From eBay Skunkworks to Agentic Payments w/ Shayanth from Highnote

In our industry, we don't own that information technically. We are acceptors of that information and we should be protectors. So, for example, we request individuals to provide us their most sensitive details. And as you scale to different countries, it gets extremely personal, talks about your genealogy, talks about your parents, your children, and your social security number.

Those types of relationships need to be kept secret. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Risk and Reason, the leading podcast about risk and reason on this side of the Mississippi River. Joining us today, a good uh a dear friend, Shine Sinnaraja.

Uh, we've known each other for I want to say close to four years at this point. Uh I actually have a very fond memory of us getting together early on when uh this is a true story that I'm gonna give to you live. That I don't think you definitely will not have heard this side of it. And I remember Footprint was maybe four months old, and you were so kind and you're hearing about what we we were doing, and you asked us if we had customers, and we had one customer at the time because we were four months old.

So I described that company in ten different ways uh to to to to try to give us more more gravitas as as a company. Um, and I felt that now is the time of candor for me to come clean about this. Uh but without further ado, now that we now that we've dropped that, uh, thank you so much for coming in VOD. You have uh really, I think there are a lot of people who who've been in fintech.

There are a few people who I think have actually built, like truly be the finding companies in around fintech for for over a decade. Uh from your time at Braintree, building some of the most like technical, gnarliest parts of integrations when you think about how do we actually process payments on the internet, uh, to then after uh being a staff engineer there, leading, I think, kind of unifying their their vault, being a tech leader on their commercial foundations team to being the founding engineer of High Note, I think one of the coolest companies in issuing, um, working with some of the really uh kind of next gen companies.

Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Eli. And you know, it's been such a pleasure to hear about Footprint's growth. Um, and you know, funny enough, it all just started with the LinkedIn conversation out of the blue.

And I want to pull that one out too. Eli just reached out to me out of the blue and I was like, who's this Eli person? And uh, you know, I saw that you were starting a KYC, KYB company, which, you know, is an area that I really love and enjoy and I think is is foundational to the industry, um, especially in the areas that we're going into with generative models, creating deepfakes and AI and some of the core philosophies of what Footprom was building, um, was really trying to defend against that future um through the biometric scanning and just the orchestration and and kind of uh you know not allowing the concept of KYB, KYC to become secondary in nature, but more primary to enable um better quality of customers to be part of the ecosystem.

Um that goes beyond just the you know the the enterprise model and the and the reward model of scale that the company provides as well, uh, which is incredible for anyone that wants to become part of your network and bring in the uh the foundational knowledge that you have gained um as a positive reward system instead of a negative reward system, which is really great too. Um so excited to be on this podcast, excited to talk to you, Eli. Um, and you know, it's been a very long journey here um on my end as well.

Uh, you know, starting all the way back in 2014 when I was an intern at PayPal. Um, and that was when we were part of the eBay uh conglomerate at that time. And um I was part of this team called Vertical Solutions as an intern. And what we were doing back then was um was all these skunk work projects.

It was like the skunk work team for PayPal under eBay. Um and like one of the first projects I got to work on was uh implementing PayPal into Bank of America's mobile app back in 2014 um in order for them to send money to each other uh through their accounts parked by PayPal. Kind of sounds like something familiar that the banks have now built called Cell. Um and so it's you know a lot of just these like foundational moments uh that we've uh that we've done through the past 10, 12 years um as an entire industry um that has now shaped the way that we think about payments today.

Um and that's what you know HighNode is looking to do is break that uh you know perspective and introduce a more modern stack, a more modern perspective and a more um relatable perspective to the world of payments, um, more so than just creating a bunch of APIs. It's you know, how do you tell that story in a very simple, easy, and fast way? And the goal there is to eventually you know think about closing your loop. And you know, once you have a closed loop but networked ecosystem, you end up having a really strong, broad identity, risk, and money movement model um that's all powered through a general ledger that is unifying um these concepts across the board.

And so it's been a journey. Um, I got to enjoy a pretty awesome career so far, I would say, and have a wonderful career ahead and I'm excited for it and got to experience everything from um being part of uh eBay to uh going back to PayPal as an intern in 2015, uh, to experience the entire split um and understand what that means to go from being part of a company to splitting from a company to IPOing, um, and then joining back full-time in 2016 to start um from the ground up uh partners and marketplaces, which is now called PayPal Open.

