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Zuba’s Josiah Senu on Fixing Cross-Border Payments in Africa · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Justin Friedman: I'm Justin Friedman.
• 0:01
  Justin Friedman: Welcome to a special live recording of the Stable Pulse taking place at Stablecon USA 2026, just outside Washington DC.
• 0:11
  Justin Friedman: Welcome, our guest today, Josiah Senu, the co-founder and CEO of Zuba, which he launched just five months ago.
• 0:20
  Justin Friedman: So Josiah, Nigerian parents, you were born in Gabon, raised in London, and I understand you're planning to move to New York City.
• 0:31
  Justin Friedman: Why?
• 0:33
  Josiah Senu: It's great, great to be here, first of all.
• 0:36
  Justin Friedman: Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome.
• 0:38
  Josiah Senu: Um I suppose, like why the move to New York?
• 0:42
  Josiah Senu: Um it's a place of incredible ambition.
• 0:45
  Josiah Senu: Um it's a it's a place where I believe the best builders, creators, and inventors in the world come to challenge themselves and place themselves in the arena in the hopes that they might accomplish something much greater for humanity.
• 0:59
  Josiah Senu: And so as an individual who aspires and dreams to create a better future, it feels like a natural home.
• 1:07
  Justin Friedman: Great.
• 1:07
  Justin Friedman: So Zuba is brand new.
• 1:10
  Justin Friedman: Uh, what does Zuba plan to accomplish?
• 1:14
  Josiah Senu: Um the way I like to see it is that in in the emerging markets today, there's uh this process known as de-risking, uh, which is happening.
• 1:25
  Josiah Senu: So um Tier 1 correspondent banks are leaving um Asia, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Africa, um, many others.
• 1:34
  Josiah Senu: And so it's created a gap, a gap where um when it comes to the the clearance and the settlement of a dollar flow or the clearance and settlement of a supplier paying someone else across borders, that is that is difficult.
• 1:49
  Josiah Senu: Um so the ambition of our business is to create um a correspondent bank uh that serves the emerging markets, that uh is able to bring back um this the strength to global economies, but also to support the the fast urbanization that is happening in these markets today.
• 2:09
  Josiah Senu: And of course, we're at stablecorn, we're here to talk about stable coins, and you know, most people like to talk about stable coins in the Western markets, but the reality is that the majority of all the flows that are happening today are happening in the emerging markets.
• 2:24
  Josiah Senu: Um and so what better use case there is than to serve the people who's who have the most acute need, who have the greatest need, uh and and where the need for the US dollar clearance is strongest.
• 2:36
  Justin Friedman: So a lot of people talk about how traditional correspondent banking processes and relationships are outdated and just not meeting the moment.
• 2:47
  Justin Friedman: What is particularly true about the continent of Africa?
• 2:53
  Josiah Senu: I think what you have in the in the continent of Africa is uh a dying need to uh uh uh accept money internationally and send it.
• 3:03
  Josiah Senu: Um, you know, you you have a really young population, so the average age is around 21 years old.
• 3:09
  Josiah Senu: Um, you have a group of people who will grow from about a 1.5 to 4 billion people uh by the end of the century.
• 3:16
  Josiah Senu: Um ultimately GDP growth far outstrips many economies in the world.
• 3:22
  Josiah Senu: Uh, fundamentally, you have an increasing uh pop a population that's increasingly more economic in its activity, right?
• 3:29
  Josiah Senu: So um GDP per capita will only go up, and therefore it needs access to the rest of the world.
• 3:34
  Josiah Senu: 70% of trade happens in US dollars, and so if you want participation in the economy, you have to in some way engage with USD.
• 3:44
  Josiah Senu: Now, the challenge that exists in these markets is that access to USD is controlled.
• 3:49
  Josiah Senu: Um, you have capital controls, you have governments which ultimately uh manage that.
• 3:53
  Josiah Senu: Why?
• 3:53
  Josiah Senu: Because of exchange risk, right?
• 3:55
  Josiah Senu: So the huge volatility, inflation in these markets in terms of their currencies, and and so you have this very weird situation where you have these these countries which are effectively net importers, you know, the balance of payments means that they are bringing in more goods and services, paying for those goods and services, but they're paying for it with a USD, which is almost impossible to access.
