Why Banks Can't Afford to Wait on Tokenized Deposits, with Jon Briggs

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hi everyone.

Speaker A: I'm Icebram Marcellus Partner, Commerce Ventures. Today I'm really excited to have my good friend John Briggs on our podcast. We're going to talk about everything payments related. John, welcome.

Speaker B: Nice. Thanks for having me. John Briggs, currently global head of money movement and embedded finance at fis. So thanks again for having me.

Speaker A: M. So before we get into payments, John, what I have in front of me is an almond croissant. And I got this croissant earlier today in your honor because John always gives me a hard time of getting pastries whenever he's talking to me. And I inevitably have one of my kids around me, whether that's in a car or somewhere else. So John, what in fact is your favorite pastry? As I take a bite of mine.

Speaker B: That's a good, that's a good question. Just to set the record straight, I actually think that that's all you eat is pastries because that's 90% of the time. That's all I see you eating. It's probably some sort of Danish and something that, you know, marries the combination of good fruit with the flaky pastry, maybe even some, some sweetened cheese matter in there along with alongside the fruit. That always works for me.

Speaker A: I think this sets the context well for the podcast. A certain level of complexity and sophistication to your palate in terms of your pastry choice. All right, that was that wonderful start. You're obviously at FIS now. You and I got to know each other probably close to a decade ago now when you're at KeyBank, and there's a couple topics we're going to talk about today. But before we get into those topics, uh, you spent a lot of time in your career at a bank. You moved from key to FYs last year. What was that transition like? There's obviously a lot of differences in the environment of one versus the other. But what's been some of your interesting lessons learned there?

Speaker B: Yeah, it is probably the most stark change was I went from spending a number of years working with and partnering with fintechs of all sizes, small ones, all the way up through ginormous platforms like fis. And so you, you gain this perspective of what it's like to, to work with them. You question why, like why is X, Y and Z so hard? And so for me, the most eye opening thing was flip over and be to be on the other side serving all these, these banks. In seeing just the disparity across the banks in terms of their, their infrastructure, their strategies, etc. And all of it uh, leading to a lot of complexity. And to be honest, I didn't have an appreciation for the level of diversity and the type of end clients as well as complexity that big companies like an FIS have to deal with every day.

Speaker A: You know, one of the things we saw at Key, and obviously we have had a couple of portfolio companies that worked with you Key. I think one of the interesting things outside looking in in terms of what you and others at Key did really well, it's all bank, it still takes forever, whatever. But one of the things we saw at Key that was interesting is my perspective is you all had a clarity and a intentionality in terms of how you partnered with fintech companies, especially in the commercial payments space that was a little bit like punching above your weight. And uh, a lot of people have asked me like why is that and what did Key do? Something specifically unique in terms of the operating model, how it was structured in terms of that kind of go to market motion. And I know that you and Ken gaverty kind of structured these things in a very specific way. But what now that you've also seen and worked with other banks that are not Key from the FIS side, do you think there's like a specific thing that you all structured a KEY that enables you to do some of these things just like differently?

Speaker B: Yep. Part of it was, or a big part of it was the situation frankly we were thrown, thrown in probably a decade ago, which is I believe when you and I first crossed paths. My background and Ken's background as well and others that were, were part of the transformation. We were not payments people didn't know a thing about payments frankly, and were thrust into this business with a mandate to turn it around. And what we started to do to educate ourselves is we tried to go out into the ecosystem and talk to people that were doing some interesting things, had interesting perspective. You guys. Obviously one of those, try to understand where, where you guys saw the, the world of payments going. And for us what, what was eye opening is through that process is we started to realize that hey, payments like the what payments is, that is, is highly commoditized that, that an ACH transaction is an ACH transaction is an ACH transaction then. And all of the, for our clients, all of the friction either existed before that payment or after that payment. And what we started to see in the industry was a lot of innovation happening around the payment which then caused us to dig a uh, dig a little bit deeper into that and understand why that was how it was happening. And then you Naturally, then go look in within your own portfolio, try to understand your client, your client base where you have concentrations of various verticals and marry those things up and try to find some of the best companies out there, solving material friction points, workflow points for clients that are in verticals that are highly strategic to you. And that's really how our strategy was born. And so it wasn't, it wasn't that we woke up with one day with this highly strategic view on the topic. It was through learning over a long period of time and iteration and failing and having success. And then ultimately I would agree by the time I left there and I would still say the team embodies it today. I think they have one of, still one of the most thoughtful perspectives on um, how to grow payments business and deliver differentiated solutions to your end clients.

