On Ep. 2 of Stablecoin Stories, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo and Ran Goldi, VP Payments, Fireblocks are joined by Anthony Soohoo, Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram to discuss the transformation of MoneyGram's mission, MoneyGram Ramps and more!
On Ep. 2 of Stablecoin Stories, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo and Ran Goldi, VP Payments, Fireblocks are joined by Anthony Soohoo, Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram to discuss the transformation of MoneyGram's mission, MoneyGram Ramps and more!
Timestamps:
Tokenized is sponsored 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.
Tokenized is also presented by Fireblocks
With over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, Fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold, and manage stablecoins. And it’s all done securely, at scale, and with built-in compliance. Learn more at fireblocks.com
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Music by Henry McLean
Sy Taylor 00:00
Simon, welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon tai I am your host for today, author at FinTech brain food and head of market dev over at tempo. And my goodness, I am joined by one heck of a co host for this week's stable coin stories is Rand Goldie, aka Goldie, the one and only SVP of payments and network at fire blocks. Goldie, how are you and why don't you remind the audience a little bit about what stable coin stories is and what we're doing here.
Ran Goldi 00:42
Hey, Simon, yeah, no, I'm super excited for this episode, as we'll unveil very soon. We have a very special guest now. This series is really about the stable coin stories behind what's happening right now, behind the hype, the world is filled it feels right now with stable coins, people are waking up to this new reality of stable coins everywhere, especially, obviously, if you live on LinkedIn, we're here to tell the story behind the coin. There are untold stories that are creating the tectonic ships we're filming today, and we've been doing this for a while, so trust me, the industry has some interesting stories at the back. So today we're going to ask our guests, what's the story behind what they're doing in stable coins.
Sy Taylor 01:22
So joining us today is Anthony suhu, who is chairman and CEO of MoneyGram.
Anthony Soohoo 01:28
Anthony, how are you doing? Sir, I'm doing great. Thank you for inviting me here. No thanks
Sy Taylor 01:33
for being with us and bringing the MoneyGram feel to it and really excited to get into your story. But just before we do, I gotta remind viewers and listeners the views and opinions of contributors of their own and might not reflect those of their company. Please don't take anything we say as tax, legal or financial advice, and always do your own research if it's anything of that nature. We are not selling investments. We are telling stories and a stable coin story and a half. Anthony. You have, Anthony, I want you to start with your story before we get to MoneyGram. So take us back. You've had this fascinating career arc from big tech to retail to media to all kinds of places and now payments and stable coins. So what's your story? Where were you before MoneyGram, and what brought you over to moneygrass.
Anthony Soohoo 02:21
Yeah, so I am actually a byproduct of an immigrant household, so I'm actually the first person in my family to graduate from high school. And the fortunate thing, and there's a longer story to it, is that I grew up in San Francisco, and there's a reason how I ended up in San Francisco with my family when they immigrated from Hong Kong, but I ended up being in some of the middle schools with some of the early computers, because Apple donated a bunch of computers at a young age, I think at 11 or 12, I learned a program, and then that led me towards a career in tech. Initially in high school, I paid off some of my bills by programming for local businesses. Ended up doing an internship with Apple. Then subsequently, that launched my whole career in tech. The first part of my career was really working inside tech companies like Apple, like ink, to me, one of the pioneers in early web, one search as well as Yahoo. And then something kind of interesting happened the second part of my career, which is I decided to become an entrepreneur after Yahoo, and one of the companies I started was acquired by CBS, which usually when they acquire a person or a company, and they typically put you in a corner, and they take your tech, and a tech that we're using was to power CBS news and entertainment tonight, but actually at the time, Senator redstone or Les Moonves asked me to Take over the digital entertainment division, and so with no media experience, I jumped right in and ended up leading their early efforts to take him to streaming. That was a very successful tenure in terms of what happened there for the company, signed to early deals with YouTube, with Netflix, as well as really getting them on the track to be a leader in streaming and then subsequently, because of that experience, 10 years later, it led me to helping transform part of the E commerce business at Walmart, and then helped them with their om channel transformation. After that, find myself here at money grow. That's a
Ran Goldi 04:15
really interesting word. You said that transformation because you saw firsthand the transformation of PCs and computers and the Internet, and you were part of the transformation, I guess, and for entertainment to come online. MoneyGram has been around for a long time. It's a household name, and when you became chairman, CEO, it was wherein the company was taking private again, there's a real question of what you inherit, right? Like, what's the say of the business? What's the mandate for you to transform MoneyGram as I know you've been doing behind the scenes?