• 4:17
  Josiah Senu: And so they're paying for it in local currency, and of course, that m has huge implications for um their ability to service their clients locally, but also to service customers internationally.
• 4:28
  Justin Friedman: There's no shortage of FinTechs building new rails and trying to solve all these problems.
• 4:33
  Justin Friedman: So, what is Zuba's superpower?
• 4:38
  Josiah Senu: I love that question.
• 4:39
  Josiah Senu: Um I I think it's a customer obsession.
• 4:49
  Josiah Senu: Um and and I say that because um within only a a couple of months um we have uh continued to to grow our customer base um through through understanding what is actually important for them.
• 5:06
  Josiah Senu: Um and I think it it's in three parts.
• 5:09
  Josiah Senu: Um most people will say it's about price.
• 5:12
  Josiah Senu: Um you know, give me the best rate, give me the best FX, and I'll switch.
• 5:17
  Josiah Senu: Um uh but the reality is that it's not.
• 5:20
  Josiah Senu: Um actually there's something more fundamental, which is about reliability.
• 5:24
  Josiah Senu: So, you know, take uh uh a pay-in or a payout that needs to happen in Cameroon or Senegal or Ivory Coast.
• 5:32
  Josiah Senu: Um settlement happens in T plus nine days, right?
• 5:35
  Justin Friedman: Nine days.
• 5:37
  Josiah Senu: Right.
• 5:38
  Justin Friedman: We are a generation into the internet era and it takes nine days to move money.
• 5:43
  Josiah Senu: And and that's astounding, right?
• 5:45
  Josiah Senu: Um so so when you think about the problem, um, the problem is okay, how do I increase that settlement speed?
• 5:53
  Josiah Senu: But then also, right, um, you actually don't know whether or not a settlement has bounced until the very end of the process, right?
• 6:01
  Josiah Senu: Until the sender receives information back saying that there was a failed payment, and that can take two weeks, right?
• 6:08
  Josiah Senu: Um so you you have this very weird system where there's a lack of reliability when it comes to actually the payment clearing and settling, and you have uh uh uh ultimately some settlement speed issues, and of course you have all the compliance costs associated with the bank moving that money to and fro and the counterparties in the middle of that chain.
• 6:25
  Josiah Senu: So when you talk about you know what is important, what is Zuba's superpower, it's understanding fundamentally what is the thing that the customer cares about the most.
• 6:35
  Josiah Senu: It's getting paid, getting paid on time, and then getting paid at an affordable price.
• 6:42
  Justin Friedman: I can imagine a comical scenario where something goes wrong, the transaction doesn't go through, T plus nine, it's you know, maybe there's a holiday, you know, it's a couple of weeks before you even realize that the payment wasn't received by the sender.
• 6:58
  Justin Friedman: You start the process over again, you're still back to square one, T plus nine.
• 7:02
  Justin Friedman: It could take a month.
• 7:04
  Josiah Senu: It could, honestly.
• 7:05
  Josiah Senu: I mean, we I was spoken to some uh merchants that we have where they literally told me it would be easier to take a plane from Benin to Gabon uh and carry my money in cash and drop it than it would be to send a payment via the local bank.
• 7:19
  Josiah Senu: Incredible.
• 7:21
  Justin Friedman: So over the past few months as you've been building this business, how has your thesis evolved?
• 7:31
  Josiah Senu: I I think when we we started the business, it was always with the desire to uh improve access, to create financial inclusion, um, and to provide a product experience where the customer was not thinking about you know how much money we were taking from them in their fees, or but rather how much money we returned to their pocket.
• 7:52
  Josiah Senu: Um I think that thesis for us has still remained true.
• 7:56
  Josiah Senu: If anything, it's simply accelerated.
• 7:58
  Josiah Senu: I think we've understood very clearly what the challenges in the market are.
• 8:02
  Josiah Senu: You know, there are countless number of people I speak to in the space, countless number of investors, um uh even people we tend to hire who are like, well, how are you solving liquidity, right?
• 8:12
  Josiah Senu: Everyone always says it's about liquidity.
• 8:14
  Josiah Senu: Um, and I think they're wrong.
• 8:16
  Josiah Senu: I I think they're fundamentally misunderstood what the biggest challenge is.
• 8:20
  Justin Friedman: Look, if you have to pre-fund in destination markets, then liquidity matters a lot, right?
