Crypto-Powered Commerce Across Africa | A Conversation with Chris Maurice

The reality is, is that free trade on the continent isn't possible without a technology like blockchain, without stablecoins. Hello, I'm Jeremy Allaire and this is the Money Movement. I'm really excited today to have a great guest, Chris Maurice, who's the co founder and CEO of yellowcard, a really innovative firm that is bringing the power of stablecoins and crypto infrastructure to a really broad group of people and businesses in Africa. So Chris, welcome to, welcome to the show. Great to be here, man. Awesome. Well, I was just commenting before we got started, you had a really nice profile in Bloomberg. I don't know if it was yesterday or today or what that is, which. Huge, huge kudos. I think the yellow card story is a really exciting story and so we're gonna do our own version of it, much better than the Bloomberg piece today and talk about it. And just to share with the audience, I've had the benefit of knowing you for a little while and working with you and seeing the progress that you're making and so forth. First of all, just congrats on the, on the progress. We're trying to be big boys like y', all, man, one day at a time. Yeah. So let's do this. Maybe, you know, maybe I'll do a little bit of framing and, and, and then, and then we'll kind of dive into your story a bit, which is, you know, I think there, there's, you know, a lot of interest in stable coins right now. It's sort of like a hot thing. Like people are buying companies for lots of money and that's not the main point of it, but it's attracting a huge amount of attention. And we've kind of got to this place where the technology of stablecoins really works and, and the benefits are really powerful, which we're going to get into. But there's been this talk about, you know, the growth of stablecoins in emerging and developing markets. We certainly see that as circle with usdc, just like, you know, with like partnerships with like you guys and so many others around the world. The growth in the adoption of stablecoins for cross border transactions as well as I like to joke and have joked for like 10 years, a cross border transaction is like seeing a cross border email at this point. So a lot of these are going to get blurry because of stablecoins. But anyway, we have this big backdrop and I get asked questions all the time about like, tell me about these uses, tell me about these, you know, what, what's happening and What I love about, you know, Yellow Card and why I'm so excited to have you on the show today is you've got like the, you've got really deep ground truth on this. And so I want to go into that ground truth and bring to life a little bit the stories of people who, whose lives are being impacted by this. And, and, and obviously, you know, what, where, where you're headed as a company. So that's like the backdrop from my perspective. And, and, you know, maybe just to start, just, you know, give us the, the, the founding, the founding story and kind of, I know from building companies, right, where you start and where you are today, you know, there's, there's, there's pivots and there's evolutions and, and, and all that stuff, and you don't need to go through every, every pivot you've had as a company. But like, you've really landed on something now. And so I'd love to hear about the founding and kind of love to hear kind of how, how that's got gotten you, you know, where you are today. Long story short, right? So I, I grew up in New Orleans, went to school at Auburn and Alabama, so I'm about as Southern as it gets. And my son is going to school in New Orleans actually, so I love to hear that. Tulane, good school. Yeah. And so while in school, got into bitcoin first. Right. I think most people get into the space through bitcoin. Right. So I got in pretty early in 2013. My co founder, Justin, was the guy who would go around parties back in the day just evangelizing the gospel of bitcoin. Right. He's a real tall, sweaty guy, so he'd have like six people in a corner just hovering over them, you know, just talking about bitcoin and, and, and converting the masses. And yeah, you know, that, you know, that went on until about 2015. And at that point I was fully down the rabbit hole, right. Like, this is the best thing ever. This is what I'm doing with the rest of my life. And so, you know, we got to work, right? And, and you know, I think what we ended up landing on a couple years later, so now about 2017, was we were going to put a gift card in cvs, Walmart, places like that. You'd be able to walk in, buy this gift card and redeem it for bitcoin. And so we started building this out and one day I met a Wells Fargo in Auburn, Alabama, of all places. And there's a Nigerian guy in Line waiting to send $200 to his family. And the bank charged him $90 to send 200 over to his mom. And I thought, well this seems ridiculous, right? And so I talked to the guy, hey, have you heard of bitcoin? It's free, it's instant, it's fun, all this great stuff. And you know, went home and, and just started thinking, what's this guy's mom going to do with $200 of Bitcoin? Right? Like you can't buy food with that, you can't pay rent with that. Right. You know, what, what problem are we actually solving here? And you know, especially at the time, everybody in the industry loved to talk