Um, and so that is like the journey that I had at PayPal. Um, and in that process, I got to learn, you know, all the different parts of the payment industry from onboarding to um account creation to money movement to risk to fraud compliance um to charge matching disputes, um, just because the the uh partners and marketplaces um division needed to to build that support, but um at a scale for not one, but you know, um scaling to thousands and hundreds of thousands of merchants underneath the the partner ecosystem for people like Etsy and um Facebook and uh GOAT and all these different marketplaces that were our partners um at that time.

And uh at the end, I you know I got an opportunity to um look at a different world, which was issuing and not acquiring anymore. And it was a fun journey because it's the other side of the business that um is required in order for acquiring to exist in many cases, and so um you know we've had high note going for the past five years, and we've uh really built out a solid issuing issuing foundation that scales across prepaid, debit, and credit. Um, and we've launched into our money movement, um direct money movement capabilities as well, with uh OCT and AFT on the networks, um, getting into launching RTP and FedNow.

And I have uh just non-star stablecoin partnerships as well, um, to uh launch multi with Cross River. That is absolutely correct. Yeah. Um so Cross River is actually a great partner with us, and uh, you know, they also do power our acquiring solutions, which we have launched as well with one customer, and um, you know, it's just you know getting the feet wet in the water.

Um, you know, this is the way we do it. We start with let's sort of dabble with the idea, let's think about what the concepts will be, and then we start to actually scale the solution and productize and monetize it. And you know, Heina has done an incredible job, and I'm so proud of everyone, the team, um, so proud of our leadership. They've done an incredible job, you know, really shaping the identity, the culture, and the vision in a way that can make sense to not just the you know the employees who are just you know there to build a product, but also to the external customers in a way that takes the complexity of payments into a simplistic model.

Yeah. Um, so that's been a really fun process so far as well. Um, I I have a ton of questions on this. Uh, I want to first take a step back.

So PayPal, I feel now is almost like not talked about enough. They're they're a massive company, uh $53 billion market cap. They are down 76% since you left. Um, and I feel we don't hear enough talk on the street about the correlation uh of that.

I'm curious to to get your perspective on both, you know, uh you went to Cal, you're you're in school in the Bay. Um, what attracted you to join PayPal at the time? Like what what what what what got you interested in payments? And then when you go forward, you're at a massive company.

What what gets you excited enough about opportunity to say, you know, I want to go back to I want to go from uh at the time $150 billion market cap to zero uh and build this from the ground up? That's a great question. Um let's just I'll start from the beginning. Uh so like what interested what interested me in PayPal?

Um I I just thought the way that they they built their product and it was you know this idea that you had a startup that never really came out of a startup mentality because it was just became acquired by eBay early on in its days, um, to become more of a secondary method on a primary company um was pretty interesting to me because it allowed it allowed us to um think about a world where uh you kind of have a lot of funding to do a lot of fun projects. Um so I found that to be kind of curious.

Um the second thing, and probably the most important, is I I love the concept of money movement. I think payments is like the core to how the world turns. And I do think it's important that the the way that we receive and send money um becomes extremely easy in order to make that a uh a core core bedrock to the foundation of how we you know just operate. Um I find that even till today, the concept of payments is still pretty complex, and it's only going to grow in complexity as the economics start to become thinner and thinner.

Um and that comes with the more and more players that become part of the ecosystem and the amount of opportunity we're going to allow for selection um on both the merchant and the cartilager side. And so um I find that to be a most interesting problem. Um, I think the idea concept of like networking and graphing and like the idea that this is kind of like a social world. It was like, let me put it this way, it was kind of like, you know, at that time Facebook was like the hottest.

I was gonna say, people talk about the social network as a graph. I think it's funny, you know, what most companies end up uh whenever I show friends in different industries, what does footprint actually look like? They're like, oh, this is a workflow builder. That's kind of what mo most companies that did in their graphs and workflows.

And I'm the the complexity, no shade at meta, but the complexity of building payments at scale is incredibly intricate. Mm-hmm. Absolutely, because not only are you looking at it from like a social network at a typical company, like a social media company, um, starts off pretty closed, meaning that they have a uh a bounded wall that they can go and leverage. Um, and their like their truth is their own truth.

Um and they don't have these like they didn't have at that time, I would say, like regulatory bodies that were trying to say, like, well, is Eli really Eli? And is Shinth really Shinth? Um, whereas in the payment space, you know, that is a mandate because you are taking money in and out of a country, which can actually have uh secondary effects like funding terrorism, money laundering. We're seeing some interesting news these days.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right? Um, and then you know, just the concept of layering is kind of interesting to me because you know, a lot of countries outside of America, they do model their world in this manner. They think it's actually okay to some extent, but when it gets too big is when it gets concerning. And so that is something that America got to experience early on with a lot of its I would say 2007 prior type uh financial um you know breakdowns.

