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Triple-A And The Future Of Enterprise Stablecoin Payments · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Dante Reminick: The passage of the stablecoin legislation drafted by the Senate dubbed the Genius Act because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things.
• 0:08
  Dante Reminick: The best products are created by obsessives who understand their industry from A to Z and have a maniacal will to push their products forward.
• 0:23
  Dante Reminick: Today we are chatting with one of those founders to better understand how stable coins are impacting money flows around the world.
• 0:31
  Dante Reminick: So, Eric, welcome to the show.
• 0:33
  Dante Reminick: Very, very excited to have you here.
• 0:35
  Dante Reminick: Thanks for having me.
• 0:36
  Dante Reminick: So, Eric, as you know from listening to the show, we always like to start things out with a segment that I like to call braggadocious, right?
• 0:43
  Dante Reminick: This is an introduction to you, an introduction to what you're building at Triple-A, but I want you to take the normal introduction that you tell people and remove any essence of humility.
• 0:54
  Dante Reminick: And truthfully, I think that this is very, very well deserved for you, considering, you know, A, your background and B what you've built at Triple-A.
• 1:00
  Dante Reminick: So tell us more about yourself.
• 1:02
  Dante Reminick: Tell us more about uh Triple-A,
• 1:05
  Eric Barbier: and please, please, please brag as much as you can.
• 1:07
  Eric Barbier: I'll try.
• 1:09
  Eric Barbier: Uh so yeah, I've I've been an entrepreneur almost uh all my life, uh almost always in payment.
• 1:15
  Eric Barbier: I've I've only been an employee for three years in my life, and and the the the rest of the time I've I've been building companies in mobile and mobile payments in particular, then then it's been remittances like um uh transfer to which became tunes, and and I started Triple-A something like five, six years ago, um on the idea that um you know the the the chicken and egg uh I realized that because there was so much crypto adoption, stable coin adoption, uh the the the the the the chicken and egg problem was already solved.
• 1:50
  Eric Barbier: So so there was already maybe like 50 million, now there's more like 500 million people having uh crypto stable coins, and that they wanted to be able to pay with those.
• 2:01
  Eric Barbier: And and and that's how I got the idea.
• 2:03
  Eric Barbier: And I um you know we I was one of the first one to get a um uh crypto digital payment token license uh in Singapore, for instance.
• 2:16
  Eric Barbier: Um and and and I think I was one of the first one to really believe that there was uh an opportunity uh uh for using stablecoin for payments in a regulated uh environment.
• 2:32
  Eric Barbier: Uh, because all the all the people in the in the crypto space, the crypto bros and so on, they were keep telling, oh no, but crypto is different, we're not regulated and so on.
• 2:41
  Eric Barbier: Why when I started Triple-A from day one, it was first a financial institution um which happens to use the blockchain Rails.
• 2:49
  Eric Barbier: I love it.
• 2:50
  Eric Barbier: And I think a lot of people that are listening to this podcast right now, the first question that's always on their mind is what should my stablecoin strategy be?
• 2:58
  Eric Barbier: What does a stablecoin strategy even look like?
• 3:00
  Eric Barbier: You guys have helped a lot of very, very large enterprises craft their stablecoin strategy and become a stablecoin-enabled companies.
• 3:09
  Eric Barbier: Can you walk me through how Triple-A enables stablecoin payments for traditional businesses today?
• 3:16
  Eric Barbier: So, yeah, so really what the problem we're solving uh for our clients is that all our clients tend to be traditional web 2 players.
• 3:25
  Eric Barbier: And they they don't know, they don't want to understand uh stable coins, uh they understand that there is uh risk associated to that, money laundering, uh terrorist financing, uh, and so on.
• 3:38
  Eric Barbier: So really what they want is that they they they start to understand from their clients that they they some of their clients want to pay them with stable coin, but they don't want to handle any of this complexity.
• 3:50
  Eric Barbier: Um and so that's the primary reason uh our clients are are working with us is to be able to transact with the now about 500 million um people across the world, mostly in emerging markets, uh, who are, but not only, but who are uh owning stable coins and who would like to be able to transact with them.
• 4:11
  Eric Barbier: Um so yeah, sorry.
• 4:13
  Eric Barbier: No, no, no, go ahead.
• 4:14
  Eric Barbier: You you said something that I want to dive deeper on.