about, you know, practical use cases and solutions. And there was just nothing actually practical about it at the time for you know, somebody in, in Lagos. Right. And so look, I don't think I knew where Nigeria was on a map at the time. They don't teach you nearly as much about Africa as you might think in the Louisiana education system. So it comes as a surprise to some people. But you can prep your son for that. And just really became obsessed with that problem. I find myself skipping class and just doing research, trying to understand the country and the currency, the continent and the banking system and everything. And eventually I realized if I want to understand Nigeria, I need to speak to somebody from there. I'd been on a plane four times in my life before starting the company and I land in Lagos, Nigeria on a six day old passport, no visa, no shots, and a one way ticket that we spent all of our money on. So it was a real trial by fire. We weren't going to do it the easy way. That's how we got started. And then now fast forward, obviously the base has evolved quite a bit and I think for us it was really 2021 where things shifted completely from bitcoin to stablecoins. And I mean it's just a pretty clear transition early 2021 where everybody just was a, you know, yeah, we had just reflective from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2020 we grew USDC 1000%. And then the beginning of 2021 to the end of 2021 we grew USDC another thousand percent. So it was like that was the time when like, you know, basically like stablecoin started working and the stablecoin liquidity got everywhere and it, it, it, I mean now it's obviously even bigger in terms of the, the, the, the scope and reach and, and adoption stuff. But like that was a good time to pivot to stablecoins 100% man. And you know, I guess, I mean, for context now, right. We're the, the largest licensed stablecoin payments infra and the emerging world. Right. So we operate in 20 countries, all in sub Saharan Africa and work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, make it easy for them to access stablecoins, to make international payments, to manage their treasury, to essentially access the equivalent of the dollar, do anything that you would use the dollar for, anything that you or I would use our US bank account to do. Businesses across the emerging world don't have that privilege. Right. And they need an alternative to be able to make those transactions and save. Yeah. So that, that's, you know, I want to dive in, I want to dive into that. This is getting, this is the meat on the bone, right. Which is like real world utility value from this new alternative to the legacy banking system and you know, made possible through products like USDC and USDT and others. Right. And I'd be interested in, you know, maybe a few different angles on this is sort of maybe tell a story or two maybe about a household or an individual and maybe a story about, you know, a business and like, you know, their discovery of like what stablecoins could do for them and kind of, and how, and you know, kind of the kind of hurdles that maybe people have had to overcome or questions or what are the challenges they've had to overcome. And then once they've started, you know, once they've kind of come through that, you know, how they think about all this. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's, I mean, it's hard to pick, you know, one or two stories. Right. I mean, we could do the, we could do the whole show just talking about my, you know, use cases around this. Right. But I mean, you know, you hear every day around, you know, people using stablecoins for savings. Right. In countries on the continent that have very high inflation. Right. I mean, some countries have, you know, peaked at almost 100% over the past two years. People are, people are using this technology just to store their wealth. Right. Just to store any money that they're able to bring in in something that's secure. Right. I mean, we know plenty of families that receive money from overseas and they prefer to receive it in stablecoins because if you don't receive it in stablecoins, then you're getting all the local currency at once. Right. And they don't need to spend all the local currency at once. They need it over the course of several weeks at 100%. It takes a while. Yeah, yeah. So you're giving them with, with the yellow card, with the yellow card app basically like you're giving them the, the, the, the end to end kind of experience to both store, send, save, receive and then are you also providing like the, the, the, the kind of on and off ramps to the, to the local banking systems is, or mobile money systems or other things that are, that are needed. Like there is always the, like I got to pay my utility bill or I got to, you know, you know, what have you. How, how does that work for people who are, who are using it? Yeah, I mean so from, from our side we serve predominantly businesses, right. And we have, we have two main products. So we have the, the on and off ramp which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, right. It's the, the full end to end payment flow. Right. So you're, you know, in any country on the continent that we serve, you need to make a payment, you know, you need to settle an invoice in China and India, in Europe, anywhere like