And um the uh the idea with the social graph on the on the uh payment side is that it's got not just it's an infinite growing number of connections, not just by means of being a friend, but by means of activity. So um it can be everything from how you who you request money from, who you send money to, who you check out with, um, what items you looked at on a merchant shopping cart. All of these become points of connections because um all of that are actually ways in which fraud can occur within the system.

And so you need to make sure that you are continuously connecting. And then you have like, you know, the third-party tools like you know, have plaid and you have Finicity and you have MX, which all provide you external financial accounts as a means to hydrate, validate, verify. But then also that creates a different edge of connection in your system because the bank to bank and the bank-to-person linking can then also look at you know provide you a way to see if there is money laundering occurring in your system.

So it's just like a whole this concept is is so interesting because it's not just social, it's social, it's monetary, it's it's it's so real. It's just the real world, if you want to think about it. And that's the way I would I would like I got super interested in payments, is like it really encompasses every single part of your interaction with other humans as well. And when you think about building tools in the space, um people often if you're at a company the size of PayPal, they're going to be different teams for payments versus vaulting versus identity.

My guess is part of the attraction, I know this is a leading question, but joining high knows getting to build from the ground up, but viewing these more as actually infrastructure tools that are the same. Obviously they do different functions, but when you're thinking about latency of payments, where people expect real-time payments, but knowing that that means, okay, how do we securely ingest data, uh, get the proper tokens, and then do the proper screens in real time, you realize that these actually have to be very connected systems.

Could you maybe talk about both I think people maybe overlook like the infrastructure, and by that I truly mean the systems from a security standpoint, but also just from ingesting the system information and how that really ties in when you think about building systems at scale, why maybe people should be thinking about this more as har horizontal infrastructure, as you will, as opposed to there are specific PMs who should be leading specific tools because we want a PM who owns Finacity versus we want a PM who owns uh an AML tool.

Absolutely. So I mean at the bedrock of any sort of payments company and fintech in general is security. Security should be the top of your mind. And that goes into the.

Why is that? Because I think that's a I I I think that's something that a lot of people would overlook. Oh, okay. Well, it's important because I completely agree.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, because uh, you know, in our industry, um, we don't own that information technically. We are acceptors of that information and we should be protectors.

Um, so for example, you know, we request individuals to provide us their most sensitive details. And as you scale to different countries, it gets extremely personal. It talks about your genealogy, it talks about your um your parents and and your children and and you know what your income is and your social security number, um, your EIN if you're a business. Um, and then you start to then um offer and provide them um, these are my friends, these are people I partner with, these are my businesses that are my partnerships.

And so um those types of relationships need to be kept secret, um, especially to people that don't or should not have access to that information. Because if you really look at it, at a certain point, these could be considered trade secrets for those companies because that is how they operate their business, maybe how their economics of their business actually is supported versus what is advertised. And you know, that in-between layer is something that needs to be kept maybe to their heart and away from us as well.

And so it's extremely important that we keep that information safe and secure. Um, the other part too is identity theft. Um, it's very easy for a fintech when they get hacked to become the a pretty big uh data center for identity theft. And uh there aren't many elements in at least in the US, uh, for you to actually submit um in order to get a credit card today.

Um it's pretty basic, it's pretty uh well-known information. And I would say like maybe the only field that needs to be truly guessed at this point is like an SSN, but uh we all know that can be probably easily figured out as well. Um it's like a pretty pretty common tool and tactic. Um so at the core of it, you need to think about building the company with that first, is that you know, our mentality is if you don't know, encrypt it.

And if you do know, you need to build the business definition of the column and explain the reasons for why this should be a raw value. Um, you know, with with that comes then you start to think about well, how do you then build your domains? So how do you build your concept of uh core payment infrastructure as components horizontally? So you think about things like Vault as a as a component, identity as a component, you think about uh you know transaction processing as a component, and you start to build these interfaces between the ecosystem that allows the data to connect to each other.

And if you think about it in that scenario, you then make actually payments one giant connected chain of a series of thoughts. And it starts off always with your first point of contact, which is who you are, and from there, if you build that connectivity, you then get to the point of the transaction, which is I already know who you are, I already know your characteristics of payment, I already know maybe what likely you're going to use to pay. And so then you can simplify the the actual interaction that occurs 99% of the time versus the 0.

