What If You Built a Bank Like a Blockchain?

Transcript

There's trillions and trillions of dollars that is trapped in the legacy financial services infrastructure. And with the blockchain technology, you get to have this once in a generational opportunity to try and unlock that. That technology in the world of artificial intelligence needs a rewrite. Instead of you having to go to the bank, the bank comes to you. The treasurer that was very skeptical, you know, it's crypto, there's scams, all of a sudden now has the access to the efficiencies of the blockchain. 24/7 365 capital on call. We call it the continuous bank. >> We want to have transparency into that information. So we built a lot of machinery to be able to do that. We just couldn't have afford not to move these receivables off balance sheet. Can JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs do everything that we've talked about? Absolutely.

Probably not as fast as we will be able to do. >> Welcome to the A16Z crypto podcast. My name is Guy Wlette. I'm one of the general partners here at A16Z and I'm really excited to be joined today by D Chia the founder and CEO of Open Reserve and by Rick Korea the president and COO D and Rick came from a storied fintech and financial markets background previously at Money Lion which was started in 2013 went public back in 2021 and last year in 2025 was acquired by Gen Digital and now they are on to their next adventure starting open reserve.

You guys are building a new bank and I'd love to start with a very simple question which is why is today a good time to build a new bank? >> Well, first of all, Guy, thanks for having me here. This is super exciting. Uh it's an exciting day for us to to to be here to talk about um really sort of the arc of the evolution of the American financial services market, right? know if you think about the United States it's an incredible legal framework that governs financial services broadly you know and and really as we think about our founding story and our background um banks generally provide the fuel for our society really to function right so as we think about open reserve we're building the

continuous bank but really the priors that have had to really form for us to be here today are pretty unique, right? What we're trying to do is quite novel in terms of marrying traditional financial services and DeFi capital markets into um a modern bank that that's really envisioning the infrastructure for 2028, 2030, 2035. And this is an incredible time where you have the priors not only in the regulatory side for traditional finance but also the priors from a blockchain maturation perspective where you can now marry the two build a core from scratch and really go deep into the infrastructure of banking to make money movement capital formation global but

also 247 365. >> Yeah. As a former CFO and and treasurer uh of a public company, I I had a front row seat to how difficult it is to manage cash. >> And if you think about the problem that kind of exists, there's trillions and trillions of dollars that are just kind of trapped u in the legacy financial services infrastructure. And with the blockchain technology, you get to have this kind of once in a generational opportunity to try and unlock that. Uh, and there's trillions trapped in everything from trade receivables to companies that just have to keep excess working capital because of the inefficiencies across markets and across borders. You have institutional

portfolio managers and wealth managers that are constantly having to wait for things to settle to be able to execute their next trade. And so this is an opportunity for us to change the plumbing and unlock all that trapped capital. Yeah, I think uh banking is often a very complicated and conflated concept and certainly one of the things we hear when we go and talk with the big financial players in Wall Street or uh some of the financial market infrastructure providers is that part of what is exciting about blockchains is the opportunity to have much more mobile capital or collateral. I'd love to understand what trapped capital exists today and how are you guys thinking about the opportunity to to move it faster. So the the the trap capital is is actually uh it's pervasive. There's

10 to 15 trillion uh of capital that just kind of parked around banks around the world just solving for anytime that a transaction has to happen across border. You have nearly 2 trillion of capital that is just posted margin for derivatives type trades as one example. Um and that has to sit out there for the life of the contract just in case the other side doesn't show up. Uh, and on top of that, there's trillions of of just kind of cash settle trades that are always in flight. And you have the treasurer, of course, that is always kind of keeping excess working capital to the tune of a couple trillion dollars. Half of that sits in in receivables. That is money that they've earned, but they can't touch. And so there's trillions of it kind of just locked within the plumbing.

