Tuum Talks Episode 7: Live at Money20/20 

Welcome to Tuum Talks Episode #7: Banking on an Adaptive Ecosystem – The Challenges and Opportunities of Open Finance

Recorded Live: Wednesday, June 5th, 2024 
Location: RAI Convention Centre, Amsterdam 
Host: Myles Bertrand, CEO, Tuum 

Panelists: 

  • Grace Ge – Senior Principal, Strategy, Publicis Sapient 
  • Luis Valdich – Managing Director, Fintech, Citi Ventures 
  • Miriam Wohlfarth – CEO, Banxware 
  • Justin Forsythe – Lead EMEA Payments & FinTech Analyst, UBS 

In this special live edition of Tuum Talks, filmed at Money2020, our esteemed panelists discuss the transformative impact of open finance on the banking ecosystem. They explore the opportunities and challenges that arise from increased interconnectedness and the evolving role of financial institutions. 

Key Takeaways: 

  • The Evolving Role of Banks: Understanding the shift in responsibilities and opportunities for traditional banks. 
  • Opportunities and Threats of Open Finance: Identifying the potential benefits and risks associated with open finance. 
  • Regulatory Impacts: Examining the influence of regulations like PSD2 on the financial landscape. 
  • Security in an Interconnected System: Addressing the security concerns in a more open and interconnected banking system. 

Stay Tuned for More: 

To keep abreast of the latest in banking innovation and future episodes of Tuum Talks, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this page. Join us as we continue to bring leading voices and perspectives to the forefront of the fintech dialogue. 

Watch, read or listen to the conversation below:

Banking on an Adaptive Ecosystem – The Challenges and Opportunities of Open Finance

[Full Transcript]

[00:00:00] Myles: Hi everybody, I’m Miles Bertram, CEO of Tuum, and welcome to Tuum Talks, live from Money2020 in Amsterdam. I’m joined by our fantastic panel of people today. Just quickly introducing, I’m joined by Justin Forsythe, the Lead EMEA Payments and FinTech Analyst at UBS; Luis Valdich, Managing Director of Citi Ventures; Grace Ge, Senior Principal Strategy at Publicis Sapient; and last but not least, Miriam Wohlfarth, the co-CEO and founder of Banxware. Great to have you all here today, real pleasure. Thanks for joining.

Straight to it. The topic is talking a little bit about open finance. Justin, what is open finance and how is it different from open banking? Which is a question a lot of people ask.

[00:00:59] Justin: Yes, it is. First, I just have a very quick disclosure I have to say, which is, the views are mine and associated with my research, and not the broader views of UBS Group. Got to love banks.

[00:01:12] Myles: Disclaimer accepted.

[00:01:13] Justin: Yeah, disclaimer accepted.

[00:01:14] Luis: By the way, I’ll say the same disclaimer.

 [00:01:19] Myles: You’re all getting disclaimers out of the way now. We’re good to go.

[00:01:23] Justin: Thank you, Luis. In reality, open banking you need to start with, which was predicated by the issuance of PSD2 by the ECB and regulators around Europe. What this did was it mandated financial institutions to allow third party providers to allow access to consumers to their financial data at any given point in time.

We’re talking about a pretty narrow definition, which is primarily bank account data and a handful of transaction data, maybe some address data. We’re talking about initially a great use case, but a very narrow one.

The idea of open finance isn’t a new one, but it’s looking to be paginated into law with the oncoming PSD3 regulation. PSD3 is an iteration on PSD2, looking to remediate some of the perceived shortcomings with PSD2. What you have is these authorized in under open banking account information service providers, or the guys that connect into the data, or PISPs (payment initiation service providers), which is those that initiate payments.

What you have now is the advent of an FISP (financial information services provider), but in theory, these could all be the same provider. The idea though is that you want to open up the amount of data to not just include this narrow use case, but to enable, for instance, there’s a whole host of different things; it could be mortgages, loans, credit worthiness, credit ratings, insurance, investment, real estate, pension. There’re so many broader use cases which can enable a full screenshot of an individual’s financial life at any point in time, and therefore an almost instantaneous view. A great example would be to make a mortgage lending application decision at an instant in time.

What I would say is the use case of this is in a way there’s potential to eliminate this intermediary layer – this third-party layer that exists in a whole bunch of different industries. I won’t name them but you can imagine what some of those use cases are.