• 4:17
  Eric Barbier: You mentioned that there's AML risks, that there's a lot of compliance risks with operating with stable coins.
• 4:23
  Eric Barbier: I think that's something that holds a lot of these traditional businesses back.
• 4:26
  Eric Barbier: Can you dive into what those risks are and also how Triple-A solves them?
• 4:32
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, so the first thing you need to understand is that um stablecoin uh as a as a payment option sits between cash and the traditional banking system.
• 4:45
  Eric Barbier: So you don't have as many uh as many ways to uh protect uh against money laundering risk as you have in the traditional banking world, even though the banking world is still the most preferred uh places to do money laundering, but that's that's a separate discussion.
• 5:05
  Eric Barbier: Um and and and and on the other hand, some people think like it's the jungle.
• 5:10
  Eric Barbier: So it's like cash, there's no way to uh to mitigate any of the other risk.
• 5:15
  Eric Barbier: So that's not true.
• 5:16
  Eric Barbier: The beauty of of the blockchain is that you are actually able to trace back the transaction how much um how much needed back in time.
• 5:26
  Eric Barbier: So and so what we are doing is that we're using, and that's usually mandated by regulators uh or banks, um, our banks, um, so that uh we're able to detect and block transactions which would come, for instance, from an OFAC uh sanction entity.
• 5:44
  Eric Barbier: Now OFAC is listing uh crypto addresses in their uh sanction list.
• 5:50
  Eric Barbier: Or maybe we're able to identify that this specific stablecoin is associated with uh a scam, for instance.
• 5:59
  Eric Barbier: Uh it was the proceed of a scam.
• 6:00
  Eric Barbier: So all those transactions on our side are gonna be uh uh uh blocked in real time.
• 6:06
  Eric Barbier: Uh our compliance team are gonna review them manually and potentially file uh an STR, a suspicious transaction report.
• 6:14
  Eric Barbier: Got it.
• 6:15
  Eric Barbier: And honestly, this is not where I was planning on taking the conversation, but I think that when we talk about compliance, when we talk about you know OFAC screenings and AML, this is the type of stuff that you know people are really, really unsure of when building up their stablecoin stack.
• 6:29
  Eric Barbier: And it also happens to be the most critical or one of the most critical elements to crafting a working stablecoin stack and a you know an impactful stablecoin strategy.
• 6:40
  Eric Barbier: You guys have focused very heavily on this.
• 6:42
  Eric Barbier: I mean, you've stated publicly that you're investing a ton in your compliance team.
• 6:46
  Eric Barbier: You guys have licenses literally all over the world.
• 6:49
  Eric Barbier: Talk to me about why that was such a big focus for you and what sort of compliance, uh what sort of compliance sort of strategies that you guys have that separates you from your competitors and allows you to offer better services?
• 7:06
  Eric Barbier: So yeah, so the the the whole compliance money laundering uh discussion is always pretty, you know, that's why we're spending 60% of our time when discussing with uh with with potential clients.
• 7:22
  Eric Barbier: It's it's you it used to be like 80% and so on, but since the Genius Act and it has improved a lot.
• 7:32
  Eric Barbier: Uh so uh our sales cycle have have uh have reduced uh drastically.
• 7:38
  Eric Barbier: Um but still it's the major concern.
• 7:41
  Eric Barbier: Uh the the beauty of stablecoin payment is that it's cheaper than card, there's no chargeback risk, uh you know, there's so many benefits, and you're you're able to sell across 150 countries around the world.
• 7:54
  Eric Barbier: So um so so all those benefits, they get it and so on.
• 7:58
  Eric Barbier: It's just that for our clients, uh remember, they tend to be like the traditional bigger enterprises and so on.
• 8:06
  Eric Barbier: So they're always concerned about reputation risk.
• 8:08
  Eric Barbier: Uh they want to uh obviously make sure uh that they they're not they are not gonna be impacted.
• 8:14
  Eric Barbier: Well, yeah, you know, as you know, the prime in payment is one bad transaction can can kill you.
• 8:19
  Eric Barbier: Um and and and so that that's something we we we need to uh to pay attention to.
• 8:24
  Eric Barbier: So that's why from day one at Triple-A, the decision has always been to invest into uh into all our uh licensing, having you know, the second largest team after tech uh in in Triple-A is the compliance team.
• 8:40
  Eric Barbier: And that enabled us to work with tier one banks.
