The Future Is Financially Inclusive: Teana Baker Taylor, Circle

Transcript

oh thank you so much for for making it over from beautiful London and visiting us in the crypto Valley Tiana we are going to talk about the future and how the future is financially inclusive however we we first would love to focus on you as Tina what led you here where you are today and leading circles Policy Department sure um so I used to be in banking I'm a reformed Banker I like to say and my last uh job in banking was really kind of looking at integrating fintech Technologies and blockchain Technologies

into the banking infrastructure stack um and I felt a little bit like a hamster on a wheel going around and around looking at proof of Concepts and different companies and as we know this technology doesn't easily plug in um and has some risk connotations that were slowing down that process um I was working on a number of um inclusion projects as kind of passion projects and um they just weren't on the bank's agenda and the more I learned about the technology the more I was really excited about the opportunities to democratize finance for people that don't either

have great access or don't have maybe the the skills or understanding or knowledge around how to create you know Sovereign wealth for themselves and so I decided to to leave Banking and go into the industry full time and just kind of take a leap and went to work for a very tiny exchange a Bitcoin only Exchange in London um really on purpose because I wanted to kind of learn the industry inside and out and at that time this is like 2017 there wasn't a lot we could do right we could basically kind of trade tokens um but the infrastructure was being built out you know this is kind of the beginning of the hype of the Ico bubble and really kind of the Advent of everyone trying to tokenize everything

so yeah that's how I got here super when we when we prep for the school we highlighted that when we look at Financial financial literacy today and what is really the state of [Music] um young Generations like like how much of the young Generations how what percentage invest consciously we find that typically um typically these are man or is in man take care of investments in a family and and how can we make literature as in financial literacy how can we increase it how can we

include other sectors of society other parts of society and and how crypto is a great tool for this what are your thoughts can you can you share with our lovely audience yeah so I think what we think of financial inclusion we automatically kind of jump to Emerging Markets or you know people that have less and and would like to have more and I think that there's a big gap between um the ability and the access to have you know financial services and the understanding around how to access those financial services and make decisions and I think that you know we

have this explosion of you know retail opportunity and there wasn't necessarily a lot of Education around how to make good decisions how to you know vet and validate projects um and so you know we hadn't entered this kind of speculative hype cycle which is very normal for any new technology you know the Gartner hype cycle kind of takes us through stages that happen over and over again and I will date myself I entered banking during the.com bubble um and you know was on teams that took lots of kind of famous projects forward like pets.com I was on that team so have seen this hype cycle before and I think what is missing is really that Financial

literacy portion of that and being able to kind of apply critical thinking to some of the things that you're doing so I think if we couple that with the way that information and sharing of information has changed dramatically from if you go back to you know the.com bubble and the ability to move value at the speed that we're able to today lots of things have changed that increase the velocity of both information decision making and then the movement of value and so when you kind of look through that lens of either kind of next-gen finances which is what banking would call it in the movement of that generational wealth from you know the you know father that will retire and

hand over a business or hand over generational wealth to their children you know typically you've got private Bankers that kind of tell you where you should move your money and I think today the younger generation wants a lot more control over what they invest in um and they want to make those decisions and they want to be part of that process and they're not going to take advice right but there's that Gap in between around you know how to make good decisions and and what you're looking for and um I think that we've seen you know a number of Cycles where we've had you know busts and Booms right and then within that there are accessibility challenges that we're addressing but again giving people access to things

doesn't necessarily always mean that it's going to be good for them straight off the bat without some kind of education process so you know we talk a lot about banking ourselves and not your keys not your coins but if we give all of this access to somebody and don't really put out good like do your own research is great but where are you supposed to get that information and from whom um and how do you validate the what you're learning is is credible as relevant right so I think the industry has done a great job at creating new cool stuff but not as great of a job as we could do around kind of bringing people along for the journey making sure that you know we have great

disclosures and that people understand what these projects are doing and exactly what you're investing in um and then I think the other element of that is you know it's not necessarily kind of gender specific but you know with any type of you've got you know technology has traditionally been male influenced Finance has to you know traditionally been male influenced and then if we look at kind of the way that information is shared within those communities it can be not as inclusive right and so I think that this technology is open to everyone it is open source and bringing everybody into that I think my experience has been that crypto has been a lot more inclusive

than other industries that I've worked in absolutely but part of that too is understanding that wouldn't make decisions differently um and the way that we intake information is different and so creating those communities for women to feel comfortable to show up in to learn um and to feel confident to take those decisions because you know we talked about this I don't know for many women in the room I was you know raised and a you know upper middle class uh environment I had four brothers um and I was uh treated like a smart person um but also lots of decisions I didn't

need to worry about right and then you get married and it's like oh you know your husband will take care of all those things and so I know how to you know how comfortable is that right too right but you don't even really take care that you're uncomfortable right until you're put in a situation where you're like oh well um and I don't think we always are conscious of that and so I think as long as we can be a little bit more present to the idea that you know if you speak a different language you're going to take an information differently if you're from a different part of the world where culturally maybe you know you're not exposed to the same opportunities or information you're going to take in information differently I love how you came up with the example of different