01% of the time. It's interesting that you, you know, like some very small percentages here make such a difference as you're describing it. I'm curious, you know, when you take that flaw or when you think about this, going from acquiring to issuing, like you were speaking about earlier, how does the mindset what what what what are you still thinking about in a similar way? And what do you have to change about when you make that move?

And maybe more broadly, could you could you introduce a bit about what HiNote does to the audience? Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start with what HiNote does. Um HiNote is a um issuer processor and an acquiring processor um that offers uh full program managed capabilities for um various different customer bases that include fleet verticals, that include corporate expense, that include um commercial and prepaid uh programs, um, AP invoice automation, um, and our you know credit as well with uh innate rewards or network supplied rewards programs as well.

Um it is a money movement infrastructure as well. Um, on top of that, where we connect to multiple various banks, offer one unified platform, one unified ledger, um, offer a single viewpoint um for ace, you know, a business to see how they can um move money between all of the different solutions, um, but also within various different programs um within their own ownership structure as well. Um, so it's building truly a um a one-stop shop for customers to come and start their own issuance program.

Um we handle everything with the banks, with the networks, we provide consultancy services, and we also provide them with implementation support. And um, after the fact, we give them full outcount management support and support through various support channels and our support team. Um we do everything um for the customer, um, and we expect that our systems are 100% available, which I can't we should say that we expect that our systems to be available um 99% of the time. Many nines of uptime.

Yeah, uh many nines of uptime, but you know, the the key here is is really shaping um what we have from a foundational perspective and then letting the customers drive their product, um, focusing on what is important to them. And that's not necessarily the nitty-gritty of how a card payment works, but it could be something like, oh, how do I, you know, generate um a credit card uh line based off of a car purchase? Um, or um how do I take a uh you know traditional key lock um and then convert that into a credit card?

Or how do I you know um be the back end for like uh you know for the fleet industry um so that you know they can go and start moving our packages and getting our Christmas gifts delivered on time. You know, it's like things like that become super interesting, but it's so archaic as well, in the sense that there is a lot of adoption, a lot of um a lot of adoption of the newer technologies need to occur. And that is really on the acquiring side, because until there's an acceptance, um acceptance mode, it's really hard on the issuance side to push that as a product because you kind of want that to become ubiquitous or at least well apparent before it becomes a true product offering on your system.

Um, it's an expensive thing to to keep without generating revenue or value on. Um and so like that's the key part. Um I think I answered the question, right? You did you did.

And I guess when you you know you you you shouted out a couple very cool customers of yours. There were maybe four or five years ago, you know, we had a famous talk, everybody should be a fintech. Uh and then we went through a a shorter period of nobody should be a fintech. And I think we're back in this kind of place of everybody in a way is a fintech, just like everybody in a way is going to be an AI company.

Now it money movement is genuinely the US GDP is lending. What are what are what are card programs? It's it's it's credit. Um what do you who do you think is a company that should actually be looking uh to use uh a tool like Highnote?

And I'm not sure if you uh the but the optional follow up is who do you think actually isn't a fit? So I I think like the optional companies that are looking to to be a fit um would be. Fit are um you know I do think there's a world where um I'm just gonna go like pretty far. So I would say like in the in the news space, um I would say like stables.

I think so I think stables so stables are a great backbone. Um I think it's a beautiful pro a product to be used for cross-border. I think it's a beautiful product to be used for business-to-business transactions. I think it's a beautiful product to be able to um create a real-time network on a traditional five-day network or six-day internet network like ACH and our banks.

Um, I think it gives us an opportunity to all become money managers, if that makes sense, um, and have and have and have options to build treasury functions for future businesses to manage their money. Um, you know, at times, the way I look at it is, you know, the stripes and the PayPal's of the world today, um, when you think about cross-border, um, they are the ones managing the business's money, truly. Um, when it comes to foreign transaction fees, when it comes to cross-border payments, they are setting the pricing, they are set, they are setting the the availability of what they can do.

Um, I think in this new world with stable coins, I and if you if you productize it in a way, in my opinion, that makes you um, let's call it the the the pseudo bank of these coins, uh these stable coins, and then a a uh and then they and then you offer a marketplace for these businesses to uh I guess participate versus force them into it, but they become participants in the real-time network. Um, you then kind of give control to back to the business. Um and then that becomes influential in the way that they provide their solutions or their items that they're selling.

And why not? I totally agree for cross-border, you know, if there is just to play the soundtrack of extreme, extreme bull on stables. It's as you said, seven days, you know, that they're 24 hours. Why, why would they, why should they still not be the default for domestic transfers?