• 8:47
  Eric Barbier: Uh I think that's what differentiated us from uh a lot of some of the other players is that this investment in licensing and making sure things were really done by the book and so on, uh enabled us to work with uh with large global banks.
• 9:06
  Eric Barbier: And and and maybe you know, for most people, opening a bank account is kind of easy, but when you're a stablecoin company, it's a nightmare, it's typically a one-year due diligence process.
• 9:18
  Eric Barbier: Uh it tends to be even worse than you know the kind of questions you're getting from regulators.
• 9:23
  Eric Barbier: And because it's new and it's uh you know, there's additional risk, which can be mitigated, but but there's additional risk, they usually put in front of you their best compliance feedback.
• 9:35
  Eric Barbier: So they are uh they're asking the the the best question.
• 9:37
  Eric Barbier: So so but that's that's a process.
• 9:40
  Eric Barbier: Um and and this you know, this is this means a lot of resources taken for at uh for one year, for instance, with uh with zero business.
• 9:51
  Eric Barbier: So that's one uh that that's uh that's that's the kind of investment where we we've been able to do.
• 9:58
  Eric Barbier: You guys are on a different level, in my opinion.
• 10:03
  Eric Barbier: So we talk a lot on this podcast about what it means to be a global first fintech, right?
• 10:11
  Eric Barbier: To to natively be truly global and how stablecoins can enable that.
• 10:15
  Eric Barbier: You guys are licensed, like I said, all around the world, but in each of those jurisdictions, compliance can mean different things to different people.
• 10:23
  Eric Barbier: How do you guys manage working with funds that need to be compliant in Europe and Singapore and the United States and all of these different areas because compliance means so many different things to so many different people?
• 10:37
  Eric Barbier: Well, yeah, you're right.
• 10:39
  Eric Barbier: It's it's challenging because uh every regulator, and remember in the US, uh you have like 50 different regulators, um and they all come up with different uh uh different thresholds, different requirements, and and so on.
• 10:57
  Eric Barbier: Um so for instance, one thing we had to do initially what we're trying to do is to have some kind of um the most uh the the biggest constraint we apply to all our clients, unless it really doesn't make sense from a um uh from a uh from a commercial standpoint.
• 11:20
  Eric Barbier: Uh so the example I would give, for instance, if the the travel rule, if I'm not mistaken, is about uh $1,000 in some jurisdiction, in other jurisdictions is more like three, five thousand dollars.
• 11:32
  Eric Barbier: So in this case, what we do is like uh we we we we have to have routing in our technical setup saying if the client is from the US, that's gonna be this threshold is gonna apply.
• 11:43
  Eric Barbier: If the client is from uh Europe, it's gonna be that that threshold.
• 11:47
  Eric Barbier: Same thing for Europe, you know, Europe has uh the the the you know they love to over-regulate.
• 11:55
  Eric Barbier: Uh so so so so we're kinda uh sometimes we're in some silly situation, but we have to live with that.
• 12:02
  Eric Barbier: Uh that for instance USDC is legal, Bitcoin even for payment is legal, but not USDT.
• 12:09
  Eric Barbier: Uh so it means that we cannot offer USDT to um uh European resident.
• 12:16
  Eric Barbier: And you know, we we just have to to comply and so on, even though from a money laundering risk it has zero impact, but the regulation like this, whether you like it or not, you you you you have to follow it.
• 12:30
  Eric Barbier: Yeah.
• 12:31
  Eric Barbier: Yeah.
• 12:32
  Eric Barbier: And I I've talked to many, many people who's who the compliance side of the business that keeps them up at night.
• 12:40
  Eric Barbier: Uh, but it seems like you guys have uh a pretty good flow to that.
• 12:43
  Eric Barbier: So Triple-A started in Singapore, right?
• 12:46
  Eric Barbier: You're based in Singapore most of the time.
• 12:48
  Eric Barbier: Talk to me about how stablecoin usage varies region to region, right?
• 12:53
  Eric Barbier: You've built global payment companies in the past, you're building one now.
• 12:57
  Eric Barbier: Does the way in which stablecoins operate and the use cases for those stable coins vary from region to region?
• 13:04
  Eric Barbier: Not really.
• 13:06
  Eric Barbier: That's that's what I'm the beauty is stablecoin is global global by default.
• 13:11
  Eric Barbier: Um very often, you know, when I'm and we're on board and working with a new new merchant, new new clients, and they're saying, oh yeah, which corridor should we start with?