that. Right. Or you know, vice versa, you need to bring that money in. Right? You're a, you know, a large retailer that you know, needs to facilitate imports or a large pharmaceutical importer that needs to import medicine. Then you know that's one of the, one of the big use cases that businesses are using it for. The other main product that we have is our payments API which I like to call Africa as a service. Essentially what that does is that takes our bank accounts, our mobile money relationships etc across the continent and just makes that available for you know, companies to be able to utilize to serve their customers on the continent more effectively. Right. So that's what Coinbase for example is on. And so that, that abate but does through that, through that product. Right. I'm, I'm an enterprise or I'm another fintech or I'm whatever I am am I am. I basically like I'm integrating with that and, and inside of that you're providing the liquidity into things like usdc and so they're sort of, they're able to kind of purchase usdc, store it, manage it, run transactions, redeem the USDC and go out to their local banking or whatever as needed. Yeah. So you know, essentially, essentially the way that it works is you know, a company that integrates it. Any money that's, that's collected, any like local payments that are collected, everything automatically gets converted into, into stablecoins and then vice versa. Right. So you know, you hold USDC with Us and then you just tell us, you know, make a payment to, you know, Zambia. Right. Make a payment to South Africa, et cetera. Right. And how, and like how are the counterparties for those payments? Do they, they can use whatever Web3 compatible wallet that they have? Is it just like a wallet addresses that you're sending to or do, or do, or do you encourage like the counterparties to also onboard into yellow card as well? Yes, I mean we, we handle the third party payment. Right. So I think you know, in most cases and you know, I'm sure you guys have experienced this, you know, outside of the US and outside of, you know, the west, right. Most of our customers don't really care about stablecoins necessarily. Right. They're not, they don't really care about the technology. They care about solving their problem. Right. They care that they, they, they need to make a payment and this is the best technology on earth to be able to do so. And so you know, for the vast majority of our customers, you know, they, they want that payment terminated in a bank account. Right. USDC becomes the rail as opposed to necessarily the, the settlement currency. Right? The, the stablecoin sandwich thesis as, as. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we see a lot of that. Definitely, definitely. Which is amazing right, because it's like effectively like USDC becomes you know, a substitute for the entire correspond and kind of international settlement pipes. Yeah, yeah. I can tell you for a fact I know many fintechs on the African continent that are using usdc, using usdt, have relationships with y', all and just will openly say they don't touch, you know, crypto, they don't do anything with blockchain, but are actually in practice using circle on the back end for, you know, facilitating a lot of these payments. Right? Yeah. And we're, we're even seeing banks basically in many different markets who are, and they'll never admit it. Yes, some of them, the biggest, the biggest emerging market bank in the world, like the most innovative high growth emerging market bank which is nubank out of Latin America. USDC is front and center. You know, they're, they're, they're, they're, you know, they're really, they're really pushing it. And so I, I think you know, they're an innovative, they're like a fintech bank, but they're a true bank. Like they do credit, they do lending, they do investments, they do your whole portfolio banking services regulated by the central bank there in Brazil. Leaning in. We, we, we, we're going to see you know, more and more of that blurring, right, between kind of crypto, native firms, payment institutions, banks, etc. But that's amazing. So it sounds like, you know, are, are you finding. I guess maybe another way of asking is like, how much of the flows that you are involved in are within the sub Saharan, Sub Saharan Africa versus, you know, with other, you know, export import markets that are off the African continent. And do you measure that at all? Yeah, you know, we, we do. Right. The, the majority of it is imports to the continent at large. Right. It's, it's, you know, things, goods, raw materials, consumer goods, et cetera, coming in from Europe, coming in from the uk, coming in from India, coming in from China and. Yeah, you know, I think, you know, one of the things that we're working on actually with you know, paps and you know, some of the other companies that are involved from like the African Union level is, you know, how, how do you encourage more intra African trade? Right. You know, the, the AfCFTA which is now in place. Right. Is supposed to create this free trade, you know, union within the continent. Right. And pretty much every country is signed onto it. And you know, look, that's, that's a great first step, but the, the reality is, is that free trade on the continent isn't possible without a technology like blockchain, without