Latest / Leaders In Payments / Stablecoin Rails For Real-World Payouts with Cyril Mathew, Co-Founder & CEO of Latitude | Episode 488

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Stablecoin Rails For Real-World Payouts with Cyril Mathew, Co-Founder & CEO of Latitude | Episode 488 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Leaders in Family Podcast, where we talk to three-level leaders from affects the payments and space.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be discussing the products and services that affect the payments space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the company.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders of Famements Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Greg Myers.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: And today's special guest is Cyril Matthew, the co-founder and CEO of Latitude.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, Cyril, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Pleasure to be here.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: So before we dive into your career in the company, can you just give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm in one of the tech hubs of the world.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just kidding.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Houston, Texas is where I'm currently currently from.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I actually grew up in Houston and have moved around quite a bit in my personal career.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if I even take it a step further back, my parents were immigrants from India and moved to Texas back in the 60s.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so kind of had this international DNA in me.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so spent some time later in my adult life in the Bay Area where I go into working for Facebook and then actually lived in Europe for 10 years between London and Amsterdam.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: My wife's British, continuing with the international theme.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: She's also half Nigerian.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got three kids, all uh from different sorts of places in their DNA, which is kind of one of the sparks that I believe led to me wanting to also start Latitude, which is a global company by default.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: But a few years back, moved back to Houston, Texas, after a lot of that time abroad.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: I have three young kids, still a lot of family in the area.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: And our Latitude is a remote but hiring and hubs sort of culture.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so great airport to travel from and great food here.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: So back in Houston, Texas now.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, can you walk us through your professional journey and maybe talk about why you started Latitude?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'll give my more recent experience aging myself.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just start with more recent experience.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned being in the Bay Area.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: That was really when I started joining what I would call a set of hyperscaling companies.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: At the time it was Facebook, now called Meta.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: This is back in 2011, 2012.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, went out there, really nothing to do with payments yet, but we were starting a partnerships team and an advertising technology, aka ad tech part of the platform, where eventually through that program, 25% of Facebook's ad revenue went through by the time I had left Facebook.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so went there for a few years, really got, I feel like, learning in how companies, especially mission-driven companies, which is a theme I can speak to too in my experience, scale and scale rapidly.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: Halfway into that journey, I got an opportunity to move to Europe.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: They needed to expand partnerships in Europe and other places.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I moved to London, actually hadn't been there yet, and was a risk worth taking for me.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I say risk in terms of just, you know, moving to a different country I hadn't been to, but it was something that paid off a lot because it really again started growing that curiosity for how different international markets work, how companies scale in these international markets.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so fast forward a few years, I was in London, I was at Facebook for a few years, and I was traveling on a work trip when I was with Facebook.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually in the Philippines, and I didn't know.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: I asked some friends about is this a safe area I'm in?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what do you think of it?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And they mentioned, hey, just be a little careful.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: And at the time, and I was looking for a taxi and I couldn't find one.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: And Uber had just launched.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so I opened up my Uber app and said, maybe it's in the Philippines.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: And lo and behold, there was an Uber driver within a 10-minute vicinity in a country I'd never been to.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uber, I didn't know was even outside the US.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: But it was like a light bulb moment for me.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, wow, this technology is pretty interesting.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so my next role, fast forward a little bit, I went to Uber.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uber's international headquarters was in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where outside the US.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so Uber is really where I started understanding more about payments.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so at Uber, the international entity is how we paid all of our drivers across the 40 or 50 countries outside the US that Uber operated in.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: So the first time I started learning about the pain points of cross-border payments, the number one requested feature from Uber drivers was at the time was how do I get my money faster or can you pay me more often?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so we tried different solutions, like lipstick on a pig solutions, I would call them, where it was driver debit cards where we confront them, their salary for a week.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And there was an aha moment for me there about payments and needing to improve these cross-border rails, which was we were interviewing some drivers in London and we were asking them what they do with their wages.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of them were for different GOs across the Middle East and Africa and had families back home.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: And one of them said that they were remitting money in this case back to Morocco by giving someone a bag of cash and minus 20% later it would end up there.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: And this wasn't that long ago.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: This was, I want to say at that point, 2014, 15, or 15 time frame.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was like, wow, there must be a better way.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so at that time, I started reading about blockchains and cryptography and this sort of technology.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I sort of caught that bug of, you know, these pain points of cross-border payments exist.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: How do we have a better technology to solve some of these things?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so my next role after that was at Coinbase.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: I helped Coinbase launch internationally across the UK and Europe.