:19 · Jack Zhang
[00:29:19] S1: If you think about how many global banks out there are, right? So there's um uh almost every single GDP, uh fintech or banks or insurance company are kind of the majority of the top 50 companies in that economy, right? Um, and then we have tens of thousands of banks and it's this sort of traditional financial services company uh around the world. And um how many of that are gonna be left in 10, 15, 20 years, right? So I think you will see the like of the Revolution Stripe, you know, et cetera, or us, and we're gonna continue to scale. So the next decade is really for the hyper scalers in fintech. You know, I just mentioned um the the fintech is is a high risk, low margin business, and the only way to build a big big business is scale. And but what the benefit of fintech is once you have scale, there's such a big time, and you can just keep compounding and growing for 10, 20, 30 years, right? The cycle innovation is getting shorter and shorter. The time, you know, like 50 years ago, you the incumbent have 10, 20 years react on certain strategies, but now you like AI within three years to become a global phenomenon, right? They still try to figure it out, you know, moving everything to cloud. And they try to still figure it out what is the API strategy. None of the banks have APIs, yeah, right. And how are they gonna figure out what to do with AI? Because AI is on top of uh, you know, the data strategies on top of this API strategy is on top of the infrastructure. So if you kind of laid on all this stuff before AI, then AI just only make it 10 times worse for worse for you. Yeah.
00:31:02 · Cameron McLain
[00:31:02] S2: And you said fintech's a high volume, low margin, high-risk business. I mean, presumably with stable coins, the margins will continue to go down. Um, how do you how do you see that affecting your business? Is it good for it? Because it lowers kind of the friction of moving money, or ultimately is that going to eat into the margins of everyone's.
00:31:19 · Jack Zhang
[00:31:19] S1: I think people looking at okay, FIA financial system, stable coin, they look at it like, okay, there's two different things. Actually, not. I mean, if you think about cash, right? It's cash still like we have still have a lot of cash in in a society. Yeah. Uh, and it takes like 30, 40, 50 years for cash to gradually disappear. Um, you know, stablecoin is going to be a very similar sort of story. I mean, is, you know, just by first principle, does it make sense for financial services to be 24 by seven? Yes. Right. So um it's a lot of the settlement um uh infrastructure that should be uh you know leveraging stablecoin, whether it's stock trading or commodity trading or FX trading or money market font, tokenized assets. So all these traditional financial services that possibly uh you know moving on-chain maybe should and then and kind of have this uh you know 24 by seven real-time payments uh sort of settlement system. But the world is doesn't, it's not binary. So that when you when you're trading, when you trade like a million dollar FX, where, okay, so I have like $400, $400,000 on stable, and then $600,000 that I couldn't find liquidity on stable. So what do I do with $600,000? So somebody needs to build a unified infrastructure that crosss both field and stable. Essentially, what I'm trying to say is stable just payment rails, right? So whether you know the payment rails is, you know, there's a wallet that's bank to bank, um, you know, the stable, there's many sort of payment rails out there, and these payment rails are going to continue to evolve over the next decade. And so for a platform like us, we basically need to build its unified infrastructure to catering for all these different rails and then facilitating all this sort of transaction. On the other side, uh me and um another uh friend of mine from Melbourne that we actually co-founded a stablecoin infrastructure company recently. Oh, you did? Um essentially uh moving a lot of the settlement layer uh in in Fiat to 24 by 7 on chain, and we built our own layer one. Um so we we're gonna we're gonna make an announcement um very soon. So, you know, again, I mean they this just you know, it doesn't matter how the Rails evolving uh globally, the most important thing is what the customer needs. The customer needs a seamless experience of growing that business globally with efficiency.
00:33:36 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
Uh they wanted to, you know, sell the product in all these sort of 200 countries around the world. They want to hire anybody around the world, they wanted to operate with efficiency, they want to have an agent to pay the taxes and look at the PLs and tell them what they should, where they can save money, where they should spend more, because that's more efficiency in certain markets from a go-to-market point of view. All this data sitting in the company right now in a dozen different systems that they're not able to unleash the true power of their product. Right. And that is what airwallets are here to do is to really build uh the infrastructure to allow them to run that business autonomously. [00:34:17] S0: Jack, in brief, where where is Airwalllocks today in terms of scale, evaluation, and revenue? And then this next kind of giant idea of agent banking, how big do you think you'll be in in 10 years?