stablecoins, without just, you know, a advancement in payment technology. Right. A large part of the reason that African intra African trade is five times smaller than intra European or intra North American trade is not because people hate each other. It's because it's very difficult to make a payment. It's extremely difficult to make a payment. Right. And the thing is, even if I want to pay from say, Ghana to anywhere, or I'm paying from Senegal to Kenya, that payment is going through New York, it's going through London, and then it's landing in Nairobi on the other side. And so it's just not conducive to, you know, encouraging trade on the continent. Yeah. I have a bunch of FOB questions I'd love to hear your perspective on. So, so one, one is just within the, within the use case of, of these businesses that want to use this because it's a sort of better, faster, cheaper way to actually facilitate payments. How many of them are also sort of, you know, looking to store value in digital dollars like usdc, as opposed to going out to their external banks where they maybe are subject to inflationary currencies or other. Like, is the store of value piece also being adopted by businesses? And are you Providing some of that with like your own wallet infrastructure. It's, it's. I, I will say it's not nearly as big as the, the payments use case. Right? I mean the, the payments is an immediate problem. You know, we need to solve this. Let's, let's make this happen. There are a number of initiatives that we're working on specifically to encourage more of that savings aspect. What I will say, and I think this is good for you to hear as well, is for USDC to really win on the savings piece, it needs to win on the payments piece as well. What we find is that these companies, when they want to hold money for any extended amount of time, they will always default to doing that in a method or account or whatever where they then have immediate access to be able to do whatever they need with that money. And so that's really key is providing people a place where they can hold USDC and then they can make that dollar payment, they can make a Euro payment, they can make a rupee payment, you know, real payment, whatever they, whatever they need to do. Right? Or they could just pull it out in shilling, right? They can pull it out in Rand and you know, any, any currency that they, they need on the continent. And you know, making sure that they have both of those pieces available is, is critical to really encouraging that. Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like you're obviously checking a lot of boxes in, in terms of the, the, that interoperability with existing rails right in, in, in Africa and, and some other places too. So I guess another question is related to this which is, and this is sort of getting crossing a little bit into kind of the politics of all this which is, you know, probably, you know, like I said at the start, like one of the first questions I get asked is like, you know, tell me about these use cases for stablecoins that are, you know, you know, what's driving adoption. And we see like all around the world like this emerging and developing market kind of uses and trade and cross border payments and like it's just a huge, huge phenomenon. But, but one of the like questions that comes right after that is like isn't this a problem for the local governments? Like aren't the local governments concerned about payment systems that kind of bypass their own regulated payment systems? You know, what are they going to do? Are they going to regulate this? You know, currency substitution, like could undermine fiscal policy in some of these places. Fiscal and monetary policy, but fundamentally it's fiscal, right? And like isn't that a threat? Won't they just like, crack down. I mean, obviously we've seen like, the Nigerian government, like, take actions just on basically OTC markets for stablecoins against Anaira. You know, in the, in the Binance case, obviously, that's really the core of it is just like a free market for people who, who want to trade Naira for stablecoins. And so, like that. That's a. Yeah, it's, it's a complex set of issues, obviously. And, and you have to navigate that as well. But, like, what, what do you, what are you seeing on that front? And, and, and how do you think about that issue? And, and, you know, is there, is there an enlightened pathway here for the continent to embrace this without it being somehow threatening to their ability to do what they need to do to run their governments? Yeah, 100%. Right. And I think for us, regulation has always been front and center. Right. I think that you're not able to build a centralized exchange without being realistic about regulation and working with the regulators and treating them as stakeholders in the ecosystem, which they certainly are. And I think when you look broadly across Africa, what you'll see is over the last two years, the continent has had just a complete sea change in terms of friendliness towards the space, sort of at the same time that the last two years in the US has been pretty rough. And so it's really been great to watch. We've, you know, really been able to go in and work with a number of regulators across the continent. Right. And so, you know, today there's, you know, licensing in Botswana, there's licensing in South