[00:03:37] Myles: Yeah, absolutely. You talk about open banking and open finance, and open banking always seemed to be the doorway to start the threats on the incumbent banks. Over to you, Grace, what’s your perspective on that? Do you think open finance potentially is a threat to the incumbent banks?

[00:03:54] Grace: I think it is more opportunity for the incumbent banks. What I’m seeing is that of course incumbent banks realize there’s urgency for them to change, because regulations change, market dynamics changing rapidly, customer expectations are also changing. They are also realizing it’s the right time to start embracing the change because the technologies are maturing and also the risks can be well mitigated.

What I am seeing is a lot of the incumbent banks have started to embrace open finance, building out the modern tech stacks and making the associated business and operational changes required to embrace this change. Some of the incumbent banks are already realizing benefits, including, for example, enhance the speed to market, agility in the business model, reduce the cost to serve, and to be able to provide more tailored, customized services and products to their customers. The resilience bits and the stability are also enhancing because a lot of the manual processes are being reduced and the risk mitigation practices are being established.

[00:05:04] Myles: I agree 100%. I think you see a lot of that. But it’s the actual momentum, like how quickly can they do that? I think, mentally they’re there, they want to get there, but then the rubber’s got to hit the road and start to see those things.

Miriam, over to you, what’s the role of a bank today when you think about open finance?

[00:05:20] Miriam: Maybe if we look a little bit back, I think in the past and today, a bank has been a general service institution for financial products. It was you could do everything at a bank. You did your lending, you did your account, you did your mortgage, you did your investment. I think this is probably driven by the role of the consumer. If you look back 25 years, there was no iPhone, there was no Amazon, Readiness. The people expect something different from their user experience.

This is something that is really difficult for traditional banks to cope with, because usually a bank is not that fast, not that super agile, and not so technology and customer-driven. It’s just natural for big companies. Innovation often establishes itself in smaller companies.

Now we are in this change process; we have banks that have invested a lot into technology, that became agile, that put really tech first, and there are lots of banks that didn’t do that. It’s the thing, what is going to happen, but it depends. I think that you will see some banks maybe in 10 years not there anymore, to be honest. Because when they don’t really believe that technology is in a way a core to invest in, they’re not there.

In the future you will see more and more ecosystems evolving where the customer can choose the right product, and there is not a one-size-fits-all approach anymore. I think this generalistic approach doesn’t work anymore, because the single points, the single parts of banking, to make them cool and accessible and easy, it is a lot of technology behind it.

As I said at the beginning, when you don’t invest into technology, they are not cool, the user experience is uncool, and people don’t like it. The customer will go away; they will go where they find it in a way that it’s easy. Therefore you need tech,

[00:07:24] Myles: I hear customer expectations now, about what they expect from their banks. The level, as we go through the generational shift, the change, the expectations just go from here to here to here. I think the incumbent banks have to start moving a lot faster.

[00:07:39] Miriam: Yes, it has totally changed. If you look at the young generation, my daughter is 19 years old, she has never stepped into a bank.

[00:07:47] Myles: I try to avoid it like the plague.

[00:07:49] Miriam: They abandon everything when it’s not fast and easy, when it’s complex. You need technology to take out complexity. Therefore I think the banks they have their role to play, but I think it’s going to change. Partnerships are really helpful.

[00:08:05] Myles: That smells opportunity for the investors in the room. Luis, over to you, how do you think about from an investment opportunity, new players coming to the market, how do you as an investor think about open finance and how’s that an opportunity for you?

[00:08:21] Luis: Absolutely. We’ve been big believers in the open banking, as it used to be called open finance opportunity. We invested in Plaid back in 2016, early days of cloud and that entire trend, as you all know we’re leading player in this category. Subsequently we’ve invested also in a company called Emporia, which is backed by consortium of banks in the US, in Balbo, which is another leading open finance playing that in America, and many other companies as well that are leveraging the open finance capabilities, for example, to embed it as part of decisioning and deliver embedding, create underwriting and blending for embedding payment flows.

We’ve invested in a company in France called De Facto, which is using a combination of AI and open finance as part of their processes. Anything out of Sweden, including personal finance management as well as consumer lending.

The fact is, by the way, on the B2B side, Justin talked a bit about the consumer side, but there’s clearly a business aspect to open finance that we think is quite exciting as well.

[00:09:35] Myles: You’re obviously making smart decisions. I was quite happy for you to join my camp table.

[00:09:41] Luis: Thank you. Very excited.

[00:09:44] Myles: Maybe just to close out the topic to you, Justin, just touching on that as an infrastructure provider, do you think all the pieces are in play to turbo charge the open finance stream, or do you think there’s still components of them missing?