I think with domestic transfers, you um you do pay a lot of overhead on the coin side, right? There's a lot of processing costs, there's a lot of gas, there's a lot of uh network ecosystem partners that need to be in play in order to to truly um to make this like you know, to make the end settlement work. Um and in the end, uh within the US, you still need to go back to fiat unless you start to accept coins at the at the acquire level. Um, and then it just kind of doesn't, to me, it doesn't make sense because you you still need to have a fixed asset of the dollar for the stable to be um to be of value, so like because it's dollar backed.

And so if no one uses the dollar and moves the stable, then the stable itself loses intrinsic value. And so it's important that the dollar back is still eventually used, and it's still is we still have the dollar back. Um, and that is the key part, is a world can't live on stables unless there is a true currency at this point. Makes sense, and I derailed you from the the the the question you're you're you're actually answering around kind of like who should be who should be using high note.

Yeah, so the folks that should be using high note, you know, I really do think it's going to become um the the I'm just gonna throw it out there. So I I do think like the the world of like you know uh conversational based checkout is going to be of the future. Um I do I do think the concept of uh you know scrolling through a a page of uh two by four images with the buy now button, um I think that's going away pretty fast. Um and it's going to be more so um an approximation to what you think that you want to buy through conversation.

And those will be integrated directly into you know all of the top leading chat sites out there um and um intrinsically in every single LLM that you could possibly want, right? Um I would say, like, you know, a great example is like I use Clock Code today. Um and Clock Code has you know tools and skills and energetic workflows that you can go and kick off, but um, there's no concept of actually metering those or providing um benefits to individuals that maybe want to put that in a marketplace.

Um so think like, you know, what if you had a uh the same concept of they their metering to Claude at the secondary level? And and then you as a user um you know put up your wallet and they put up their acceptance material and and like what they can accept from a checkout perspective, and you actually let the LLM navigate that for you. And so then as it starts using its tools, because it's really the brain around it, so as it uses its tools, it's able to then also use that as a means to intrinsically understand what's my cost.

Not the cost to process, but the cost to understand the cost to query. Um, and that becomes now a new world of payments that are not actually human to human, but agent to agent. What still needs to get built to make that world possible? As someone who's built, I'd say like like finance v1 of the internet, finance v2 of the internet, like for us to get there, could because to me what when I hear this, I I I I say, you know, there are protocols that still need to be built from our perspective on the identity side, which I actually don't know who's responsible for building them.

Uh it doesn't mean I they they clearly will be. I go to who could make a nuclear announcement where all of this work that startups are doing doesn't matter because now Stripe or OpenAI set a protocol. I'm curious from your perspective, when you think about to actually enable payments uh in an agentic commerce world, what primitives have still to be built and who do you think should be building them? Like should people who are listening to a startup quit their jobs and build a startup to do this?

Do you think that at the end of the day be as a MasterCard after you? I'm curious how you think about that. Yeah, so that's actually a great question. And I think it's there is multiple parts in the way, you know, the way we should answer that and be and be understanding and respectful like of our major players and of our regulations um that exist in in in the in this country.

Um I'm gonna keep the scope of this part to the US because um as soon as we leave the US, my points probably become irrelevant in general. Italy may sue you, actually. Um you and cloud player can can be codependent in court. So I I do believe, you know, truly I truly believe that um at the core of where um the player that needs to sit uh at the core of all of this is the network still.

Um I do believe that Visa MasterCard still hold a pretty strong um play in connecting um issuers and merchants um in the in the traditional format, and they do have the um ability to to move funds uh between the banks, right? Um now do I think that like there is opportunities for the integrators uh into Visa MasterCard, like the high notes and the PayPals and the blocks and the and the stripes of the world um to start thinking about um, well, how much do we need to leverage the network um from a money moving perspective versus a security or tokenization perspective, um, versus a branding perspective, right?

And so a lot of that comes um into play when you think about like which partnerships you want to go after. Um, you know, does a consumer trust visa or do they trust stripe link? It's just a question of which consumers using it, what era they're from, and what they know in the in the industry in the space. Likely the visa brand is yeah.

I'm sorry. And then in other words, kind of the the networks have to set protocols, at which point it's really up to the innovative companies, high note stripe to set no, okay. No, I don't think the networks set the protocols. I think the networks set the standards.

Does that make sense? Yep. Yeah, or how it's how do you do how do you define standard versus protocol? You're saying standard is here is what must happen in order for us to process this, but then you can still actually set you as high note can set the protocol of, well, how do we actually implement that to make it easy for people to actually engage in that?