• 8:28
  Josiah Senu: I I I I think you know if you if you try to uh boil it down, actually, right?
• 8:34
  Josiah Senu: The liquidity comes from uh your ability to command a better experience for the customer.
• 8:42
  Josiah Senu: It's it's a much longer conversation and you've got to break it down into multiple parts.
• 8:47
  Josiah Senu: Everyone attacks the the sourcing liquidity, the pre-funding of the liquidity in order to fund and pay out and do last mile settlement in a really clear and efficient way, maybe even credit lines which are associated with that.
• 9:00
  Josiah Senu: But ultimately it's a cost of capital, and the cost of capital is is an efficiency mechanism, and you can reduce the cost of capital if you think very clearly about the sources of capital.
• 9:11
  Justin Friedman: I love to ask questions about leadership.
• 9:13
  Justin Friedman: So uh here's one.
• 9:15
  Justin Friedman: What's the biggest mistake, the most expensive mistake that you've made as a founder?
• 9:23
  Josiah Senu: Well, the most expensive mistake.
• 9:25
  Josiah Senu: Um I think I've made a number of mistakes.
• 9:28
  Josiah Senu: Well, I don't know.
• 9:30
  Josiah Senu: Tell me about that.
• 9:31
  Josiah Senu: The therapy session now, is that we're gonna go into it.
• 9:34
  Josiah Senu: Um I I I I think probably my most expensive mistake is associated with with people.
• 9:42
  Josiah Senu: Um I I think as a as a founder, you often have an incredible amount of optimism about everything.
• 9:51
  Josiah Senu: Um, there is no problem that is too hard to tackle.
• 9:55
  Josiah Senu: There is nothing which is impossible.
• 9:57
  Josiah Senu: Um, and so when you're engaging with someone that you bring on board that you want to work with, that you want to have a partnership with, often you might engage with uh an element of trust, right?
• 10:06
  Josiah Senu: Um and trust is fundamental to our business, right?
• 10:09
  Josiah Senu: It's it's the way it works.
• 10:10
  Josiah Senu: If you can't extend that trust, if you can't earn trust, it's it's uh hard to really deliver outcomes for your business.
• 10:16
  Josiah Senu: And I think you know, in some of our engagements with different counterparties, uh, we have trusted and actually been severely burnt as a result of it.
• 10:25
  Josiah Senu: And you know, when your customer expects you to settle a $4 million trade and you've trusted a counterparty to settle, and that counterparty doesn't settle, it becomes a little bit awkward, you know, telling your customer, yeah, you know, your money is stuck.
• 10:38
  Josiah Senu: Um, you know, the the reality of our space is that a fraud is incredibly high, you're dealing with high-risk markets, you know, the the transaction monetary systems have to be correct.
• 10:47
  Josiah Senu: There are a lot of huge and heavy implications with our business, which is why working with license-regulated compliant um businesses are key, but even license-regulated compliant businesses uh might have practices which are a little bit suspect.
• 11:03
  Justin Friedman: Tell me about your customer.
• 11:06
  Josiah Senu: I I think we have a variety of different customers.
• 11:10
  Josiah Senu: Um, if I boiled it down to what is the crystallizing thought, it's a business which operates internationally and a consumer a consumer that spends and buys internationally.
• 11:24
  Josiah Senu: Like that is fundamentally the customer.
• 11:26
  Josiah Senu: And that means for that customer, a USD account is the central account of operations because the majority of international trade on commerce will happen in that currency.
• 11:36
  Josiah Senu: That that world is changing, by the way.
• 11:37
  Josiah Senu: Like, you know, like let's not take it for granted, right?
• 11:40
  Josiah Senu: Table coins that comes at a materially important time, but that's the truth, right?
• 11:44
  Josiah Senu: That's the the world as we see it today.
• 11:46
  Josiah Senu: Um, then the question is okay, what are what are the different types of customers, right?
• 11:50
  Josiah Senu: And you've got everything from you know your crypto exchanges to your Tradfire businesses, um, you've got your payroll companies, you've got your remittance businesses, the classic use cases that require infrastructure to be able to support their customers.
• 12:03
  Josiah Senu: And then you've got the importers and exporters who need a business banking account, who need corporate treasury, needs access to um a credit, to yield, and a whole variety and slew of different products to serve.
• 12:14
  Josiah Senu: So I often think actually the way to think about our our customer is is um you know what what are they trying to do?
