Why Liquidity Comes Before Yield in Corporate Treasury

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: I'm uh, Brett Turner, founder and CEO of Truvada. Uh, Paul Bantas with me. This is really part two of an episode that we, we did. I'd encourage you to go listen the first one if you didn't do that. That was sort of the backstory of just how we connected really sort of insiders and from the, from our respective areas with. From really the blockchain and crypto world and Paul and uh, the founding of PyUSD and then how we connected, which were really the Travatis story which is really around data and infrastructure and automation of all the workflows, building something new and modern from a digital experience and managing cash and liquidity more on the corporate side. Uh, we'll pick that up from that episode. But uh, I'd be remiss to mention really the whole thing about this is a new stablecoin series that we're kicking off. So we got a lot of episodes coming. Again, this is the second part of the first episode really under this banner of what is it going to take for stablecoins to go mainstream, particularly in corporate finance and corporate treasury. That's very different than consumers. So if you think of like all the back and forth and the battle between the bank lobby and the crypto lobby happening around the Clarity act, why isn't that done yet? Yield is a huge topic right now and warring on that banks worried about the flight of deposits. Can you get yield directly on the stablecoin reserves that sit outside the bank? Well, that's a problem. And so all those things are happening. But the corporate use case is very different because that's just. We see that we got a different story to tell because from that standpoint it doesn't really matter. It's not really about yield. It's around liquidity and, and managing your operating capital, which is primarily just all of the blood and the arteries of the body of a business. I mean that managing that working capital and that corporate cash is really critical. Liquidity trumps yield. So that's really a core thesis of this. We'll talk about and unpack a lot there. M so that's really the stablecoin series that we're kicking off. We're kind of teeing up part two now. What is so the segue that we kind of ended the last episode telling the story how we are, we connected. I got introduced from an investor to Paxos. Paul was at Paxos at the time. I remember it was pretty cool. They kind of, you know, were gracious to Meet with me. It was the next day I was in town, uh, came in and then here I am, uh, telling this, you know, this corporate use case and all what was happening. It was like, we need more use cases for stablecoins to actually do more than just crypto trading. And so here I come in. And you know, Paul was right to mention I was starting at the time really, uh, looking with circle IPO and coming out a big, sort of like a lot of folks, it really legitimized the inspiration of like, where this is now going to go and take off. And so it started with this, uh, Am I crazy? Because, I mean, it felt like this has to happen, but what am I missing here? I need to talk to people that really understand this business, really understand the blockchain infrastructure and crypto and stablecoins. And so how is this going to intersect? And I think that's where we met. So maybe we'll, we'll pick it up there and talk a little bit about this corporate use case because that's where, uh, where it started and how we can get started now.

Speaker A: I know, I think that's a great place to start. So I'm going to ask you, never, um, asked you this before. So what motivated you to walk into Paxos? I know you said there was things that were happening in the industry with circle ipo, et cetera, but what were you hearing from a Truvada perspective? What were you hearing from your customers? What were you hearing from the bank? Or what had you identified internally that made sort of some of those light bulbs go off and say, hey, this is something that I need to explore and then come up with your thesis. And then, you know, am I crazy for looking at it from this perspective? You know, tell me a little bit about sort of the, the genesis of all.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the genesis. I mean, it's, it's one of these things that's when people see where Travat is at today. I learned this phrase from a mentor of mine way back. He built a successful company, took about a dozen years, went public. And when they were going public, one of, uh, the junior bankers on the team kind of looked at him and said, man, you guys just came out of nowhere. And he's like, yeah, just a, uh, 12 year overnight success story. And I feel like a little bit of people like, well, what's the epiphany? And it's like, well, you kind of, yeah, you have to have a vision in the beginning. And we did, but you're learning so Much as you go. And this is Truvada now, started the company uh, 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago now. We've been in market for seven years. But really so you know, to answer your question, it really comes out of just this journey that we've been on because it's really around the uh, thesis that started with Truvada trove of data, really this steeped in data and modern infrastructure, cloud native infrastructure. Still today not a lot of people understand the difference between cloud hosted and cloud native which is a very different building block. And so we focus there. We pioneered APIs with banks, another big part to answer your question, because we work with banks, it's a big part of our go to market strategy. We want to work with banks, it gives us a way to distribute our products but it also helps the banks with building great technology. And everything is resulting in this next gen experience that needs to happen and next gen technology that the bank also needs. Especially with all these new things like a stablecoin. So all of this in being in market, working with customers, being in the corporate landscape. My background as a uh, cfo, I started out as a CPA at Deloitte many many years ago. Spent some time at Amazon and their corporate finance group. But just being in the trenches as a finance