>> Yeah. I I'd love to ask you, especially because you were the CFO and essentially the treasurer at Moneyline, what would you have done differently a couple of years ago if you had a banking partner like Open Reserve? >> So, one the one big thing that you have is you're always waiting for kind of your receivables to settle. So, the first thing that you would be able to do is to kind of have a unified ledger with all of your counterparties >> and so that you have that kind of instant settlement construct. uh there's an asymmetry of trust between the counterparties, right? Exactly. Creates these air pockets of distrust and that creates crowds capital and I think in a day today where you have so much streaming data and if you can create a substrate where the bank is the trust vehicle that's stamping how you can get

into like sort of the technical zero knowledge proofs and how you're kind of doing that but but really I think that that's probably one of the things that at least I saw as well with money line. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then just also the connectivity, you know, between that that matching problem of extending credit to somebody and then financing that and that can come from of course deposits, but it also comes from a very large kind of credit um part of the capital markets infrastructure. And so the ability to connect those more efficiently. So to be able to tokenize a receivable, making it a tokenized credit receivable, and then the ability to kind of move that off balance sheet with kind of a smart contract that's imprinted with more information into the capital markets would allow just a more

efficient cycle of being able to extend credit, uh, finance that and kind of run that repayment cycle. >> So it's it's very clear now that building a modern bank, a bank on a blockchain would make it easier to move assets around and make them much more efficient and productive. I'd love to take a step back and ask what a bank is. You know, our audience is is is vast. Some of them will be treasurers of public companies. Some of them will not know what you mean when you say uh we're building a new bank. >> So maybe you can ground the importance of getting a bank charter. Uh what that means functionally, what services that allows you to offer and then talk a bit about the difference between consumer and commercial banking. So basically if you think about financial services in

the United States the way the United States has kind of evolved is there's massive diversity of types of banks in the US and and a bank at its core first principle is the assets and liabilities of first a village right then a town and then a state right so you think about all of the a loes in a in a community all the tractors all the farmland all of the real estate usually back in the day financed by the capital the money, the deposits of that community, right? So, banks take uh $100, they keep uh tier one capital in the bank as a reserve. It could it could be $10, it could be $12, and they take the remaining $88 or $90 and they lend that out into the community. There are significant

precedents and even uh market share laws that uh preclude any bank from having more than somewhere around 10% of the deposits of a community or an MSA as they call it, right? If Bank of America or Chase wanted to, they could have 100 much more than 10%. Right? They got the branch network big brands, but the regulator of the United States has historically really fostered innovation and diversity. So today, there are 4,200 banks in the United States that are FDIC insured that have uh federal deposits insurance uh on their deposits. So vast uh vast uh diversity at the state level and the federal level. We at Moneyline were running a financial technology

company that was built on top of many different partner banks. But what you realize is that these banks have different business models. Some are more focused on commercial loans. The Northeast banks are focused more more on multif family. So they're different manifestations of assets and liabilities. They all run on the technology stack. That technology stack usually limits the type of lending that they could do. Right? So I think a lot of the a lot of the excitement that we have at open reserve is in the world of artificial intelligence our ability to build that bank core you know our view is that that technology in the world of artificial intelligence needs a rewrite.

The opportunity really here is um for people like us who have seen the problems that that bifurcated infrastructure creates um both at the regulatory level and the technology level is to really collapse that and rebuild that infrastructure. And when you rebuild that infrastructure, the marginal cost of going from a working capital lending book to a trade finance lending book to digital asset loans backed lending to installment loans is once you've got the primitives right, you could scale much faster now, right?

As historically that bank in Iowa could only do a loans. They wanted to write mortgages, it was an impossible, it wasn't impossible because of the capital. It was impossible because of the technology stack. You need different loan underwriters. Uh, and that's what we we really perfected at Moneyline was we built an underwriting stack. We built uh the back office, but now with AI and inside of a security perimeter that's really really strong, you can now go rebuild the front office, the middle office, the back office, all fit integrated in a pretty unique way. And I think that once you've got that harness up now, now you can have a lot of degrees of freedom and have a lot of fun with um building in a modern way as well. I I'd love to talk a bit more about the technical limitations of a