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: And at Coinbase, I also worked on one of a very relevant product to Latitude today called USDC as a stable coin in partnership with Circle, which is one of the top two stable coins in the world now.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And back then it was no product market fit.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: People were like, why do you need this thing?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: I want to see the number go higher on Bitcoin and Ethereum and these other tokens.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I felt again channeling this theme of I've seen these pain coins from Uber drivers.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: I've now lived abroad and know how it is to send money back and forth.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, wow, a stablecoin is this promise of the new blockchain technology, but it's not as volatile as long as you don't consider the dollar volatile.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's tied to a dollar era, or it could be tied to other stable assets.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was pretty interesting for me.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'll finish out my journey a little bit here and happy to double-click anywhere.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: But fast forward after I spent a few years at Coinbase helping dev to grow internationally, I went to Stripe.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: And um, Stripe, you would think, okay, I'm in the digital asset crypto space.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm, you know, going to Stripe now.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Why'd that move?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: I felt where this technology could really take off is like embedded into a major sort of payment system, a major payments infrastructure.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so actually, when I joined Stripe, crypto was a technically banned.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't supporting payments for any crypto companies.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't sure what to think of this new technology.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so I joined Stripe to first lead expansion.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: But given my history at the time had come in from Coinbase, I got to meet leadership really quickly, John Colson, who was very curious about what this new technology could unlock.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: And Stripe had done some crypto things earlier.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: But fast forward, I was able to then help spearhead the relaunch of crypto efforts at Stripe.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: And the first product that we launched there, that's really again relevant to Latitude, was we can only do marketplace payouts for the marketplaces on Stripe, like the Lyfts or it was a Twitter or Ubers and these sorts of companies in 50 countries where we had banking rails.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so we thought, let's try to use USDC, the stablecoin, you know, we'll rewind a few years that had been launched with Coinbase and Circle to pay out in 100 countries, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: And we did a pilot with Twitter, it was the pre-Elon Musk Twitter.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: This was back in now 21-22.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: And we said, okay, this can extend the reach, and these creators around the world would love this feature.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: When we launched that product, that iteration of the product, no one really used it.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was very minimal usage.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we did user research, we'd polled users, and why aren't you using it?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And they said, well, what do I do with UACC in a Vietnam and an Argentina and an Africa?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: I need to buy groceries and local things.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was a light bulb for me that I believe this technology is really promising, but you've got to solve getting in and out of local currencies efficiently in compliant ways, affordably.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so long winding journey of my personal history, but those were all kind of sparks that led to what we've launched at Latitude.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: I did one more stint at a company called Zero Hash, which is does embedded digital asset infrastructure.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was there president for a year and learned there kind of how important it is to kind of embed digital asset services within mainstream apps.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so Okay, great.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for sharing that.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about the company now.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: So tell our audience what Latitude does.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: So Latitude really was the combination of those experiences that I've mentioned across the Uber, the Coinbase, the Stripe.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: We really didn't see anyone trying to build on this new technology in what we felt would be a way that could build mainstream adoption.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: And what do I mean by that?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned the story at Stripe when we tried to do USDC payouts to 100 countries, but a lot of the users were like, I need my local currency.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: And in the end, right, I need to buy local things.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so what we focused on is building on top of stable coins and blockchains, but making sure that we can build connectivity between stable coins and local currencies around the world, right?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so that means if I'm sending from point A to point B from, let's say, the United States to Brazil, I could use stablecoins in between to do that faster.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Since I've cut out middlemen, do it cheaper.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: Since I've eliminated a lot of the traditional technology, I should be able to do it without pre-funding or float, as they call in the payments world, we can double-click on, and really do that in a much more efficient way.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: But you can't do that unless you've built one, the connectivity on the US side, but also the Brazilian side, where when I do want to take that stable coin back to local currency, I can do that in a seamless way.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so we've built what we've what we've called the Latitude Liquidity Network.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: We're building, we came out of stealth, quote unquote, a month back where we announced we can do our first product, global fiat payouts, which is a way for a marketplace, for example, to do payouts of their creators or of their sellers or of their contractors into now 50 countries around the world.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: And we uh are also disruptive, we feel, by doing that at a price point that a starting price point that's lower than what we've seen is that 50 basis points or half a percent.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, with volumes, we can even get further down below.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: And we can do that, by the way, typically in under two minutes end-to-end.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to pay out my creator and they're in Brazil or they're in Mexico.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: I can do that end-to-end into their bank account in under two minutes with what a lot of people in these conference panels call the stablecoin sandwich, where we're using a stable coin in between to move the money faster, but again, delivering fiat currency in the end.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, the platform that we're recording on today, Zencaster, was one of our first customers.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: They use us to help pay creators in India that kind of monetize their podcasters and then earn these payouts from Zencaster.