professional, as a CFO in startups, but more enterprise focused startups. Managing cash is key. Just as when you want treasury, it happens more formally with very large companies. But every company, the lifeline is cash. And all of the utility of that, the working capital, all the management and workflows that go along with that are always hard. You don't get a lot of leverage with. You're either using bank portals and spreadsheets or if you're some of the largest companies, you're using a Treasury management system. Those systems, there's few left and they're all extremely antiquated. There's a few left but nobody's uh, built the new treasury management system in almost 30 years. Really this is all the context of going through this, innovating in this market, built on this data and infrastructure strategy that we focus because it's about automating all the workflows that sit on top. So part of the when more and more is happening with the blockchain, knowing that there's, this is going to really be the future. I think a lot of people would uh, see that. But then when you have some of these catalyst stable coins and then this sort of coming out party a little bit with circle that everybody, uh, gravitated to and sort of legitimize sort of the value and their approach to making it more regulated and focusing on that side more. Kind of where the cryptos past kind of came through over the last few years. Then it was like, okay, now this is maybe not going to happen immediately tomorrow, but this is now a building block, this can be used and go, how is this going to go prime time here we've got a perfect use case for it because it really hits all of the utility aspects of it. Really long answer to your question, because there's just so much there of the why. But I think this is where the reason why it's the corporate use case is just because it's the next step in doing all the automation that pairs with AI that needs to happen. Otherwise you're never going to get that sort of escape velocity or that sort of acceleration to kind of take everything to the next level.

Speaker A: Okay, wow, you said a lot there. So let's unpack a couple of things. One that I'm interested in early is you mentioned the banks, right? And we've mentioned that in the, in the first session that we did. There's this sort of debate or tension between the banking industry and let's just call it the crypto industry, uh, on what the impact of stablecoin should be, how they should be regulated, should they pay yields, how do banks participate, etc. You're in a unique position because you obviously have all of these corporate clients, some of the biggest brands in the world that utilize Trabata, but you're also have these wonderful partnerships with, with some of the biggest banks in the world. So in your conversations with those banks and as you start explaining what Tribada wants to do, how we want to incorporate digital currencies, how we want to automate some of these processes, how do those conversations go with banks? You know, in your opinion, do you find sort of, they've accepted this sort of position where this technology, let's just call it the technology is coming one way or another and it's a question of, you know, what do I support, uh, what do I build? You know, do I do a tokenized deposit, you know, do I provide infrastructure for my customers? How are those conversations going with the banks? And can you share a little bit of how they see a platform like Truvada being able to accelerate their own sort of digital strategy?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think the early days of Trivada, in order to build really a, uh, data and infrastructure, where does data come from it's the customer's data. But the banks are keepers of that data, the ledger with the core system. And so they have all the data. It's just not being utilized. And it's disparate in all the different pieces and parts and layers and things like that that the bank ecosystem is today. So in those early days it was about the APIs, and in the early days of Truvada it was talking about APIs, because that was prevalent in tech. That's how tech sort of rose, leveraging APIs. A lot of folks in banking didn't know what an API was, but they embraced that APIs came along. So we pioneered APIs. We did it with banks. Banks had to build them, make them available. We built to them. It became the intermediary. And that's true. It's still not a perfect science today, far from. There's no standards. So we had to do a lot to actually make them useful and leverage that in a powerful way. And that's a big part of kind of how we built Truvada on kind of that data thesis. So now we've kind of come a long way because I think in those days it was the banks were like, do we really want to do this? Do we need to do this? And I think now it's a pretty emphatic. Well, of course Data is key. APIs are part of kind of where we want to go and uh, where we need to go, how our customers need to leverage their data. And so now when you kind of look at the stablecoin strategy, I think it's now whole next level from there, knowing that there's systemic change coming. The blockchain is very different. The momentum is moving to the blockchain. What exactly is it? Is a stablecoin just another rail to adopt and utilized by the bank, or is it really now a killer app? That's actually the momentous shift that's going to drive people to making blockchain, uh, something very different and really a whole new planet that's going to start to spring up in terms of where the global system, financial system is going to go. So I think now what's happening is that whole shift has happened. I think the banks know it's systemically important. I think if they don't do it, they know that there's going to be issues. And so I think they've all embraced it. And so I think now the next question is, okay, if you do it well, what happens next?