Latest / Leaders In Payments / Verified Authority for Payments with Jeremy Blackburn, ChainIT | Episode 525

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Verified Authority for Payments with Jeremy Blackburn, ChainIT | Episode 525 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: 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_01: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Jeremy Blackburn, founder and CEO of Chainit.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, Jeremy, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: So, to begin with, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I actually grew up in rural Utah in Richfield, and I call Utah home again today, after stops on the East Coast and New York and Charleston.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I've also done projects and kind of lived temporarily really all over the world.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: My academic background was or formal education was in mortgage banking and physics.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I'd say most of my practical education came from actually building and operating businesses.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I founded or led companies across mortgage banking, commercial banking, lending, insurance, real estate, commercial construction and manufacturing, and technology, of course.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that combination taught me to look at problems from several angles at once.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say physics taught me first principles.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Banking taught me that details have economic and legal consequences.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then construction and manufacturing have taught me that the physical world doesn't care what the presentation says, something either works or it doesn't.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's still how I approach technology today, trying to take into consideration all of those different viewpoints.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe talk about why you started Chainit.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: So my background being pretty some people say it's diverse across those different industries, but they all relate back to this physical and digital world interaction.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if I had to describe Chainit, I'd say Chainit is a verified authority and governed execution infrastructure for complete commerce.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we really do is we verify objects, people, events, and the physical world into the digital world in a fully functional digital token or format that allows us to identify things like authority, verification of people and organizations.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It literally is at its foundation.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: We verify the individual, the organization through authoritative sources, meaning DMV, Secretary of State, IRS.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: We don't create data.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: We only verify it and then we tokenize it so future validations can be in a zero trust environment.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then we we use these data to interact with what we call complete commerce, which is literally the entirety of the commerce transaction, not just a singular like payment transaction or compliance verification, but the entirety of the transaction in one.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so we found a chain at kind of having the experience of seeing where technology and payments and commerce were going with Web3, AI, and then now soon uh quantum.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what would you say is the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'd say right now it's that authority gap.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Historically, authority has been treated as something that you know a bank or a lender or a card brand could could infer.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: A person had the right title, they had the password, they had access to the account, or their name appeared on a corporate resolution.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were using a company email address.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But identity is not authority.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Access is an authority.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Technical permission is not authority, and even if a real person who has authenticated, they might not have authority to bind the organization and release its funds or transact on behalf of that organization.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And now we're going into this age of agentic commerce and agentic agents that are going to be acting on behalf of people.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you might be able to identify the agent.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: They might be authenticated, they might be technically permitted to call an API, but they have no legitimate power to enter an agreement, to borrow money, to transfer assets, or create liability for the entity or the individual that they're representing.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the best way to say is that in payments we talk about authorization.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Network authorization may establish that a credential is valid.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Transaction can proceed through the cardrails, but that doesn't necessarily establish that the human or the agent that initiated that transaction had governance-derived authority to create the underlying economic obligation.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: We don't invent authority.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: We verify that the relevant people and organization derive that authority from governing records, such as, again, the DMV Secretary of State.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then we can apply specific transaction constraints that revalidates that authority at the moment of execution.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the difference between trusting a transaction was authorized and proving that the actor had the validity and the authority is where we are different.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, without getting too far in the weeds, so that authority that you're talking about, so does your do your customers set that authority or how does that happen?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: So as an individual, you would create the authority or you would designate the authority.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So let's let's let's talk mainly about agentic, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't create data and chain it, we verify it, as I stated earlier.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are going to act in a digital world, how do I know that you are who you say you are?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, having again an email, a password, some digital marker that you say, hey, this is correct.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I then usually have to trust that that's you.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, if you look at just the traditional historical like document execution platforms, you get an email, you click, and it verifies you based on a email and an IP address in some cases.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know of many people in business that haven't done that for others because it's not actually verifying that you are who you are supposed to be.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so inside of Chainit, one thing that's a differentiator is we have no passwords.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Your face is your password.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: We have a five multi-factor biometric authentication.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the fifth is actually a derivation of the first four.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you act inside of Chainit, everything requires biometric attestation.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's never assumed and there is no trust involved.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: So when you act inside of Chainit, you're doing it through your biometrics that are connected to you, that are then connected to, probably in your case, either your passport or your driver's license.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, Chainit is live in over 150 countries.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: We can move money in all those countries.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so different countries have different sources of authority, whether it's passports or driver's license.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the first thing is we're connecting you to a government source of authority, and then that connection is through biometrics moving forward.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we're always validating that initial verification through your ongoing biometric attestation.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for a business or an organization, it starts at the similar foundation.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: The foundation is we need to verify the individuals of the organization, the officers, the directors, the shareholders.