• 12:22
  Josiah Senu: What problem are they trying to solve um in the world of moving money and making money, growing money and becoming more wealthy?
• 12:32
  Justin Friedman: So you hit on a few you know well-known use cases for cross-border money movement.
• 12:39
  Justin Friedman: But when you think about stable coins, what is the biggest opportunity that you haven't seen solved yet?
• 12:52
  Josiah Senu: Probably um just in time settlement at a merchant acquiring level.
• 12:59
  Josiah Senu: Um you know, ultimately the world of card acquiring is still one of pre-funded balances, credit facility arrangements between um networks and acquirers and issuers.
• 13:12
  Josiah Senu: Um and I think there's a gap here that's interesting to solve.
• 13:16
  Josiah Senu: I also think when it comes to um a point of sale, so a a closed loop ecosystem, uh my my sense is that businesses like Starbucks and and Target, etc., where the merchant has its own stablecoin and is using that to manage its operations and almost businesses becoming um quasi banks.
• 13:44
  Josiah Senu: Um uh you know, I use that in a in a soft way.
• 13:48
  Josiah Senu: Financial platforms, but but yeah, ultimately, right, like these platforms that are now able to manage um the economics of their business much better, which should hopefully then translate into uh a superior experience cost for uh the business or consumer.
• 14:07
  Justin Friedman: Do consumers know about stable coins?
• 14:10
  Justin Friedman: Do they care about stable coins?
• 14:13
  Josiah Senu: It depends on what part of the world you're talking about.
• 14:15
  Justin Friedman: Yeah.
• 14:16
  Josiah Senu: Right?
• 14:16
  Josiah Senu: Um if you're talking about a merchant or consumer in Lagos, yeah.
• 14:20
  Josiah Senu: I mean they care about stable coins a lot because USDT is a great way for me to be able to move money, have it as a store of value.
• 14:26
  Josiah Senu: If I'm in Venezuela, I care about stable coins a lot, right?
• 14:29
  Josiah Senu: Um, but if I'm a European or American merchant, I don't know if I care about stable coins that much.
• 14:34
  Josiah Senu: I don't know if I care as much because if there's no real direct contributing value, there's no 10x in the way I operate, it's maybe like a 1x or a 2x, right?
• 14:43
  Josiah Senu: So you've got to find the right use cases in order to sort to support um that that fund flow.
• 14:48
  Josiah Senu: So um I guess if the question is like why do stable coins matter, I don't think they matter necessarily today directly for a business or consumer using it, but it does matter from an infrastructure perspective, um, because it's it's in my view what is civilizationally important, which is this permissionless protocol.
• 15:09
  Josiah Senu: Um, and that is a really fundamental architectural design of the world as we know it.
• 15:15
  Josiah Senu: You know, everyone's talking about AI, and you know, great, I love AI too, but but there's something actually really fundamental happening um at the base layer of money movement, of money as a concept, right?
• 15:25
  Josiah Senu: Um, which people are missing.
• 15:27
  Josiah Senu: And if you miss it, um it might be too late.
• 15:30
  Justin Friedman: Do you see some potential to more economically move smaller amounts of money that you know just don't earn enough revenue for legacy traditional money movers to care about today?
• 15:44
  Justin Friedman: Aaron Ross Powell For sure, right?
• 15:46
  Josiah Senu: Micropayments are massive, um, where you know if it's an on-chain transaction and the gas fee is effectively negligible.
• 15:54
  Josiah Senu: And so if you're doing an on-chain transaction, I mean even on-chain effects of atomic swaps between currencies, you're doing an immersion point of sale, naturally you're going to end up in a world for sure where like for that specific use case.
• 16:06
  Josiah Senu: Of course, for a business to make money or for that, you need a you know uh a unit economic model where you know the cost of acquisition of that customer, the money that you're getting back, and the payback that you have over time still makes a lot of sense.
• 16:19
  Josiah Senu: That is typically one of the more challenging businesses to make profitable because the volume matters more than the individual customer.
• 16:27
  Justin Friedman: So uh you mentioned earlier that Zuba leans into compliance first, and I understand you know you look to work with licensed partners in country.
• 16:38
  Justin Friedman: So can you talk about how you vet those partners, what you look for, what does your ideal partner look like?
