Latest / Leaders In Payments / Ruben Galindo, CEO of Airtm | Episode 248

Transcript

Ruben Galindo, CEO of Airtm | Episode 248 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: We believe in a world where payments are happening peer-to-peer.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: We believe in a world where you can earn online and cash out most of the money.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: We believe in a world where you don't have to be paying outrageous amounts of money just to be leveraging someone else's infrastructure.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: I guess tying it all together.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: We believe in the power of digital entrepreneurship.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: We believe in the impact it can have for our countries.
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: That was Ruben Galindo, the CEO of Airtm.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: He is my special guest on this episode, episode 248 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: I'm your host, greg Meyers.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Airtm allows consumers to access their money whenever they want, wherever they want.
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: They have a solution for both consumers and enterprises.
• 1:06
  Speaker 3: We've got a fascinating episode ahead about passion for justice, owning your money and decentralization.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: So let's get started.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: Hi Ruben, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: Hi Greg, thanks for having me Excited to be here.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Let's go ahead and dive right in, Tell our audience a little bit about yourself where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Oh my, I grew up in Mexico City and I was here until I was 16.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Then I moved to LA.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: I went to high school in LA.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Then I went back to Mexico for college.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Then, after starting engineering, I was in sustainable development.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: I decided to go work for a Bitcoin startup in San Francisco.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: I had an internship there on the business development team, which was basically looking at the different ways people could buy Bitcoin and writing blog posts about it.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Bought a few Bitcoin at like $200, $170.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: Sold them all.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: I actually just found half a Bitcoin from those days, like three days ago, which was awesome.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow, yeah, on some local Bitcoins account.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: Then I founded our TM.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: During that time, I came back to Mexico, finished college by Miracle.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: I don't know how I finished college.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: It was difficult being an entrepreneur and also being in school.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: I was here in Mexico for maybe five years.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Then, when the pandemic hit, I started traveling around trying to understand myself in the world.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: I lived in Paris, I lived in Oaxaca, I lived in Tepo San.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: I lived in LA.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: I lived in Miami.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Then I ultimately settled for New York, which, of course, did not seem like I was settling for anything.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: It seems like I had everything there.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Then, about a year ago, I went to Rio de Janeiro for vacations and I met a girl and we had a baby together.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: Now I'm a recent father and I'm still running RTM and it's exciting.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: Let's dive in and talk about RTM.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: What does RTM do?
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: RTM helps people thrive in the online economy.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: There's all these people that work online.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: They really hustle to make ends meet.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: They do so because it's better than what's available locally.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: At the same time, it's a bit of a challenge making money online, not just because it's a very competitive marketplace, but also because you have to work a lot in order to be able to afford to work online, because the cost of receiving a payment is high.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: We created this payment system that is basically tailored towards digital entrepreneurs in the global south, which means that if they earn four bucks, they can cash out four bucks.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: If you're living on four bucks a day, into cash out on that very moment.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: We enable real-time cashouts to basically every single payment method around the global south that is their TM for retail consumers.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: However, the solution for this digital entrepreneur economy would not be full if we didn't also help their places of online work, deliver payments to them or collect payments from them.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: We created the suite of cross-border payment services for enterprises that they can use to interact with these digital entrepreneurs.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: I mean financially, to send or receive payments from them, using tools that are similar to PayPal, nutella, skrill, paynears, apis the ones that allow you to automate inflows and outflows of money.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: That's what our TM does.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Why our TM is different is not only because of our focus on digital entrepreneurs and also our rails that enable these very cheap and expedited cashouts, but we also leverage this technology to make payments within our network and ecosystem participants, peer to peer.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: When you're leveraging your TM's mass cross-border payment tool, you're not necessarily using RTM's rails to send payments.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: You're using a public blockchain and you're using a public asset.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: Payments in your TM are middleman less.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: That is a paradigm shift because if a company is paying via PayPal, they are essentially using PayPal's rails and they are going to be paying for the service if using the rails.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: That's why enterprises across the world are paying 2% up to $20 plus 50 cents when they're sending through PayPal's rails money to someone across the world.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: That's different from the fee that person getting paid is getting charged when they withdraw.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: That's different.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: In RTM, we are leveraging public rails.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: I want to say that we are in a transition.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: We started kind of like in the dawn of crypto.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: We have always been very close to the space and its concepts.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: It has taken us eight years to be fully migrating towards crypto technology.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: It's happening right now.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: Our migration.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: August 1st is going to be the first time our users are going to be exposed to the fact that their assets are actually USDC.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: I guess we mentioned that AIR-UST is actually USDC, but we're just making it such that AIR-TIM is fully blockchain payments platform First in its class.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: We want to be the first version of Web3 PayPal, so we kind of are already and we think there's a lot of benefits for consumers by being so.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Anyway, this migration is going to happen starting August 1st and then October 1st we're also going to have a big push and then it's going to conclude in about June 2024, where all of our payments and all of our ecosystem are actually going to be happening peer to peer.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: That's what our team is in a nutshell.