Anthony Soohoo 04:48
Well, what I would say is that I was really excited about the MoneyGram opportunity because of what the company represented for the world. So when you think about it, the organization or MoneyGram as. Business operates in over 200 countries and territories across 20,000 corridors. But the real magical thing is they created this really global network with close to 500,000 retail locations in about 5 billion digital endpoints. So when you think about the far reach of that as a global payments network, it was a network that was only surpassed by a few small players that are out in the world in terms of global payments network, and they had focused the organization to focus in this remittance business, which I thought was a really amazing, interesting need around the world. It was for people to be able to send money back home to loved ones. And when I started thinking about what that really meant, it resonated and brought me back to my own story, growing up in an immigrant household where I saw my parents send money back to their people back in Hong Kong. And the thing about that send is that while people think it's actually a send of money, it's actually a send of support. Now it's also in many cultures around the world, sending money is a representation of love, which I loved, and it's really built into the name money Graham, that I'm sending you versions of love. And so, you know, when I came in, I saw a business with this vast potential of what it could be come and we've been marching down this, what we call a re founding, which is to take the best parts of what made the company great, while rethinking how we need to operate, to expand use cases and expand this business. And as we've done that, we've also sharpened a little bit more on our mission, which is to connect the world by making movement money across borders, seamless, affordable and secure for everyone, so that people in community can realize their potential. I would say I've been here now over one year, and I've been just super excited, as well as just inspired by all the stories from our customers that we enable. And just couldn't be more excited to be here to lead this transformation.
Sy Taylor 07:01
I love the RE founding frame. I hadn't really considered that frame before, but re founding is such a way to take a company back to its founding mission and its founder mode. Arguably. Satya has done it in Microsoft, and there are probably a few other examples where people have done this really, really well. So how has that manifested for you? What have your last 12 months look like, what are the key focus areas for the business? Because I look at MoneyGram, and I think there's a real jewel in the crown there, in terms of your distribution. But working back from that, what have you been set about doing over the last 12 months?
Anthony Soohoo 07:34
Well, I would say, like everything else in my career, it all starts with a customer. And as I studied what our customers are doing, what they have. We really provide and democratize finance for a good portion of the world, I would say. And when we think about that, outside of just sending funds, what are other things that we might be able to help them do? I think that under the refounding umbrella, it gives us a lot more flexibility, as well as allows us to be more liberal in terms of how we think about our market, Tai am, as well as all the services that we can actually provide. And so as a result, we ended up thinking about starting with the customer all the products that they need. And I think one of the biggest and things we're most excited about is we recently just launched our in Colombia, and now in total seven countries, our receiver side wallet, because what we're actually doing is we're providing people now with access to funds, but taking that out in their time and giving empower them to be able to access and have more power and control over their financial lives.
Sy Taylor 08:37
I think that's such a shift. We've talked about this a lot on the tokenized podcast that, historically, a remittance business monetized the sender, the person who had emigrated somewhere else and was sending money back home, but there was nothing you could wrap around the beneficiary and the recipient.
Ran Goldi 08:54
So I think that's actually a really important point. Because first of all, people ask you, me and probably Anthony, all the time, like, what's the real use case for stable coins? And I think they really help in, like you were saying, capturing the receiver side as well, because a lot of functionality that now companies can do. And again, this is a great segue for the MoneyGram story is an amazing story. And again, an 85 year old company that you are now re founding. I love that phrase as well. I'm definitely going to use that. I hope our CEO is not going to be mad when they tell him we're refunding the company. But let's bring the stable coin angle into this. So when did stable coins became more than something interesting or worth a look to MoneyGram, to something that we will actually want to build a business on this?
