From Debit to Dollars: Scaling Credit and Payments Globally with Jim McCarthy (CEO at Thredd)

I'm excited to be here today for an episode of The Ledger. No, we are not recording it at Burning Man, but we're at the Bonneville Salt Flats for the Lone Pro Conference. And Jim McCarthy, we are kicking things off with you. So I would love to have you give us a brief intro for anyone that is somehow not familiar with you from the fintech space because you've had quite the career.

Yeah, some could say it was infamous, but nonetheless, no, I appreciate it. Thanks, Julie. Yeah, so it's probably going on 30 years in fintech. I started actually at IBM with Bank of America as my client, so I kind of grew up on the sales side there.

happened to join Visa in 1999, which was a very interesting point in time, kind of the shift towards what is, you know, we all now understand as the digital economy, but landed out there and got thrown into an interesting group, which was called eVisa, very, very innovative name, but Visa couldn't come with anything better. But they took a group of people from across the company and created a mini version of Visa. Actually, it was Carl Pascarello who may be doing one of these later.

It was his idea. Carl was always very interested in everything in Silicon Valley. He was way ahead of his time. I've actually invested with Visa and Yahoo way back when.

But so he wanted us to focus on everything and payments in the early days of e-commerce. And so I was thrown into this group as the sales person to work within the team. A couple years later, as we all know, the internet bubble busted. And I was the person, because I probably wasn't the smartest because I was the sales guy that was left holding the bag on what was to become 3D secure and verified by Visa, or as we like to call it, terrified by Visa.

I got a lot of stories I can unpack there, but the craziest part about it is that thing is still here and terrorizing people globally. It's a good business for us and what I do today, but I just can't believe close to 25 years later is a core part of what Visa and MasterCard. We'll have to do a follow-on episode about that. Yeah, the authentication wars.

But yeah, so I became the product owner. So somehow I went from sales to product. And then once again, testing my intellect. And this is another Carl story we could unpack.

Debit at that point in time became the fast grower for Visa. And I think as everybody that listens to the podcast would know, Visa started as a credit card company. And it was very much grounded in a credit card company. If you described it to most people back then certainly you're on a plane you said you worked in visa they would say can you get me a lower interest rate and you'd be like oh we don't we're not a bank we don't do credit cards but we were at that point in time shifting and it was actually called mainstreaming debit and carl was the big driver for it and there was a famous forbes magazine cover with carl's face on it where he basically said you know credit's dead debits the future which really pissed off a lot of big bank clients of ours who made a lot of money on credit.

Long story short, they wanted someone to take over the role of running credit in the U.S., which still is a very large business for Visa. No one wanted it on the back of Carl's comments.

And so somehow they convinced me to take the job. And we can come back to this theme too, but that was a tough one for me because I wasn't a banker. I never ran a portfolio. So just thinking about that, I was like, man, this is crazy.

and the way it was positioned was you're going to run credit for Visa. The big aha for me was, I recognized, well, Visa doesn't take any credit risk. We don't underwrite things. Basically, I was the guy with the rule book, just kind of setting the rules and stepped into that role, realizing I had a lot to learn.

But the great part about that, and again, like a lot of things, the life timing is everything. So in taking that role, it happened to be the point in time where the Department of Justice had sued Visa and MasterCard about Amex's ability or lack thereof to actually sell through the banks. And the thinking at the time, like a lot of things the government gets wrong, was if Amex can be distributed through the banks, interchange would go down. Merchants would get lower rates.

Well, the exact opposite happened. So in order to compete against Amex selling through the banks, what we did was raise interchange rates. And so we literally at that time birthed Visa signature, MasterCard birth, World Elite, and the race is on the higher interchange rate. So like almost overnight, we took rates up to 199 from 161, Chase flipped its almost entire book of co-brands into it.

But it wasn't just the flip of interchange. What was really cool about it, and we can come back to this with respect to credit, was we required the banks to get that rate to give us name and address on every one of those cardholders. So remember up in that point time all Visa saw was just the card number. So what we did was match 18 months of spend history on name and address.

We could go to the merchants that were impacted and say we'll actually do targeted mail campaigns into them and we proved that the data works. And again we can come back to how actually we could drive the right consumers into the merchant and actually drive effectively purchases that they weren't getting previously. So that was pretty cool. On the back of that at the IPO I ended up running global product which was which was also crazy because I never had any international experience and then coming out of that you know Charlie Scharf landed from Chase and he asked me to create the innovation group which I thought for sure and Charlie confirmed afterwards it was his chance to fire me because Chase didn't like anything Visa did because we were constraining what they considered to be their ability to innovate Visa was seen as like the creating the lowest common denominator for all the other banks to keep up with Chase.