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's, uh, it's again fascinating. That's why I was asking from your perspective because it's interesting. The banks have been you know, a little slower to move. But if you look at other aspects of, of sort of the ecosystem, I credit a lot to like what Visa has done and MasterCard has done and Visa just made an announcement about their stablecoin platform bsp. You know Zelle issued a uh, stablecoin to be able to take their services international. Swift is now talking about you know, going on chain as well. So a lot of changes are happening there. That's why I was interested in your conversations with the banks. Another question along those lines because you said that you know, sort of the retail and the individual use case, you know, sort of that that's on one side but you said the use cases for corporate. But uh, you didn't double click on some of those in your mind. Some. What are these sort of no regrets type of use cases that you think, you know, a large enterprise can start utilizing? Stablecoins, what pain points are they solving and where does the technology actually add value to them? Sort of in the early days until the ecosystem continues to build out.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the use cases get missed because again not a lot of people understand how the enterprise functions, how corporate treasury functions, how even corporate finance, how they utilize various systems and those rails in all of their day to day. And I think most of the, everybody has the context of more consumer banking and there's you might have one or two bank accounts, you might have an investment account and so it's pretty compact. You're going to park money in high uh, yield savings let's say or maybe you're going to invest through Robinhood or whatever but then you're going to have your cash, your paycheck's going to come in. So it's very simple. All the utility is, there's not a whole lot of utility and you generally get those things for free. And so now with like if you look at a stablecoin you, you're kind of there's some utility, some benefits, but you want those for free. It's just a better free. You already get some of that stuff for free. I want a better way and to do more things, have more freedom but it's still, you know, still going to be from that context. On the corporate side though, managing working capital, it's not about. So therefore on the consumer side yield becomes a big deal because it's like I want to, if I'm going to use this, you know, stable coins Put my money there, I want to earn on that. And so on the corporate side though, it's, you know, the first thing people look at if you're a consumer and you start uh, asking about or you're talking to somebody maybe in corporate finance or corporate treasury, you're looking like, well, that's, you're sitting on a ton of cash. You got to invest that. You don't want to let that sit there and not earn on it. But the first thing you learn is like, it's really not about yield or interest on that money. It's about availability and control of that money. It's about liquidity. Liquidity is making sure you have the money when you need it. It goes in the right places when you need it. And so that level of control and that level of safekeeping, because it's all about using it for your operations, for your business. It's not about secondary, maybe tertiary is really earning on that. That would be nice if you could do it. But it has to be almost like, it can't be like medium risk, it has to be almost zero, zero risk, right? So that's the posture that's taken. And because of that there's just a whole different set of use cases and utility. And that's why we can get in a little bit into some of those things right out of the gate there's some low hanging fruit and that's intercompany settlement, for instance. You don't have that in the consumer side. But that can be a pain point because you got entities or businesses that have a web of entities. And a lot of business, it's transacting between entities. And so managing all that can be fairly complicated. And some businesses are just global businesses. They have these entities, they might have a thousand entities in all of the subsidiaries on all these structures. So all of that intercompany activity is big on the accounting side and especially big on executing. It can have impacts on taxes, all of the aspects that the business is setting up those for. And so, uh, the use cases are very different. That's a huge use case right out of the gate. And that's something that if you're a corporate using it and you can streamline a lot of that stuff and tap into a lot of that utility, you're like, am I willing to, because I'm paying for a lot of that stuff today and you know, am I willing to give up some yield to cover that and have all these benefits? Well, the answer is usually yes, because you're not caring about that yield as much right now and, and if you can tap into those benefits, those would be huge and a huge unlock.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting that you position it that way because one of the criticisms or one of the critiques now of stablecoin for payments is the ecosystem is not mature enough. Right. First of all you have to have a willing counterparty that's willing to accept the stablecoin or you have to go through what they call the stablecoin sandwich. Fiat to stablecoin, stablecoin to fiat. And what that does to things like efficiency and cost and is the promise of the technology being fulfilled. Fulfilled because we don't have sort of the ecosystem built out. But what you're saying is sort of an immediate use case that sort of a no regrets use case that you can start doing today is that intercompany settlement because it's not dependent on sort of the ecosystem being built out and willing counterparties to receive the payments. It's you're just moving value amongst your own related entities. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the, the other part of this is that that gets missed besides some of these utility aspects is just uh, being able to do it in a safe way. Having this accessible, these controls are really important. So I think when you kind of COVID have these low hanging fruit use cases and you have this governed access that's within your system where you're doing everything already and they become symbiotic in that realm, then all of a sudden it starts to unlock and the utility then even stacks even more. So that kind of ties into the utility. But yeah, when you look at kind of what, like what we've done with Travada for instance is that you know, now we have customers that are starting to onboard and use stablecoins within all of using Trvada as a system for where all your cash and liquidity is managed today. But now you have a new means to do different things with it. And a stablecoin does different things, it sort of collapses a lot of different things. And so now you can do things where before there was different levels of dependencies and a lot of manual workflows. And now you can set up an agent and you can move stable coins between wallets, between uh, two intercompany, uh, to settle intercompany payables and receivables between two entities that you wholly as a company, your parent company wholly owns. And so that to uh, transact and to have a ledger around that as that record keeping and that bookkeeping, you know that's constantly happening and that happens at a high degree or a high volume. So being able to do that agentically and then having an automated means to capture all that, put that into the accounting system to support all that and not having a lot of people and process and spreadsheets and things to manage all that, that's just scratching the surface. But it's almost like uh, and even if that's domestic use, not dealing with cross border because you have global entities, there's enough on the domestic side even that you're, it's almost like you're doing a form of uh, you know, internal banking or almost like book transfer except you have full control of doing it and you can do it, you know, 24 7, you can do it on a Sunday, you can manage all that stuff yourself. And that's really capturing all that, that power and all of that control that you have and then having it, you know, using agents to do it. Now you're, it allows you to sort of, you know, get leverage in an area that you know, you've never had leverage before and that becomes game changing.

Speaker A: You've mentioned agent, you know several times and I think one of the most impressive things about Truvada is how seriously it takes sort of its AI component and agent component. Off topic of the stable coins for a second, huh? Just give me your thoughts on you know, what are sort of the misconceptions or how people underestimate like the role that AI is going to play in sort of treasury management. Tell me a little bit about uh, sort of your approach to building that and what you've seen some of the customers because I think obviously you know, having stablecoins and digital currencies is going to, you know, wonderfully complement, you know, as we go towards that world. But just kind of want to understand sort of your viewpoint independent of the stable coins just on AI and tool for treasury management.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the big thing this is where you know the as we've kind of built, you know, Trotta over the years, we've still kind of coming out of a world and kind of lived through a world where you know, enterprise software is something you're using that there's a lot of complexity there and all of that. The features and functionality, I need features and functionality. I have to have those things to do my job. And in the corporate treasury landscape it's the call it a workstation very this desktop oriented view where you've got to do all these things and you need the system to be Very functional. And now when you kind of look at AI, it not only is he giving you access to this incredible intelligence, but it's also the promise of agents to be able to start automating those things. And, and so it starts to give you uh, move toward a world where you're starting to obfuscate even the UI layer. And so of course we're all too familiar with the SaaS apocalypse and all that's been happening. Maybe that's overblown and you see Salesforce and other stocks that are kind of bouncing back as a result. But there's still that overhang of where is the role of kind of enterprise software? Is it sort of the end of that? Are we sunsetting that now? And I think AI, yes, will have a bigger role in how that's going to be utilized in sort of the app layer. So I think when you now look at data and infrastructure, it's even that much more important because again, AI sitting on top of that, it can use the application layer, it can use the APIs and all those things and the functionality that's built from that lens, but it's doing it agentically and using it in a way to just have smarter outcomes. But that's all really conditional on having modern infrastructure. If you're now using something that's a 30 year old, you know, enterprise software and uh, the under the hood, all that stuff before would never really get scrutinized. Now it exposes that a bit because now your deployment of AI, is that going to be native AI? Because now when you, you're going to ask those questions more and more, uh, because at the end of the day are you getting these highly intelligent, precise, deterministic outcomes when you're using an agent, are you or using the intelligence that you're gathering through chat? And I think right now everybody is witnessing it. There are companies that are just kind of taking their database, connecting it to uh, an LLM and expecting to get great results. And will they get good results or will they get interesting thing? Of course. But if you get 80% or 80% right, that doesn't work in the corporate uh, world it has to be a hundred percent right. When you make an error, it could have massive risk and massive downstream impacts. So that might work okay for a consumer because if something goes wrong, maybe it's not that cataclysmic. But in the enterprise world, and that's kind of where my career has been built in enterprise startups, is really if you fail or if something fails, then that might Be it, you might be kicked out, you might be done. So I think those are sort of the things that is happening now with AI because it's starting to really expose the infrastructure layer, how that has to be modernized. And then also it's to really get the most out of it, to do what it's really intended to do. It has to be configured, it has to be utilized, it has to be deployed in that kind of way. Otherwise it's close but not good enough.