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: So that's pretty cool that we're recording on one of our first customers' platforms.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: The second product of how that shapes with Latitude, and there'll be many more products, which is you've seen more and more of these fintech apps that are building stable coins in their experiences.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of these, what they call crypto neobanks or stablecoin neobanks.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going global on day one.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: I offer my service into now 40 or 50 countries because it's a stablecoin that's backing it.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't need the local currency.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: But what the users of these apps need is a way to get in and out of that stable coin.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so they could use these fintech wallets or these apps or these neo banks, if you want to call them, could use latitudes embedded services, plug into our API, and provide a compliant way for users to send local currency, for example, give Mexican pesos and get a stable coin like USCC into their wallet, or when they want to get back out to local currency, send a stable coin and get back out to Brazilian Real or Colombia peso.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so those are kind of our first two products that will manifest in many different ways.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: What we're ultimately building is just a new money movement network.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: We felt incumbents, even recent fintechs, that seemingly for the user, seems like they're moving the money quickly.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: At the end of the day, they're playing this complex treasury and float game.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: If I sent 80 countries, I keep a pocket of capital in each of those countries to simulate real-time movements.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: But we believe building on stable coin rails eliminates the need to do that complex treasury management game because we can actually send the money in real time.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: And eventually we want anyone to be able to send from point A to point B or a business to a business, a business to a consumer from all these different nodes in that network that we're building.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what do you think is the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the number one challenge at the end of the day, I believe sometimes in the digital asset space, people will build solutions looking for problems.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, at the end of the day, these cross-border payments, going back to the Uber story that I mentioned, are still expensive.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the number one thing people want to see is okay, if this is such a new technology, where are my cost savings?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And again, the word cost savings are realized.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I believe this is more in to be clear in emerging markets today than it is from a Western to Western market, which has quite a bit of trading volume today, and you can actually get pretty efficient from US to Europe.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: But when you're going US to Colombia, US to Philippines, US to India, or UK outbound or wherever these flows are, you start to see with traditional sushi, those prices skyrocket.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: So at the end of the day, the first value proposition we're doing is we can do that more affordably because we've built on this new technology.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: There are other pain points that we feel are secondary but still very important, which is I mentioned the way big enterprises get over the cost is by keeping capital in float in a lot of places.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I believe, and this may be controversial, it's kind of payment veterans that a lot of them will say, uh, listen, stablecoins can move in real time.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, our cost of capital is so cheap, it doesn't cost us much.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I call a little bit of BS on that.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: I just think it's um logical that when you're tying up capital in some place, ultimately someone's paying for that capital, right?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And when you can literally move the money in real time, there is going to be efficiencies there.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: And we're already starting to see that in the 50 countries that we operate in.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: We're seeing customers that are really excited about the price points we can offer.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: But also, hey, I don't have to keep capital in that destination country to deliver, make that instant.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so the speed and the mitigation of keeping capital in these local jurisdictions is a great second benefit.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Again, ultimately you still need to be cheaper for the companies to be interested, but also solving that speed and flow is another big pain point.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: The last thing I'll say is we believe when you make money easier to send around the globe, we're already post-COVID in this gig economy world, uh, more cross-border type of transactions and volume and use cases.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: We haven't even scratched the surface of, you know, if agents start to transact cross-border.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the story we told at Uber is uh people used to conflate when Uber launched, it would just replace the taxi industry.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, what it did, it 10xed the taxi industry in every city it operated in because you made riding so much easier.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: And we believe if we make sending money across borders so much easier, there's all sorts of new use cases that are going to arise that we haven't even seen yet.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's we're pretty excited about.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what would you say differentiates latitude from your competitors?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would say it's a combination of a few things.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: First, again, we've seen a lot of companies that are, you know, talk about stable coins and cross-border and moving money.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: What I saw and why decided tools we launched latitude was a lack of a cohesive solution in the space.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: And first, I would say if you're going to win the business of customers that are moving billions of dollars, you have to be trusted and you have to be regulated and you have to be compliant.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so we spent about 15 months in stealth making sure we got licensed on day one.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's the boring stuff, but the important stuff if you're going to serve an enterprise.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so in that short time frame, we already had 40 of our 50 or almost 40 of our 50 state money transmission licenses in the US.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: Eventually, we'll have in the next few months all of those.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: We're also looking at some federal options for licensing.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: Internationally, we also felt that we didn't see someone solving what I mentioned that strike problem was when we launched that first product, which is I have a stable coin and that's interesting, but how do I get in and out of the local currency?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so part one is getting regulated and being and building compliance in-house on day one.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Part two is building the breadth of coverage of markets where I can go from stable to local currency or low currency back to stable.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: And we're not in 200 markets today, we're in 50 and growing.