Africa and Namibia and Mauritius. There's sandboxing in Zambia and Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda. Right. There's, you know, Nigeria. The SEC has released guidelines as of what, 2022 for licensing in the space. Right. And they've, they've taken over the regulation. And look, I mean, obviously there's been issues and concerns, especially in Nigeria around aml, around tax evasion, around things like that, that they went after specific players for. But I think the SEC, especially under the new Deputy Governor, Dr. Agama, I think has really been moving the industry forward in an innovative way in the country. And I think that some of their recent actions show that, that they're for business. They want to encourage this space, they want to regulate the space, and, you know, they have the guidelines to do so. And so, you know, I'm, I'm pretty bullish on, you know, what we're going to see coming out of Nigeria. I think that, you know, they see the amount of, you know, jobs, the amount of money that, you know, this industry is bringing into the ecosystem. And you know, what I would also say just from, you know, a much higher level. Right. And, you know, this is sort of. This is where I usually clash with, like, hardcore, you know, crypto Twitter people, right? Is I just, I don't see a day where you walk into a coffee shop in Nairobi and you're paying for your latte with USDC or Bitcoin or really any digital asset for that matter. Right. I think that, you know, local payments are largely solved for. Right. If I'm in Nairobi, M Pesa is the best way to make a payment, period. No matter where I am. I can pay my taxi driver, I can pay for groceries, I can, you know, get food. I can do anything that I need. Right? And so it's, you know, it's already sort of solved for, right, with, with mobile money and, and, you know, with certain other solutions. I think that, you know, where stablecoins are really coming in is not disrupting, you know, the local monetary system and the local payment rails. It's. It's disrupting the international ones. It's disrupting Swift. Right. I mean, when I think about you guys, I think if I think of y' all as a, you know, a competitor to Swift, not necessarily a competitor to local currencies or anything like that. I think that, you know, usdc, usdt, all these stablecoins are replacing the way that the dollar moves around the world rather than actually affecting the way that money moves within local ecosystems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, we definitely see, like, variability in that across a lot of, a lot of different places. You know, where, you know, for example, in, in Argentina, people just, they just, you know, it's somewhat dollarized already, but it's, it's not, it's not actually dollarized, but like, people just want to hold stablecoins and store their value and use it for local payments. And it is used like by 80, 70, 80% of people to buy the cup of coffee. Right? It's sort of, if you go to Buenos Aires, like, everyone, everyone sort of accepts stablecoins. So there are, there are variations of the, of the, of that, of that theme. And yeah, I've had a chance to meet with some of the, you know, leaders of some of the. These big mobile money systems. And, you know, I think that the, I think they're intrigued with, with what stable coins can do in terms of that international interoperability. Right. I think that's Sort of the, the, the like, you know, we don't just have to be this walled garden where it's just sitting inside of, whether it's Kenya or Uganda or wherever it is. Like there's a way to, you know, if, if, if digital wallets all around the world can speak usdc, like a way to transact with all those other people and all those other businesses around the world sort of that network value that kind of comes with that. Oh, 100%. Yeah. And I mean that, that, that to me is the, I mean that's the, you know, $20 trillion problem that's being solved, right? Is money moving around the world in a faster and more efficient way. I think the other big thing that I certainly see is as opposed to retail is E commerce, especially international E commerce when you need to make a payment. USDC is better for the merchant. It's easier for the consumer. I think, you know, look, we're not that far away from seeing, I think, you know, sort of mass adoption of, you know, stablecoins for online payments. I think the only thing that's, yeah, I mean Stripe, who's a partner of ours, like they, they launched out of the box. Any merchant that uses their e commerce system can flip a switch and take USDC payments alongside credit card payments. It just shows up in the UI and like we will see, you know, we will see as, as the UX on wallets gets better and better and things like gas fees go into the background and people don't have to worry about what chain they're on. You get cross chain abstraction and like a lot of these things that are user experience hurdles, as those things get solved and they are being solved, I think we'll find ourselves in 2025 with, you know, it'll be all of a sudden the merchants that figure it out are going to be like, I'm able to, I'm able to better serve, you know, a wide, you know, variety of audiences here and it's better for me and they want to promote it and we'll kind of get the, the snowballing going. It'll take, it'll take