The Global South Isn't the Edge Case. It's the Blueprint

Transcript

Good afternoon everyone. I'd like to start with this. When people talk about the future of money, they usually point at the same few places. New York, London, San Francisco, maybe Singapore. But today I want to point at somewhere else. And I want to talk about infrastructure. Not apps, not hype, but the reals underneath the global economy. The systems that actually decide how fast money moves and how much it cost and who really gets access to it at all.

But I want to make a simple argument. the places where and the global south where payments are being moved can actually be seen as a blueprint. But let's start with the growth numbers. According to the IMF, advanced economies grew 1.87% this year and will grow 1.8% next year. While developing economies and emerging economies uh will grow 3.8% this year and 4.5% next year.

This is actually twice as fast. What does growth really mean? Growth really means payroll. It means the ability to spend the money that you actually have in real time and most importantly the ability to access it when it's needed. But to go through the entire presentation, I wanted everyone to ask themselves this simple question. What happens when the fastest growing economies had the same financial advantages?

I'm talking about world-class technologies, global financial infrastructure and reliable access to the dollar. I'm going to give you a framework. For example, if you live in an emerging economy, it can be Nigeria, Brazil, Bonaris uh India the friction that happens within your payment systems come from the corresponding network, not the local rails. Because when you look at many of these economies, they've already had the ability to leap frog to building their own payment systems, which is their real-time system.

And when you look at their flow of funds or the compliance framework, many of the delays and bottlenecks stems from the ability to receive the dollars they've actually earned. So again, I would end with this. What if the fastest growing economies had the same financial advantages? I had this slide very importantly because I wanted to talk about something that you probably seen that is very unique. There is no convention that the north star has to be on top. I believe someone decided it was implemented and it became a reusable uh processes within our

systems. But what if we have the south in the position of the north? That is what I'm trying to explain here. We've often seen where financial innovation starts in developed markets and emerging markets adopt it later on. And when you design the flow of funds or the infrastructure, it saves one exact picture that emerged markets and economies are going to always leaprog over the current existing system to access globalized standard technologies.

But the evidence which I'm going to go in this presentation is actually otherwise. But think of edge cases and why blueprints are being underlined in within this ecosystem is because they have the numbers and also they have one of the fastest growing economies globally. So let's look at a hard constraint. So when you look at the three main pillars to how global economies are being uh um transformed we look at access speed currency and also borders Africa about 1.5 billion people one of the fastest growing economies in the world still barely has access to

corresponding banking network at scale in fact based on the corresponding banking institutes of systems major markets are currently having an ex existential crisis is across declining rates of course banking access. So when you define legacy payment systems is the local rails too slow or in the international rails actually the uh uh uh uh fragmentation to the speed of how payments are actually scaling over time. Then let's talk about distribution. Many of these economies actually earned the right to distribute the dollars. But we still have compliance bottlenecks that is tied to risk to actually move their money. But what happened? You have likes

of the Empessas where phones plus agency networks actually move money in real time. And I can go over the numbers shortly. offer the likes of speed. They've built an actual ledger to move money in real time at a fraction of the milliseconds of the speed uh uh uh um global markets actually seeing and here's some of the numbers and I'll stay with Empessa for a bit right uh while we were trying to understudy Empessa we saw so many numbers behind the transaction count that it made it so complex for the human brain but let's go over to the impact 92 million financial inclusion from a

customer perspective across the eastern region of Africa because they were mobile fest instant and global by nature and also programmable. Let's look at uh uh uh UPI in India about 24.5 billion transaction count in just August 2026 alone or NES 11.2 2 billion with its new instant payment transaction network or the popular Brazil that we all know today picks 170 million users and from a framework before going to advanced economies many of these systems just started building their own real-time infrastructure but one of the most interesting things we've seen across the last two decades it's stable coins

where it estimated monthly value of cross body payments in just June 2026 alone cross about 24 billion and it's increasing at an aggressive rate. So for the first time we believe that this stable uh uh um infrastructure is actually built for emerging markets because they already have the ability to move money in real time. They're global and also programming by nature. So let's look at at at what emerge under uh uh building this core framework or what I would call the core ledger. that as mentioned early on you have Empessa, NIMS, UPI, Pix, but let's look at Fed now, right? I'm not sure how much everyone is integrating into Fed now.

This is a net new technology. It's the real-time technology of the United States where you can actually move money between banks. Just think of it as the open uh uh um ledger infrastructure. It's a fairly new context in comparison to real-time technology systems that we've seen globally. But when you let's drill down to stablecoin and its ability to actually cut across multiple geos in real time and also span across multiple emerging market economies. We believe that stable coin and emerging market has the same direction whereby the systems can be different but they point at the same direction global programmable and instant settlement.

So let's so so if we reference back to the infrastructure we see that the infrastructure itself has been able to change and adapt with this emerging market economies because by default we have the capacity to program payments at multiple jurisdiction around the global south and this is what we've been building our credit for the last 5 years you can be a consumer client a business client enterprise we have banks and fis or even AI agents having the same core centralized ledger in the same infrastructure with a compliance packet to actually move money across the global south using the dollar from an access and distribution metric in real time.

So when you look at our compliance stack we are integrating into about 1,500 banks 500 million wallets and 450 mobile network operator. So for example, if you need to move money as a business client and you have supplies across over 60 countries, you have actually one net new infrastructure to actually move your money in real time at a fraction of the cost. So when I talk about the credit network, it's very simple. It's a network for the global south for the next 100 years. Over the last few years, we've seen the large language models scale their infrastructure. And I had to ask this

question internally. How money really moves and who what allows it to moves in allows it to move in real time. And this is where we believe that the value of agents can actually play a huge role. For the very first time since we've built the sediment infrastructure, you now have agents as uh method of records to actually re uh react to an infrastructure that is already built and programmable by nature. Then you look at the compliance stack. It can identify, create limits and also enforce policy that are in place with global compliance programs and compliance systems overall.

So, like I will always say, autonomous money would require programmable trust. And I'd like to end with this. Remember the question I asked. What if the fastest growing economics economies have access to advanced technologies? And the question is very simple. When you're looking at advanced payment and real-time technology, I want you to think of the global south before advanced economies. Thank you very much.