• 13:21
  Eric Barbier: Why do you need to even decide?
• 13:24
  Eric Barbier: It's just you you add this additional payment option, and you will see whether people are coming from Latin or from Africa or from emerging Asia or even from the US, whoever is is using it.
• 13:37
  Eric Barbier: Uh obviously, it's more likely that uh the the users and what we see on our side is like 55% of the people paying with stablecoin are coming from emerging market.
• 13:47
  Eric Barbier: So it's slightly twisted to tilted to the to the uh emerging market, but still 45% are from developed market, and among all our our biggest uh market is the US, where people are paying with stablecoins.
• 14:02
  Eric Barbier: So and and even though uh we could say but stablecoin is not solving any kind of problem in the US, uh, because everybody can access uh the US dollar easily.
• 14:13
  Eric Barbier: Uh but still uh we're seeing people transacting with uh stablecoins from the US.
• 14:18
  Eric Barbier: And who who are these people?
• 14:20
  Eric Barbier: Like who are your clients and why do you think they are using stable coins?
• 14:24
  Eric Barbier: So remember, our clients are the large enterprises who are who wants to sell globally.
• 14:31
  Eric Barbier: So our clients they are not they they they they never touch stablecoin.
• 14:36
  Eric Barbier: Uh uh would be like for instance Farfetch, which is a luxury uh e-commerce player.
• 14:42
  Eric Barbier: We're working with uh trip.com, which is uh uh an online travel agent.
• 14:48
  Eric Barbier: Uh so meaning that you can book your next flight uh in paying in in stablecoin.
• 14:54
  Eric Barbier: Uh so so so that's some of the uh some of our examples of of our clients.
• 15:00
  Eric Barbier: So and they don't what what happens is then when they're selling uh a thousand dollar uh flight ticket, they are they want uh to have a thousand dollar on their bank account.
• 15:09
  Eric Barbier: The guy is paying with stable coins or on Solana or on Arbitrum, he doesn't want to know about all this thing.
• 15:17
  Eric Barbier: Uh so that that that's the that's the key thing.
• 15:20
  Eric Barbier: So so the people who are paying with stablecoins, so it's our clients' clients, and those people there the the the what we're seeing a lot is people from emerging markets.
• 15:32
  Eric Barbier: One of the big pain points people have from, I don't know, from Argentina or from uh India, Bangladesh, and so on, is that either people don't have cabs uh because it's not it's not so common to have a cab, or even if you do, it's not enabled for international purchase, it's only activated for domestic purchase.
• 15:54
  Eric Barbier: And even if it's activated for international, there's uh there's uh a limited amount of money you can spend on a monthly or yearly basis.
• 16:03
  Eric Barbier: Uh and so that that that's one of the one of the issues.
• 16:07
  Eric Barbier: And on the other side, when you're using a traditional credit card processor like a Stripe, an ADN, and so on, whenever uh they are seeing a card which is issued in an emerging market, they will classify them as high risk.
• 16:23
  Eric Barbier: So because of the risk of chargeback, the risk of fraud, so they are more likely to decline that card.
• 16:30
  Eric Barbier: So this means that uh effectively, with the traditional uh payment option like card, it is very difficult for people from uh all those markets I've mentioned uh to actually make an international payment.
• 16:44
  Eric Barbier: And that's the thing stablecoin is solving perfectly is that, and sometimes that's the only uh that's the only option they have.
• 16:54
  Eric Barbier: Uh one of our merchants was telling us that 50% of the of the sales that they're making into Africa are done through uh through stablecoin because you have just no other waste.
• 17:05
  Eric Barbier: Interesting.
• 17:07
  Eric Barbier: Very, very interesting.
• 17:08
  Eric Barbier: So there's two things that I want to dive into.
• 17:09
  Eric Barbier: The first is you said that your clients, if they get paid five dollars in stable coins, they want five dollars to end up in their bank account.
• 17:19
  Eric Barbier: Oftentimes when we use stable coins, especially when it's not purely stable coins and it's a sort of a hybrid of fiat in stable coins, there's really heavy fees involved, right?
• 17:28
  Eric Barbier: For ramping, for the compliance elements, right?
• 17:31
  Eric Barbier: Everyone has to take their cut.
• 17:32
  Eric Barbier: How do you guys make it so that $5 in means $5 out?