Speaker A: One of the interesting things for me was US bank at the time. Obviously I had shy lash on the, on the executive management team. But outside of US Bank I think he was probably the only sort of large top 25, top 30 bank that I can think of. And somebody's probably going to call me on this and say I'm wrong. But for all intensive purposes it's the only one I can certainly think of that had a individual leader, in this case Ken, reporting directly to the CEO of that remit. How important do you think, and you obviously reported directly to Ken on everything from product commercialization to go to market. How important do you think that was from an operating model and organizational structuring perspective? Because clearly in the last three years you've seen that model now take shape at other banks. Using other banks say look, payments is a hugely important piece of this. It's a hugely important contributor to fee based income. It's a capability that extends cross consumer to corporates. It's not just a capability, but it's also a P and L. But how important do you think that is from just an organizational perspective to have that top down alignment to actually driving success? Does it matter? Does it not matter?

Speaker B: I would say it matters a great deal. The other I would say advantage is we have so not only having Ken as head of commercial sitting at the executive table, but also we were fortunate where the previous leader of the payments business was Clark Kayat, who was also happened to be our CFO and leading strategy as well. And so had a uh, lot of great buy in and alignment around the strategy and the need to be able to grow our deposit base and recurring revenue streams. And what that led to was a lot of empowerment to be able to go make it happen. And part of our success was I think our ability to see an opportunity and move with speed to be able to go capture it. And I don't think you can do that without having that type of alignment

Speaker A: top to bottom, contextualized move of speed. Right. Again, understanding this is still happening in the broader context of the bank. But what do you mean by that? Like dimensionalize that?

Speaker B: Yeah. I'll uh, give you an example of one of the last big product launches that we did at KeyBank was our launch of our key virtual account management solution. And we did that with a fintech partner that we then built on um capability on top of integrated. So not only did we, it was a partner plus a build, plus an integration into our digital environments. We accomplished all of that including getting through, if you think about within a regulated institutions, all the third party risk management processes, all the risk management processes around the new capability you're bringing to market. We uh, did that nine months from handshake to launch of a product and that is versus other benchmarks I've, I've seen pretty good relatively speaking for, for

Speaker A: banks maybe to close on the KeyBank chapter in your journey. It's easy to think about success. But what do you think is like what was the biggest miss? Or like what if you look back at that, what's the one thing you wish that you could have done? Or what's the one thing that you wish that you're going to the organization could have done that ultimately didn't happen?

Speaker B: I don't think it was. I can't point to a miss. There's things that, there's a number of things that I wish we would have thought of sooner in terms of how to get these things right. Everything I just described to you in terms of being able to pull off that virtual account management capability in nine months was a culmination of, call it 10 years of trial and error to get there to hone all of our processes. And I wish what I wish we would have known way back when was hey, it's not just the uh, mousetrap that is differentiated but you gotta make sure you have the right type of talent and people to be able to deliver that mousetrap. Oh, by the way, you're still a, even though you may be doing this with a fintech partner, you're still a bank. How do you think about the servicing experience and deliver something that is still, that is an expectation of your client but with technology that is not all fully in house or delivered in house. Those were some of the learnings that we over that those 10 years we stumbled on at times including even the selection of partners. We've had a num. We had a number of really good capabilities and ideas but they weren't the right management teams to be able to help us be successful and doesn't mean they were bad leaders. They were just wasn't a fit. In the context of taking ah fintech capability through a bank channel there isn't any one regret. I just wish like all those, all those learnings of all those missteps if could have learned those sooner would have been the outcome would have been even better.