languages because we have this saying in Hungarian that you're as many persons as many languages you speak and we feel that if we go to a more trade Fire Conference versus a crypto conference it's it's the vibe is so different it's a different language spoken there as well so I'm hearing Tina that financial literacy is part of financial inclusion and what do you think what is the solution how how you see the way forward how how can we make the future more financially inclusive and then we can go into how circle is is helping here

yeah so I think you know we're entering this period where there's a lot of scrutiny kind of placed on what we're doing and how we're doing it and some of that comes from the public some of that comes from policy makers Regulators Etc uh the press and I think that one of the things that this industry hasn't done well and I've seen it time and time again I come from a calms background and so yes now today I spend a lot of time talking to regulators and policy makers But ultimately it's still a calms game whether you're talking to you know a customer or a potential business partner or a regulator it's all about the message that you're putting out and this industry can be a couple of things so you know I will just be blunt we talk a lot about the tech we talk a lot about

decentralization about you know immutability about um you know programmability and transparency and we use these big words and you know Regulators kind of look at us and go but exactly how is this good for society like practically what are you doing that is important for people and we're terrible at articulating that um so I think that you know leaning into the use cases and the problems we're trying to solve as opposed to talking about the product that you're building is critical I think the second thing is who are we building this stuff for and I think being very mindful about again the

problem that you're trying to solve and for whom and being able to communicate that is important but also ensuring that that the people that you're trying to build these products and services for that it's accessible for them um I was just reading a summary of something new that just came out um yesterday and somebody attempted to do the thing right and it was like 17 different steps that's not an exaggeration to get from here to here and so while this you know idea and it was you know no fees was was quite cool right it sounds great on paper but actually doing it was incredibly difficult and so I think

this industry is trying to change Behavior ultimately right and people don't like change Behavior change is hard and so if you don't tell them like why this is good for them and then tell them exactly how to do something and then make it easy to do like people just aren't going to do it and we're going to be in these rooms talking to each other for another five years and I don't think that's what anybody wants I think we want Mass adoption so we need clearer communication we need to communicate differently and we need to to work together with Jews who are masters of communication and and understand product Market fit and understand how to how to speak to various audiences

and I also think that you know there is um there's a lot of discussion now about you know how regulation is going to potentially change the space what we need to regulate do we need a whole bunch of new laws do we need um bespoke regulatory treatments for different types of activities and again I think that's another area where the community could be one more consistent and what they're communicating and how they're communicating it because otherwise I think we are at risk of being over regulated and while I am definitely you know kind of pro-regulation for you know same risk same activity same rules um there are plenty of things that we do that if well articulated would make more

sense to a policy maker around maybe the existing structures that we have today are adequate and then we don't need to kind of bring the heavy Hammer but what isn't helpful is saying oh we're completely decentralized so you know you can't regulate us I mean the can the can regulate you whether it'll be effective and Achieve policy objectives and be enforceable is a completely different story but they can make everybody's life very difficult so um it's just a better practice to start building in more best practices into how you're operating and a lot of that has to do with you know being accountable you know being able to distill what you're doing down into exactly what is

the business case what problem are you trying to solve and for who and then be mindful that there will be questions asked around things that can consumer protection right I mean I don't think that we think about this as often as we should if we're going back to the mindset that we're trying to open up Financial Services or you know Big Data lakes or you know identity Solutions or privacy enhancing Solutions it's not just about the money right the the flow of value is value of any kind it could be content for example that ultimately at the end of the day people are going to be using this stuff and if we have the ability to build in you know AML

prevention uh modalities or um be able to plug some of the wormholes where we have a smart contract failures that we see happen that do that just like think all the way through instead of launching half-baked crap for people to buy I'm smiling that you came up with or mentioned smart contracts because yesterday on on the stage of one of the uphold colleagues said that smart contracts naming is so unfortunate because they are not contracts and they are not smart for instance so it's also a communication communication Nuance right so when we when we prepped for a distance you highlighted that usdt is

the internet ready dollar usdc usdc oh my goodness sorry it's morning we have to we have to cut this um and so how how circle is promoting Financial inclusion through usdc and and true you have now a team of more than thousand people you you are 10 years old soon as is circle and usdc is five years old uh congratulations on on the Milestone of 10 years and five years how how are you thinking of uh of promoting Financial inclusion when you put on your circle hat yeah so I think usdc is is really a platform

um that that can be built on to serve a number of of use cases um so obviously the you know earliest and and the the use case that people know the most is to facilitate smoother crypto Capital markets trading right um but within that um it's essentially a payments platform it's a payments mechanism and so you know a number of areas of the world have inadequate payments infrastructure and so it's very easy to kind of see where usdc can solve some of those challenges dollars are also very expensive in some