• 17:37
  Eric Barbier: So we we we still do charge a fee.
• 17:40
  Eric Barbier: The big difference with the traditional card acquirer, because you know you have to pay the scheme, you have to pay the card issuer, and so on.
• 17:49
  Eric Barbier: So where the the the merchant ends up paying three uh maybe three, four percent.
• 17:55
  Eric Barbier: And also remember, if it's a cross-border transaction, the the card holder also is being charged two, three, four percent, depending on depending on the case.
• 18:05
  Eric Barbier: Uh and and and so the beauty with stablecoin is end-to-end for this transaction, it can be less than one percent.
• 18:11
  Eric Barbier: And that's that that's a game changer for a lot of those uh merchants.
• 18:16
  Eric Barbier: Not only now they're able to get paid from places it was very difficult to get paid from, but it's cheaper and there's no risk of fraud.
• 18:26
  Eric Barbier: Interesting.
• 18:28
  Eric Barbier: And the other thing that you mentioned, which I want to double click on, is like you mentioned that there's many different stable coins across many different chains, right?
• 18:36
  Eric Barbier: You have clients or rather your clients' clients that want to pay with USDC on base or USDT on Solana or maybe PyUSD on some other chain.
• 18:46
  Eric Barbier: How do you guys deal with the complexity of all of these different stable coins across all of these different chains?
• 18:54
  Eric Barbier: Uh you know, that's part of what we have to do.
• 18:58
  Eric Barbier: There's no uh there's no there's no easy way to do that.
• 19:01
  Eric Barbier: So we're supporting all the main chain, we're supporting all the main stable coins.
• 19:05
  Eric Barbier: So this means that we need to manage liquidity uh in all those different uh assets, because at the end of the day, a USDC on Solana and a USDC on base is is is a different asset.
• 19:19
  Eric Barbier: Um so so even though they're both USDCs, um but you know that's part of uh of where we maybe our third largest team is the treasury team to manage uh and to make sure that we always have uh enough liquidity uh you know when we're working with directly with a stablecoin issuer like Circle or the others, uh uh to manage all this, and so that we can do uh just in in-time settlement to our merchants.
• 19:51
  Eric Barbier: Uh because also one of the benefits I forgot to mention is that the merchant gets paid faster, uh typically with cards settlements, it's every three days, can be longer if you're a high high-risk merchant, like for instance in the travel industry.
• 20:07
  Eric Barbier: Uh sometimes they they don't pay you in full, they only pay you like 80% because they want to keep a reserve.
• 20:13
  Eric Barbier: Nothing of this uh is true in the uh stablecoin world.
• 20:18
  Eric Barbier: Interesting.
• 20:20
  Eric Barbier: Do your clients know or do they need to know about all of those complexities of you know many different stables and many different chains?
• 20:27
  Eric Barbier: No, no, not at all.
• 20:29
  Eric Barbier: That's that's the key reason they're working with us, is that we completely abstract all this.
• 20:34
  Eric Barbier: They are calling our API saying, I want to get paid a thousand dollars.
• 20:38
  Eric Barbier: Uh and whatever so if they want, they can know, because they obviously they can still see in uh in our dashboard or in the transaction report or whatever.
• 20:48
  Eric Barbier: But we we would tell them, if they're interested to know, uh that this guy paid with USDC on that chain and blah blah blah.
• 20:57
  Eric Barbier: Um but if they don't want to look at those columns in in his report, uh for him is the it behaves exactly the same way than uh when they're using uh uh uh at the end for uh for a card card uh card card payment.
• 21:15
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:17
  Eric Barbier: So we've spent almost this entire time talking about sort of the merchant acceptance side of stable coins, which I know is you know one of your biggest businesses, but you guys do far more than that, right?
• 21:26
  Eric Barbier: You also do the other side, the payout side, right?
• 21:30
  Eric Barbier: Absolutely, yeah.
• 21:31
  Eric Barbier: With the the stablecoin payout.
• 21:34
  Eric Barbier: Uh so typically in this case, um our our clients are we we start with the uh content platform.
• 21:43
  Eric Barbier: So one of the very nice use cases is for uh content creators to get paid.
• 21:50
  Eric Barbier: Uh and and the beauty is that you can start with like one dollar, one dollar payment.
• 21:55
  Eric Barbier: You don't need to have sometimes you with many platform, I think on Instagram Instagram, you cannot get paid until you get like $200 or something.