Speaker A: Yeah probably ultimately still helpful in the context of what you're doing now. There's obviously a lot of things that sort of sit under your hat today and there's a lot of things we can talk about.

Speaker B: Um. Mhm. I'm gonna uh.

Speaker A: I'm gonna focus our conversation today on kind of two topics. The first one being what's happening of tokenized assets writ large and specifically what are we seeing with stablecoin and tokenized deposits? Obviously even in the last 24 hours some of the news coming out of D.C. and the clarity Act I think just continues to make this very timely. The second topic is your on the back of the Capital One acquisition of Brex is what are we seeing of both bank and non bank responses particularly looking at uh, business banking and the business customer as a key area of focus. And to the extent that we have time left we could talk about AI but that's a lot of meaty topics in the next 20 minutes or so.

Speaker B: How long is this?

Speaker A: I need another croissant. That's what I need. But maybe just to start like stablecoin and tokenized deposits. Right. There's clearly a lot of movement in this page is probably the most obvious thing I can say. But you've, you've already seen acquisitions in this space. We have clearly seen a number of companies, both us based as well as ex us that have gotten to really meaningful volume specifically with this concept of okay, I've created a product and uh. A uh. Productized stablecoins as something that I can truly commercialize in market and pretty much all of that is not bank based. And now you're seeing in the US this initial sort of reaction from banks that are saying okay, we're going to, we're going to do some things in the stablecoin space. But now we're also focused on sort of tokenized deposits. My first question is in My view, people tend to conflate these things, and I think it's actually really unhelpful. Like, how do you think about stablecoin as one structure versus a tokenized deposits as a different structure or a different concept? Let's start there. And my sort of second question is, have banks missed the boat on this already? How do you actually think about this? Where does it go from here?

Speaker B: Can I start with the second question first? I don't think so, actually. Let me back up and say, I think what underpinning, whether it's stablecoin or tokenized deposits or the tokenization of assets, is a set of technology that our view has the potential to transform financial services. M. You can't deny the benefits of it in terms of the efficiency that exists with it, the transparency that exists. And I think we're in the very early days of just seeing how that technology will reshape financial services for banks. Do I think they've missed the boat? I don't think they've. I don't think they've missed the boat yet. I do think there is some urgency. In just the past year, we've started clearly seeing the regulatory environment get a lot more clear in terms of what the future looks like. Uh, and to your point, uh, just in the last 24 to 48 hours and what that should. And what we're seeing from a banking perspective is it's getting banks attention in the sense of the realization that they do need to be able to take action. And some are thinking about it as from a highly defensive standpoint. Others are thinking about it more as a. From a growth opportunity standpoint. And there's a whole lot of folks that are, I would say, sitting in the middle and unclear what step to take first. I do just to talk a little bit about what we've done in this space, we announced a partnership with Circle late last year. We are in the process of integrating that into all of our money movement rails. So the way I like to think about it is we've. We're effectively adding another lane in our payments highway for. For clients. And I think a number of our more commercially oriented clients are excited about that and the potential that it can have to help them solve use cases like cross border as an example. Let me pause there, see if you have any questions before I go on.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's really helpful context, actually. The. What I keep coming back to and I want to come. I also want to come back to my first point around. Like, how do you actually Think about stablecoin versus tokenized deposits more definitionally. But one of the. We were having a conversation earlier this week with the head of a large bank and um, in that conversation with that specific individual, it was a pretty interesting line of questioning around specifically of tokenized deposits, which we can argue is effectively a more modern sort of GL approach or database approach. Is this just tech for tech stake? Is there a real business case around commercializing this and having net new revenue that's derivative of it? Or is this. We're all payment geeks. Is this. Yeah, it's cool, but there's no real step function change in terms of what it enables. Like how do you think about that argument in terms of is this tech for tech or is it tech to actually unlock a fundamentally new tam?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's more, I think it's a combination of both. So I do think there are uh, existing, there's problems today that are solved that can probably be done a little, done better and more efficiently with this technology. Is it going to be massively transformational? Probably not. I do think there are though new and better use cases and more possibilities in terms of being able to improve the outcomes for banks and clients with this technology. So if you think about the power of tokenized deposit blockchain technology, the programmability of, of that money, you start to be able to open up new B2B use cases. There's a, uh, strong case to be made where you can massively improve the risk profile of those payments from a fraud perspective. From an AML perspective, um, you're able to do it with a level of transparency that doesn't exist the way it does with that technology, which I think is, is interesting. The programmability nature of it allows you to think of injecting liquidity into a payment whether you're on the, the, whether you're the buyer or the supplier in a, in a contractual and transparent way that can't be done as efficiently today with, if you think about trade finance use cases. And then obviously there's a whole laundry list of other use cases that become possibilities. I think the obvious ones though that I think are more in the near term are more inter and intra bank settlement use cases, cross border use cases and B2B use cases.