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: And when you say digital entrepreneurs, can you define that a little?
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: Give us some examples.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, anyone from gig economy participants, the freelancers, the gamers, the content creators, streamers, podcast producers, anyone who hustles to make money online and there's a wallet that they sign up for.
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: is that correct?
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a wallet for them and there's mass payment services for enterprises who pay them.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: Okay, and how does that connection happen, if you think of, say, twitch, which is a gaming platform where people, I guess, create gaming content and then they get paid for it.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Well, they pay up via PayPal and the idea with their TM is okay, don't use third party rails, make your own payments and use their TM suite of mass cross-border payments to deliver your payments.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: We'll partner with you, rather than you can use our infrastructure and it will charge you, and so those payments are actually directed to blockchain addresses that are tied to users' emails and the enterprises' note, and so that way they can easily refer payments to people, but using a blockchain, and we only get those emails because we work with these enterprises to onboard their users, and so we'll work with Twitch eventually to onboard their 50,000 gamers throughout Latin America, and we will have campaigns with Twitch until they're all onboarded, and then they'll start seeing that RTM is the best way to cash out, and so they'll choose RTM over the alternatives, which, of course, which will have PayPal and dozen others listed as payment methods, but the idea is that, when put side by side, rtm will be, I guess, a preferred alternative because it's very cheap and it's very fast.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: You can cash out to any payment method.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: That's how those two relate to each other.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: Okay, and how do you make your money?
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: Whenever clients deposit and withdraw, we make some money.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: So it's a similar transactional model than to PayPal.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: We're making a bit of a fee on every transaction.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: When we actually built our enterprise product, it was actually also priced, and so it is not until we conclude this migration that we will actually, I guess, change how that happens.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Because right now all payments are actually happening within RTMs ledger.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: But we are migrating to this you can call it self custody crypto model so that this enterprises can process their own payments rather than to have to use RTM or other middleman.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: But that's going to change a bunch, because right now that's revenue stream for RTM.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: We have enterprises paying anywhere from 2% to 1% other total dispersed volume or payments.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: That's going to change radically, so that's going to be a difference in our business model.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: That will be happening pretty soon.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: Do you find that the consumer side or the business side did they care?
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: What is the technology Like if you don't tell them that it's on blockchain?
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: Does it matter to them as long as it works?
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: Or is there any kind of fear from either side that, oh my gosh, this is using this blockchain technology?
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: Should I be scared, or what's your kind of view on that?
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: I guess there's two different answers.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: One for retail consumers I think that they don't care, and we've been giving them financial services for eight years, so I could kind of know they care that their money is there, they can use it, that's in dollars that they can take off the platform, they can spend it, etc.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: We are, for sure, going to have to, come August 1, work with our community to help them appease any concerns that might arise from the fact that their money is being held in USCC and the flip side of that is very easy to defend because they are going to be, as opposed to when they hold a balance in any other financial service platform.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: They're going to see that their money is there and it belongs to their wallet and it's 100% backed and there's no funny business happening in the background with their money and, if they want, they can just take it away, because we are using an open money standard which makes Airtioms, from the consumer perspective, safer than any other alternative.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: That is not a blockchain alternative.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: And then on the enterprise side, we definitely get concerns, for hey, am I exposed to crypto risk?
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: And the answer is always no, because the risk they're talking about is a volatility of crypto assets, which we don't in any way take.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: We are basically using stablecoins only and USCC, which we believe is the best stablecoin to help them process payments.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: And if they have questions or concerns about USCC, then there is a bunch of support that we have from Circle, who's also an investor, to help people understand why USCC is safe.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: It has been literally put in the ringer several times and has always come out triumphant, and so we kind of are comfortable with defending this standard, this open money standard.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: And then about do they care about blockchain or do they just care that it works?
