On this bonus episode of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, is joined by Chris Harmse, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder @ BVNK and John O'Brien, Chief Revenue Officer @ dLocal, to discuss the BVNK and dLocal partnership for global payouts, real-world stablecoin use cases and more!
On this bonus episode of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, is joined by Chris Harmse, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder @ BVNK and John O'Brien, Chief Revenue Officer @ dLocal, to discuss the BVNK and dLocal partnership for global payouts, real-world stablecoin use cases and more!
Timestamps:
This episode is brought to you by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
This podcast is also presented by BVNK
BVNK is the leading provider of stablecoin payments infrastructure—helping businesses move money faster, settle globally, and even launch their own stablecoin products. Head to BVNK.com to learn more!
***
We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Sy Taylor 00:00
Matt, welcome to a bonus episode of tokenized, the show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of real world assets. I have the pleasure of being joined by Chris arms, Chief Business Officer and co founder of bvnk, and John O'Brien, Chief Revenue Officer at D local, to discuss some incredible news. And yes, you may remember both of these gentlemen from the last new show we just did. So this story comes from everywhere you managed to break the internet, and bvnk and D local are going to partner to power faster global payouts with stable coins. I could tell you a little bit about the partnership, but John, why don't you take it away with this partnership? What you guys are doing at delocal and what customers you're serving, for
John 01:01
sure. Thanks, Simon. So the local for folks who don't know, is an enterprise focused business that operates solely in emerging markets. So we help merchants and fintech businesses collect and disperse funds into over 40 emerging markets today, and we're super excited about the deeper collaboration we're kicking off with Chris and the rest of the team at bvnk. We've been working with the guys to help us with real world problems, to be frank about it in our markets, which don't know how much you know about emerging markets, Simon, how much you cover it on the podcast here, it's a lot of challenges every day you work with those markets, and you're particularly reliant on having good partners and dealing with good people, and we started our relationship there with Chris and the team, with solving really specific issues in Africa for us, with liquidating positions that we had there to make sure we weren't building up stock, et cetera, we could pay our merchants some time. And of course, that was all done through stablecoin. We started it almost, I think, four years, almost four years ago now, Chris, I think it was probably early 2022, when we started doing it, and those volumes are now really, really significant as it relates to the Treasury side of our business. Over the course of the last year, myself and Cobo, who's one of the co founders of delocal, and our prior CEO, I'd been discussing with Chris and the founding team, other ways to collaborate that we saw could be beneficial to bvnk and to ourselves as well, particularly given BV and Kay's expertise in the stablecoin space and off ramp capabilities that the local has as well, not just in Latin America, but also across Africa, Middle East and Southeast Asia. So given, I think, the high level of utilization of stablecoins in emerging markets, and the fact that our relationship was more born out of solving like a real, tangible challenge and problem for us as well, it felt very natural for us to expand the relationship with Chris and the team and see if we can go and solve more front end problems together as well. And we're very excited to be building with the team there, and I think we can help each other a lot in the spaces we have done over the course of the last three years, and offer a pretty differentiated experience for people who are looking for stablecoin and off ramp solutions in emerging markets.
Sy Taylor 03:09
Chris, obviously you've been working with a lot of folks in our new show. You talked about, kind of going from Treasury to payouts being the next big step. How much are the payouts use cases scaling? I know you did a partnership with WorldPay recently. And what is it about that use case that you think applies in this case particular? Yeah,
Chris Harmse 03:26
I mean, I'd like to, and I'd like to call out, like, it's a bit of a secret that John and team at D local were really kind of, like the first PSP to do the stable coin sandwich. You know, we were solving those treasury problems in Africa for them four years ago, as you said. And remember, you know, when I mentioned PSPs generally started, hey, I've got a treasury problem. Can stablecoin solve it? Answer is yes, and you can do it at scale. Then they quickly, as John mentioned, realize, actually there's a bunch of other use cases around payouts, pay ins. Let's start expanding that. And this is really where this partnership is going. You know, it's now expanding into a dual partnership. We starting to provide stablecoin pains and payouts to D local and the underlying merchants, but equally, we integrating D locals payouts capability in these emerging markets into our layer one payments platform, and really able to terminate stablecoin payouts in local currency and vice versa. So I think you're seeing a lot of excitement around payouts in stable coins, but also payouts in stable coins that land in local bank accounts, that land in mobile wallets, and that's where D local's great network across emerging markets comes into play. Yeah, people