Speaker A: And going back to this sort of distinction point, stablecoins are obviously a synthetic unit of value that is fundamentally coupled to a fiat, uh, currency, let's say US dollar versus a tokenized deposit is. I'm going to bastardize this, but it's A on chain representation of a deposit. Right. They are different things.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's a digital twin of a deposit

Speaker A: versus a synthetic derivative is one way to think about it. Mhm. Do you have a view in terms of the benefits of one versus the other and maybe just put a little bit more of an edge on that? We've clearly seen some institutions in the US notably Citi and JP Morgan launch both their own proprietary stablecoins or their own proprietary coins as well as develop a set of foundational capabilities to tokenize the deposit. Do these things run in parallel? Do they solve different things? Does one like fundamentally cannibalize the other? Like again, I find a lot of people in the market tend to use these things sometimes interchangeably, which to me is intellectually sloppy. But how do you think about it?

Speaker B: It's a big question. I think what hasn't changed is that the foundation of our financial system is the notion of trust. And actually I think this are. We did some, we conducted some research and surveyed a number of consumers around their, their willingness to try stablecoins if offered by a bank. 75% said they would, but less than, just less than 4% felt comfortable with an unregulated provider. So like in there, there's something telling in there around what I think the opportunity is for, for banks in the traditional financial system. I think what the stablecoin providers are doing, they are proving that with better technology they can provide better experiences for consumers for, for corporates. And it is doing a healthy thing, which Fintech has always done, which is pushed the banking system down a path of innovation for the benefit of their customers. And I think we're starting to see that play out. I think as fast forward over some period of time. I do think trust will be, has to be the bedrock of this thing and I think will ultimately determine the winner here.

Speaker A: And obviously there's some level of both cyclicality as well as adoption. It just looks different outside the US versus inside the US Right. Like even the point that you just made around adoption, the data we've seen I think would generally align to that view. Though obviously ex us you're seeing a lot of platforms get the pretty significant scale, albeit with a lot of sort of high risk aspects to that volume. Do you think that inevitably it's going to take much longer for banks to get their act together on this stuff than the non bank entities and that's just a function of the operating environment of being a regulated financial institution, which I think we all understand at least conceptually. Do you Think it's okay to be still talking about this two, three, four quarters from now? Or is it doing something? Do you think there's actually the risk of the market accelerates past a certain point or do you think it's like, hey look, some of this stuff will play out over here and the institutional response at an industry level will play out over here. And yes those things will converge at some point, but they don't necessarily have to track at the same time.