a few years. But, but like it clearly is, is you can see it, you can see it coming 1, 100%. And I think that, you know, companies like Stripe moving into that space is what's really going to, you know, help take that over the edge. Right? Because you know, look, right now, why do I use my credit card for everything? Because when I do, I get 2% back, I get consumer protection and I don't actually have to pay it for 30 days. So there's actually several benefits that I think sort of get under told for using a credit card. And I think that somebody like Stripe entering the mix in terms of processing the stablecoin payments, they're able to add all of that stuff in if they want to. Right. And I think you'll have companies like Stripe, you'll have other major processors, you'll have other companies that'll pop up that will effectively make stablecoins. Yeah. And there'll be like on chain, native versions of credit extension and transaction reversals, insurance against fraud, all these things. Right. You're going to see. Yeah. Our hope is to see all of that develop on chain and be natively intermediated by web, three infra smart contracts and kind of build that entirely from the ground up on chain. 100%. Yeah. You can have a decentralized version of it. Right. And I think that's the thing that's really going to take it to the next level. Right. Is when stablecoins are not just as easy but are actually as safe and have all the other perks, it really takes it to the next level. I'm kind of preaching to the choir here, so. Yeah, no, I know, but it's good, it's good, it's good. It's always good to riff about this. If you told me you didn't agree, I think it'd be a, you know, a bigger issue. Yeah. You know, but the thing is, is like a lot of, there's a lot of people who tune into this podcast and it's an evolving story. If you go back four years and start listening to the podcast four years ago and compare it to now, talking about a lot of the same themes. But where we are on that journey is incredibly. It's remarkable the fact that I'm sitting here and we're talking about real commerce, moving online, cross border trade, moving through stablecoins, store of value spanning entire continents, leapfrogging payment systems. This was all a dream four or five years ago and now we're living in that reality and it's entrepreneurs like yourself that are bringing this to life as well. So it's pretty awesome. The progress is incredible. And I think, you know, what really gets me excited about it is we don't really know what the impact of that is going to be. Right. I think, you know, people speculate on what the impact of that can be. But you know, right now you have large, you know, large portions of the population globally that cannot make Online payments, right. You have, you know, parts of the world like Africa where E commerce is, you know, far behind, you know, how much adoption there's been in like the US and Europe and China and other parts of the world simply because of the payments issue. And so, you know, think about the amount of jobs that, that can create on the continent when you open up E Commerce, right? When you open up the ability for these companies to be able to sell online, to, you know, hire locally, you know, do all this stuff locally, more deliveries, all of this. I mean, so it just, you know, the amount of jobs it creates is. Yeah, yeah. And access innovations, access innovations in finance and financial services that are being built up on chain as well. 100%. 100%. So and then, I mean, and then there's, you know, even on top of that, there's the trickle down effects, right? I, you know, I, I like to brag about the fact that we have six former employees. I, look, we're, we've not been around that long. We're not that big of a company, right? I mean what 250ish people. And we have six former employees that have raised seed money for their own startups, right? So I mean, you know, it's just a very entrepreneurial continent, right? People are very, you know, people are just ready to solve problems and you know, the impact of, you know, stablecoins being able to open up jobs, being able to open up opportunities for people that then turn around, start their own company and you know, it's a compounding effect, right? It's a compounding waterfall. I love it. But we, our, our formal mission statement, and it's been basically consistent since we founded it, is to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. And you know, I think like as you make value exchange as easy as the Internet and, and not just payments, but all kinds of value exchange that happen, like it, it grows economic prosperity in many, many facets. And like you said, it's hard to imagine where it's going to go. I mean it's fun to imagine where it's going to go, but it's, but it's, it's, it's, I think we've, you know, we've crossed, we're crossing the chasm in sort of tech market evolution speak, right? We're crossing the chasm and we're, we're, we're getting onto what they call the slope of enlightenment where the world, you know, truly wakes up and becomes enlightened and adopts this at mass scale. So well, it'll be fun to continue working on this together with you, Chris, and really appreciate you joining for the podcast and excited to get the story out there. We're always ready to party, brother. You let us know. Thank you, Chris.