• 22:03
  Eric Barbier: Like the beauty here is that you can get paid at $1 because there's almost zero friction cost on paying with uh with stablecoins.
• 22:12
  Eric Barbier: So so so we have this whole content creator uh market, one dollar to a thousand dollars.
• 22:25
  Eric Barbier: Then the second one we work a lot with uh freelancer marketplaces uh uh where you know again if I'm a freelancer I'm coming um I'm from Argentina, it's very likely that I would prefer to receive stable coin instead of a local currency.
• 22:44
  Eric Barbier: I prefer to stay in a strong currency like like USB C, for instance.
• 22:49
  Eric Barbier: Um so typically payment from one uh thousand dollar to ten thousand dollar uh kind of uh kind of payments.
• 22:56
  Eric Barbier: And then uh now we're seeing more and more like B2B transactions uh where um some some even very large companies now they they have their suppliers telling them, oh, could you pay me in stablecoin uh instead of uh the traditional Swift payment?
• 23:16
  Eric Barbier: Interesting.
• 23:17
  Eric Barbier: And why do you think that is?
• 23:19
  Eric Barbier: Right?
• 23:19
  Eric Barbier: Are people wanting stable coins because of dollar access?
• 23:23
  Eric Barbier: Are they wanting stable coins because you know you can move them around easier?
• 23:28
  Eric Barbier: From a payout perspective, why do you think stablecoin payouts are so powerful?
• 23:33
  Eric Barbier: So stablecoin payouts, especially like the that's why I was mentioning the freelancer.
• 23:38
  Eric Barbier: So you know, SME, uh you know, freelancer like one person professional.
• 23:44
  Eric Barbier: So usually they are more like the white-collar workers, they are more tech uh educated and so on, and and and they're more likely to do uh international business.
• 23:55
  Eric Barbier: So uh I'm a I'm a web designer in in India, I'm having a client in the US.
• 24:02
  Eric Barbier: Uh today, if I if I'm getting paid by my client uh in US dollar, the US dollars are gonna be converted by force into Indian rupees, which is uh which then you cannot use the way you want you you want to have it.
• 24:19
  Eric Barbier: So so that's what the beauty of stablecoin is that this enables this freelancer who uh for for whom it cannot open a USD bank account in India, uh and you know I'm I'm living in Singapore, and of course it's so easy for me to open any kind of currency uh bank account, but but for most people on the planet, they can't uh open US dollar bank account.
• 24:46
  Eric Barbier: So the next best thing is to hold stablecoin.
• 24:50
  Eric Barbier: Uh and and that's exactly the problem.
• 24:52
  Eric Barbier: Uh and so that they can hold the stable the stablecoin, the US dollar.
• 24:57
  Eric Barbier: Uh so then whenever they need to make an international purchase, they already have uh them in US dollar.
• 25:06
  Eric Barbier: So that's that's the I would say that's the biggest use case.
• 25:11
  Eric Barbier: The second use case is the the uh especially for B2B payments in some industry, the ability to uh to be real-time is is a big um you know can reduce big time um uh your working capital.
• 25:28
  Eric Barbier: My my former company uh tunes, uh even the sister company DT1, uh because everything is pre-funded, so you need to buy in advance, and if you do it through Swift, it's gonna take like three, four days, even longer if there's a weekend, bank holidays, and stuff.
• 25:45
  Eric Barbier: And so this means that you have millions of dollars uh for those companies which are trapped in the the pre-funding cycle.
• 25:53
  Eric Barbier: Uh so we so it's a big, big working capital uh impact.
• 25:57
  Eric Barbier: So I want to dive into that more.
• 26:00
  Eric Barbier: If you guys are holding stable coins, but you need to, for example, settle in fiat in whatever currency it might be for your client, do you not need to have a bunch of different bank accounts with that fiat to release to your client?
• 26:13
  Eric Barbier: Or how does working with stable coins become more efficient than if you were working in the traditional fiat space?
• 26:20
  Eric Barbier: No, so you're absolutely right.
• 26:22
  Eric Barbier: And remember when I was saying that you know one thing which differentiate us from others is that that's why we've been investing a lot into our fiat traditional banking, fiat payment network.
• 26:35
  Eric Barbier: Because you still need to do the last mile in the uh in the local currency, and um, and because most of our clients, they are more uh like the traditional enterprises, uh they they wouldn't want to touch this.