classical bank core and what is possible to build today. I know you guys built a bank core from from scratch. We've talked a lot about the idea that a bank itself is uh programmable today if you build it correctly and looks a lot like what uh you know I think a lot of developers were originally interested in in blockchain for. >> Yeah. Look, I think the the by definition the old bank core had to have a daily close for batch filing, right? And then you would batch um your AC, your NACA files, your visa files, and it would settle at one moment in time. It could be at 2:00, 5:00, 7:00, 9, 9:00, depending on where you are in the country. The idea of building the core from scratch now is you can build it

like an L1, right? So it's it's it's got 24/7 365 settlement, everything happens or not if it happens. Um, so I think that that's really the technical limitation that we're now overcoming from these mainframe cores that were really designed in the 1970s, right? So IBM had a very nice business with their with their cobalt core, right? And unfortunately there are still thousands of bank that run on that mainframe technology. So like our core now the challenge that we've had is we want to do banking as a service for certain clients and want to do payments as a service. So our new core that's built like an L1 has to be backward compatible right?

>> So I think that's really where um that challenge is overcome again with you know lots of capabilities um on AI coding um you know a lot of trial and error but also ultimately it's it's a it's a math problem that can be solved you know just getting that compatibility with the existing financial services ecosystem is the biggest challenge not necessarily building the core for yourself. I I think it's an interesting match that a lot of fintech companies have wanted better banking as a service partners. It shocked me how few sponsor banks comprise how much of the fintech ecosystem. And then you look at the history of what blockchains were designed to do. They were trying to facilitate payments on a an open neutral ledger. And I think one of the challenges or opportunities of the last

couple of years has been that uh we amongst many other people invested a lot of money to make blockchains much more efficient. And that I think really compressed a lot of the business model of being an L1. Yeah. Where if your transaction fees are super low and your throughput is very very high. It's it's quite unclear than precisely how an L1 maintains defensibility or or thinks about value capture longer term. And uh you know the answer to that in some sense might be that the L1 itself should be a bank that it inherently has a business model because uh you know it is offering a financial service that's very legible to the to the rest of the world.

And so yeah, that that match I think is sort of a one potentially made in heaven. Yeah, I mean let's go back to 2009 January 3rd where the financial crisis was we were kneede in it and some you know masked man Satoshi writes a long paper and basically says okay uh we're going to have this construct uh and it's going to be a unified ledger and it's going to not be run by governments or people. It's going to be run by math and thousands of machines. And the very first imprint on that ledger is from the Times of London and it says that the

chancellor is considering a second bailout. So if you just think about that, it was to solve what was a crazy problem. The idea that you could lose your money or that a bank could go away in that, you know, current system was unthinkable. And so if you kind of fast forward 2015, we start getting kind of smart contracts with like the if then statement that you could put in imprint kind of instructions. And then you fast forward to your point to where we are now with blockchains and stable coins. And it's to solve exactly that problem which is how do we ensure the stability while innovating. I think for us the ability to connect in directly with institutions, business partners uh as clients uh into their subleddgers having

a unified ledger with them and their counterparties to have instant settlement, the ability then to help them with simulations around um their liquidity and to be able to kind of access credit. That's only possible because of using kind of the blockchain as our ledger >> and the priors are in place, right? So like we don't have to spend necessarily all that kind of scientific work with five PhDs in a room figure out bridging, right? The clearing of one bank stable coin versus another bank stable coin. Um all that infrastructure is being built as we speak, right? And and some of it is not as scale as we would want it to be, but you can see in front of our eyes that old 1970s mainframe being

completely rewritten into a hybrid Fed wire plus blockchain being built right on top of the metal and right next to each other. And I think that's, you know, a an important export of where we are in 2026, 2025, 2026 and really kind of coming out of the Genius Act as as sort of the regulatory tailwind. I think if we wind the clock back a couple of years to a lot of the excitement around blockchains in 2020 and 2021, there's kind of this indefinite optimism. You think of a 2x two quadrant, you know, definite meaning I have a specific opinion about exactly what's going to happen. Indefinite being not quite sure, optimism, pessimism. the world was very indefinitely optimistic and and I I'm quite curious what you guys think in a definitely optimistic sense will be