Speaker B: Yeah, so if I were in my old role, I would be pushing us to take action now. And it's why Because I think the amount of time required to understand the technology, understand the risk associated with it, uh, how to stand that up, establish it within a regulated environment, educate your, not only your internal teams but your regulators at the same time, like that is, that's a lot of work. And I do think there's the deposit risk for, for the financial system. It is a real risk and any delay in terms of starting on that journey to be able to understand the space, start to define your framework, um, just pushes that date out further and further for when you, you have something that's competitive and meets the needs of your clients. It is take circle in US DC today. Imagine a middle market company trying to pay a uh, supplier over in, in Asia and in Europe. Think about the traditional money movement system FX and the latency and the lack of visibility in the payment and just the cost to commercial customers. I think you, you can't deny in that use case that there's a better way of doing something that banks are already doing today. And so I think it's a healthy thing, the constant pressure to force continued innovation for the betterment of the clients.

Speaker A: I want to go to my other topic in a minute but maybe just to close out the this specific piece because we can obviously keep talking about this for hours but if you step back and say where do you think the market generally and banks specifically will be on this particular topic in terms of the what I'll call industrial implementation of true productized tokenized deposits applications, etc. Uh, where do you think that will be two years from now? Where do you think there will be five years from now?

Speaker B: My hope is so look, the, this only, I think this only works within here domestically if there's a level of collaboration in amongst banks. So all of this requires scale, requires network and my hope is two years from now as a, as an industry we've, we've figured it out and we've created a competitive solution for, for Banks to create digital money and power continue to power commerce in a more efficient way five years from now. I think if banks don't start to take action I think there'd be a lot of regret if that's how it played out. I think this does have, it has a lot of potential and you can't deny it. And I don't think inaction is a friend of the banking system M which

Speaker A: I think is an interesting segue to the second topic. I was talking to somebody that you and I know very well earlier this week and that person said not anyone from keybang just to be clear and that person said that they thought the Capital One acquisition of Brex which obviously has not yet been finalized but that that that announced acquisition is one of the five not just biggest in terms of size but the five most transformative and arguably least expected transactions in arguably the last certainly five if not ten years. And to some extent that's uncontroversial because I think by my account it's the largest by far capability centered acquisition Acquisition exactly that a bank has ever made. Probably my multiple of at least five. Do you think this is a big deal?

Speaker B: Uh yes, on a couple of fronts. I think one thing and this I don't believe in this thesis but it's one that's out there. One view is and actually I'll preface it with the reason why I don't believe it is because I don't believe there's only a few institutions in this world that actually have the potential to in house all their technology and this is comes on the heels of their Discover transaction and I think it's just a consistent trend as as far as cap one of owning a push to own their the technology end to end and I don't think it's. I don't think there's a lot of of risk of that taking hold within the financial system across a number of banks just because like bank technology is is complex. There's a lot of you know, legacy along with all the new capabilities and it's, it's created an enormous amount of complexity for, for banks and companies like ours to be able to manage. I think what that announcement does specifically is and you think about our recent closing of our acquisition of tsys I think in a good way for us it elevated that category as an area that our clients are looking for to us for solutions to be able to continue to remain relevant and serve their customers and continue to grow on the commercial front that has been welcome development