• 26:52
  Eric Barbier: So at the end of the day, either I'm paying them or on their bank account, or they are they are paying me so that then I can make the stablecoin pay apps.
• 27:01
  Eric Barbier: And so that's that's why it's very important to save as much time as possible, is to have as many different banks as close as possible from our clients.
• 27:10
  Eric Barbier: So that's why we've been investing so much in building this network.
• 27:14
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, and I think that at least to me, like when I was doing my research on Triple-A, this is part of what makes Triple-A special.
• 27:20
  Eric Barbier: A lot of these stablecoin companies and a lot of your competitors, they piece together a bunch of different relationships with banks that are not their primary relationship, right?
• 27:30
  Eric Barbier: They're using this off-ramp and that off-ramp, and they're just sort of integrating a bunch of different APIs.
• 27:35
  Eric Barbier: You guys have gone out there and not only formed your own relationships with these banks, but you've also gone out there and gotten licenses where it matters.
• 27:42
  Eric Barbier: And so you own those relationships and you own those licenses.
• 27:45
  Eric Barbier: Is that sort of the secret to Triple-A's success, or is there something that I'm missing there?
• 27:50
  Eric Barbier: No, no, no, you're absolutely right.
• 27:52
  Eric Barbier: You know, that that that was the idea in terms of um and and you know, it was not totally new to me because the funny thing is because what I was doing at Tunes with which was a lot of remittances use cases, uh, there's one thing banks hate as much as crypto are uh consumer-to-consumer C2C remittances.
• 28:14
  Eric Barbier: So I was used to a lot of rejection and and so on.
• 28:18
  Eric Barbier: So that that's why uh from day one I knew how important uh um uh it was to establish a good good bank account.
• 28:28
  Eric Barbier: Uh and and so you know that's why the the playbook for us has been licensing, uh strong compliance team so that we can get uh good bank accounts uh because what's important as well is not only to work with a small local bank, but like with also the big global banks and to leverage their global network.
• 28:51
  Eric Barbier: You've been building Triple-A for five years now.
• 28:55
  Eric Barbier: Do you think that the environment is different now than it was when you first started in terms of being able to work with GCIBs, these larger banks, these larger enterprises?
• 29:04
  Eric Barbier: Are people more open and willing to work with stable coins?
• 29:10
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, there's still a lot of uh there's still a lot of uh constraints to start with stablecoin.
• 29:19
  Eric Barbier: First, getting licenses is getting more and more difficult.
• 29:22
  Eric Barbier: So uh so you need and you need to build the whole compliance program and everything.
• 29:27
  Eric Barbier: So so that's not that that that's not getting easier.
• 29:30
  Eric Barbier: Um I I I think in in in most instances, I think all the payment companies uh they're all having trying to have a stablecoin uh strategy.
• 29:42
  Eric Barbier: They're all trying to figure out, and that's probably one of the reasons there's a lot of MA uh happening in the uh in the industry.
• 29:50
  Eric Barbier: Uh so there's gonna uh there's also a lot of partnerships.
• 29:53
  Eric Barbier: Some will partner, some will buy, some will try to make uh themselves.
• 30:00
  Eric Barbier: Um but uh but but uh remember the banks are still very uh cautious and and and uh whenever I asked to one of my my friends in industry saying, Oh, uh you're working with this bank?
• 30:19
  Eric Barbier: Yes, yeah, yes.
• 30:20
  Eric Barbier: Um they are decently crypto friendly.
• 30:23
  Eric Barbier: But when when we approach them to do something with a stablecoin next, they told us no.
• 30:28
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, but because uh usually the first reaction of a bank is always to say no, uh just to be uh so if you don't insist them, it means that uh you don't uh you don't really need it.
• 30:39
  Eric Barbier: And and because that's gonna be more headache to the uh account manager in terms of uh having to deal with their internal compliance and stuff like this.
• 30:48
  Eric Barbier: And also because they know that they are not mature enough, you need to learn how to deal with the specific uh risk which are related to stable coins.
• 30:58
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, I think that's something that every single person in stablecoins has had to deal with is you know going to try traditional financial institutions to ask for a partnership or ask for help and being told no ten times.
• 31:09
  Eric Barbier: Uh but I think that that will evolve.
• 31:12
  Eric Barbier: Um speaking of that evolution, you built Triple-A for where stable coins are at today.