Speaker A: No, that's great answer. It makes a lot of sense. And the other phrase that you constantly use is governed access. Right. Um, so when you're talking to the different treasury teams and talking to CFOs, what's top of mind for them when they start talking about those type of things? Like, have they articulated what their concerns are either on the AI side or on the stablecoin side when you said you can only get, you know, you can't get 80 or 85%, it's 100% or you're looking for a job. So how do you close that gap? How do you make sure, what is it that they're concerned about when you say, you know, government access and things like that, and how are you going about sort of building that confidence for these folks to be able to say, okay, we're going to test and learn and be able to incorporate? Because as we've discussed, you know, in other contexts is there's a lot that a company has to do to be able to start utilizing this right? From, from creating their policies and procedures, you know, to training folks and understanding the technology. So tell me a little bit about, uh, you know, that whole governed access and those guardrails and controls that that Truvada puts in place to make it easy for these companies to start testing?

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean it when you're dealing on, you know, on the corporate side, the enterprise mid market side, it's like you can't bring, um, a piece of software to market unless you have those kind of things in mind. The hardening of the software, the testing of it, the securities, the controls, the transparency, the logs, the audit logs, auditability, all these things are so crucial in all of that. And if you can't, in a world now with AI or even years ago, is kind of like the hesitancy of using machine learning. Because it'd be like, great, I like it conceptually, but if it's a black box, I don't know how it's computing or uh, doing things, then that's a problem because I Have to have a full auditability or whole audit trail of exactly how it arrived at the outcome. Because I can't just say, well, it just did it, trust me. Just like the teacher, when you're, you're probably that math teacher that you had, it's like you can't just show the right answer, you got to show me the proof, you know. And so I think that's a big part of that. So when you look at all of those, you know, the internal controls are really extensive. The larger the company, the more complex. Um, there are teams that manage all of that. And so having various systems, having all those controls, all of that, that makes it. So it's all about risk. It's through the lens of risk. It needs to be industrial grade, it needs to be hardened in a way that, you know, the risk of error, it's, you know, nothing's ever perfect, but the risk of error is extremely low and a tolerable risk when you know that even if something happens, you've got good visibility, you've got good remediation. All of these things that, you know, are set to be able to respond to that. And I think, uh, those are the kind of, that's the lens really that they're looking at. Stablecoins. It's like, yeah, but I don't, I'm not just going to go and, you know, set up a coinbase wallet and start, you know, moving money into that wallet and move it to some counterparty and you know, in Colombia, for instance, I want to get the money to that counterparty in Colombia, but I've got to do it in the context of my system, all my workflows, all those controls, all that governance layer and if it's not in there, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to wait till it does get in there.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's, I definitely see that. Um, and like you said, risk management is an important element of this, you know, and just from a compliance standpoint and giving them the tools that are needed. Do you find that in your conversations with potential customers, do they see the promise of the technology, do they already see the use cases? Or is it also not only in terms of the govern access and controls, but is there an education process of saying, hey, anytime you're moving value from A to B or anytime you're doing any of these sort of activities, there may be uh, some benefit of using stablecoins. And that's what we alluded to earlier, that trying to avoid hype. Right. And saying that it solves every potential situation, which is not true. There'll be certain situations where stablecoins make sense and others where other forms of payment will make sense. But do you find that you have to sell folks also on the use cases, or are Treasury Departments and just corporates already thinking internally? Here's all of my operations, here are all of my workflows. And are they starting to independently see where those opportunities are, or is that still an education gap that Truvada has to sort of take on?