And I was running product. So he gave me innovation, which was about 1500 people at time, and said, you can go run innovation with six people. And the classic way you would do that is you'd get your six smartest people and draw stuff on a board and basically say, here's our great innovations, which would never, people would just be like, oh, that's not great. So instead, what we did is we decided to do exactly what D-Hawk did, who created Visa, and we worked with the industry.

So we went to Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, the tech giants, and said, how can we work with you to innovate? And that led to tokenization, led to Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa Direct. I mean, almost everything that you see today that's driving the innovation strategy across the industry. So, and then our venture investing and other things.

So anyway, sorry. No, that's a lot to unpack. But Jim, given your background and your history, I'd love to just, we call this the Jim McCarthy show because I could listen to you talk for hours and hours, but you touched on a couple of things that I'd love to get your thoughts on, given your background and experience. Talking about the blending of, as you said, Visa started as a credit company, credit card business.

Now they moved into debit. We're seeing something really interesting in the ecosystem. We've seen the, I call it the rise of debit. You've got all these new challengers.

yet now I kind of, one of the terms I like to say, you can't debit interchange your way into profitability. So we're seeing a lot more focus, you know, at LoanPro on credit and lending products. So what type of advice would you give to folks in the ecosystem that maybe you've been, kind of grew up in debit and now we're considering credit and lending and how would you suggest that they look at the ecosystem? Yeah, it's a great point, especially when you look at the neobanks who have built their business on debit interchange or have tried to, and are obviously constrained, I think, as a result.

And especially if some of those underpinnings get kicked out, it may or may not happen. You know, you obviously spreading deposits amongst multiple bin sponsors to kind of, you know, hide the ball is not a well-kept secret. So, you know, I think that's a difficult road to hoe. But I think the challenge fundamentally, and this goes for the banks as well, and it's something I learned from working with the Chinese new entrants like WeChat and Allok.

and Colton hit on it earlier at the main 10 session, is a lot of it's grounded in the technology underpinnings, and to some degree the business models, which is in the US, most of the bankers and people that have grown up in this industry think about lending and deposit taking as very different businesses And the P show up like that and the tech stack show up like that and they don think about consumers or small businesses as like kind of their cash flows and the needs to take you know whole money and lending needs and I think the fintechs do a better job and actually not the ones necessarily that are building neobanks but if you think about what a firm has done and others when Max Levchin started building a firm and I was still at Visa like a lot of people people are like, who needs BNPL?

Because we have credit cards. And you're like, well, there's a whole market out there that sits somewhere between debit and credit that aren't comfortable with open-ended revolving. And so the point is, I think, to what you're getting at, is that there is a need for credit. There are a lot of credit seeking.

I think a lot of people thought, well, people don't want credit. That's not true. Small business is another great one, where you can look inside a loan book, And you're going to see it's clearly small business behavior, but most of the classic banks don't know how to get at it because they just can't speak the language. Small business bankers don't know how to speak the language and really understand what that small business is trying to accomplish.

So what I learned from working with the Chinese is they've built the entire stack around payments at the core and understanding the flows. And then from that, they've built the data business around it. then building ad models and search to purchase and all these other things. And from there, they do all of that.

They expand into all sorts of other business, wealth management, other things, but it's grounded in payments. Interesting. Jim, you touched on a couple of things that I'd love to get your thoughts on as well. Speaking of these international businesses, you mentioned Carl Pasquarella earlier, and he really pioneered, as my understanding, a lot of debit in Asia and some of those areas.

And I look at the US marketplace. My joke sometimes, I say the only good thing that came out of COVID is we finally started to do tap and pay here in the US after all these years. But given your experience, like you've talked about understanding with Alipay and WeChat, maybe a little bit more as your role as CEO with Thread, what type of innovations do you think the US should be looking at that we're seeing in some of those international marketplaces? Yeah.

So what we see is, and some of it may or may not apply here directly, but clearly wallets are the way consumers prefer to pay in all of these markets. And so you see again, the kind of full-on digital experience. And I mentioned this before that payment's at the heart of the relationship, and then you build this whole ecosystem around it, that includes bringing merchants in, but providing value back to the merchant. Because when you have data around the payment, you can actually serve up to the consumer some very targeted, very specific, very relevant offers that's great for the consumer.