• 16:46
  Josiah Senu: Yeah, I I think there are often a variety of different gates that a business might have for assessing a partner, right?
• 16:53
  Josiah Senu: You might say, look, you know, in terms of balance sheet risk and liquidity, you need to be doing X million in volume, or you know, you need to be over around for like you know, been around for more than five years, or something along those lines, or you know, you need to have X number of credible partners, and we need to trust that you're someone in the ecosystem to be able to work with.
• 17:10
  Justin Friedman: Yeah, or you know, maybe you've survived a full credit cycle, you know.
• 17:15
  Justin Friedman: Exactly, right?
• 17:16
  Josiah Senu: Like we know you're not gonna go bust, right?
• 17:19
  Josiah Senu: Like, you know, like are you insured?
• 17:20
  Josiah Senu: Do you have insurance?
• 17:21
  Josiah Senu: You know, what what happens if you guys do something wrong?
• 17:23
  Josiah Senu: Can I get my money back?
• 17:24
  Josiah Senu: Uh these these are questions that you know we we've got to ask and we and we do ask, right?
• 17:30
  Josiah Senu: Um the the reality is that you can never truly 100% know, and no system in the world is foolproof, fail-proof, it just doesn't exist.
• 17:40
  Josiah Senu: But we go through the most rigorous structures and processes that we can to try and reduce that risk because that matters for our customer.
• 17:49
  Josiah Senu: Our customer needs to know, right, that the money is gonna get paid.
• 17:52
  Josiah Senu: Like it's the most fundamental, the most important thing.
• 17:55
  Josiah Senu: Are we obsessed about that one thing in the markets where it's the hardest to do?
• 18:03
  Justin Friedman: So blockchain, on-chain transactions are really fundamentally reinventing the way we do financial services.
• 18:14
  Justin Friedman: Not everyone is seeing it in the United States.
• 18:17
  Justin Friedman: Um, it's not really apparent in most people's daily life.
• 18:21
  Justin Friedman: But as you mentioned, there are places in the world where people deal with volatile currencies and there are capital controls and they look on-chain for solutions to problems that have never been solved by the incumbent financial system.
• 18:36
  Justin Friedman: So, uh what's your vision of the future?
• 18:39
  Justin Friedman: Think 10 years ahead.
• 18:42
  Justin Friedman: Like, are there places where fiat currency will have ceased to be relevant?
• 18:48
  Josiah Senu: I I love this question.
• 18:49
  Josiah Senu: Um Maybe I'm a pioneer, but maybe I'm not a pioneer enough.
• 18:55
  Josiah Senu: Um who knows?
• 18:56
  Josiah Senu: The world the in 10 years' time we'll see if whether or not my prediction is correct.
• 18:59
  Josiah Senu: But but I effectively think you're gonna have massive interoperability in the world of of fiat and and crypto.
• 19:06
  Josiah Senu: Um I I I've just history has shown us that um no system of exchange gets totally and entirely eradicated.
• 19:15
  Josiah Senu: It simply evolves and changes, and consumer and business behavior will dictate where the fun flow and the movement will be.
• 19:24
  Josiah Senu: Um my sense is that increasingly um what will happen is that stable coins will enable, again, this idea of this permissionless protocol where ultimately uh money is moving on on a cryptographic basis of trust, on a ledger, that then enables counterparties to move that money more freely without needing to have nostra and vostra accounts across different financial institutions.
• 19:49
  Josiah Senu: That feels like a fundamental re-architect and uh redesign of the way money moves, right?
• 19:55
  Josiah Senu: Um that's not to say though that it means everyone's gonna be holding USDC, USDT in their you know wallets and they're gonna be spending that.
• 20:01
  Josiah Senu: Maybe they do spend that.
• 20:03
  Josiah Senu: Maybe there are particular use cases, right, where uh you know an immigrant travels abroad and goes somewhere, they've got Nigerian IRA or they've got Brazilian Are and then end up ultimately paying for that um at its merchant point of sale, and there's an atomic swap happening that it's converting into the USDT balance, USDC balance, it's getting paid, the merchant decides whether or not they want to get paid in stable coins or in local currency.
• 20:25
  Josiah Senu: Like that these, of course, these use cases like massively exist.
• 20:28
  Josiah Senu: Um what will the world look like?
• 20:31
  Josiah Senu: I think with AI is going to be a more fundamental change to that world.