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they go through that same biometric identification process.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then we build from there, just like you would organize any company, there's corporate resolutions, there's bylaws, we retrieve the articles of organization directly from the Secretary of State.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: We can then verify bank accounts, IRS filings, EINs, do all the compliance checks into, again, an immutable data token that is the digital representation of that organization.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so just like you have a corporate resolution that authorizes certain events inside or chain it, we can then designate those digital resolutions that usually have no visibility through biometric attestation of the officers and directors, and then from there back to the shareholders that an individual or an employee or an associated person to that organization actually has the authority to enact on behalf of the organization.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then we can set the business rules where it's whether it's a type of transaction, a location of transaction, an amount of transaction, so that when that individual acts on behalf of the company or the organization, you have this audit trail, which is included in that event token that verifies they had authority to act on behalf of the company.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And all of those verifications and authority can be validated prior to the execution of a financial transaction.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we get authority, it's derived, it's not assumed or or implied.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's actual verified through biometric attestation to the company that they had the authority to act.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we do the same thing for agents.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we're definitely going into this agenda mode where, you know, how are agents going to verify that they have authority?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: How are they going to verify that they are who they act who they say they are acting on behalf?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because then the next question is authority is the first part, then compliance is the second part for payments.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you have several different, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if you call them business units or components.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: You have Chain It Pay, you have a few others.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe walk us through those and then how they're all kind of related.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yeah.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Chainit is the enterprise platform that contains, I'd say, the features and and products, if you will, of everything I just described.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Chainit Pay is a sister company, if you will, owned by the same holding company that has different relationships.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's PayFac, it's an ISO relationship with multiple banks.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so we just like any other traditional company in the payment world, we use Chainit to process payments and move value through the digital world and then the physical world as well.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then we do have some industry-specific verticals that we've literally built for different verticals that we have experience in.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's ones for sports and entertainment, art, there's some crowdfunding that are coming soon.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, those are built on Chainit.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Chainit has, you know, an SDK that we work with several developers that are also now building different applications on the Chainit platform for their industry or their business.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so we found uh that there was some really low-hanging fruit opportunities.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we built those individual applications ourselves.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: But there's other applications in development right now where we've got uh development teams that are that are using Chainit to build applications for their specific business.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when they do that, you know, Chainit is that foundational enterprise, and then they they connect through Chainit Pay for whether they need FBO accounts, different cardrails, stablecoin.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: We are native Web3, so stablecoin is literally what our wallets are non-custodial wallets.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Everything inside of our infrastructure is Web3.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what would you say most differentiates Chainit from your competitors?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Well, I mean I'd say first and foremost that we're native web 3.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Stablecoin has kind of got a lot of press recently.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that has to do with obviously the Genius Act and the Clarity Act that they're now looking to pass.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Chainit was built on Web3 principles.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, what that means is opposed to having to, I would say, bolt on a Web3 wallet or a compliance solution, all of that is in native and embedded inside of Chainit.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we don't have to go and bolt anything on because we were literally built for it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: You want to run fiat transactions, you want to, you know, cards, FedNow, RTP, wires, ACH, stablecoin, we do all of that today.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I again, if I would say the biggest differentiator is back to authority, because of the way that Chainit was constructed, the fact that we can prove who acted, that they had authority, and that the transaction was verified before it moved, I think that's that's a big differentiator for us right now.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Okay.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, where do you see the biggest growth opportunity for Chainit?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I mean, right now, we've had several press releases about our partnership uh being in the partner network of US Bank.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: We've also got some of the larger system integrators from overseas that have already integrated Chainit for opportunities there.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have multiple enterprise banks and large companies that are currently doing pilots, where if it's a regulated industry and involves, I'd say, authority, you know, required authority or attestation, then we can it's a major game changer.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: We still do all the traditional payments and normal, what I'd say, bank processing and card processing.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have you know a lot of customers there already, but I'd say where we are making the biggest change is in a regulated process.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: For example, a construction draw.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it seems like a simple thing.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna fund a construction draw from a lending bank, and you know, we're gonna pay contractors, subcontractors, vendors.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: There are multiple interdependent but variant or unrelated parties inside of a simple construction draw.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a very complicated process traditionally.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, with Chainit, the lender sending out an email, it goes to every one of those subcontractors or contractors.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: They then simply onboard through Chainit, which takes hardly no time because we have the direct access to the sources of authority.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then upon them, you know, confirm they they are who they say they are, necessary compliance, AML, watch list, verifications, then the money can move programmatically.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm a subcontractor and I've got a$25,000 uh construction draw coming to me, and I get an email or a text message, and I click on it, and I'm literally scanning my driver's license, scanning my face.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then biometrically agreeing that I'm signing for what's a conditional lien release.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then once all that's done, the money programmatically moves into my wallet.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we just say literally days, if not weeks, of time in that process.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So construction draws where there's required agreements before money moves, we can make that all one complete transaction.