Anthony Soohoo 09:42
Yeah, I would say, by the way, I think folks over at fire blocks are not going to have issues with the term refounding as long as they don't change a cap table on anyone, right? Yeah, fair. But what I would say is that when I came on board, and I just spent my whole career and where I see. That companies typically get wrong is when they start with a technology to look for a problem to solve. And when I came on board at MoneyGram, the thing I saw was a company that had 85 years, as Coley had mentioned, in operating and had a rich history of problems they were solving, and also the potential to solve many other new customer problems that were not previously enabled but were now possible with technology. And I would say that the idea of helping someone protect themselves when they receive against inflation in high inflationary environments was certainly very attractive. The ability to give them financial access to rails or access to capital that they might not have previously accessed. I think all of that kind of played into this idea of what we wanted to do with refounding and then going back to the stable coin bit, it's really important, as I mentioned before, that any company when they're launching technology, you start with the customer problem, and really understand that in a high fidelity way, very deeply, and I would say, intimately, as an organization, and then figure out what are the best things that you can do without just doing a me too product like everyone else, to be able to provide differentiation in a product. I would say that the big thing for us as a muscle was to focus on making sure that we were solving not just real life problems, but really real customer problems. And when we were doing that, I think it goes beyond just press releases, because, you know, there's so much noise right now in the crypto space, especially with stable coin, that everyone's talking about it. But being a student of history, I would say the most interesting thing about this is that most industries get launched and when they don't really hit the inflection point of adoption, until they figure out the killer app the PC had the idea of, I would say the killer app for the PC industry was really the spreadsheet with Lotus, 123, the internet. The killer app there was a browser. And then, when you think about it for mobile, things like Uber and others were made possible because of the mobile phone. I think it's the same thing here, where crypto, for a while, was kind of searching for use cases from developing satellite coins, so you can make sure at all times you have access to your coins to many other different use cases. When I walked around early days and checking that out, it reminded me of the PC industry. You heard in the old days, Steve Jobs used to talk about they thought that the apple two was best used to collect recipes, and obviously the spreadsheet was really the thing that launched it. And I think we're in early stages of crypto, or specifically stable coin, being that killer app, not just for the industry, but I would say, for the world. I think it's going to touch every part of our economy. And it's just a really exciting time to be here. I'm curious
Sy Taylor 12:57
why that is from a customer perspective, like, what is it giving them? Give me an AB test on the customer experience you have before and the customer experience you have today. Like, what's different in the timing and the experience in the field, especially to the recipient?
Anthony Soohoo 13:13
Well, it's our goal at MoneyGram is to provide our services, as I mentioned, by allowing our customers to save time, effort and money, and when we think about all three of those, one is, how do we save them time? How do we save them effort, and how do we save them money? And in terms of doing that, I think, honestly, stable coin touches all three. In terms of saving time, we can do it in real time. You can actually get to real time sense, which is an amazing unlock. And then number two is in terms of effort, I think, in terms of verification and and the idea and the safety of blockchain, it's just going to unlock a new level of in the future, I think authentication and tokenization of that piece of thing that you're sending. And then overall, if we can make the operations more cost effective, we can make it very cost effective for the customer. In fact, I can see many use cases where money, where I might not even charge a fee at all to share with the customers on these sends on something that costs a lot of money. And that comes from my understanding in my five and a half six years at Walmart, which is the beauty of their motto, is it? What they do is they try to offer the lowest price, which drives volume, volume drives then allows them to lower the cost structure, which allows them to pass the savings back to their customer. And I believe that that's what we want to do on that front. Also, the way we run our business. Stable coins can be a huge unlock and a different version of a killer app for the B to B, because it allows us to manage our treasury without needing to pre fund and forecast. Well, it's going to allow us to settle in real time instead of t plus one, say it happens in t plus zero, it allows us to be able to handle our risk in a much better sense. When you do that. And so what I think it touches when I think about moneygrams business, and many people don't think about it this way, but we really are a B to B to C, and across that whole end to end of B to B to C, there's a massive role for stablecoin to allow our industry to work better.
Sy Taylor 15:18
What fascinates me about the B to B to C is people forget that you are in the business, not just of consumers, but in businesses. And we see that corporate treasury use case come up a lot on our podcast, but let's go nerdy now and away from the customer. You've talked a little bit about real time money movement there, but that instant ledgering for people that don't live the CFO job every single day, for people that don't have that experience of trying to manage risk and waiting for settlement to happen, talk to me about the difference that feels like to a CFO and your business customers. What have you heard them say to you, and what are you seeing adoption look like from them?