 [00:09:58] Justin: I think this goes back to what pre-empted the PSD3 legislation to be brought in the first place, which is, are there aspects that are missing or things that could be improved? I think there are two resounding pieces of feedback I had heard from talking to industry professionals and people working at banks, et cetera, not including myself, which is, first, the initial layer of open banking data is not structured enough to lead to as much value-add as could be brought out of the system.

It almost, in a way, to me, leads back to a conversation around messaging formats and the impending implementation of ISO 20022, where you have effectively these unstructured, initially, data streams where, it could be that my name is Forsythe, Justin instead of Justin, Forsythe, and that causes it to throw an exception in the system that needs to get remediated.

Once we get to more either rich data formats by standard, which would be ISO 20022, at some juncture we know it’s meant to be coming soon, or you have open banking providers that are doing a lot to enrich data out there. Now, some predominantly play on the aggregator side, so they’re just the piping into the data. Some are doing more to enrich, and some are focused on the payment side. I don’t know that there’s one that’s fully focused on all three use cases and doing them all incredibly well.

The second point I would make is, I think it’s caused a little bit of fragmentation across Europe, at least. The U. S. market is completely different. It’s not really fully open banking, it’s just multilateral.

[00:11:29] Myles: It’s a huge region. It’s different. I’ll be there at with the whole thing.

[00:11:32] Justin: The point is that there wasn’t really a super prescriptive API standard. What you have is that coverage is in 100%. If coverage is in 100%, then you have this aggregator of aggregator models that some providers have employed. When I think of the shortfalls, in addition to the things we suggested around open finance and data initially, is perhaps something around an API standard, which has been suggested in certain use cases around the better structuring of data, which is maybe falls outside of the regulation, but is something I think providers are innovating on, for sure.

[00:12:03] Myles: Absolutely. Circling back on that and bring it back, and you guys provide a lot of strategy and guidance for a lot of organizations trying to do this, Grace, what do you think are probably the most critical points for them to think about from a tech capabilities perspective to get to where they need to go?

[00:12:18] Grace: I think from the tech capability perspective, open finance has built an API EPA technology. But in order to enable that, the banks need to think more holistically what are the technology capabilities I need to build?

There are a couple of foundational capabilities. For example, you need to have the cloud foundation, and also the data foundation, be able to really put data at the core for you to be able to truly utilize the rich sources of the data you’re going to receive to enrich the understanding about your customers, about your business, to really enable you to make data driven decisions.

Also, the companies and the banks need to think about eventually embracing modern tech stack. That would include a neon lean core, and building up the composable architecture to enable microservices. There are strategic decisions that need to be made, for example, what to buy versus what to build. Also, once you’ve built the shining thing, what things do you want to manage in-house and what things do you want to outsource?

[00:13:25] Myles: Yeah, 100%. That’s one of the big challenges we have, is that you have conversations with banks that say, I want to embrace new technology, but I just want to try and lock that back into the way I’ve done things for the past 25 years. That’s where the big challenge comes from, is that cultural shift sometimes. It’s just not about new technology. You’ve got to think about how you do this differently. You’ll get to a better outcome, you just got to get there in a different way.

[00:13:49] Grace: Yes. Just to build on that, any technology transformation is also a business transformation. What we are seeing is the banks need to be up in the game in terms of fundamentally transforming how they run businesses. The operational processes will be changed. The was they perform as a team is changed as well, the ways of working are changing rapidly. They also need to think about the target operating model. That will be fundamentally changed as well. In the meantime, be able to effectively manage the due run, ensuring your business process, your colleague experience, as well as your customer experience, are transitioned in a seamless way. That’s also quite critical.

[00:14:29] Myles: Absolutely. I’m going to put you on the spot, because you’re representing big banks in the room. Do you think big banks are culturally ready to accept the concept of this? I know we went through a whole cycle where basically your data was your king, predict your data, don’t open up your data. Now it is asking for that cultural change within big incumbent banks, that you’ve got to think about this stuff differently. Are you ready for that change and what’s required?

[00:14:54] Luis: Yeah, it’s a great question. Grace touched upon it a little bit in the earlier question. How much of this is a threat or an opportunity? I think that it really depends on the posture of the bank. Different banks are making different decisions in terms of how to address the dynamics.

There’s obviously a minimum table stakes question, which is that anything that regulators ask or mandate, banks will do. Also clients, customers have a ton of a say in that the customers ask for something, then banks either have to do that or face the consequences of customers going to someone else who’s doing that.