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Well, these big enterprises, they have these payment method product managers and historically they've been forced to choose amongst the cheapest alternative that can deliver payments to the places they need payments delivered to.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Then there is all these ancillary features that they need to make sure that they can leverage some payment infrastructure provider.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: That's historically how that decision has been made.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: They have never in the past been offered to process their own payments and, at the same time, even PayPal is vertically integrated end-to-end in certain countries.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: Paypal has a company in Mexico that does payments and they have a company in Brazil that does payments talking about Latin America, of course in the US.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: What does that mean?
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: You could send payment from PayPal in the US to PayPal in Mexico, almost bank-to-bank and end-to-end.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: It'll be PayPal infrastructure.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: But then the rest of Latin they cover with a blanket region and they call it rest of Latin.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: Think, even PayPal would benefit from being able to be integrated end-to-end by being able to deliver payments via USDC and these product managers.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: We are already talking to them about the benefits of processing their own payments.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: Is there money?
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: They should get to pay it themselves, without the need of using an external middleman.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: What does that mean tangibly, when they were paying a fee to use someone else's rails?
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: They're basically losing $2 up to 20 bucks plus 50 cents.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: So out of 100 bucks, only $97.5 got to their end consumer With their TM.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Those $2.50 out of that 100 bucks it could be passed on a savings to the consumer or it could be realized as savings, perhaps a new revenue stream for enterprise that are making a payment, and so that is very different than what is being offered today.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: Obviously, online marketplaces have this platform fee most of the times, meaning they make some money and then the people that create on their platform make another portion of the money that the platform makes for distributing the content and selling ads or something.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: Talking about Twitch or subscriptions, we are all looking to optimize our margins and spend less money in terms of service subscriptions or the costs of doing our business.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: So I think RTM is a no-brainer, because it's like why are you paying for this thing?
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: That should be free and, in fact, you can make some money out of it if you wanted to.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: So I think it's very different, but obviously we're going to be selling that A year from now.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: You're going to say oh my god, here, tim's a new paper.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: You're going to be like huh, this is blockchain, guys.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: The next question is about the future of the payments industry, and I sort of feel like we're talking about that now, but are there other things within payments that you feel like are going to happen in the next two to three years?
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: I mean, obviously, what you are working on and your company is developing or has developed is, in a lot of ways, the future.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: So just curious do you have other views on what's coming, what's ahead for the industry?
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: Sure, I think there's a fork in the road and you're going to have payment service providers, digital wallets, having to decide do I want to keep having this close-loop money network and be in between all of these transactions, or do I want to adopt an open-money standard and just help people process better payments?
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: And the reason why I think it's a fork is because I don't think every single company traditional company is going to go forward in the open-money standard route, and I think a lot of companies are economically incentivized to continue on their current path, meaning they'll want to be in between every single transaction and to end the more the merrier, because that is how they make their money.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: And so on the other side of the road, the other side of the fork, we're going to have companies like your team and others that are going to adopt the open-money standard.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: What does that mean?
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: You're going to have consumers costing their own assets, customers processing their own payments.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: You're going to have very cheap remittances or cross-border payments.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: You're going to have very low cost structures because these types of companies will be regulated differently as companies that are costing people's assets or transmitting money on behalf of people, and so we're going to be able to process smaller, cheaper payments, and that's probably going to impact the civic sectors or cohorts of the cross-border payment industry in terms of retail users, because no one really cares for a $20 fee if they're transacting a million bucks, but if they're transacting $20, they might care for a $6 fee.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: So there's going to be portions of this cross-border payment ecosystem or economy that are going to migrate to the open standard sooner rather than later, and others that maybe won't, and they'll be able to continue using Swift, paypal, etc.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: But nonetheless, you're going to have, on the second side of the road, adoption of these new payment ecosystems that are going to be basically creating technology or services for people to program open money in a way that works for them, in a way that's familiar.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: And I think what's going to be most challenging for ERTM and others is going to be the pioneers in selling the benefits of this new open money standard where payments happen peer to peer, and so it's going to be a lot of trust building, brand building and, of course, being at prosperity with the likes of PayPal, these large enterprises.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: They're having to let go of things that they really cared for when choosing ERTM.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: These are all the ancillary kind of features that I talked about before.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: Maybe you have some control requirement where you have multi-account approval processes for payments.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: You need that so you cannot go to the future of payments if you don't have that, and so there's other features like that, and so we're going to be working towards achieving this level of prosperity so that companies don't feel like they are having to compromise in this new future.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: So that's, I guess, how I see it, and I guess another thing that I think is better, just maybe at a higher level.