Sy Taylor 04:34
always ask me about the last mile problem, John, but that's one that's probably very familiar to you. Talk to me about, like, the economics of using the stablecoin sandwich versus going more traditional routes for the person that's making the payout. So if you guys are settling into an end bank account, fire stablecoins. Who's this benefiting and how
John 04:52
primarily the cases that we see today, Simon are when people want to fund those for stablecoins for. Edo funding and to avoid some of these other cases with pre funding that I think we discussed on the prior podcasts, you know, where you're doing swift wires, etc, waiting two or three days to clear and pay things out. So we saw those use cases very similar, I think, to what Chris is seeing within his own portfolio with payroll and employer of record companies and also remittance companies. The cost is, I think one benefit to it, from a treasury repair perspective, I know when we were doing this for markets apps and helping him pay us in USDC, for him, it's more about speed. You know, the cost efficiency is there, but it's more about speed and optionality, and being able to do that over a weekend, and us not having to open up a line for him that he's got to pay for, etc, as well. In terms of economics, Simon just depends on what necessarily is going to be happening as relates to the off ramp. So in some cases, as Chris knows, you'll be paying straight through with either usdt or USDC, where we're doing the off ramp, and paying into local currency, depending on the nature of the business and the size, like all FX business, it's related to the size of the trades that people are going to be doing, to what the economics typically look like. But already in our markets, these are very low cost infrastructure settlements through picks and mobile money and other things. The effects, of course, just depends on the nature of the market and how things are operated there. You know, for remittances, as the example I gave, many of those are regulated in our markets there, and governments offer rebates for receiving currency, etc. So definitely varies in our markets. But I think the infrastructure cost has been taken down by uh, the likes of bvnk and other companies coming along and providing the infrastructure to merchants to be able to do the funding to companies like ours as well and take that conversion and not necessarily have to handle cryptocurrency themselves, right?
Sy Taylor 06:48
Yeah, that complexity of handling the crypto is something that a lot of folks really get concerned about. Chris, do you see that changing? Or do you think that's going to be the case for the foreseeable
Chris Harmse 06:58
look, I think with solutions like ours and our layer one programmable payments platform, we take care of all of that abstraction and complication of the blockchain away, and then add in one or two licenses, and then you've got a full stack suite where a merchant or a PSP can just arrive with a bank account and an API integration and get access to these new payment trails. So I think people are definitely leaning into it. You know, we've seen all the momentum in the market more broadly. And I think everyone's more comfortable, as John mentioned recently, everyone's more comfortable to have a stable coin conversation. Or, you know, can you provide this sort of funding method? Are you able to pay out? And if you can take care of them in an enterprise ready infrastructure stack, then, you know, I think we're only going to see it grow from here. Heck,
Sy Taylor 07:39
yeah. All right, well, is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have? Gentlemen, for
Chris Harmse 07:43
me, I think you know what to expect going forward. I think for us, it's more corridor expansion. We're doing more integrations, and I think crucially, more production scale use cases. These use cases are getting to scale. It's moving trillions of dollars of TPV. So yeah, we just excited about being useful and getting some of these amazing use cases we've been talking about to scale and into the hands of more merchants and PSPs. Well,
Sy Taylor 08:04
I learned something today, John, I didn't realize you were one of the pioneers of the stablecoin sandwich in production. So thank you so much for doing that work. I think a lot of folks now will be very grateful that you were there doing that stuff four years ago and building from that base. John, of course, if people want to learn more about D local. Where do they go to do that?
John 08:22
Yeah, just delocal.com. Folks can find me as well on LinkedIn. I'm not too active, Simon, as I mentioned on the last podcast, on social media generally, but yeah, always happy to talk FinTech and particularly crypto and stable coins with our customers. And as we mentioned earlier, we're super focused on getting that merchant feedback and building these real world use cases. And it's a lot of fun for our team as well to actually go from having something that was a bit more back office and Treasury to being like a tangible product, thing that people can build, get excited about and actually solve real world use cases too. And it said cool to do with Chris and people that we know and have worked with for a long time as well. So team is super excited about that and happy to take a new offering to market.
Sy Taylor 09:01
Heck, yeah. And Chris, you and bvnk,
Chris Harmse 09:04
just bvnk.com and you can find me at Chris Holmes on LinkedIn.
Sy Taylor 09:07
You'll find me at sy Taylor everywhere@sardine.ai, and fintech brainfood.com and you'll find more of this podcast if you go ahead and subscribe and share it with your friends, if you're enjoying what we're doing, and we'll see you soon.