But beyond what in a way is a forced decision, as Grace said, there is some real opportunity for everybody. Because no matter how big the bank is, in most medium or large countries, the reality is that unlike other sectors where there is a winner take most, very few, I can’t think of any major or mid sized country where a bank has 80% market share. The reality is that there is a lot of competition, from banks of equal size and smaller sizes. Thus, for those that have the appetite to grow, taking advantage of the opportunities and the dislocations that the combination of new regulatory environment and changes in consumer preferences are coming on the back of this open finance revolution make it extremely exciting times. I think we will see it.

Maybe that’s something that you mentioned, which was around, the future will look very different from a banking industry in terms of who are the winners and the losers and consultation and all that. I think it’s super exciting times.

[00:17:12] Myles: I guess to answer that question for you, the regulators are generally bringing legislation to try and open the market up at PSD3. You’ve seen a bit of a change from a regulatory perspective over how they want to encourage this. Do you think that’s going to continue? Do you think they’ve gone too far? Do you think they’re pulling back? For you as the player you are in the market, how’s that working for you?

[00:17:36] Miriam: If you look at Europe, I think, yes, PSD3 is in the making, so this is going to move on. I cannot speak for all the countries, but I think PSD2 was a big success here in the European market, because it really started to open up that ecosystems are possible. I think if you look back 10 years ago, this was a very new idea. When I first heard this, there was a term, unbundling of banks. I didn’t know what it was and I could not imagine what it was, but you see that PSTD2 made it possible. Because otherwise, it would not have been possible.

What we do at Banxsquare, so we do embedded lending, and we use also third parties to get access to data. We use account data from bank accounts. All these things would not have been possible 10 years ago. I think so it has proved that PSD2 helped us a lot. Therefore, yes, it’s time to make it even bigger and build it more. But at the beginning, it sounded a bit like, there is the incumbents against the banks, and there’s like a market that goes against each other.

What has changed now, especially in the last three, four years, is that more and more banks and FinTechs work together. They realize what they can do and they need also good regulation, a regulation that fits and doesn’t kill innovation. That’s also very important to make better products together.

We work together with some banks; we have two investors at our banks. One of our really big investors is UniCredit. They were a really fast bank, and they are really a fast mover. I think it’s great what they are doing. We have a big cooperation with them now. It’s cool. I hope that we get even more better things here.

[00:19:25] Myles: It’s really encouraging for us as well as technology providers in the space. I’ve seen a bit of a shift in the regulators attitude as well to new technology coming out. They really are trying to support it because they want to fundamentally provide support, the ability for the organizations to drive this.

The big question, Justin, who’s going to benefit? Who’s going to benefit the most from open banking?

[00:19:46] Justin: I love that I’m here to answer the big question.

I think it’s pretty clear, at least to me, that it’s consumers and small businesses that win. It’s dramatically improved customer experience. I think that was what was at the centre of the regulatory push at the beginning of all this. At the end of the day, you have much more unified customer journey or small business journey. You have faster lead times for applying for a mortgage. You have less friction at checkout, potentially. There are so many endless use cases where you can see this having a benefit in the life of a consumer and SME. Increased cash flow management capabilities. We can go down the list and it’s going to be there.

I think as an ancillary benefit, you have the infrastructure providers who were set up to do the account data servicing AISPs or PISPs, and going to play, I think in theory, a similar role or an add on role by being this financial data infrastructure layer.

I just want to pose one thing, which is, and we’ve thought about this in the past, it’s not necessarily just financial data. I think, eventually you’ll go one step further. Are we talking about healthcare data? Are we talking about, digital passports? There’re so many different use cases eventually that, we’re talking about regulation well beyond the PSD3 time scope, but eventually we get to a place where it’s almost seamless potentially to passport a lot of information around, not just financial data.

[00:21:11] Myles: Over to you, Luis for this one, I’ll jump around a bit, but I think that’s a really good point. I think also open finance is an opportunity for lots of organizations, new start-ups, to come in specializing in things like cybersecurity, fraud detection, data protection. Does that give you a boom opportunity for you to look at new investment opportunities as an investor in the FinTech industry, to help drive this as well? Encourage more companies and organizations to get up?