Anthony Soohoo 16:00
Yeah, just a disclaimer, I'm not a CFO, but I'll try to play one on TV here. Yeah? Well, we're all lolling in some way, yeah. And so I would say, as if I was a CFO. The thing I really love about the role of crypto, or specifically stable coin, is, first the idea. Let's start today, how money moves around the world. So someone walks in a store, let's just say, or they send it from their app. It gets sent to a location, and then on the other side, most of the time, they have to convert it back into cash, where it costs, actually a lot of money to kind of manage cash. The reason is, you have to take the stakes of moving physical money around. Actually, there's a huge cost there in terms of logistics, as well as from security hiring, I would say, armored cars to move money around. It's a very expensive proposition on that type of supply chain. What you're talking about with a digital ledger is the portability of being blue money in real time, where the portability of moving things around is almost zero. It's the beauty of doing a transaction where you actually do not need to touch anything physical until the point that the customer actually wants cash. And you know, there will be use cases, but you protect yourself, especially in environments where, let's just say, there's huge amount of currency fluctuation, the customer is completely protected from that until they're ready to spend. And most the time, if the currency, their currency is going down in value, waiting till the last moment until you convert to cash is a huge boon for them. For the CFO, they love it because it enables them to not again, going back to the idea of forecasting, they can fund in real time. And they can actually also do away with things where you convert the cash, move the cash into a part of a corridor, and then you might need to a few days later send it back to that because you need to redeploy the cash. The idea of doing it all virtually means it's a little bit more like magic, in some respects, like Harry Potter from, where you can basically zoom things back and forth at a minimum amount of costs. And I think that that is a huge, massive unlock. Now, the important thing I always say, and this comes from my days at Apple and just working in consumer is that the consumer doesn't care about any of that, and our job is abstract that whole layer away from them, so that they don't have to worry about it. The only thing they need to know is we will get it there in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of effort, and we will save you money in terms of doing so, and in the process, we will make it feel like it's magic. It's going to be as easy in our mind. We want to make it as easy for the consumer sending a text message or an email. And if we can do that, then they won't worry about everything else that goes with it. They just know they're protected.
Sy Taylor 18:58
You know, that sort of example to the CFO, if the one thing they hate is uncertainty, and the one thing they're quite good at, historically has been sending emails. So just push a button and money moves. It sounds like the kind of thing that should be obvious, but actually, in practice, is incredibly difficult. So to get there is is genuinely magic. So thank you so much for joining us so far. I just need to pause here while we hear from our sponsors that make this show possible. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform vitapp uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat backed tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap tokenized is also. Sponsored by fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses, from visa to WorldPay to bridge to Revolut with over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold and manage stable coins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built in compliance with fire blocks. You get complete control to build your own stable coin orchestration layer, create payment accounts, manage liquidity and access on and off ramps in over 60 currencies makes it easier for you to build and scale and expand your business globally. Learn more@firebox.com All right, thank you to our sponsors. Speaking of sponsors, Goldie, I know you have some other thoughts on the cash offering. Yeah.
Ran Goldi 20:59
I mean, I think there's another story here, right? And what MoneyGram is doing right now with stable coins is super interesting. What, Anthony, what you were saying about it can be used for Treasury. It can be used to get money back to MoneyGram for all of its locations, and obviously capturing the receiver as well, not just the sender. But I think there's another story here. And Simon, I think you're gonna like this one, because this story is maybe MoneyGram has launched something that is actually the on off ramp killer. Now, Stripe acquired bridge more than a year ago, for one point billion dollars for being the best on off ramp out there, probably, or at least, you know, one of the best frameworks, MoneyGram launched something called MoneyGram ramps. And I think that's super interesting, Anthony, I'd love to talk about that for a second. You launched something that allows basically every application in the world, every wallet in the world, if they want to fund you guys with stable coins, and then off ramp it through part of your network, your 500,000 locations. I think that is super interesting. And obviously, alongside your launch of the app in Colombia, you're becoming a stablecoin powerhouse. So maybe tell us more about that. How are you coming into these decisions? Why did you decide to also take advantage of your infrastructure, make it available for others? And then maybe a bit about Colombia. What made you choose that place first?