Speaker A: I would say to Me look and I agree to me it also and what you're saying brings two different potential implications to the forefront. The first one has to do with with your point around market competitiveness and what are you seeing in terms of this sort of push banks and non banks to sort of expand along the value chain. Let's start there. The second point is more the operating model point but maybe just to start there. Right. The core thing that you see with Brex and Ramp and others is that spend management tied to card et cetera is really the core it, let's call it connective capability that drives retention, drives engagement and you can hang all of these other financial products off of. And clearly in the market you've seen an increasing amount of competition to really bank and to really use bank in air quotes. But the bank or to win the business customer to commercial customer. Right. You've seen pressure from the intuits of the world and the bills of the world. You've seen competition from other banks. You've seen competition from the sort of challengers like Ramp and you've seen increasingly more, more sort of fragmentation from vertical specific players. That's how I think about the four attack vectors here. One of the things you've seen is then banks looking for kind of this additional, these additional products to capture the share of wallets. Do you think spend management is like that important to that vision? Do you think? So if you think about what do banks need to do to actually compete MHM and to be well positioned against that dynamic and obviously now you have Capital One owning this platform just outright. How can banks do this especially for that segment.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're back to actually to the beginning of our conversation is kind of the way I think about it. This is this trend. So I do think spend management is is really important thing for banks to, to have a capability around, to be able to be defensive around what has been traditionally bank share of wallet with commercial spend cards, D and E cards. I think what we're seeing in that space and Brexit and Ramp are two really good proof points. There's a whole bunch of other companies in that category as well is it's in a way I equate it to what we saw happen early on with acquiring as acquiring left the tradition model of banking and it started to get embedded in software as a an industry. Banks pivoted uh, to be able to support that integrated payments model. Then you started to see banks building uh out exposing APIs for core banking services to be able to deliver solutions natively within erps. I think this is in a way it's an extension of this into the card, the card space. What is spend management? It is that that experience layer that sits between that piece of piece of plastic and ultimately a bunch of information that needs to make its way back into the general ledger of a company. And these platforms are doing that really well today. And that's kind of how I think about it. And banks absolutely need to be thinking about how to defend against this. And by the way, I lived this in my time at uh, KeyBank. We saw it every day, the challenge of going up against these players and it becomes used the way you used to compete in commercial car before there was any software involved or capability was it was all on rebate. And these guys have changed that model. The efficiencies in the experience, employee experience derived by having these capabilities outweighs the rebate play.

Speaker A: I'm going to frame up something that's probably unfair. Probably again, someone's going to probably come out as being somewhat incorrect on this one. But just maybe it's like as a sort of uh, a device for argument, if you will. Ramp versus Square, right? There was a lot of noise when square started to really scale that this was going to be really bad for banks, especially in the acquiring side. And what we ultimately saw that just wasn't true. Right. Like the acquiring TAM grew, the large acquirers kept getting bigger. Just the square became bigger. And obviously there's lots of reasons there, there's lots of things we could unpack that we don't have time for. But the fundamental point is like square changed expectations, especially down market and certainly down market initially. But like the big acquiring platforms still got bigger and I think took a lesson out of that playbook to your point and in grid of a whole bunch of this stuff. So that was a very sort of complimentary thing at the same time.

Speaker B: Yeah, just. But just on. On that point they were able to do that because they pivoted. It wasn't just that card acceptance was. The pie was growing and everybody got to forced innovation in the big guys to be able to remain relevant. Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker A: Your. What's your.

Speaker B: That's fair.

Speaker A: I think my second point was like. And it certainly was definitely an element of competition. My second point is. Is ramp the same as square as in. Should we think about it in the context of. There's a lot of debate out there that the Rams. Rams specifically because I think you could see this, the Brex thing is a reaction to that. But that ramp is Sort of eating the lunch of a lot of these other players and there's a real risk to banks. Do you think that's true or do you think this is more of like a square moment where it's a little of a wake up call for banks but it's also this thing where you can, if you're figuring out the right set of capabilities to integrate as part of your value proposition, you can actually grow to tam just like we saw in acquiring with Square. Maybe put more simply, is this a zero sum game where one player will just take share at the expense of others? Or do you think this is something where everybody wins?

Speaker B: I think it's more zero sum and it's, it's interesting because I, I have friends that use ramp to run their, their business today and they use it like their core operating account at a bank and it's it. So if you blur your eyes a little bit like what is it that you're looking at? Are you looking at a spend management platform or are you looking at a digital banking experience?

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And that for banks like even Square, you can argue that, yeah, everybody, the kind of. The rising tide lifted all ships. But there's. I don't know how many SMBs square has now, but there's a lot of them that are not at banks today. Traditional banks today, brick and mortar banks, they're at square.