Speaker B: It's a great question. I feel like on the enterprise side, there's a different kind of sequence of adoption. I think on the consumer side, once there gets to be sort of this, this education layer and understanding of it, then you see this engagement start to happen and it's maybe a little bit more broadly. On the enterprise side, though, there's always early adopters, and the early adopters absolutely see those benefits and more so than others. But the barrier is just like, okay, I can't use it until it's, you know, the risk goes down, or again, governed access. When it's consumable, then I'll wait in and use it. And then once those early adopters use it, they become sort of the test case, the leads for the rest of the industry. And because they're looking for their people that they trust, they're people that they think through, they see those use cases firsthand, they see the case studies, and then they start to wade in. And so I think definitely their education is ramping along the way, but the biggest catalyst is seeing that who's going first. Some of those trailblazers are using it. And I think like anything, it's like maybe when you, you went to, uh, that scary roller coaster when you're a kid at Magic Mountain or whatever, and you're like, you know, I'll go on that, but I want my big brother to go on it first. Once you go on it and I know that you're safe and you get off and you can walk off the ride, then I'll go on it. There's a little bit of that. I think that's kind of what happens a little bit on the enterprise side. It's like, once we see that it's safe, once we see that it's working, I already believe in the value. I already see some of the utility. Yeah, maybe I'm not going to be a power user and use all that out of the gate, but I definitely. You don't have to sell me necessarily on those pieces. You just have to sell me that it's going to work and I'm not going to get fired if I, if I wade into it. And I think it's kind of stages in those, in those two buckets.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, and I think as we said, you know, and some of the momentum now in the industry with reputable big giant companies like, you know, Visa, MasterCard, what they're doing, some of the banks, uh, you know, I think it's encouraging for folks, right, because these are people that are in the business of moving value, moving money and payments. And to be able to incorporate the technology makes it safer, I think for some of these enterprises to at least dip their toe, as we like to say. I hate roller coasters, by the way. So even if you were right, I wouldn't write it after you. But regardless, uh, no, that's interesting. Now let's take a step back for a second because we've been talking about stablecoins, which is tokenized dollars, right. I think the more interesting conversation at times is what we're starting to see on just other forms of tokenized assets, right? And sort of the interplay there between the tokenized dollar and a tokenized asset. And we said earlier sort of atomic settlement of going in and out of these positions quickly. You know, tell me a little bit based on your background, you know, in your career and currently with Trvada, you know, how do you see the potential for that? Like, you know, what are some of the, again, pain points that something like that can solve when we start this whole concept of tokenizing all of these assets, which, know, a lot of people have been a proponent of that for many, many years. And, and they said, in fact, we're going to start with the dollar and then we're going to go to other assets, whether it's gold, whether it's equities, whether it's real estate. Tell me a little bit about, from a Treasury management standpoint, how, how you view that sort of evolution of, of tokenization of assets.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I, I think that because there's such high utility, because that uh, govern is so important, that's why you kind of go where it's safe. You work with, you know, can't fail banks. You know, that ecosystem is so important to utilize. And if you look at the last 40 years like again, banks are still run off their core systems or off mainframe, uh, computers. You know, these mainframes are still, you have to find COBOL developers who to fix something, right? So, uh, we laugh about that, but that's kind of still really the state of a lot of banks and how they function and operate. And so you look at the entire global financial system, we want to do all these advanced things, but at the end of the day it goes through the bank. If it's not going to, you know, you're not going to really do much outside of that. You've got to sort of reconcile, you've got to, you know, make sure that it's happening with the bank. And I think over the last many decades, that's where you have just layers and layers and workarounds and this and lots of different new Rails and formats and protocols and you just get this massive system. And now when you could look at the promise of like blockchain and a stablecoin or digital assets and tokenized assets, now you're talking about, you're really. It's not about how that's going to fit into the banking system because that's sort of the, you know, the, everything is revolving