Anthony Soohoo 22:22
We're very excited about what we are doing right now in the crypto space, but specifically, one of the areas that you talk about with ramps is that it's our belief that at MoneyGram, we need to build an open network. We also need to focus a lot on interoperability, which is why we're so excited for our partnership with fireblocks, because it allows us not to be enabled only inside our network, in that's very close, but be open to the world. And I would say that the idea about ramps, as goalie had mentioned, is just our initiative to open up our network to anyone who wants to access it, as long as they connect through us, where we can do the coordination of being the cash in as well as a cash out ramps for that. And you might ask, Well, why is that important in a digital world? It's because, you know, about a quarter of the world still operates in cash and in addition. And I actually love classical rock music, so this does not date me. This is way before my time. But if you listen to the song Hotel California, it's a place you can go into, but you can never get out. And I believe that partly crypto, up to this point, was a little bit of that you could get in, but it was really hard to get out. And what we decided to do is, is there a place for buddygram to be really that bridge between digital and real world or the physical world, and we want to give people access to real world assets through our ramps. And excited about it, we have a lot of people building new applications. I can't mention all of them because there's still some of them have not launched, but what I would say is that it gives us the ability to think about MoneyGram as much more of a network platform company and in partnership with folks like Goldie and fireblock, so it's just gonna enable stuff that we would not be sitting here today thinking about, because we're not just coming from a place like Apple where, when they developed the iPhone, For instance, or when I was working on laptops, we didn't know what the killer apps were, but it's unleashed just next level killer apps, and we hope they do it on ramps.
Sy Taylor 24:28
It's so often I hear people say the stable coin thing is fantastic, but I can get the stable coin to the last mile. But then what happens? You've got this last mile problem. Companies like MoneyGram are at the last mile dealing with cash with an agent network, and that's what excites me about the distribution. This is possibly one of the first times in the transformation of money where the advantage with stable coins really does sit with those who already have distribution. The classic is, can the incumbent get innovation? Distribution before the innovator gets distribution. Well, stable coins are pretty egalitarian. Anyone can use them, but distribution at the last mile takes a long time to build and is incredibly difficult and is a durable moat that really excites me. In September, you launched a new mobile app that you talked about your wallet, but you started with Columbia, and it uses USDC to modernize remittances. But was there any specific customer insight or even gut feeling that said, Yeah, Columbia, this is the right place to start. Yeah.
Anthony Soohoo 25:32
I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that, but what I would say is that, to reiterate, cash remains King in many communities around the world. So as we think about that operating outside countries like the US, where cash is so central to everyday lives in many parts of the world, what we're looking for was a place where we believe that we could add a lot of value. The reason we chose Colombia and thought it was the first ideal market for us is that they are one of the most biggest major inbound remnants corridors. In fact, I think they receive more than 22 times the money that gets sent abroad than they send out. And they were also an economy where there was a big part of the population that were really digitally native and understood as well as the fact that they had a currency that had a lot of volatility the last few years. So all those things kind of made it ripe for us to launch there, and then, since then, we've launched in 600 other countries as well, including Mexico and Honduras and a few others.
Ran Goldi 26:33
I want to ask another story, Anthony. I think the story of what happens in a large company, incumbent, maybe like yourself, when a new CEO comes in and says, We need to look at stable coins, we need to launch this. We need to do infrastructure. We need to launch apps, how is the internal discussion going on? Right? How was the internal debate, what people on your team thought about this? Oh no, it's too risky. We're an 85 year old company, or you're going to bring us down, or how can you make them feel comfortable?
Anthony Soohoo 27:05
Yeah, I think the intersection point and where we met, obviously, when you have a company that has been at scale like MoneyGram and has have had all the success the company has had, there is just ways that you think are the best ways to do things. And I think that the nice thing about joining a company like that is that you avoid actually the pain of trying to build distribution and trying to find product market fit in the early days. Because, as all of us, having been entrepreneurs, know it's like watching paint try and it's a very painful process before you get product market fit. So the company already had product market fit, at least for a segment of the use case that they had. Our thought was, Can technology enable a better customer experience? And what was a more important thing, is anchoring that all those discussions to the customer. So it was not the dogma of saying and us arguing about technology as much as technology is an enabler, but what we're really trying to solve is a better outcome for the customers around the idea of helping them save time, effort and money, and aligning to that, I think, is easier, and I've been really proud of our Employees and how they're working and really reinventing MoneyGram on the fly. I just celebrated my one year anniversary a few weeks ago, and when I reflect back, the most amazing thing I find is that I can't imagine we could run any faster if I was inside a startup, just because you start off understanding and having insights and use cases so much faster when you are operating at scale. So I'm hoping that we can become maybe the case study MoneyGram can where we operate with the speed and agility of a startup while operating with the scale and efficiency of a big company. And if you can do that, you really have magic. And you know, we're not completely there, but what I would say is that I like where we're going.