But it's not spam, but it's things that they go, okay, this is great for me. And then they can go to a merchant and actually get value, but the merchant's getting value because they're getting the consumer they want creates these virtual cycles. So as an example, we have a client. It's not just in Asia, but as a result, there's a client of ours called Zilch in the UK, who most people would think of as a BNPL, but they don't describe themselves that way.

And they're on debit rails in the UK, so highly regulated, not great interchange. But what they do is they've created what they would call an ad subsidized payment network. And it's similar to what's happening with WeChat, where they've created that virtuous cycle of getting consumers on going to merchants with the data where those consumers are spending and creating an ad network where they're doing search to purchase, getting more merchants, more data, more consumers, and they've grown that, that basically that, that ecosystem and just gets bigger and bigger, more data, better, better offers to consumers, more merchants.

And the whole business is funded off the ad spend, which by the way, is a much bigger pool of revenue than interchange. Right. It's so interesting you look at like the ad spend versus the interchange. It's so, it's like people get so concerned about picking up, you know, the pennies and nickels over here when you can make dollars on the ad revenue.

So it's just really interesting is I think a lot of times we think about the ecosystem is like, oh, well, what's my interchange rate and just interchange, interchange, interchange and that. But there's so many other ways to monetize in the payments ecosystem. That's, I think, a perfect example of that. Well, but if you see what just happened yesterday, like again, these, I can tell you over my in 20 plus years or close to 20 years of Visa, just watching these same things happen over and over again.

People try to reinvent what I've seen already. So just, I think it was what, two days ago, three days ago, Google announced its payment standard for agentic commerce called EP2. And it's hysterical because it's really not a standard. It basically, my view is Google's attempt to put themselves in the center of an agentic ecosystem where they control all those touch point so that they can be in the center of an agentic search to purchase play in an agentic world.

Because they're at obviously big risk of being disintermediated in an open agentic world where the chat GPTs and others start to string this together. And Google's lived on search to purchase, albeit they never really got the purchase. They have a lot of data to try to impute it, but they never crossed that chasm. And that's why when I come back to Ali and WeChat, they built an entire ecosystem.

And then from there, the flywheel spins out, they get into wealth management, P2P, all these other really interesting things. And you can see what Revolut's done as well, very similar. Is it possible to do that in the US? I think the answer is yes.

And I think people have just not, for whatever reason, I don't understand why they haven't. I think it comes back to technology to a large degree. If you look at you know PayPal, it was actually, and they announced a deal today, I just was reading about, in the Google ecosystem where they were marrying up the PayPal assets with the Google assets, but it was like a laundry list of products. And for a while PayPal had said they want to be the Uber app, but the problem was it It was, again, a hodgepodge of not well-integrated tech stacks underneath it.

And when you look at the Chinese apps, that's not the case. It's highly orchestrated with taking friction out of the experience. Well, it's part of that just because, I mean, part of the reason payments is so much more advanced in Asia is because it was so bad and they just came and ripped it all out and did something different. Whereas here, it's hard to rip it.

I've heard people say it's harder to rip out the infrastructure. Here's why. because in China, they also have a very similar situation as the U.S.

They have very large banks that were focused on competing. China Union Pay is the incumbent card network. Their stated objective was to be bigger than Visa, and they were executing on that strategy with China Union Pay, and they were focused on growing outside of China. While they were focused there on competing in the old way, and the banks were all stovepiped and siloed with their processing, and their cores with China Union Pay acting like Visa, they didn't pay attention domestically.

And Alipay and WeChat Pay came and created better value propositions, plumbed into them, basically sucked all the domestic payments out. And today, China Union Pay is almost irrelevant inside of China. But those banks are there with those same tech stacks and siloed business models. In the US, the biggest challenge, and Colton was even talking about today when you're talking about deposit cores and lending cores and wealth management cores when i hear that it makes me my head hurt because because you're replicating the same things that don't let the banks focus on the consumer and the way the consumer lives especially in a in a in a world that's digital today and going to agentic because it's right for people to come in with a view that's more holistic and that's what's happened in china is is while the banks were focusing just like that competing for like is it my customer in treasury management is it my customer and merchants like is it a merchant which is the acquiring business is it a treasury management customer you know consumers is it my deposit side or is it a credit card customer or is it in the lending side and people fight inside the banks and they don't talk to each other and the systems certainly don't talk to each other which sets it up for disruption yeah and and and even this whole concept of cores i find really interesting because the only time you hear about cores in the digital world is usually when someone left the bank and says oh i going to start a neobank i gotta go get a core because it a it really a nod to the past because the word core is inherently a banking term whereas what we're talking about the name of this podcast the ledger is not like you need to have a you need to have a compliant ledger oftentimes that can be accomplished with modern tools and techniques and to the point about credit and debit and where you're going before, Scott.