Absolutely. So, you know, like so like let's call it this way. So like Visa has a an entire tokenization platform. Their tokenization platform supports a variety of use cases, everything from your Apple wallet to uh cloud commerce.

So when you store your you know your your card on a Amazon.com and you know, when and you and you go to your wallet on Amazon.com's website and you see all of those card art, like all that art and imagery. Um, that's all powered through their tokenization platform.

And so that's like some of the cool features that token tokenization gave to the um modern um payment space was more of that real-time ability to understand the cards, um, understand their intrinsic codes. Um, you know, every card in the industry has what we call a product code, and that product code defines um the characteristics, everything uh from how it can be used, where it can be used, and what type of uh interchange that car may be generating um for that issuing bank. Um and all this information comes through either tokenization or it can come through um like a bin service, which is extremely important when it comes down to understanding why or how to choose a card as an individual um paying at paying at a merchant.

Um you know, traditionally you pick the card with the highest rewards. Well, you know, with the recent um announcement and settlement with Visa and AstroCard with the merchants, that card may not be accepted anymore. But the but maybe a lower tier card of the same company with the same aim, like a reserve versus a uh preferred sapphire, may get accepted. And so um, you know, that that level of complexity is going to start to arise because the margins for these merchants are getting thinner and thinner and they need a way to actually run their business.

Um, and so that's why it's interesting to look at it from that perspective, because what you could also look at it from is, well, once that merchant receives the money, well, they need to pay for the payroll. They need to do invoice invoicing and account payables. Um, is that an opportunity for them to actually generate revenue off the cost of the good in the sale? So then you're looking at it from a perspective of where traditionally you were receiving the funds, going through ACH, paying with cash, or paying with your own credit card to buy those goods.

Let's say you're just a grocery store. You are you are yourself receiving funds into a bank account where you generate funds through interchange by using your own card to pay for those goods and for those services. And so then you end up in this ecosystem model where if I can get 3.2% for buying a bulk amount of groceries, maybe selling them at 2.

9 or 2.8% could still give me a profit margin in the end. And so it's just like really about combining this ecosystem together and connecting them from side to side. And that's where I think the chats are going to be really important because it makes it more intrinsic, it makes it more natural, it makes it less programmatic, and it's more um it's more turnkey, if that makes more sense.

How does that how will this change the economics for I guess the different people in the ecosystem? Because, you know, as you as you said, people are operating at thin margins. Do you see that this new world there are more people taking a cut? Uh, or do you see it and maybe the answer is yes, but it's such an expanded pie because we're essentially democratizing access to more tools.

How do you think about that? Is there gonna be like a balkanization of tools here? Do you do it more so as tools will actually they can do a lower margin because they're increasing GMV? I'm just curious what you think the unit economic ramifications are for this.

So you know, I think what's really awesome is that like these tools, like, you know, chat anthropic and openai and and all these all these you know um major players now in the in the chat space, um, have made discovery a pretty easy process. Um, so I I do think that there's going to be a lot more players horizontally, and there's gonna be a lot less players within the vertical. And you're going to start to see um just a lot more unique solutions within this space of payments that have been tailored, characterized, and verticalized to user-specific needs versus corporate-specific needs.

And I really think it's no longer gonna be a concept of like there's a merchant and there's a there's a person purchasing from a merchant. I do believe that there's there's just gonna be parties in this world that are negotiating on a trade. And so it's really going back to like really bartering, if we want to go down to it. I think that's really what we're going back to in the full circle model.

Because what is a merchant versus what is a um a group of people working together to build a table, right? Yep. Um, these are labels that we classified on on businesses in order to tax them, in order to classify them as a means of money acceptors. But today in this new world, I do believe that both the acceptance and the uh giving part um are going to become synonymously the same.

If I made you emperor of payments infrastructure uh and came to you and said, you know, uh as you said, let's maybe say five years from now, how people transact in or maybe even sooner are completely different. We have an issue in that today uh companies often at checkout they want to block bots because historically uh agents or bots that emulated humans but weren't, we're seen as uh surefire uh link to risk. How would you think about building on the other side the infrastructure to to disambiguate here?

And how would you think about kind of building that acceptance framework? Yeah, so so what it comes down to as an agent, you have um you have you have true agents, which are operators on uh on a user's like browser. You have these browser operators, um, and those operators um are are acting on behalf of consent typically given by a user. And so and so and so that idea is um kind of critical is very critical in terms of actually um solving that problem because how should they send the consent?