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And insurance claims, another big one.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of uh pilots going on there.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there's really almost an endless opportunity because if you think about it, almost all commerce requires verification before money is supposed to move.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so being able to have that authority verified and then be able to move that money across any rail, again, card, crypto, uh stable coin is really a differentiator for us.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Okay.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what does success look like for Chainit over the next, say, three to five years?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I'd say that success means that Chainit becomes embedded authority and for certain infrastructure beneath consequential digital commerce.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know that was a mouthful, but I think a lot of consumers may not see Chainit on transactions.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: But before a bank, an enterprise marketplace, uh, you know, a payment provider, I'm just thinking about our current customers, stablecoin wallets and ERP platforms, and especially AI agents can create economic consequence.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: The workflow would call Chainit to answer who was acting, for whom they were acting, what was the source of authority, what is the scope of the authority, or what are the guardrails?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is that authority still valid?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Has it been expired?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is it been revoked?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which rules and conditions apply, and then what payment rail is required to be used or desired to be used?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things with Chainit is we allow to be, you know, you could pay how you want and get paid how you want.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so you you might have one vendor that's paying via you know RTP, but then the recipient wants stablecoin.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: We transact that entire transaction through Chainit natively.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, when you kind of step back and look at the payments industry holistically, and I think I know part of the answer to this question, but what are the biggest trends that you're currently seeing that's really reshaping the payments industry?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'd say one of the things is that the time between instruction or you know, that API call and settlement is collapsing.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: RTP and Fed now provide, you know, immediate availability and final settlement.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what the market wanted, right?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't think speed is the question anymore.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think authority is.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure that's what you were gonna guess I was gonna say.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: But it really right now, the payment rails are removing that time buffer that previously allowed institutions to you know investigate, detect, and then sometimes reverse mistakes or failures.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you look at RTP and FedNow, they didn't create the authority problem, but I think they definitely exposed it.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, the mistake that I think was carrying out those trust-era authorizations that we talked about earlier into real-time settlement.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's one of the biggest things that's gonna change.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think obviously stablecoin and tokenized value.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, ChainEt also does real-world asset tokenization natively in our platform.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even charge for our wallets, we don't charge for tokenization.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're directly on chain.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: So money is becoming programmable and transactions are becoming automated.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So frankly, you know, computer code can now direct, determine like when, where, and under what condition value moves.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that is going to be a major change.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think before we talked about embedded payments, but I think now it's going to move into what we term complete commerce.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so the actor is changing.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: AI agents, everywhere we go, it's a Gente commerce, an AI, you know, authority.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, an AI agent can search, it can negotiate, it can, you know, assemble transactions, it interacts with wallets, and it can even initiate payment instructions.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact that it can do that, again, capacity is an authority.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: An agent's technical capability does not establish it as a legitimate power or authority to bind a person or organization.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that you know, with most things, there's going to be an overreach and you're going to see agents that are making mistakes.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then there'll be rules established.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully the government steps in sooner than they have with crypto.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: It took way too long to get the clarity, you know, act to the point it's at.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: But speaking of that, I think that the cryptographic infrastructure, you know, is definitely going into the quantum phase.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I still remember the first time I saw a quantum computer in person.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Don't hold me to the exact year, 2013, 2014.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I remember thinking then, wow, this is going to change everything in you know, 10 years.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, I was off by five.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: But but it is coming, and it is a, it is even going to be more disruptive than AI.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what I see happening there is that we will actually have to utilize our humanness, our liveness of biometrics combined with the AI to actually control quantum.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, it is a major game changer.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it might not be right now, quantum might not be what the merchant, you know, acquiring world thinks out, wakes up and thinks about.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it's already being obviously discussed.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's consumer or commercial products being rolled out right now.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's several scheduled for release at the end of this year, mainly in you know, chemistry and medical, which is where they should be focused.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that's that's going to become a major issue as you look at infrastructure and data security.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so the government's responding.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's all sorts of I've seen even recently there was additional uh, what was it called?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: The National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee, I think was reconstituted.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the AI agent standards through NIST and others are being established, and authority is a big discussion item there.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's what's gonna change a lot.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I have a lot of conversation, obviously, in in my interviews with leaders in in the industry about agentic commerce, and I always kind of like to get a feel from the guests.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do you feel like it's like the consumer is going to drive the use?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think it's more gonna be used on the B2B side first and then consumers will catch up?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of your thoughts on kind of who's gonna really drive it forward.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's a lot of talk obviously in the industry about standards and the the technology, but at the end of the day, if consumers aren't using it or businesses aren't using it, it doesn't matter, right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: So who do you think is gonna lead in this kind of setting up agents to buy on their behalf?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Your last comment threw me because it's absolutely gonna be used.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how many people use AI today?