Putting that stuff together and thinking about that differently and thinking about cash flow needs and other things, I think is where the winners of the future will be. Jim, I'm interested along those lines, you think kind of like the future and kind of where things might be going that way. You know, we've certainly seen now with digital and I'll call, you know, with stable coins as an example, certainly a really interesting to see kind of, you know, maybe I'll call it the rise of the the stable coins, where do you see digital assets, stable coins, where do you see that playing out in the next 12 to 24 months?

Well, the first thing I'll say, just to at least put my opinion out there, I think it's a great business for Visa and MasterCard. I know they took a big hit when Walmart and Amazon said they were getting into the space. Just like crypto before it, to think that Visa and MasterCard are going to get wiped off the planet because all of a sudden I can spend, whether it's a crypto token or a stablecoin token, I think misses the entire point of what the network does, not only in terms of ubiquitous acceptance, but the protections that come with it.

I mean, maybe someone wants to spend a stablecoin over the internet with someone they don't know, trust, and hope they get some outcome that's good. I'm not sure that's the smart- Well, no charge-wracking dispute rights, but yeah. But that's a whole nother thing. But I think Visa and MasterCard serve a very important purpose in that.

And beyond my opinion on that, going back to the crypto days, the early days of Bitcoin, like almost every major player in the space, whether it be Coinbase, Crypto.com, YRX, and even FTX before they melted down, we're all using Visa and MasterCard as the on-ramps and off-ramps because no one wants to build that network. And even the largest wallet players in the world are increasingly opening up their closed loops because they've realized as big as they are in some of the biggest markets with the biggest penetration domestically with their wallets, they can't do that cross border.

And inherently, just like we talked about credit and debit before, consumers want choice. And they're not as simple as all I use is debit. In the case of Visa MasterCard, they want to be able to spend outside their country. And these domestic schemes can't replicate it.

So back to stable coins in this instance, I think there's a ton of opportunity to solve some real world problems. Clearly, hyperinflation markets, pegging the dollar has always been something that consumers have desired. It's been tough to deal with paperback currency, getting money into those markets. And if you tried to do it electronically, it was very expensive, prohibitively.

You know, for years, money transfer agents have gotten better. There's been more competition with things like Visa Direct and MasterCard Send, but it's still expensive. But beyond that, with the stable coins now, I think it's just going to put more liquidity in those markets. I think it'd be easier to do that.

So I think for sure, cross-border, moving money and remitting is going to be one of the easiest use cases. But clearly, even in the lending space, collateralization, smart contracts, I think there's a huge opportunity for stablecoins to have a big role. Just because of the digital nature and the fact that you can effectively have programmatic money, which is really exciting. and has actually been since Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the white paper on Bitcoin has been kind of one of the big unlocks that we just haven't seen yet.

And I think pegging it to fiat with reserves, and I think there'll probably need to be some regulation to make sure that people don't get burned in this, I think is the future. And you're seeing banks like JP Morgan start to move into the space because they're just not going to let it go up. Jim, one thing that's interesting as you're talking about kind of these use cases for stablecoin, you know, and kind of like on the remittance side and an inflationary hedge. I lived in Argentina in the 90s for two years.

And I remember at the time, you know, in my early 20s thinking, wow, if there was just a way, you know, to not have to have something seeing, just getting seen, seeing, you know, the pace was just getting devalued over and over and over again. I think, you know, I totally agree. I think you're going to see in that remittance space and some of these areas, a lot of use cases for stablecoins in the future. Yeah, I agree.

And then obviously in the fintech space too, what we're seeing is innovation on the acquiring side in terms of settlement because the classic Visa MasterCard windows where a lot of our clients have to hold reserves, but the faster they can get back to cash flow, settle and do that now with Visa MasterCard supporting stable point settlement. For real-time settlement, I agree with you. I think that in particular is going to revolutionize a lot and it's all about cash flow. Cash flow and letting those, what are basically small businesses optimize their cash flow in their business.

It would be interesting to see what merchants can do with it too, kind of marrying the whole agentic commerce and stablecoin team together. What if merchants want to have their own stablecoins that you buy in? Sort of like Starbucks already kind of has. Yeah, I was going to say, you nailed it.