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: And we're also not religious about stable coins.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: There still needs to be a little bit of maturity in terms of regulation in other markets, in terms of more demand for some of these stable coins in some markets.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: So for it to work in 200 markets, but we do see that adoption curve growing exponentially.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so part two of where allowed to differentiate is we have a breadth of markets now, 50 plus and counting where we can go between stable coins and local currencies.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: The third thing is also what we look at as table stakes, but maybe boring on the outside world, is the core payments experience.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: My co-founder Brian, he's our CTO, he's from Stripe, I'm from Stripe.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: My other co-founder, XUber, who was at Zero Hash with me.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: What also I believe a lot of the kind of crypto native solutions lack is I've got to get the boring payment stuff right.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we were talking to one of the marketplaces that pays out in the Philippines, they were like, Do you offer Gcash, which is the top payment to a wallet solution in the Philippines?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: And we offer that already because we're thinking about what are these local payment methods that a company will need if they're sending to that market?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: Or how is your RFIs that they call in the payment space, like the request for information and the payment failures?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of our early engineers aren't these, you know, DeFi, like really crypto native engineers, actually core payments infrastructure engineers that have built robust systems at Coinbase and Stripe and other places like Amazon.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: And we believe that will compound over time, where a company that's taking a bet on latitude because we're early sees that, wow, you guys have built enterprise scale systems.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: You've thought about the boring payment stuff that a stablecoin native company may not always think about.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you talked a little bit about growth, but where do you see the biggest growth opportunities in this segment of payments?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just to double click on the point I mentioned earlier.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right now we're focused because we believe stablecoins are still maturing on these business to consumer flows.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: What I mean by that is you have all these sorts of marketplaces now that are doing payouts to sellers, that could be like an eBay type company, payouts to creators, that could be Zencash that we talked about, payouts to contractors, these are companies like Deal and Gusto and others.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And we believe there's more and more of these companies that are growing.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: For example, I'll give you a new vertical, data AI labelers, these companies that, whether it's Surge or Mercore or Scale AI that Meta acquired, what they do is these labelers, as they call them, are validating model outputs.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so if it's a medical output from a model, there's doctors that you literally are getting paid in these countries around the world to say, is that medical advice actually accurate or not?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so all these data AI label companies need to make payouts around the world.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a vertical that didn't even exist three, four, five years ago, right?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And we believe, again, making it easier to send money globally will make these new verticals arise.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the second thing I would say is the other use case that I mentioned earlier, that there are just two that I know about now.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: The fintech app that's going global on day one.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: There's all sorts of new types of consumer use cases that are popping up now that we can have a digital dollar and access to that digital dollar in several different countries around the world.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Neobank example or a fintech app that goes global on day one isn't one example.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: Another one is prediction markets.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: We see several companies that have launched prediction markets.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: Internationally, these prediction markets actually operate with stablecoins or crypto on the back end.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then their retail users of those markets need, again, simple on and off ramps.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so we see a lot of demand from those two spaces for our Rails.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: But the meta point I would mention is we believe just the fact that how global stable coins are, there'll be many new use cases that I can't even envision today that will be served.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: And they'll need a regulated, compliant infrastructure to make sure they can get in and out of these stable coins efficiently.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what do you think are the biggest trends that are reshaping the payments industry right now?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, what you're doing is reshaping the industry, but you know, beyond just the obvious one there, what other things do you think are really reshaping the industry?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Again, the point I would double-click on from our what we're doing is just this going global on day one is a really big theme.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: I believe in four or five years, if we're doing our job with stable coins, we're not even talking about it, just like, you know, dating myself again.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: When you said email, you don't talk about it was SMTP that was used as the technology.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you're a payment leader, either an incumbent or a new company, and you think, wow, my expansion strategy looks a lot different now because I don't necessarily have to go build some local payment integration.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: I can provide stable coins and get to so many markets in a matter of months.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, you've still still got to do your regulatory compliance analysis and all those sorts of things.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: But so going global and being able to expand much easier is I think the first theme that I would call out that I've seen most leaders thinking about today is it's actually going back to when I mentioned my personal background with Stripe leadership was thinking about wow, I can extend the reach of my platform to a hundred countries now if I use stable coins.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I would say that's theme one.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: I would say the second theme that's obviously very top of mind for folks right now is what does this world where agents potentially are transacting look like?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be the first to say we monitor that space closely and we want to build systems where, for example, if people are onboarding to our platform, they can do so in a day instead of what used to be six weeks or in a matter of hours down the road.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And we believe that translates well to how agents may need to onboard and start transacting cross-border.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've not yet seen like skyrocketing use cases of agents transacting on day-to-day use cases, but it's something that I believe everyone needs to be thinking about.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: I've been through these technology shifts when, again, I mentioned seeing Uber and how they expanded and the way people took rides.