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, chat, grok, claude, cursor.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I use every one of those constantly all day long.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I guess here now, I mean, I I have multiple agents doing work for me constantly in the background.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think most business leaders do.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the natural progression of that is to have agents and act on your behalf to perform financial transactions.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I think that's where that authority becomes so vital is to make sure those guardrails are in place.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying that the government needs to like out-engineer the private sector.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's historically never happened, but it does need to shorten that feedback loop through working groups and there needs to be more collaboration so that I think the government can, you know, stay up with what's evolving and developing because that that technology creation to deployment loop is shorting by the day.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think for sure businesses will go first.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Businesses are going to, they're set up to be more technology aware and technology, you know, utilize technology because they have to stay competitive.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think the first industry that it's rolling out in now is is B2B.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have agents that do stuff for us and our company right now involving financial transactions, but they have authority to do so because literally that's what chain it was made for.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think eventually you will see individuals and consumers do the same thing.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: If I could have an agent read my inbox, identify certain bills, and then automatically pay them, depending upon the guide rails that I established and that I had the authority to do those, and the agent then verified my account information in my in my bank account.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that would save time, and I think people would start to do that very readily if the safety and the guide rails were there.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, I would have to quickly scan my face to confirm that these things were going to get paid.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they were in certain vendors or certain amounts, then they would autonomously be paid and happen.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: So again, authority and guide rails are absolutely important.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: It rolls out through business and then to consumer.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, two more questions.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: So if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would it be?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think relationships are the most important thing that you develop.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Education and knowledge are paramount, but those are almost foundational.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to have the knowledge and the and the whether it's through education or through natural learning that you acquired.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that I have focused a lot on that continual knowledge acquisition, which is great.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say keep doing that.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then, you know, I think one of the things that, for example, with Chainit, that has made it so, you know, successful is that it has a very close knit investor group.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: We always say we're founder funded.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's with founders or partners that I've been involved with for decades.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so these are call them families or friends that have been involved with multiple businesses and different projects over the years.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those relationships, when you have that longevity, things don't always go well.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: You've got ups and you've got downs.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have that ongoing continual relationship, I have those and I'm very blessed to have those.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, I think that if I go back, I'd say, hey, make sure you focus on those because doing X number of projects and X number of countries is great and you've got that experience.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: But what is ultimately gonna to win the day is your relationships.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that now I have the benefit of, you know, again, I founded the the mortgage bank in the 90s, I founded the bank in the 90s, and a lot of the individuals that, you know, I had relationships with back then are also now, you know, they're CEOs of banks, they're CEOs of fintechs, they're CEOs of major, you know, enterprise organizations.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so those relationships have have actually been probably the most valuable thing I have.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if you were to summarize this episode and and maybe have one takeaway for the audience, what would that one takeaway be?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I would say that the next payment rail is not category, it's authority.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think that between all the different fiat and card and you know crypto stablecoin rails, we have a lot of ways to move money.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I think authority is going to become the most important thing in payments.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, being able to prove, again, who acted, did they have the authority, was compliance conducted?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then to be able to do that like in real time without multiple integration or API calls to third-party products and services.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: People that have that or companies that have that will will gain a significant competitive advantage.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Jeremy, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you so much for being here.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: And until the next story.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 24:09
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