Any time people bring it up, I laugh. I'm like, it exists today. It's the OG stablecoin. I'm buying Starbucks dollars.

We'll call it Starbucks coin, but it is the OG stablecoin, right? I'm stuck in their ecosystem with Starbucks dollars. But again, like it sounds easy today because we've all used it and it's been around, but I'm sure actually implementing it is a lot harder and like getting people hooked on it and stuff too. Whereas like Starbucks does it.

Starbucks obviously does it by like, hey, you get two X points when you pay with your Starbucks stablecoin essentially versus paying with your Visa or MasterCard or whatever it might be. The funny one there that I've always wondered about, I mean, publicly when we've had discussions like this even inside of ESA was the one that was always curious to me was Walmart's one thing because they've got physical, I get they're a bit e-commerce giant now, but multi-lane retail, very difficult to insert like a loyalty or something to get people to change the way they pay because it's getting people out of the line.

They have one pay, but I never use it. But the one that's always made me think is like Amazon, because they've tried lots of different things. They've had Amazon coins. But I've always wondered why they haven't done like the Starbucks incentive, because in the digital environment in which they exist, and they've got so many tools, whether it's Prime or other things, where they can effectively monetize that loyalty that people have with them and get people to change the way they pay.

They just have never pulled that. Because maybe it's back to because they've I got so focused on the customer experience, but no one's really replicated the Starbucks loyalty and I'm stuck in it. So it worked. Well, Amazon is interesting too, because like I have the Amazon credit card because I get extra percent back on my purchases.

So like, wouldn't you think Amazon in the backend would do better with something like that if you got more points back by using their stable coin instead? Maybe there's something in their agreement where they can't do that yet until, I don't know. You might know more how these backend contracts and stuff work, but I agree. It seems like a no-brainer from the outside.

So there must be something, I don't know. I agree, that's why I'm saying, no, I've always wondered. Even from the inside, no-brainer, okay. Jeff Bezos, we're gonna have to try to get him.

Yeah, he called the Bezos coin, right? Exactly. You can keep that going, so. Jim, I just have one other question for you.

Your current role as CEO of Thread, you've got, we were talking earlier, talking about a guy who lives his life on a plane, flying all over the world. Super curious though, what you've got on the radar with Thread, any upcoming announcements or changes with Thread again in your role and what you're seeing kind of globally with your business. Yeah. So thanks for that, Scott.

So, you know, we grew up in the in the UK. I mean, you worked at Galileo. I oftentimes give the example that Thread was very much like the Galileo of the UK kind of growing up in the prepaid industry prepaid processing stuck around long enough to get discovered by Revolut Monzo Starling, became a neobank processor as a result. But we diversified and went, we went east instead of west.

And so we process today for Paytie in Japan, it was a PayPal company, a lot of large, very large fintechs throughout Asia, UK, Europe, and we're now in Canada and come into the US and go into Latin America. So key for us, and it's something I firmly believe in back to even this discussion, and not just because we're in the Bonneville Salt Flats, but I see the world as flat because the internet is here, stable coins are here, and commerce is a global phenomenon. And historically, back to what I was talking about the constraints, processing was a big constraint for clients globally, where it was like, oh, if I want to do issuing, I've got to go find partners, not just bank partners, but I've got to find processing partners in multiple markets to do it.

So it's a very difficult thing to execute my business plan because of the technology ecosystem. So the path we're on is to have a single cloud-based, API-first global platform that we can passport clients that they want to grow around the globe. So connect once and be able to roll. Now, not everyone wants to do that, but we have a lot of large enterprises that do that.

And I think if you look at audience success on the acquiring side, it's very similar stripe to a lesser degree, but they all have that kind of view for merchants because merchants oftentimes want to move like that. So that's one thing. But, but the second thing about that, and it's also kind of back to the Galileo analog is prepaid was great. I always called it the Swiss Army knife of products because if you look at Visa's history, credit was a very narrow thing.

Debit was also narrow in that it was tied to the deposit product and core. And then prepaid came along. And I would argue that the fintech ecosystem across the globe exists because prepaid came out because it opened up this, it started off, obviously we talk about GIFT and J-hooks and preload networks and how to do that. But out of that came things like Visa Direct because you need ways to move money.

Like we were sat there and go like we got this refund thing. Oh, it's hard in it. And now you get money in and money out. And all this innovation came from it.