Yeah, right. Yeah, so that consent should be um you know part of every MCP instruction or tool or API call that is made, um, as as as their context. Um, you know, we all live in a world of uh you know authorization tokens, authentication tokens. We have context that gets passed through through the different LLMs.

Um there needs to be a way, in my opinion, which I think is in process, where not only is it just agent to agent to agent or you know, bot to bot um acceptance of consent, um, it needs to also be user-to-bot, bot to user. And in the end, you should be eliminating the bots in between and then viewing it as a user-to-user interaction. The bots are just there to act as accelerants to the user's wishes. Um, they're just um, how do I put it, workers in the end.

They're just they're just agents of the user. And so if you really think about it that way, then it really is a user has agents, and the user is acting. That user could be a business, the user could be a person, that user could be a vehicle, the user could be a TV. But each of them need to have the the baseline context of who they are, what they are, are they verified, what do they have access to, what are they capable to do.

And and that's yeah, I think that's really where it is. It's an app ecosystem again. It goes back to a marketplace structure, and these tools become part of your marketplace, that's your wallet. That's really what it comes down to.

Wallet is no longer just payment methods, it's tools. I'm very interested in in this payments conversation. I wanted to uh as we get to the end, I want to shift to to something I find pretty interesting about Hyno and you simply that you're very much an engineering-driven company. Uh, engineering often is overseeing a lot of these where other companies maybe will have PMs and these these blur lines that the boundaries I think will blur even more when we think about cloud code and like how they can empower.

But can we just speak philosophically? What are some of the things that you're very proud of decisions that you made early on at Hina that you think of paid ramifications? And just from an Oracle perspective, how do you think about really creating an engineering-driven company? So when we started Heina, we did we did a couple of things that I think I paid off in in multitude of ways.

One was um we really built the ledger in isolation from the rest of the ecosystem. Um, and the reason for that is we wanted it to be truly a ledger and not a product of a ledger. Um, and then we productized the ledger for the different use cases. So we allowed the use cases to flow into the the way the ledger works and looks, but the ledger itself is more the true accounting um principles of how you do double entry accounting.

Um, so what that allowed us to is really scale the verticals um while keeping our horizontals really well tested, really well tested, first of all. Um, and also able to scale horizontally of the with the use cases without having to go and keep rebuilding and rebuilding. Um, you know, one of the biggest things when you think about engineering is how do you take the um the noise of what you're building and try to take and break that apart and then you know take it down to its core principles and basic principles of what you're building.

And and a lot of that comes down to is you know, what story are you trying to tell as, you know, from your perspective through your service or APIs. Um and then it really comes down to then how do you organize your APIs and structuring in a way that tells that story. So it helps navigate not just internal customers but external ones as well. Um, one of the core philosophies we have at HighNode is um, you know, when you build something, you're building it not just because it's internal, but you it'll be externalized eventually.

Um I really love that mentality. And I think that is something that I enforce um through just constant repetition and reminders that you know you you should build this once and build it, build it well. Um doesn't have to be complete, it doesn't have to be the perfect thing in the world, but it should be something that you're proud of, whether it's an internal tool, whether it's you know a second-level tool or third-level API call. Um, because you never know when that layer might get horizontally ejected and become a vertical.

Um and you may want you want that to have a turnaround time to be you know fast. Um, you don't want to be worried about, well, if we go public with this, do we have to worry about our internal customers or the internal clients and their data set? Um you start to build a mentality of just productionalization from the get-go across every single team member. Um, now that comes down to um a lot of things, right?

You have to be consistent with your perspective and mentality. You have to understand what shortcuts are being taken in order to meet timelines and goals, and then really hone in on those shortcuts and goals, uh, or really just hone in on that at the end and understand, okay, well, where are we really with this entire process and development lifecycle? Um, from an organizational perspective, I do believe that you need to think about a world where um you're not over, you're not over be careful with my words.

Um you're not you you're you're not um over concentrating, I guess is the way I put it. Um around around the um around the verticals. Um you're you're you are focusing on the core components, and you have individuals and you have team leads um that are responsible for core components. And then you do, and this is where your product team becomes really strong.

Um, you're this is where the product team really starts to shine in, is they become now this um thread of all of these horizontal components and teams and form the vertical of the solution. Um, and the reason for that is engineering is should be responsible and always responsible to make sure that even though you have all of these horizontal, you know, or sorry, vertical lines coming down into you from a product request perspective, you're taking that, you're consolidating that, and then you're viewing that more on a horizontal lens.