around the bank in this world now. It's moving to. You're going to see an entirely new order or stack of how that's all going to work. And, and so, you know, maybe the analogy would be like, and I've got gray hair. So I had to deal with this with the uh, your component video cables. You know, the green, the blue, and then you got audio. There's a couple cables there before, you know, fiber came along. So you're using a lot of cables. It's like, man, there's a ton of cables. And then all of a sudden the HDMI cable comes along and it's like, hey, it's got audio, video, one cable. All of those pieces and parts kind of all now happen in one cable. Isn't that nice? Just connect one cable now and you handle audio and video with that. Uh, and I think, uh, there's a little bit of a, there's a chance to kind of, as we kind of look at this, where blockchain is going and stablecoin sort of being a, uh, you know, tokens are going to be, you know, these ways that are all digitized and it's all essentially built on the core of data and modern infrastructure now you can sort of do things differently. You don't need to go through the same, you know, system. You don't need to go. So I think they've got to reconcile, they got to come together. And I think the uh, bank absolutely still has a big role in this. But I think when you, when you look at now It's a chance to kind of do things different, more streamlined. And then once you're in that world now you can start to stack or be interoperable in all these different other kinds of adjacencies. And whether it's a tokenized money market, you know, fund, that's something. Because when you look at the interplay between your corporate cash and then you look at excess cash from what you intelligently determine that excess cash now does that you start to have a different tokenized instruments to the money market securities and things. And does that be something? Of course, everything we're moving into a digitized or tokenized world. And so now when everything kind of boils down to data leveraging in a blockchain world, all of a sudden you get that things that you can just do, bundling into many, moving parts, moving into one, no disparate data, all kind of. Instead of batching things, you don't have to batch for efficiency because this system has choke points if you put too much data through. So you got to batch it in order to make that work. And now this world, like millions of transactions flowing through at high rates of speed, like everything can now just happen at a transaction level because that volume of transaction is no longer a pain point. And so you can handle all that at high speeds. And so that means you're not going to deal with reconciliation. It's inherently reconciled because you just have everything is there's no batches to unpack and then to tie out transaction to transaction identifiers. Now, uh, AI will essentially just easily match those up. So I think everything is, it sets up for this proliferation of tokens, which then, if everything is moving in that world, this is where AI and agents can do things. Because now it becomes a great baton for agents to be able to do things and automate a lot of these things. And we don't quite know how that's all going to look just yet. But, uh, on the corporate side, we do know that it's constantly, over decades, it's constantly coming down with finance and treasury and accounting always having to do more with less. And we're coming out of the cloud area and technology where you expect that you can get all that compression, on cost, on workflows, getting leverage. And that just hasn't really happened that much in the finance world. And so now you can finally get this shift where you can get that kind of leverage. And once you get everything kind of digitized and tokenized on this new foundation of blockchain, and you have AI and AI is teaming up with the tokens or teaming up with Stable Coins, everything can change. And I think that's sort of ushering in. Then it gives you a chance to really look at all the underlying workflows. Why do we even have to do it this way? Now you can change all of the workflows. Some of those just might just go away. I think it's exciting. It opens up all those possibilities. It gets a chance to really dream big. From a first principles, uh, perspective on how that's all going to happen, how that's all going to interoperate, then it just, it's going to just be a bit of a flywheel of where that's all going with all kinds of other adjacencies and other tokenized products.

Speaker A: That's fascinating. Like we said, it's a really interesting time to be in this space. So I'm, um, going to ask you one last question. Uh, again, you're fairly new into the whole digital currency stablecoin space and all that. So what has you interested? What are you following? What's sort of the topic of the day for you between now and maybe the time that we record the next one? There's the whole thing on clarity act, you know, there's some momentum on that again. And are they going to land that plane soon? Mad rush of everybody getting an OCC charter. Right. Every week there's an announcement, somebody's got, uh, their new license. There's the announcements of open USD, which again could be, you know, quite interesting.