built on open reserve as a programmable platform as you know something that looks a lot like an L1 you know what are the first five or 10 use cases or or businesses that you're most excited about working with partners on >> yeah so so I there's probably there's three big buckets of customers the first is the institutional investor >> y >> whether where uh the portfolio manager at a hedge fund or a mutual fund. Um the kind of pension fund managers and they all have the same challenge which is trying to kind of execute their trade and their strategies is kind of held up with the kind of current inefficiencies of settlement. And so being able to kind of solve that problem that one you can have a high degree of confidence in

terms of the value of being able to kind of have instant settlement in addition to the ability to kind of execute on that. The second big segment would be as we've talked about the corporate treasurer. >> Um and you know I think that they have probably are only starting to think about like how do they tap into what are a lot of buzzwords at this point. A ton of confusion and I think that's a significant opportunity because they feel the problem. They know they have cash sitting. they know that when they're trying to execute or do some type of transaction overseas that it takes a lot of hops um in terms of being able to make that happen and of course at the same time all of their stakeholders from their salespeople to

their product designers are altering to the treasurer the CFO saying hey how can we kind of finance this more efficiently and the third is this the area that you talked about which is banking as a service overall the ability now to help what is obviously an emerging agentic uh economy. Um in addition to a lot of innovation that's kind of happening within fintex. They were kind of where we were which is you have the idea but the regulatory requirements and benchmarks to be able to actually be a bank to do things like lending and taking deposits. They're not going to have the infrastructure or the team to do that. They need to lean on a partner and they need to lean on a contemporary partner. We lived it. Trying to innovate

and come up with really helpful solutions for consumers took years and it was because you had to go through partner bank partner ledger provider. Um then you had to go try to secure to some type of financing. We are able to do that in services that'll cover everything from originations through to servicing through to financing all on chain. I would just add that look I think the adoption of all these blockchain primitives is a definite over the next 5 years only because now a bank with federal deposit insurance can come in and stamp and say I have definitively KYC all legs of this transaction. So the treasurer that was very skeptical, they you know it's crypto, it's it's there's

scams, I don't know who the other counterparty is, all of a sudden now has the access to the efficiencies of the blockchain, right? I'm getting 24/7 365 capital on call. We call it the continuous bank, right? So continuously being underwritten for capital. It's cheaper cost of capital, >> right? Because we're seeing more of the ledger, more of the payment stream, more of your Visa, Mastercard settlement stream. Now you can all of a sudden take a receivable that was just sitting in your balance sheet not not productive >> if you wanted to or if you needed to you could you know access capital markets that's America's number one export is our capital markets are insanely efficient deep broad innovative um but the everyday treasurer so far has not gotten the benefit of uh these

efficiencies. So we're going from the fringe parts of hey we're going to use for per trading and for speculative nature is now you're going to sort of like really bring it into um you know societal use cases and I think that's probably in my mind the the most exciting part and something that I think by 2028 2030 we're going to see a lot of proliferation in in broader markets. >> We have a great understanding for what you guys are focused on today what the history of banking was. you guys are part of a wave of new banks and I I think it's easy to lump them all together and to say all banks are the same and they all do the same thing and I think that would be very wrong. I I'd love if you can sort of separate out the payments business, a bank that focuses

on lending. We've talked a bit about banking as a service already. Uh and then also you guys have a broker dealer and if you can make that a little bit more concrete, help people understand what each of those pieces allows you to do and you know what activities uh you're most focused on. I think that would be very very interesting. >> Yeah, look I I'll go back to kind of a limited experience that we had right. So uh when we started Moneyline in 2012 and in 2013 uh the banks then had just taken TARP and the Treasury was a preferred shareholder in JP Morgan and Wells and Capital 1, BVA and and down. Um so they effectively for a good five or six years really seated um you know banking as a service payments were relatively stale