And what that allows you to do is look and plan. And you're saying, look, I could go and maybe wait a week, these three requests are gonna come in in a horizontal line, deliver all three in one week, and then you know, that's the that's the win we get right there. Um, and it also lets you start to just become more homed. A lot of a lot of people get worried in general when uh they do context switching.

And so context switching is like a huge concern in the engineering life. Um, and the the way that you know you structure it this way, in my opinion, you can create homes, you can create comfort, but you allow them to start also innovating and because they're becoming experts in what they're building. And and then exactly, and you allow them, everyone individually, to start proposing solutions, ideas, uh designs that are actually orthogonal to the request that's coming from product, but solves the product request in itself.

And that's because that comes down to placement and learning and planning and and forward thinking mentality, where you know the goal is that the next build should always be shorter than the current build. How do you get there? How do you get yourself to a point where the the things you need to build are more about Legos versus code you have to write? Um, and that really comes down to building platform and you know, foundational uh you know, data models in the end that can go and support that.

But you really need to understand the business that you're in, top to bottom and left to right. Um, because it's very easy to go in an overly abstract model um that ends up not creating business value in the end um it's extremely important to to to understand the business uh as an engineer my my final question and i thank you for for being so generous with your time here uh if you zoom ahead five years what do you think is the biggest change in one payments on the internet and two how engine teams slash startups operate given the advances that we're seeing in AI and Cloud Code and all of that so so I mean I think I answered the advancement part earlier.

That's true. Yes we can bypass that with commerce yeah and it the chat is just there um as a stepping stone to voice. And you know I actually was thinking about this pretty deeply and I and I I agree. Conversation is way more important than than email writing they in terms of the interaction perspective.

Someone who uses m-dashes in their writing uh it is annoying to me that now more of my content than is actually AI generated people assume is AI generated. Yes. Yes isn't that and that's the issue right is that we're not seeing good voice emulation. But yeah we're not we're not yet and I think it's gonna come it's gonna come with time it's gonna come with scale and it's gonna come with um the the increased usage of the text-based platform um because we need to start understanding at the text you know text level how to you know expand across or expand beyond um you know the the US languages um you know look at how the the context between you know Spanish and English in in inherently is interpreted and then draw those lines and connections uh you know I I do think that like maybe on the conversational aspect it's it's more gist-based so it's like have I captured this correctly okay then I can translate that and you know that is that is kind of like how a lot of the um the world works today because not everyone is an expert in every language um especially if you're trying to go um you know to a different country and and you're in the US so it's about gist-based understanding where you have translators that are giving you an under their understanding and so it's just um you either could go down that path and have a secondary translator for everything or you can start to think about a world where that becomes no longer a problem.

And so I do think that the work that Apple is doing with the i AirPods and the inline I don't know if you've used this before but have you have you tried that? I haven't tried them no it's pretty cool. So like I had my friend speak to me in Spanish and then through my AirPods it came in in English. And it was like pretty it was like pretty it was pretty okay.

That's cool. It was it was pretty okay. But it works even through here so like if I set the you know if I set it up you'll be talking in Spanish and then it'll come through in English. And it's just like well if it if we're gonna get to that point then yeah maybe voice is a better way of doing it because the emotional impact of how you speak is pretty strong.

I would say people are likely to be you know this is just a general assumption um but people are tend to know how to speak more than they can write um if that makes sense. It does yeah yeah it's philosophically a whole can of worms um maybe we'll do a follow-up pod on it but for now thank you so much for coming I I learned a lot about the future of agentich payments uh and so much more and hope uh the audience took something away as well. So Shannon thanks so much for coming on no problem that you know I'd love to do a follow-up on maybe one of two particular topics because like there's a lot to talk about in agentec payments um there's a lot to you know we're going through I would say the uh the protocol proliferation stage um and everyone's battling for who will be the open standard um it kind of reminds me of I think it must have been like 2017 or something like that when Google came out with the payment request API and was trying to make that the only way to process payments on Chrome.

And and uh you know it's still being adopted. And so it takes time. It takes time but it's also just like I think you're gonna see a new set of players come up. As these big players start to try to take control of a new space you're going to see the smaller players start to get more traction in order to um adopt this new ecosystem if that if that makes sense.

Because like now you have an opportunity to say look I don't actually I can move away from Stripe I can move away from PayPal I can move from all these companies because this is all new stuff. Whereas before it was all about translating the same protocol to different companies. And so the lift there the lift there was actually kind of harder to see and harder to sell and here it's a brand new sell point. It's actually going to be an interesting interesting world in the future.