[00:21:37] Luis: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we also continue to be very active investors across all, we think of it as, software infrastructure for financial services enablement, which include identity verification, fraud mitigation, KYC, cybersecurity. There is a vast ecosystem of software that is so intertwined with the financial fabric of opening accounts, extending credit, underwriting, servicing, stopping cyber attacks, that as an investor, it’s extremely exciting; all that open finance and this digital transformation journey we’re on is embarking.

[00:22:23] Myles: Yeah, very cool. That’s exactly what we want to see. I think to switch it back to Grace here quickly as well, we talk about the regulatory side of it, but then there’s the compliance side of it as well. We have had some failures there, a few other things that have occurred. What do you think we know when you’re supporting and working with a lot of these organizations? How are you tackling some of those challenging topics as well?

[00:22:44] Grace: In reflection, I think the collapse of Synapse is serving a very important lesson, a very painful lesson for everyone who is playing in the BaaS industry, be it technology providers or banks.

From the compliance perspective, it’s important to realize compliance to ensure that what you’re providing is robust, is secure and resilient. It’s more important than revenue and top line growth.

These can be potentially different things for technology providers and for banks. A couple of things for the technology providers. One is to ensure that you have robust technology solutions, and you clearly understand the limitations and potential defects. As well, you understand it not only from the technical perspective, but understand from the business perspective; understanding what it means to your clients and to the end users. Then you clearly communicate those with your clients, to empower your clients to make better informed decisions.

The second one is take a preventative approach. If you see there’s a problem, identify it early on, proactively try to fix and address the problem rather than hiding it, delaying it. From the bank’s perspective, ultimately the banks own the customers, they own the data, and they own the compliance piece of the puzzle.

Also a couple of things to consider. The first one is it’s really important for the banks to have robust practice in place in terms of vendor management. That is becoming more challenging nowadays because they’re embracing composable architecture. The third-party ecosystem is becoming more complex nowadays than before. This also applies to not only have robust due diligence in the vendor selection process, but also continue to monitor it as a relationship ongoing. Also importantly to consider whether this vendor is compliant, whether their solution is robust, secure, and resilient as a key criterion in your vendor selection assessment.

[00:25:02] Myles: From personal experience, we sit at the heart of financial institutions and that resonates with us perfectly, because it’s the number one thing we have to focus on. You’re asking a bank to basically outsource all those key things to us, so we need to make sure that we’re culturally aligned and we’re proactive and ahead of the curve around security, compliance, thinking about answering those questions because you have to give them the confidence that you’re taking care of it even better than the way they take care of it themselves.

[00:25:32] Grace: Absolutely. I think that’s really critical. From the bank’s perspective, to be able to manage the risks in an efficient way, be able to even quantify the potential risks, and also be diligent in your route to life processes as well. Do robust testing, sufficient testing, understand the limitations of a solution, what it means to your customers, before releasing it to life, and also taking a progressive approach as you are releasing it. Test it out in a small environment with small group of customers, identify problems early on before scaling the solutions.

[00:26:09] Myles: Couldn’t agree more. Switching topics a little bit, just maybe a little bit of what everyone thought of Money2020 and how we’re doing it. Miriam, over to you. The hype two years ago was embedded finance. That was the thing. Didn’t hear much about that topic last year. Are we through the hype cycles? It seems to be a hype all the time. What are you seeing out of Money2020 this year?

[00:26:30] Miriam: I think that we’re still at the beginning. The hype cycle is not there yet. It’s maybe a bit like the blockchain 15 years ago, it was a super hype, and then it fell down, then it came up again. It starts now to have really business model that work, and they show examples. It’s not so theoretically anymore. There are first companies.

Last week we had a call with a big American company and they said, it’s really great that you survived all this. We’re a strong company, we will survive and we go through all the crises.

If you just think we have the consumer edge, the consumer that wants a better product, a more innovative product, an easier product, this is not going away.  It is going away that the people that don’t care about this, they will go away, but the younger generation want products that fit their needs at the right place and are as easy as possible. This is what it is all about, and this is what embedded finance is. Putting a financial product into an environment where everybody needs it, where you have products that are designed to your needs at the right time. This is possible. I think this is still a beginning.

Also look at B2B. A lot of the use cases start in B2B now, and also the B2B is changing a lot. B2B is today where maybe e-commerce was 10 years ago. There are huge changes there. You have huge platforms in every corner establishing, and every platform is a potential new customer. I see that there is a lot of room, but now, yes, there was this high, but we also had a huge crisis this year; energy crisis, inflation, recession, whatever it was, interest rates. It hit especially embedded finance.

[00:28:15] Myles: We haven’t even talked about geopolitical issues.