And most of the fintechs use prepaid because it is so, I mean, you can define so many products on it, but that said, you can only get so far. And so for us, we're moving and we're going to really have a much broader set of products, including credit coming very soon. Wink, wink. And beyond that, also a full suite of value added services, because clients, you know, not only looking for one stop shop to go global, but they also want to have partners that have a full stack, not only prepaid debit and credit, a commercial credit as well.

And by the way, I should say increasingly looking for partners who can do acquiring. And for those that look for a core, they either want a core or partners can bring cores. And it can't be a box canyon, too. So you need a big ecosystem of partners because you want to give customers choice.

I'm a firm believer. So all of that's on our agenda for growth. And it's a hairy, audacious goal. But that's why I'm traveling and not getting much sleep.

Well, exactly. And we're super excited, wink, wink, on the credit side as well at Loan Pro. I have one last question for you. You've seen a lot of fads and trends and stuff like that.

What's something that's overrated and underrated right now? Oh, boy. Overrated and underrated. Underrated still.

I still don't think people quite grasp how big a thing it was in 2014. I know it wasn't in 2014. and to this day, I still don't think people quite grasp it, is the tokenization of everything. It'll come up at times, but I just got asked to the panel at the FT Partners Conference about agentic commerce and what changes will that mean.

And I said, it's about tokens and risk management. Payments, even though it feels like it changes because of the user experience changes, the underpinnings haven't changed. And tokens and risk management are going to drive agentic, but it's just going to mean more virtual credentials, more identity and access management, more authentication and risk management. So I go back to, as I said, I started 3D Secure.

It was actually not a bad protocol. The user experience wasn't great, but at the time, and the reason that was the only product that survived that period of eVisa was because it it was the one thing that it was solving a real problem for e-commerce, which was authentication. You're trying to identify the parties to the transaction. So tokens was massive and it continues to be, and I don't think people get a real sense for, most people don't get a sense for how many tokens are out there.

It took Visa 60 years to get to about 3 billion cards. Like when I left Visa in 2017, there were about 3.5 billion cards on the planet, Visa cards. From 2014, when we announced the first tokens around Apple Pay to 2024, I think Visa now has something in the neighborhood of 17, probably now over 20 billion tokens in 10 years.

And they're just scratching the surface. And I think that just explodes with agentic. And I think that's the underrated thing. People don't understand not only how impactful that is, but back to my point earlier about Visa, MasterCard, Amex.

You probably throw Discover and others in there. why they're not going away is because that is one sticky thing to be in the middle of all that with holding a token vault. Overrated, and I agree with what Jason McCullough was saying earlier, I think agentic right now is a lot of hype. I think there's going to be a long evolution.

And I say that- So more so overrated and that people think things are going to happen a lot faster than they are. Yeah. And I say that just based on lived experience. And by the way, the first thing I'm going to say is I'm not Nostradamus.

I can be wrong as much as I'm right. But my lived experience at Visa was everyone thinks ATMs happen like that. Because my experience, your experience today is I can get on a plane. I don't carry cash anymore because if I need cash, there's an ATM everywhere around the planet I can walk up.

And I have to search for an ATM that works it's every ATM will give me cash that took like 20 years for that to actually get pulled together like that yeah debit I mentioned mainstreaming debit that was still going on when I got to Visa in 1999 there were still banks in 1999 big ones I won't name them that were still having to be convinced that they should issue debit cards I'm not lying 2000 that was going on you can ask Carl that it e-commerce right that was mid 90s that kind of started and we were We're still working out the kinks through the, you know, PayPal only happened in the early aughts and kind of got going.

And, you know, we're only hitting our stride. You know, the iPhone, Apple Pay, iPhone 2007, Apple Pay 2014. And we're still really mainstreaming that. So these things to really take off, given the complexity of the ecosystem and the partners that have to come into it, it just takes long.

And I think it was Jason's line today where he said we overestimate the change in a year and underestimate the change over 10 years. And I agree 100 percent with that. Yeah, it's tough because there's a lot of things in AI that are happening faster than we think. So it's kind of tough to like stay balanced and still like which parts of technology are going to be a little bit slower to be adopted.

And I think part of that is the financial regulation and everything that comes along with it, too. Well, Scott, thank you for jumping in as co-host with me today. Always happy to do it, especially in this environment with this view and cars going 160 miles an hour behind us. Exactly.

Always a pleasure to do it. Maybe you would have been upset about it if you had your Lexus here again this year and you're like, oh, it could have been, that could have been me going past over there. Yeah, exactly. Totally.

And then of course, thank you, Jim McCarthy for joining us as well. Yeah, thank you guys for having me.