• 20:35
  Josiah Senu: I think things will be happening at a far more agentic level.
• 20:38
  Josiah Senu: I think maybe humans themselves will not be conducting transactions.
• 20:42
  Josiah Senu: Perhaps humans themselves might not be even be, you know, operating root and doing real work anymore.
• 20:46
  Josiah Senu: There'll be a different type of work.
• 20:49
  Justin Friedman: So we're getting way beyond the scope of the stable pulse here, future of work.
• 20:53
  Justin Friedman: But uh I do have a I want to drill down a little bit on this.
• 20:57
  Justin Friedman: Do you see a do you see room in the future for issuance in local currency on-chain?
• 21:05
  Justin Friedman: So stable coins denominated in uh, you know, there's I don't know how many currencies there are in the world, a couple hundred maybe, um and certainly dozens across the continent of Africa where you're doing business.
• 21:20
  Justin Friedman: And so my question is, uh, can more value stay on-chain if those currency pairs exist so people can send remittances in US dollars, say, to Africa and uh make the foreign exchange on-chain?
• 21:36
  Justin Friedman: And can that value stay on-chain?
• 21:38
  Justin Friedman: And is there um is there uh a usefulness of that, or do we inevitably still see off ramping to fiat in the future?
• 21:48
  Josiah Senu: I think off ramping will still exist.
• 21:50
  Josiah Senu: Uh I I I by no means think it'll it will disappear.
• 21:53
  Josiah Senu: Um I think it will just be maybe consolidated with a few more larger players.
• 21:57
  Josiah Senu: I do think there is a world 100%.
• 21:59
  Josiah Senu: Where you can have local stablecoin issuance.
• 22:03
  Josiah Senu: It does require widespread adoption, though, and everyone needs to go on there.
• 22:08
  Josiah Senu: But you need liquidity, right?
• 22:10
  Josiah Senu: But but my view here is that what incentive, truthfully speaking, does an economy which has a weak balance of payments, which is a net importer, which is subject to huge fluctuations, which has deep capital controls, what incentive do they have to pumping up a their to digitizing their local currency when everybody's gonna move out of it?
• 22:34
  Josiah Senu: Valid.
• 22:36
  Josiah Senu: Yeah.
• 22:38
  Justin Friedman: I do wonder if uh there is a future where there are stronger, more stable currencies that um exist as stable coins, and then you have a choice, right?
• 22:49
  Justin Friedman: It it's not necessarily just USD.
• 22:51
  Justin Friedman: It might be a digital euro, it may be a digital yuan, I don't know.
• 22:56
  Justin Friedman: But um that could be very interesting, where today the status quo is you know domestic currency and it may be volatile.
• 23:05
  Justin Friedman: In the future, that may become less relevant, but now you have a choice of global reserve currencies.
• 23:12
  Josiah Senu: Yeah, I I think that's interesting for sure.
• 23:14
  Josiah Senu: So the idea that global reserve currencies are are ultimately going to uh be one of uh either the euro or the wan or the dollar.
• 23:26
  Josiah Senu: Um I think I think the euro today is the second largest reserve currency in the world.
• 23:30
  Josiah Senu: Um and then you have the Wan, right?
• 23:32
  Josiah Senu: And that that that seems that for me is probably the most um interesting uh conversation, right?
• 23:39
  Josiah Senu: Because if you look at China today, it has over 40 um bilateral currency swap agreements with nations across the world, it has um its the the its interbank settlement system already set up um with over a hundred over a hundred different countries.
• 23:52
  Josiah Senu: Um it is ultimately already operating in a way which is enabling your instant settlement.
• 23:57
  Josiah Senu: And when you think about it, right, like uh the US has left the emerging markets and China has entered the emerging markets.
• 24:04
  Josiah Senu: And when you're talking about globalization and fast urbanizing populations and where money will settle and where that money clears, it's not cle it's not going to clear in USD unless you have this uh increasing dollarization, right, with through stable coins and people moving into it.
• 24:20
  Josiah Senu: Um so you know, if you're looking even between these global reserve currencies and what they could what they could be, there is, you know, today it's the dollar, but you know, I I I see no reason actually why it couldn't be the the one or I mean unlikely to be the euro that you know they they sort of need to relax with the regulation.
• 24:37
  Justin Friedman: Okay, let's finish on one more leadership question.