and it it created this opportunity to go build what was then money line and our cohort of uh fintex were so fine lending club and prosper upstart those types of things and we had to build a lot of the primitives ourselves because the banks were on the sidelines. Um the opportunity with the digital bank now is again with that really um efficient bank core to be able to um bring a lot of those receivables that are being written offchain onto the onchain u industry right so I think that the the efficiency of that core really allows us to create a diversified business model if you look at the banks they're 10 to 15% arrow is a is a good bank um I think a lot of the value proposition that exists and

software can now be brought into the value capture we brought into the bank. You know our goal is to run open reserve 30 plus% ROIs over the next 3 to four 5 years. Um so I think that's the business model is inherently changing any regulated perimeter. So if we do this right we're global any legitimate business globally should be able to have access to dollars fiat stables tokenized deposits. Um and again the more we know again there's a lot of KYC there's a lot of BSA there's a lot of AML those are um our obligation to the government there are obligations for our stakeholders security is our obligation to stakeholders we're investing a lot in just making sure that we have the best um cyber security infrastructure folks in our team um that's a uh that safety

and soundness is built into the code. >> Yes. >> Right. it's it's either compliant or not. Like we won't even get to the next step unless it's safe, sound, compliant with all of the applicable laws. And then we believe that's still a huge TAM and a huge market for us, right? So you don't have to necessarily go into non KYC territories for this to be, you know, a very a very successful bank. You know, we're taking what we have learned over the last 20 plus years. You know, we lived through almost every 9908 um the ZER era. uh we operated we looked ourselves in the eyes in the pandemic when things weren't going well. Then in 22 we were public when trans inflation wasn't transitory and rates went up I think 400 basis points in six quarters.

So we we had to navigate a public company through that. All these things have all these things are interconnected and when you're running and operating um you know you have to think of all those risks as a bank right even though we weren't officially a bank at moneyline we had to do asset liability management as if we were right we had OCC oversight we had FDSC oversight so I think that all of those lived experiences now really kind of set us up to kind of build that bank in the future >> yeah I I think we should we're starting with what was the biggest challenge that we're trying to solve within particularly on the kind of institutional investor and kind of treasurer uh in terms of their problem that they are facing every day. And so we looked at that and thought about the construct

of having these deep integrations. Instead of you having to go to the bank, the bank comes to you. And this concept of continuous banking means that we're going to be plugged into the subleddgers, whether it's the snowflakes, the data bricks, the oracles, so that we can help a corporate treasurer or an institutional investor navigate how to have more real-time access to liquidity and we'll be more efficient at it because we're getting more information and data. We'll see their receivables, we'll see their inventory, we'll see their cash flow, we'll see the blotter of trades. taking that over time and building that into the kind of pricing apparatus and then importantly being able to play that back to that uh to that stakeholder. So we'll be able to give them these simulations.

We'll be able to give them the ability to have a window that says oh actually I don't have to think about my world in a traditional sense of trade receivables and working capital and digital asset back loans. I get to tap into just liquidity >> and then we have built the apparatus to be able to take those receivables, those credit receivables and liquidity and then efficiently move them into the capital markets for those who want that risk. And that model will allow us to be able to be considerably important to those stakeholders. And I think then if you start there and say, well, what's the legal apparatus or the regulatory apparatus? Well, you have to have a banking license. uh you have to have a broker dealer and what that allows us to

do because we'll solve the liquidity problem, but many corporate treasurers also have a kind of a short-term cash they'd like to get a return on. So now our ability to help with everything from credit through to yield, meaning helping those uh individuals make money on cash that's idle. that we are the first to be able to have the kind of continuous capital markets platform to be able to go from originations all the way through to tokenized securities for our stakeholders. >> You know, when you think about it, there's really two ways to make money as a financial services institution. It's by giving advice, right? So, it's the the the AUM fees, the commissions, whether it's like, you know, quasi