[00:28:19] Miriam: We had a really tough year. When we started in 2020, we could get access to so much money; it was incredible, but we didn’t want it. Then everything changed. The VCs changed, everything changed, the markets changed. Everybody said, ah, this is not great anymore. I think this is a great business. I still believe in it. But yeah, we have to get through hard times and prove that this is really not only an idea, that this is really a working business because then we can be a new standard. We can create new standards of easiness and customer centricity and make customers happy.

[00:28:58] Luis: Really good. Can I tag along? Cause on the one side, I want to say we are huge believers on the embedded finance opportunity as well, but you were asking about hype cycles and Money2020 Europe. Talking to my team, we said Ventures is global, we have a team in London and also covered Tel Aviv, all of Europe and Israel. We have two teams in the U.S., we’re in Singapore, et cetera.

In the U.S., AI, particularly Gen AI, is the craze. If you look at funding, it’s been down for quite some time and it’s stabilized a little because of lots of funding on AI, Gen AI, or companies increasingly talking very actively about all that they’re doing on AI and Gen AI in particular.

We saw much less of that here. It was much more subdued. Coincidentally, we’re about to publish an article from one of our companies, and it’s a lot about how they are using Gen AI in multiple areas across the entire lending journey. But it’s fascinating that it is more in the background than in the foreground. I’m not sure whether it’s here being a little bit under hyped and people are using it.

[00:30:29] Myles: They’re trying to be subtle with the whole thing. What do you think of the VC mood? A lot of VCs here. I’ve had a lot of meetings, they’re like, what’s the mood? Are we out of the freeze, out of the winter now? Are we coming into the spring of investments in VC? Where do you think we are?

[00:30:47] Luis: It’s a very tough one to call because I’ve been calling out that, but the interest keeps on going down. But I am hopeful that we are close to stability before things will get better. But frankly, for us who are very bullish on the longer-term opportunity in FinTech, the fact that there is a bit less competition, and as a band we do our diligence and all that, so we don’t mind that it is not ‘21.

[00:31:22] Miriam: No, no. With us it was much cheaper. For many of the scenes, you had many down rolls in the last years.

[00:31:27] Luis: Not looking for downs, but certainly hoping that founders will continue to want to jump into this incredible opportunity. I do think Gen AI and AI, combined with OpenTransit¸opens an incredible opportunity to transform this huge industry, so they will not be shy because we see something a little bit less.

[00:31:51] Myles: I’m a big supporter. I think as well. I really think particularly in financial services, AI is going to have really good impact on support, great decisioning, those things, and really help drive a lot of this behaviour.

You’ve done a piece of work with the Financial Times recently, you’ve got some research coming out. I’ve heard a rumour. Maybe you can give us some sneak peeks into what’s coming out in that?

[00:32:12] Grace: It’s a global banking benchmarking research that we’ve been doing for three years, in partnership with Longitude and Financial Times,

We have a happy hour right after this. We’re going to give our clients and anyone who’s interested early insight of what we found out.

[00:32:33] Myles: Can we get one?

[00:32:35] Grace: You’re all invited. One is that, as you said, AI, Gen AI is definitely.

[00:32:42] Myles: The last question for the group. Justin, key takeaways from Money2020?

[00:32:48] Justin: I might go a little bit different to the subject du jour, which is, obviously Gen AI, my takeaway anecdotally is that the content slate was pretty heavily focused. You saw a lot of people speaking about it, conversations. Is it one of those things where it’s just not an argument? There’s nothing to discuss, it’s here and it’s really important?

But I would say I’m having a lot of discussions with companies and thinking about the complexities around cross border payments. That’s a solution that, maybe it’s something that you’ve experienced as well, though, is where there’s just a lot of complexity. This whole dynamic of competing infrastructure and rails and people solving individual use cases, but there’s still this bigger problem, which is how does money move cross borders? Which I think we’re still not really that close to solving. There’s a lot of awesome solutions out there, but there’s still a big problem to solve. I think there’s a lot of conversation heating up around that topic.

[00:33:44] Myles: I agree on that one. You get this personal as a consumer, like I consider myself quite a global citizen because I’m all over the place and moving money around is still painful. But then there’s some great solutions out there which can help you as well. I think there’s a lot more to watch in that space.

Anyway, time is up. Absolutely pleasure, thank you all so much for joining the panel today. I hope we now can all go to happy hour and get some insights.

[00:34:10] Justin: Love that. Thank you. Have a great day.

Get in touch to find out more.

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