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: I think the open money standard is better for the end consumer, because throughout the world, you have billions of dollars that are quote unquote owned by people that can't access those billions of dollars.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: So, as people have a balance in Amazon gift cards, in some electronic money ledger, in some banking system, they can't access it.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: They can't access it because having closed money is how you keep your kind of money making machine going.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: If you're a payment system, paypal benefits from being able to control everything that happens with a paypal dollar, and that makes it such that people are having to pay sometimes 20% of the money that they have on paypal to unblock it, because they basically sell the balance in the open market so they can cash out from paypal, which sucks.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: So an open money standard.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: People would not have that issue.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: You would be able to take your balance seamlessly from one platform to another.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: I think that eventually consumers will start demanding to be paid in open money and free money, not quote, unquote, monopoly money being held in some financial institution.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: That's going to make it difficult for you to cash out.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: So tell us why you founded Airtem, sort of what is the backstory as to what did you see as the opportunity and what were some of the things you did to get this off the ground.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: I was 24.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: My co-founders and I worked at a Bitcoin startup the summer I was starting Airtem.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: I read Atlas Shrugged.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: I really identified with concepts of libertarianism and of small governments and how governments sometimes don't necessarily know what's best for people and will kind of do crazy things that go against the individual to kind of reach their goals.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: And we were very moved by what was happening in Argentina and Venezuela, where there was hyperinflation.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Essentially, I guess my 24 year old self was like that's not right.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: It's not fair that people don't get to save money in stable currency just because their government decides that they want to control the exchange rate, because they can't do a good enough job at managing their inflation, because they're constantly printing money, because they want to subsidize people, because they want people to vote for them.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: And so I was like screw that, let's throw Venezuela as well as a lifeline, let's give every single person access to a restrictionist dollar savings account.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: And that was, I guess, the rhetoric that was in our collective consciousness as founders of Airtem Something similar and maybe different for others, but for me it was definitely a sense of injustice and these ideas of libertarianism.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: So we built that.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: We built a digital dollar wallet that anyone could use to preserve their wealth, not just because they had access to a dollar account, but also because we created this digital dollar Airtem dollar marketplace where, if you wanted to buy dollars, we would introduce you to a random person who would sell dollars to you.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: If you wanted to sell dollars, we would introduce you to someone who would buy the dollars that you have in the Airtem platform in exchange for sending you a local bank transfer, and so we essentially created an organized parallel market for dollars in Venezuela and in Argentina, and that grew so much.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: By 2017, we realized that the exchange rate that we were leveraging to facilitate transactions amongst people wanting to buy and sell dollars in Airtem was not working.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: There was too many people that wanted to buy dollars, but no one wanted to sell them, because people thought that their money was worth more.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: Their dollars were worth more, and so our market was not moving, and so I pushed their TM to create an exchange rate to find out the value of money, and we did that.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: Our CFO built this algorithm on Excel that kind of calculated the exchange rate in Venezuela, and in late 2017, we kind of disrupted the black currency market in Venezuela.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Our exchange rate kind of toppled the existing exchange rate which was being issued by this online website called Dollar Today and from one day to the next, this idea that the exchange rate was something that the government and this website decided on cease to exist.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: That, in my mind, is like the tipping point for, I guess, today's situation in Venezuela, where the I guess Maduro regime stopped restricting access to dollar and controlling the exchange rate, pretty much that there's a market rate and I truly attribute that to ERTM.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: Nonetheless, after that happened, we faced a whole bunch of scrutiny by the local government or by the local dictatorship, I guess.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: We had swap teams in our teams' homes.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: We had to take them off with fake passports from one country to another.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: It was crazy and we were like 26-year-olds.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: You know, I was a 26-year-old working with a bunch of 26-year-olds.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: It was cool.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: On the back of that, we were able to raise our series A.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: We started looking outside of Venezuela.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: We started looking throughout the region, trying to see where we could expand this restrictionless dollar account.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: Lo and behold, we didn't see a lot of adoption in many countries, a lot in Argentina.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: In Argentina, it still is Tim's largest market, but it was not because people were wanting to save dollars.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: It was because people wanted access to the global economy.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: They wanted access to make money online, they wanted access to buy things online, and ERTM was a great window into the online global economy.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Because, ERTM is truly connected everywhere.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: You don't even know how connected ERTM is.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: You can deposit with straw leveraging virtually any single payment method, which is pretty crazy, and so they used it to earn money online and to cash out.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Those insights like that, and reinforced by this concept that money and PayPal was being sold at a huge discount in our marketplace in exchange for open dollars that were not restricted and that were compatible with local people's currency that we realized why people paying these premiums to withdraw their earnings from freelancecom that they made on PayPal?