investment banking >> or RAIA style activities or it's lending y right? and both as operators of a public company but also kind of seeing the evolution of American financial services over the last 20 years. Everything is a time of excess and a time of need for for consumers and for businesses, right? When you're building up cash, there's a lot of things you want to do by way of reinvestment. And when you're um running out of cash, whether it's a a micro or macroeconomic cycle or whether it's just a a business cycle, you need to raise capital. So, as we build a trusted solution for the CFO and the treasurer of the future, we wanted to make sure that we had all of the superpowers that they would ever want to need. So, of

course, um, Open Reserve is going to do all of the table stakes capabilities around cash management, liquidity management, >> the onchain and off-chain access to liquidity, but also if you need to raise excess capital, we want to have a broker dealer that now gives you the full spectrum of yield, deposit, financing options. And there are two different regulatory perimeters, right? and having um all of it on one tech stack where it's that st same stable coin that's instant settlement across the two >> um really will give superpowers to the CFO and the treasur of 2028 and 2030 and that's kind of like the northstar around >> I feel like we've been living in the future which is very fun but you guys also have a storied past and you were

talking about this a few minutes ago >> living through 9908 some of the transitions with Zer and the the pandemic >> maybe we can talk first uh about the process of taking money line public uh via spa and then >> when we first met I I thought like wow here's a person that's perfectly suited for crypto because they launched an asset it went down precipitously they stuck through the pain and had a good outcome so so like love to hear the story about going public you know some of the challenges for the price of the stock and then how you guys persevered and and had a good outcome there >> well yeah look I think you know when we started Money Line I was very young and uh >> how old were you >> I was 32 when I started money line. Um, probably had no business kind of doing

it. Um, >> that's how most great things start. >> But, you know, we we probably made every single mistake under the sun. We we raised capital in interesting ways, right? We had East Coast investors, great investors. Um, but, you know, ultimately what what that did was it forced us to be profitable. Probably we had less deep of an S-curve in terms of kind of that the investment period. you know sometimes like as just as a human I kind of think about hey look we built a significant amount of technology we innovated around the the primitives uh we were first to launch a lot of features and capabilities at that point you know we the money center banks would tell us like you just can't do that you can't offer an investment account right next to deposit account because and then we figured out sort of the the the

technical and regulatory kind of technology around that uh we took the company public in 21 in 2020 you know we had mult near-death experiences going into the pandemic, liquidity crunches, but you know, coming out of FIT, it was product market fit for our products, right? So, we had banking, lending, investing. We actually were one of the first ones to offer Bitcoin roundups to everyday Americans. The the consumer from Money Line was, you know, 50 to $150,000 household, right? So, these were um 95% of our investment accounts were first-time investors. So, we were very proud of the financial access that we were able to deliver. Um, and it just made sense in 21. I think that the markets were really rewarding growth and we're growing over 200% year-over-year and you know the spa

>> uh we did that in lie of like a series D um and it made a lot of sense from a cost of capital perspective but um I remember we probably finished the spa in the worst time >> that you can imagine in uh September of 2021 right so that's right when sort of like the looking around the bend people realizing that hey um rates are going to go up but um rates went from effectively 0 to 4% pretty pretty quickly. I still remember doing all hands where I I you know kind of like dusted off the Bezos quotes and the Buffett quotes about you know how it's uh you know voting machine in the short term and voting machine in the long run and uh Bezos had beaned it I think in 2001 or two that they had

lost 95% of their market cap we at that point I think we'd lost 80% of our market cap >> you were doing well killing it by by proportion >> but uh but look I think the public markets are really a beaten race like you have to you have to set expectations a lot of the learnings that we had in terms of just how you managed the stakeholders. Um it was different from managing private venture capital investors who had a much longer horizon. In fact, you know, they all have different positives and um considerations, but the public market investor is uh significantly algorithmic. So, you have to make sure that um if there's one less Friday in the quarter, you think as a management team that is absolutely crushed this quarter, but there was one less Friday, so you know, your growth rate was maybe off by 30 or 40 basis points. Stock's

down 20%. Right. So I think that that was kind of like the learning that we had to intimate. But the process was one that required perseverance and grit and required sort of like a you know just making making sure that you keep your uh team missiondriven and aligned on sort of that northstar. And I think that that's all those are all uh very important learnings for what we're going to do at Open Reserve. But I'm sure Rick I don't know if you want to add. >> I mean it was interesting because you go public and every single person says the same thing. Ignore the stock price. Yeah, I had a board member, Lisa Gersh.