areas of the world especially in areas where there is an volatile like native currency and so people want dollars and I think one of the things that um you know central banks potentially and Regulators don't always understand is circle isn't creating monetary policy we are literally just digitizing the dollars that are already out there and making them internet ready so that they can plug into web3 ecosystems that's essentially what we do and so that opens up a whole you know variety of doors um to to serve either people that that need or want dollars to provide FX we also have a Euro coin that is you know

kind of slowly growing over time and I think within you know the Mika context it'll be a regulated electronic money token and that will kind of change the access for payments in Europe specifically um but if we think about things like crisises or you know responding to um you know displaced people in Ukraine for example um or if we if we think back to covid um in the U.S there was a number of and and countries around the world kind of disbursements to people to make sure you could pay your mortgage and make sure that our emergency workers were still able to facilitate the services that

they needed to um and in a lot of cases you know checks were being mailed to people um so you know if your banking infrastructure has been wiped out by an aggressor in the situation of war or you've had a global pandemic it puts a lot of pressure on the financial ecosystem and dispersing those funds can be very slow and there's also unfortunately big gaps in the transparency around making sure that the money that you sent gets to the person intended um so usdc is being used by the UN by unhcr specifically at the moment with scope to expand to other U.N agencies to deploy those funds so for example the

Stellar Network MoneyGram um usdc and circle have a pilot at the moment to deploy cash to ukrainians that have been displaced so they have a stellar wallet the UN identifies who these refugees are um it's literally smartphone enabled they receive the funds and they can walk into any MoneyGram anywhere in the world and cash out in any currency and that happens nearly instantaneously and we just can't do that with you know private money today so that's that's one way um and it's not necessarily kind of financial inclusion but you can see how those types of programs could be

expanded to other types of one-to-many payments super definitely without without stable coins and in particular usdc we wouldn't be there where we are today in the crypto industry as a whole and uh and yeah it's gorgeous I'm sure if this pilot works then you will do this also in other specific use cases or with other okay okay super so um when we when we come to conclusion that how the future is financially inclusive and how the audience can help uh and take away today how can they contribute to to achieving Financial inclusion

quicker so again I would just go back to incepting behavior change it is people don't necessarily feel comfortable changing their behaviors but it's certainly more likely that behavior will change if it is easy to understand why what's in it for me how is this going to be helpful to me two how do I do it um and and three uh kind of you know what's the knock-on benefit right and whether that's for Society for the company you know what what is the net gain here and again I think that's some of that's communication and some of that is you know in the technical builds of what we're building out um so today I mentioned you know the the

17 steps that it took to do something yesterday um we really need to improve on that customer journey I know it sounds very trite but you know I know what I'm doing most of the time sometimes I don't but most of the time I think I know what I'm doing and literally just like three weeks ago I sent a ton of tokens on the wrong chain and I don't know where they are they're gone um so um and I'm and I kind of like watched myself do it as it was happening because I was just moving fast wasn't paying attention and the next thing you know I'm like whoop it's gone um so if I'm making mistakes like that and I'm a relatively smart person that's supposed to know what they're doing what

is the average person what chance do they have right and it becomes really frustrating so I think that that if if anything that would be the one thing that I would say there are people way smarter than me than this room that are building some really cool stuff and I appreciate that the tech might be really elegant but if people can't use it at the end then we're not going to accept Behavior change at the rate that I think that we could and I think if you just look at like the rise and growth of active users of chat gpt4 it was like exponential over a number of weeks versus you know the growth of crypto usage for payments for example or the growth of you know Tick Tock users or

the growth of people using the internet right we're getting faster and faster and faster um and it's easy to use chat GP and it's clunky right it's it's not even this great interface but you can figure out how to how to use it and play with it and I think that's not something we've done well we could do better absolutely so communication then better ux better UI products that are fit for a purpose and um what what else am I missing well I think the accountability and responsibility um that we all need to undertake to ensure that at the end of the day we want people to have access to

Opportunities and to you know the the democratation democratization of value that didn't exist previously and So within that those fail-safes have again kind of making sure smart contracts don't have bugs and and back doors and being able to communicate exactly you know what the value proposition is and for who I think is important because we don't want people I mean the number of times that I will have a great story to tell and then you know at the end of that an MP says to me yeah but I've just got a hundred calls this week from people who've been scammed and you're like okay and some of

these things are you know things that we could um effect I mean maybe we can't solve them all most most cryptoscams actually aren't cryptoscams at all they're scam scams um certainly the ones that people are calling MPS about um but there are definitely things that we could do and there are definitely things that we could do within the technology whether we're using zero knowledge proofs to be able to solve for some AML concerns like start doing that and if we can explain that the industry is plugging those risk gaps ourselves then you know the heat kind of comes down and the scrutiny starts to become less and then the other thing is just to keep in mind that you know I know we all

experience it together as a community but stuff like FTX that sets us back it sets us back a lot and the conversations that I'm having now literally I could have had three years ago and I just feel like it's Groundhog Day and I start over um so I think we need to hold each other accountable to just do better thank you so much Tina Baker Taylor please put your hands together as an appreciation thanks Tina [Applause]