• 31:18
  Eric Barbier: And what I mean by that is you accurately realize that most banks and most enterprises do not want to custody or touch stable coins in any way, shape, or form.
• 31:30
  Eric Barbier: A lot of people think that's going to change.
• 31:32
  Eric Barbier: How do you think that the landscape around stable coins are going to change?
• 31:38
  Eric Barbier: How do you think that the appetite of these organizations around stable coins will change?
• 31:42
  Eric Barbier: And how does Triple-A evolve over time, right?
• 31:45
  Eric Barbier: What is Triple-A going to look like in five years as a result of this?
• 31:49
  Eric Barbier: I wish I knew.
• 31:51
  Eric Barbier: First, I think that banks will move slowly into uh having stablecoin on their balance sheet.
• 32:02
  Eric Barbier: It will and it will start, and it has already started in the US, um because the regulatory framework and it's you know the the US, especially at the moment, is way more open than uh than other jurisdiction.
• 32:15
  Eric Barbier: I think outside of the US, it it's probably not gonna happen in the next two years, um because the the cost of holding uh any kind of digital assets uh in your in your books is prohibitive.
• 32:35
  Eric Barbier: Uh and and this is gonna change only very slowly.
• 32:41
  Eric Barbier: Um you know the all the basal uh requirements and so on.
• 32:47
  Eric Barbier: Um I don't believe my personal views is that large enterprises in the US, in Europe, in Singapore, Hong Kong, and so on, they will for most of them they will never uh hold stablecoin uh because stablecoin is not solving any problem.
• 33:09
  Eric Barbier: Uh the example I uh I would give is uh do I prefer to hold my uh my treasury in USDT or in US dollar at JP Morgan?
• 33:19
  Eric Barbier: And I think for most treasurer, uh in terms of holding assets, transacting with stablecoin, yes, but holding I I I I I I doubt uh they they would need that.
• 33:35
  Eric Barbier: Uh you know, maybe we can bet, maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong, but uh, but uh but uh but that's that's my that's my prediction.
• 33:42
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, I mean I I always like to say that stablecoins are really good for two things, for the individual, right?
• 33:49
  Eric Barbier: There's value accrual, how can my money make more money?
• 33:52
  Eric Barbier: And then there's value sort of acceleration, how can I move that money around as quickly as possible?
• 33:57
  Eric Barbier: And for the individual, they get both benefits, but for banks, they have been working for 500 years at value accrual and monetary accrual.
• 34:05
  Eric Barbier: So they know how to do that without stable coins.
• 34:07
  Eric Barbier: I think for a lot of the people, your clients' clients who hold stable coins and are doing so for the value accrual perspective, it's because they don't have that ability that a lot of these banks do to, for example, earn yield and and things like that.
• 34:21
  Eric Barbier: Um, which is again one of the big reasons that we see the stablecoin market cap keep climbing and climbing and climbing from a triple A perspective, right?
• 34:30
  Eric Barbier: You guys have focused a lot on pay-ins, a lot on payouts.
• 34:35
  Eric Barbier: What's next?
• 34:36
  Eric Barbier: What's next?
• 34:39
  Eric Barbier: What what we what we're seeing uh more and more people starting to use us for is for uh treasury management, internal treasury management.
• 34:48
  Eric Barbier: And in this case, uh it is a pure fiat-to-fiat uh transaction, and which is optimized with stablecoin.
• 34:58
  Eric Barbier: Uh so so so so so we've been seeing more and more of those flows uh recently.
• 35:05
  Eric Barbier: It's how do you move money cross-border, uh especially to and from emerging market with uh more developed markets, but optimized for uh leveraging the uh the the optimization that you can do with stablecoin.
• 35:22
  Eric Barbier: That that's the big trend I'm seeing at the moment.
• 35:25
  Eric Barbier: Yeah, I mean I think it's a trend now, but I think it's gonna be just the way it works in in two years, which is which is super exciting.
• 35:32
  Eric Barbier: Um, Eric, what you have built at Triple-A is incredible.
• 35:36
  Eric Barbier: I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today.
• 35:38
  Eric Barbier: For our audience members, I highly encourage you to check out Triple-A's products.
• 35:43
  Eric Barbier: Please do not forget to follow our show on whatever platform you're listening on, and as always, stay stable.
• 35:48
  Eric Barbier: Eric, I appreciate you jumping on, my friend.