Speaker B: Fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker A: What Visa and MasterCard are doing. The Visa Stablecoin platform, you know, Anchorage Digital is doing a bunch of stuff. Like what of all of these things, which one's the one for you that's sort of like, okay, I'm keeping a close eye on that because I think that's to have a material.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I always kind of wondered like, you know, stripe is going to do more and now you're kind of, you know, some of the stuff that's coming out with PayPal and uh, that's super interesting. Uh, you see like we're coming out of a world where it feels like, you know, all of the crypto trading, the gazillion of, you know, cryptocurrencies that are out there, uh, things are coalescing around a few, but even the volume and stuff is maybe kind of waning a little bit, you know. So I think everybody's now, okay, hey, this crypto is really cool. It's here to stay. But as opposed to just kind of trading on some of these, the value pockets, uh, and uh, some of the speculative nature of it. Let's do some real world things and I think that's kind of where stablecoins and more tokenized assets are going. It's basically just tokenizing all the real things that we currently do today, which is fascinating. And I think all this is leading to again what I feel like the entire global financial system is going to essentially be rebuilt in an entirely different way. Uh, it's not going to happen overnight obviously, but it's going to happen probably over the next 10 years. I think a lot of people will agree with that. But the thing that uh, fascinates me is that when you even look at all of fintech because you have to contend with the bank, most of fintech, uh, companies are all more point solutions. It's identifying where there's some things around the edges, here's an opportunity we can exploit that maybe that the bank doesn't do or is not doing well or here's a user experience and it's building a company around that particular niche thing. Now some of these are big niches, but there's definitely lots of point solutions. Now we're shifting a bit and it's starting to open up the playbook a little bit. And then on top of that with AI coming in, the ability to develop software at a entirely different pace. And now it used to be always like, hey, stay in your lane, you're going to do this and then somebody else is going to do that. But don't get defocused, don't boil the ocean. You know, you got to focus, focus, focus. And I think that's, you know, still largely true as an operator. But I think now when you look at some of these adjacencies, if you've built, you know, you have modern infrastructure and with AI you can now tackle some of these adjacencies and, and really built it on a really powerful data mode if you have that. And I think that's the exciting thing for Travada. That's why again, trove of data, it's Travada. It's not like we weren't focused on the application layer, we were focused on the data and infrastructure layer. And so now with AI we can build things and add things onto that core. So you're starting to see it as other companies as well. You start to make this run at it's building more focus on building more operating systems or a super app sort of focus. And I think uh, you normally would never do that. But I think because of the elements of what's new, of where things are going, plus AI to aid you in that and leveraging that, that's really opening up a whole new world and how you can, you can build and how you go to market and how you can capitalize and add value for your customers with that kind of, you know, whole different, you know, paradigm shift of value that can happen. So I think that's the thing that we kind of look at, because what we've built is essentially we're the first company to really focus on corporate transaction banking data. There's no plaid of corporates. I know there's corporates that work with plaid, but maybe it's more B2C. But when you kind of look at the corporate use cases specifically and leveraging your corporate bank data for automating and decisioning and intelligence and all of that to drive all of that, like being able to have something that's across kind of the old school of, uh, data, the new school with APIs, there are no standards with APIs. So we've had to kind of normalize that and build a really powerful kind of default, standardized normalization layer through all that. So now that gives you a foundation to kind of build and now you can build faster to kind of do some of these other things that are now, um, it's much more of the art of the possible. And so, uh, uh, yeah, it's a fascinating new era. And what's crazy is I've never seen this in all my years of startups that like, everything is accelerating so fast.

Speaker A: Incredibly, incredibly. No, and I'm very interested to see how the banks are going to react to this because I talked to a lot of them, obviously in the space, and how many of them are going to support what's out there? How many of them are going to become infrastructure providers to their customers and actually provide the wallets and participate on that level. What role is tokenized deposits going to play? So a lot that we're going to cover in this series, I think, you know, just for future reference for folks, we have a lot of guests that are coming on from different perspectives. We have banks, we have treasurers, we have, you know, builders and other aspects of the industry. So hopefully just a nice mix of perspective of how all this is evolving. We'll provide that for folks over the next couple weeks.

Speaker B: Gotta be fun.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, thank you, man. I appreciate, uh, sort of your origin story as well and how we got here. And as I said, I think it's going to be an interesting time because, you know, the regulatory piece was big, you know, once we had genius act, and now we kind of again, have to land the plane on clarity. Uh, but I think, you know, once that's behind us, I think this is going to open up incredibly. I think people are. They know where the direction is going, but I think people are still kind of waiting for that last sort of bit of clarity, all pun intended on that one last bit of clarity on all of this, to kind of really unleash what they want to do. So, yeah, this is going to be a great time.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Paul.

Speaker A: Excellent.

Speaker B: And thanks, everybody. Yeah, we'll see you till next time.