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: Well, it's because PayPal is very expensive to cash out.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Well, why is that?
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: Well, it's because they're not super well connected in every country.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: It's because they're charging a fee here and there.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: It's because their money is close or endemic to the PayPal ecosystem and it's to their benefit.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: And so it was these thoughts that pushed ERTM to build a version of PayPal that was running on open balances and infrastructure, and it was not like we want to be this better version of PayPal.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: It was like no, we believe in a world where payments are happening peer to peer.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: We believe in a world where you can earn online and cash out most of the money.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: We believe in a world where you don't have to be paying outrageous amounts of money just to be leveraging someone else's infrastructure and, I guess, tying it all together.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: We believe in the power of digital entrepreneurship, we believe in the impact it can have for our countries, our countries talking about countries in the global south that, election after election, are waiting around for a politician to fix our situation, to give us more jobs, keep the value of our money stable, to be there for us if we're unemployed, to be there for us if we need health insurance, whatever.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: We're always just kind of waiting around for a government to fix our personal situation and we believe that by empowering digital entrepreneurs, people who are eager to figure out the way out, to kind of follow their passions and go compete in the global market, and by giving them a way to receive those payments in local currency, we can actually bring our countries forward.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: It's like remittances 2.0, you know, remittances are a huge income stream for developing world nations and they kind of move the economy locally in a lot of places, certainly in Mexico, and I don't want to say it's the only revenue stream or source of money that Mexico has, but it's one of the primary ways that Mexico gets money is from these 11 million immigrants that live in the US and send money back to Mexico.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: But what happens if we add yet another layer of people that are generating value abroad and bringing it back home?
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: We believe that that could be super impactful for our countries.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: I think I know the answer to this based on what we've talked about so far, but what are some things you're passionate about?
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: Maybe one work related passion and one personal passion.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: I think I'm passionate about justice, like that's the only one thing that I could tell you I'm passionate about because I feel it in my body.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: I feel injustice in my body and my reaction to it is so strong, literally is so strong.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: The biggest force that I have in my body is the one that I feel when I feel injustice being done towards me or someone else.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: I have such a desire and eagerness and a will to make sure the right way, or that the justice ends up being done.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: I definitely can tell and feel that that's kind of your life, right.
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: That's your personal passion, but it's also your business passion and those have come together to be who you are.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: I can tell that for sure.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: I think having a passion for it, understanding the technology, understanding the market, understanding the why of what you're doing for anybody going into a company is vitally important.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: I feel like the Airt-M culture is such that you're not there to fill space, right, you're there to believe in the why of the company.
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: So I think that all makes perfect sense.
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: Ruben, we've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about you and about Airt-M and what you guys are doing and what you see as the future.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: No, but I guess when I was talking about the fork maybe something I left out I will say that we are seeing companies like Payoneer that are obviously on one side of the future or of this fork, that are realizing that the more open their money is, the better.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: The more ways that their users have of accessing their value, the more valuable their system will be and the more that they will be able to compete against companies that are inherently open.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: And so Payoneer, for instance, already is connected to Airt-M, so people can withdraw balance from Payoneer to their Airt-M wallet as if they were also themselves built on an open money standard.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: And so it's not just about the open money standard, it's about the open money mentality, but I guess just the concept that money belongs to people doesn't belong to you, and you should do whatever is in your power to help them access the money that's in your platform, you know, because ultimately that's at the grassroots.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: That's why this is all important, because people own money, not the company, and so you can definitely be one of those you could call them Web 2 cross-border payment companies and have a very Web 3, meaning decentralized, middleman-less mentality, and you don't necessarily have to adopt the technology, you can just behave as if you truly believe that open money was better for your end users, and that could be just as impactful.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: Well, ruben, we've come to the end of the show, and thank you for your time.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Thank you, greg, I really enjoyed your conversation.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: Good, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 31:11
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