Hey, Lisa. She said to me when the stock was going down, she was, "Hey, D, you know, I was telling her like all these great things. We launched X feature and you know, like the team is great. We heard this person or that person." She's like, "Dang, it's never been a good CEO with a bad stock price." >> So, so you have to have this. >> Yeah. Yeah. External veneer, which is okay. You know, you have to kind of keep that as a KPI. I think we did a a good job internally of staying true to the mission. In fact, while that was all happening, we bought two companies >> because we wanted to be able to execute against our vision of saying we're going to help the individual navigate what is a proliferation of products out there kind of the the the numerous kind of

emergence of fintech companies. And so we're going to go and have a method for them to be able to access both our first party products and third party products. We're going to help non-financial companies take their eyeballs and help to kind of give them access to financial products through what became one of the largest um financial marketplaces in the country. And so I think just staying true to that and executing the revenue comes, the profitability comes, the engagement, the kind of growth, the customer adoption comes. It was rewarding to kind of get to the place where when we did self accompany um to kind of have a good outcome because we had stayed true to the vision.

>> Yeah. I think a really interesting and related question is what your relationship was like during these times having worked together for I think it's a decade or more now and moving from money line into open reserve. What what puts together a great partnership? >> I met Rick in 2009 >> um in a perverse way. We were both doing different things for the then the first version of Citadel Securities, right? So they just bought E Trade and I was kind of helping them manage that. Um and that was a big position for Citadel then and >> it was a very topsyturvy time in the market. U you know um and Rick was um the COO Yeah.

>> of Citadel Securities, right? So he was way more senior than I was. Um and then uh I started Money in 2012 2013. We didn't do our series A until 2016. And then one of the uh early investors who was also both of our bosses at Citadel, he came to me and said, "Do you like look now? You need to kind of like really get some, you know, adults in the room and elder statesman uh next to you to kind of take it to the next level. You got to talk to Rick." Rick had just kind of left Citadel and I think you you were at like it took a three or four month uh boat trip or something like okay I'll talk to you after I come back from the Bahamas or wherever he was and then you know we started working together and when we sold Money Lion in

April of last year um you know I was I became an adviser to them he kept running Money Lion >> you know I would say it was always on our road map to um transition the fintech into a proper bank >> so it was always on our road map it was just we hadn't done it at money Um and late last year, early this year, um kind of aligned again on this one. >> It's like a marriage, that's for sure. 10 years uh together. And I always joke that we're we're kind of renewing our vows with open reserve. >> Yes.

>> You've got to find I think the the ying and the yang. >> Um and it takes time to learn about like, you know, we we have thrown down. I mean, we have closed the door and but never uh for any other reason than we're trying to win. And I think as long as you kind of have that within the partnership, that allowed us, I think, to fast track to good outcomes and good decisions. They weren't always right. Um, but there was never a blame. There was never a it was just, okay, we're in this moment. How do we resolve it? Uh, and I think that's been a really successful formula for us. I would also say that I, as I've learned over time, people would come to me and they'd say, is D crazy? He wants to launch that tomorrow. And I used to say, "Oh, let me

go talk to them and and and like tell them why this can't be done." >> I don't do that anymore. >> And now you just say, "Yes." >> I just now say to them, "That's me. It's going to happen and we're going to go get it done." And so we created this saying at Money Line, which is why not today. >> Mhm. >> And I think that just became a bit of a mantra for the money line way to kind of execute and get things done. >> So it's kind of fun now where I get to like have that as my opening statement to half the team that we're hiring like, "Did you know that D wants us to do Yes. this and this and this and we want to have it at the launch and open and we want to open a month. Yes.