Sy Taylor 29:07
I like also that you guys were early to some of this to your point earlier. It seems like everybody's announcing a stable coin something lately, but it seems like you've gone into seven countries now. It's live. It's in production. Do you remember thinking back to the launch day was there, like a little Mission Control? Was there a war room? Take me inside that moment of launching this app for the first time and looking for that first transaction to come through. Did it all work? Did it all happen seamlessly? What was that moment like?
Anthony Soohoo 29:35
One of the things I try to emphasize to folks when we're going through launch is not to fall in love with yourself or try to say, be a preseason All American. What we want to do is we want to win the award after you launch. And in this industry, there's so much times you see companies
Ran Goldi 29:53
make an announcement, innovation by Pr is what we call it right. Innovation by
Anthony Soohoo 29:56
Pr, and then they call it a day, and then the engineering Tai or. The tech team hears about it on a press release, I would say that our focus has been much more focused around organizing, around making sure that we have two definitions of product market fit where we actually believe we have market fit on the case fit, so we've solved the problem, but you don't really have product market fit till a customer loves your product. And I think that going into that, we saw initially that customers adapted and used it. There was a high level of engagement. And I think we're working towards getting product market fit where the customer loves it. When we launched it, it was, honestly, I was very proud of the team. It was done a lot of celebration, as much as a lot of sharing of knowledge of what we've learned and how we can make it better, and having that mindset of continuous improvements. And I encourage a team that, hey, celebrate the wins, but we don't want to make such a big deal about it, because we know how much further we have to go, because it's just, I think we're in the early days right now of trying to make sure how this stuff works, like I said, and so we don't want to rest on our laurels and be the preseason all American
Ran Goldi 31:10
got it? No, I think you're right. And I think again, this is exactly what you said. This is like re founding even in how we're now launching new apps and new technologies, right?
Sy Taylor 31:20
But it's that focus on the metrics. Is that focus on actually, it wasn't the launch moment. It was the seeing those metrics, seeing the customers use it, seeing those NPS numbers start to come up, and staying obsessed with that as they kind of go through it. And I think this kind of comes to the CEO question, how are you steering now that you're live? What does your dashboard look like? What are you looking for every day? What are you talking to the team about?
Anthony Soohoo 31:46
First, I never start with the outputs or the financials, honestly, because I believe that if you get the fundamentals of the business right, the controllable inputs that we can control all the financials are is it's a result of all the hard work you get on top, and then it just flows through, and it's like the last metric you see. So as an executive, I try to get the team focused on the controllable inputs. So what are the things that are driving engagement among the customer base? What is driving them to repeat visit us and drive repeat transactions, and how are we feeling about their NPS score? All those things tend to tie in. And if you can see that you get typically, if those things go up into the right you typically find your revenue does the same, and so does your profit. And that's how we focus and the things we look at,
Ran Goldi 32:33
Anthony, I know you're also excited about AI, which is, again, something we try not to have in a blockchain stable coin podcast, we cannot say AI as well. It's too many buzz words right now or hyped words in one podcast. But I know that again, when re founding transforming company, that's probably a huge part as well. I know that you've partnered with an adaptive risk intelligence company to enhance more real time, I guess, processing around your transactions. Where do you think these technologies do even come together, AI or stable coins, or is it just the LinkedIn hype? And I guess, other than that, what are the possibilities around AI that are actually makes you up at night?