• 24:40
  Justin Friedman: What are you looking for in the team that you build at Zuba and how do you keep them motivated?
• 24:47
  Josiah Senu: Um I'll start in in rever in reverse.
• 24:50
  Josiah Senu: Um how we keep them motivated is that um we are tackling the hardest infrastructure problem in fintech today, I believe.
• 24:59
  Josiah Senu: The market that we have chosen has the highest remittance costs of anywhere in the world.
• 25:03
  Josiah Senu: It struggles from huge regulator regulatory challenges.
• 25:06
  Josiah Senu: In some cases, there is no regulation which governs the activities in which you're trying to perform.
• 25:10
  Josiah Senu: It struggles from huge amounts of political risk and governmental instability.
• 25:14
  Josiah Senu: So it's hard to build infrastructure that allows us to the test of time.
• 25:18
  Josiah Senu: You have you have an economy which is still heavily impoverished, and so you need people to be able to contribute to that economy, to grow it, to change the balance of payments.
• 25:26
  Josiah Senu: We've chosen the hardest market and the hardest infrastructure in the world.
• 25:29
  Josiah Senu: You know, for the most rock star people who have the biggest minds, who have the like who are hardcore, who want to solve real problems and change the world, this is exactly the problem to be solving, and that's an easy sell to anyone who likes hard things.
• 25:42
  Josiah Senu: Then how do you keep them motivated, right?
• 25:44
  Josiah Senu: Like, you know, how that like what do we do to find that, to find the right talent?
• 25:48
  Josiah Senu: Um, I think number one is is and and and it will always be the case for us, is our culture and our values.
• 25:54
  Josiah Senu: So, you know, number one, it's it'd be unreasonable.
• 25:57
  Josiah Senu: The problem we're solving requires an extraordinary outcome, therefore it requires an extraordinary input.
• 26:02
  Josiah Senu: Uh, number two, stay sharp.
• 26:03
  Josiah Senu: There are countless numbers of people who I meet who are not in the details of anything, right?
• 26:08
  Josiah Senu: You ask them what a virtual account is, you get 10 different descriptions, which mean absolutely nothing.
• 26:13
  Josiah Senu: Right?
• 26:13
  Josiah Senu: Like people don't understand what they're solving.
• 26:15
  Josiah Senu: You have many entrepreneurs building on the space and they truly don't understand.
• 26:18
  Josiah Senu: That's why these conversations are so fundamentally important, and we want a team that's involved and embedded in the detail, who's actually gone to computer village in Lagos, who's actually spoken to the merchant and who's actually tried to facilitate the trade directly.
• 26:30
  Josiah Senu: And then I think the the third and most important thing for us is being known for our obsession.
• 26:35
  Josiah Senu: And what that means is we are people who fundamentally care above everything to solve the problem, and we will go to the ends of the earth to go and solve it.
• 26:44
  Josiah Senu: And you know, for me, these are the types of people that we want to be working with because we know they can never be stopped.
• 26:50
  Justin Friedman: I think I can sum it up.
• 26:51
  Justin Friedman: Passion.
• 26:52
  Justin Friedman: You're looking for passion.
• 26:54
  Justin Friedman: So if you're a fixer and you want to work in international money movement, reach out to Josiah.
• 27:01
  Josiah Senu: Absolutely.
• 27:02
  Josiah Senu: And and passion is infectious, right?
• 27:04
  Josiah Senu: Like it tickles you from the inside and you know makes you jump up with glee and you want to go attack things, right?
• 27:10
  Josiah Senu: Um, I I I we we regularly play football as a team actually on Monday evenings, and you know, on that pitch, you see some of the most competitive and fierce fighters anywhere in the world.
• 27:20
  Josiah Senu: I truly believe that we have the best team in the world, and it's only a matter of time before I hope at least the emerging markets will see it.
• 27:26
  Justin Friedman: When you move to the US, are you still gonna call it football?
• 27:30
  Josiah Senu: Yeah, maybe maybe then it's it's soccer.
• 27:32
  Josiah Senu: You know, we've got to adapt to our local environments, but the the the Brit in me might still say it's football.
• 27:38
  Justin Friedman: Josiah Senu, founder of Zuba, thank you so much.
• 27:42
  Justin Friedman: It was a pleasure having you on the stable pulse.