Speaker A: That's fair. That's fair. I'm going to come back to something you said earlier which is you, this conversation around um, Capital One acquiring Brex and you're obviously capital is a little bit in its own unique category. But when just in your current role, given your bank account key, etc. When do you think it makes sense for a bank to own something versus not specifically in the context of tech, like what, what crosses this sort of the red line so to speak, quote unquote, where you'd say okay, if it has these attributes, um, and if it doesn't, it's like the spectrum of rent.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's uh, I think it just, it comes down to scale at the end of the day the challenge for most banks. There's only a few banks in my opinion that can truly buy scale, a scale technology company and continue to scale it further within their own four walls. Cap One obviously is one of those companies there. I do think there's the notion of capability acquisitions. I do think that's a play that banks can pull off. We did it at Key successfully. I've seen, I saw a number of our peers do it successfully. And I think success in those situations is it's where you have targeted scale in a specific vertical or you're buying something that truly is a utility and you can ingest the asset and use it more broadly within the institution in a way that you couldn't if you didn't, didn't own that. So I think those are, those are possible. But the big scaled software companies, I think those are going to be few and far between in my opinion. And also the mindset of a financial institution, traditional financial institution versus a technology company in terms of investing and developing software, they're very different.

Speaker A: That's sort of like own versus Rent, within rent. There's a huge spectrum of okay, it's just a like vendor procurement piece all the way through to. This is a special proprietary partnership, etc. You mentioned earlier that you guys have done a partnership with Circle. I laugh because I think Circle's done partnership with everybody.

Speaker B: But offended, I feel special.

Speaker A: That's not a criticism of you or fis. To be clear, I'm more laughing in the context of. Sometimes I ask people what's the extent of the partnership? It's. You get different responses to that. And this question is much less around like Circle specifically. It's actually much more around. You've done a lot of these types of partnerships and a lot of these types of deals. How do you think about structuring an effective partnership and what are your, what's like your top lessons learned? There's.

Speaker B: I think it starts, starts with alignment of the, of the. Across the teams like at the. As I said earlier, so many. You can have the best mousetrap that makes all the sense in the world to layer on your infrastructure or distribute through your channel. But if you don't have the right team, uh, and alignment across the teams in terms of what it, what success is going to look like and then it'll be hard to pull it off successfully because in these things stuff goes wrong. You can't think of everything and it requires really good partnership to be able to work, work through those. The other. That's probably, that's probably the right there, the biggest determinant of success. Assuming you know that the mousetrap itself makes sense. The second one I would say is thinking holistically about how to bring the solution to market. So how are you going to, how's it going to be integrated? How. What's the go to market look like? Are the incentives aligned on both sides? Are incentives aligned your salespeople, how are you going to service this thing in a seamless experience. Like it's doing a fintech partnership or any sort of partnership. There's a lot more than just signing a reseller agreement. It's. They're hard, they take a lot of sweat equity. And I think you need to be selective in terms of the ones you do to be able to do them, do them well, and then, um, maybe

Speaker A: just end, because I know we're almost at time here. What, what's, what's your big one? Bold prediction for payments in 2026.

Speaker B: Bold prediction for payments in 20.

Speaker A: You could be totally wrong when I call you out on this in December, but at least make it interesting.

Speaker B: You know what? I. I think we, we get to the end of 2026, and I think in the industry, the conversation around tokenized, uh, deposits or tokenized money is no longer just a conversation. We're starting to see it, see it beyond the big guys, the, the JPs and, and the cities of the world. I think that. And I should throw in bank of New York in there as well. I think it's. The technology starts to be more ubiquitous and that, I think that should excite us all.

Speaker A: I agree. All right, thank you, sir, as always. We'll have our croissant versus Danish challenge later.

Speaker B: Yeah. Enjoy the rest of your pastries.

Speaker A: Talk soon. Awesome.

Speaker B: Uh, see you.