Anthony Soohoo 33:12
What I would say is that AI is transformative like nothing I've ever seen in my lifetime. And I think as humans, it's a really exciting time when you think about that, as well as where stable coin and crypto is going, because what I would say is that we're at the dawn of this industry. And typically there's one thing that drives the inflection point. I think one of the reasons people are so excited about it is it feels like we've discovered electricity and built a PC in the same year. And so when those things are happening all at the same time. Enabling Technologies like AI as well as stable coin just unleashes new use cases. So I think the one that is very exciting that everyone talks about is the idea of, what can you do when you have programmable money? I think when you think about running the modern organization, the reason orgs look the way they are is because humans do better. They have a mindset, and they have to be fixed on a specialty, right? But when you turn to AI and you have everything in much more of an agentic world, I think the idea of what the org chart looks like is kind of silly. There's no functions anymore. What you have are task end to end. And then what you try to figure out is among that, how do does your agentic workforce collaborate with your human workforce to deliver best customer outcomes? So I would say that I don't think AI will replace everything that we do, but it's going to make our work much more fun. It's going to make our work much more impactful, because we're going to have a lot of the work that we don't want to do. I will tell you, when I started as a product manager at Apple, I probably spent 10 hours a week like doing data entry and spreadsheets get this stuff to work. And then when I found out that at a circle of reference, it took. Me so much longer, and I hated when I programed it out to debug. Debugging sucked. And I think that most of the time now I can spend most of my time creating and most of my time kind of thinking. And then I think that folks that can understand that really the moment in time we're in is the inflection of the invention of electricity, the discovery of electricity match with PC. It's just going to be magical, and that's what AI and stable coin is going to do for
Ran Goldi 35:29
us right now. Yeah, I hope the programmable money vision that you sort of mentioned there will actually happen for now. I'm just super happy that we've crossed the chasm with stable coins. And maybe that brings us to like our final question. This is something that we ask our guests. You know, Anthony, 20 years from now, stable coins, are they just a story, a hype from the past, or are they a fact still with us, powering new financial rails?
Anthony Soohoo 35:55
I think stable coin is going to be the OS, or the operating system that operates everything, but we won't think about it anymore. So if you think about 30 years ago, 40 years ago, people really cared if you use Windows or Macs. I think now all the apps work across both OSS but guess what? You have a preference because of how you feel about these things. And I think stable coin is going to be the OS for the financial community, or the financial infrastructure. And so there will be things that get built on top of it, and then there will be services that we access. But I think it's a really exciting day to be alive, and I'm hoping in 20 years, I'll still be here, playing a big role in that, because I think that when I think about our future in that world, it's a world I want to be in.
Sy Taylor 36:39
Oh, that's very exciting. I love that ambition. I love the world's most innovative incumbent with distribution that's acting like a startup. You hear that story so often, but very rarely, people can show up and show you the numbers and show you the results, but seven countries with a wallet with real production traffic, that's a different thing. So Anthony, I want to thank you so much for joining us today, and I want to thank everybody for watching and listening as well. If people want to find out more about you or money going MoneyGram, what do they go to do that?
Anthony Soohoo 37:05
Look me up on x.com at Anthony suhu. Last name is S, O, O, H, O, O. And one thing maybe I would want to share with your listeners is the fact that if you're nice to Goldie, he might get you actually your own pair of custom shoes, because he gave these to me at money 2020, this year, and they're now hanging up on my bookshelf. Is one of the my prized possessions. So thank you for that. And I hope when you guys see Goldie at a conference, you should make sure you talk to him about it, because he has a secret that no one else has.
Ran Goldi 37:35
Well, it's reserved only for 85 plus year old companies. So if you're in that category, give me give me a ring. It has to be
Anthony Soohoo 37:42
85 year old. Companies are going through a rebounding
Sy Taylor 37:45
Goldie. If they want fireblocks Or your good self,
Ran Goldi 37:47
where do they go? Always find us, obviously@fireblocks.com, I'm on x at rangoldie LinkedIn, rangoli as well. Look me up. I'll be there,
Sy Taylor 37:56
and you'll find me at sy Tai lo on all of the socials. At FinTech, brain food.com ranting into the void, or at tempo. Dot XYZ, if you want to know what we're up to over there. And listeners, viewers, please remember to do all the things hosts always ask you to do, like, subscribe, share, spam people about how good this show is, because stories like Anthony's don't come around very often, and we really enjoyed having this conversation today. Thank you so much, and We'll catch you next time.