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I mentioned the launch of USCC at Coinbase and how stablecoins really have grown since then.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a space we look at closely.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I believe everyone in payments needs to be looking at is like, how does someone transact with my company?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: How does an agent transact with my company?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: How does an agent now I send out to go transact with other companies?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what does that world look like?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a couple of final questions.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that be?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, uh, it's a long career.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'll think back.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: I would say two things.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: I would tell my younger self, and I believe I did a decent job at this, but I always had the imposter syndrome is if you feel like you're the dumbest person in the room, you're in a good spot.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: You are probably gonna grow a lot over the next few years, and you should hopefully build the confidence where you don't feel like that.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: But it means that you're surrounded yourself with people who are only gonna make you better.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: I remember when I first went to Facebook in the Bay Area where I mentioned my personal history, I felt that way.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I was definitely scared to go into meetings.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like, wow, I'm not gonna do good on this presentation, or I'm gonna ask a dumb question.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: But this is one of the times of my career where I grew the most.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I continue to try to do that when I felt like I was hitting a ceiling, even if I was at a great company.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like I wanted to now be in that room where I felt everyone around me was smarter.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I that's what I feel.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the CEO of our company Latitude.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: I generally believe all the people that we've hired are actually more exceptional and smarter than me.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the type of culture we're trying to bring.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: I would mention one fault.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: That was my one A.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I'll mention a one B, which is also being comfortable to take risks.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: For me, that looked like going to a Facebook and moving to the Bay Area where I didn't really know anyone or a late.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Moving to Europe to help this company expand and not having stepped foot there before.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And those were some of the most rewarding times for not only my professional career, but my personal career.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: My move to Europe was professional, but I ended up marrying someone who was British, had three kids who were born in Europe, and now back in the US with this multicultural family.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: And also with the family, I also believe some people believe once I have a family, I can't take risk anymore.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm adamant against that.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: I still believe you can grow your career.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: You have to balance that.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can't move as much as you did before, but you can continue to take risk.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something that I've tried to do every time and every stop I've been in my career.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: I've worked at great companies and I've been fortunate there, but I've also not been comfortable.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: If I felt I got comfortable, I wanted to sort of now take a new risk.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one final question.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: What's the one thing that payments leaders that are listening today should really be thinking about right now?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: I would say to question your assumptions.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's a broad, ambiguous statement, but it applies to many things.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: It applies to, okay, there's this new stablecoin technology.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: My payment rails work great.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: I again, if I'm keeping float in places it's very cheap, cost of capital, it's not going to be more efficient.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'd actually say when you don't question your assumptions, it's, you know, the innovator's dilemma, which is a popular book, can happen.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And the same thing is what I'm trying to do in this new world of AI, which is I don't yet see the specific use cases that where an agent's going to take over the day-to-day transactions of a certain use case.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I believe that day is coming.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you sort of rest on your laurels and believe, like, well, I, you know, I don't believe in that and you're not monitoring it closely, I believe you'll be caught flat-footed and you won't adapt to this new technology.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean that everything on, you know, X or these social platforms that are sometimes fluffy or overhyped, you, you know, you should take everything with a grain of salt, of course.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I believe if you're not paying attention to how these technology shifts can change your business, you don't, you just you'll be caught flat-footed, and that's not a great thing.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's just end with one quick, if you don't mind telling the audience, like the one thing that you want them to take away about the company and then how they can learn more about you in latitude.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, at latitude, again, we've built on this new technology of stablecoin rails, but we are very big believers that we're trying to be change the way your normal money movement works.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of times companies are saying, Oh, I'll test a new stablecoin wallet and this sort of new fringe thing.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, the core way you move money could be improved if you're using this technology.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we're trying to build a compliant, regulated, robust platform that allows you to move the money faster with stable coins, but do it in a compliant way in your core flows.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so if a company is interested in exploring that, we'd love you to reach out to Latitude.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: That can manifest itself in lots of different flows.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: You can find us at latitude.xyz or at RTP, which stands for real-time payments on X.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: And we'd love to help.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Cyril, thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know your time is very valuable.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: So again, appreciate you being here and look forward to keeping up with the journey.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: And again, thanks for being on the show today.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Greg.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was a privilege.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a big fan of the pod, and thanks for having me on.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: And until the next story.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 25:05
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