>> Yeah. >> Yes. That that seems like a symptom of a broader disease is the wrong word. Maybe superpower. Uh I noticed you guys are not very good at taking vacations. It sounds like both when you joined and when you sold your company, uh there was a very brief vacation and then it was back in in the ring. It's always very hard to ask someone what motivates them, but I I am fascinated by sort of the psychology or or the the reasoning for going from undoubtedly a success with money lion to, you know, the the next adventure now with open reserve.

>> First of all, when we were approached to sell money line, I don't think either one of us were like fully ready to sell it. Um, you know, there's definitely a view of the world where if we kept the public kind of what happened over the last couple years with our competitors, the >> business would have been maybe three to five times more valuable than where we sold it at. Um, but we we we sold it because we've been doing it for 12 years and sometimes as a CEO you have to kind of read the room in terms of you know your core team and a lot of them had been working with us for 10 years and you know it wasn't a natural public company because uh anything below $10 billion market cap you don't get equity research you're float issues you're at the machinations of you know the memes

and sort of the winds of the markets. So we did it for rational reasons but I had uh a lot on my road map >> y >> from just like a personal um technology vision a personal kind of business model that I wanted to kind of u execute on. And the other thing you learn is like when you do it at our level for 12 years you you build um a lot of skill sets in a very specific part of the industry >> and that specific knowledge is really important to compound on. So so that's that's sort of like the view that I had.

Hey, look, you know, I'm not old enough to It wasn't for the money. It's really uh I saw the same opportunity last year that I saw in 2012. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to challenge the banks then on customer acquisition because you can now go on Facebook and Google and optimize it with algorithms and acquire a banking customer for $15 to $50. Whereas Chase historically with their branch network and all in costs were paying $1,500 to $5,000 for that same customer. now um because we have the genius act and let's see what happens with clarity. It's very positive right now in terms of meshing historical all the things that we talked about with the infrastructure modernizing it and that was for me an opportunity too um

kind of important to pass >> I also learned a lot about myself and I wasn't wasn't like running money line for 4 months I like working with teams I like working with the smartest people I like you know kind of convince people like yourselves to join the team and you know kind of help us go build >> very good at recruiting. >> Yeah. So, I think that that that was part of kind of like what I missed just from a day-to-day perspective. And then you always have to see who am I, where am I, why am I here today. And all of that kind of compounded together. Um, really kind of got me back in the game. >> Was it an immediate yes when he called you or >> It was how quickly?

>> Well, it was interesting. We were both looking at this opportunity independently. >> Yeah. I don't think anyone will ever believe us, but we were both looking. >> I knew he was and I wasn't saying anything. Of course, >> it's like the touring machine and the lambda calculus. We're independently inventing the future. >> So, when we broached it, it was yes. Um, and I think that the word that you use compounding, I think points in my life that that's the thing that has motivated me to think about what's next. >> And I would say after after eight years at Citadel where we kind of started created and created like version 1.0 point of Celt securities and then we actually started um and built out what became one of the largest long-term equity platforms or strategies at Citadel. Um and over that time kind of

working for Tank Griffin, I just learned so much about how to think about innovation and precision at scale. you know, that led me to think, okay, well, how do I now kind of take this information, this knowledge that I've kind of compounded as a skill set. You learn about leadership. Um, you get your PhD in risk. Uh, you learn how to deconstruct it. You learn how to quantify it. Uh, and you learn how to know what you're sitting on for every millisecond of every day. that changed I think what I felt was my ability to kind of go from what I think no one would have predicted was working in kind of building one of the largest strategies running tens of billions of dollars um at Citadel to something called money

lion >> but all the the kind of skills and things that you learn and the the motivation and the excitement around kind of creating something um that becomes like a drug and all of a sudden once you kind of see that opportunity that excitement that energy you're like there's no time to sleep right now. We have so many tailwinds. How can we not just work every day to kind of bring this to reality? And I think that's where we sit today. >> I think that might be the first instance, and I say this very positively, of stable coin psychosis. We hear AI psychosis now. You can spend 18 hours a day with with cloud code. I love that you now have this with the opportunities presented by stable coins.

And maybe we can stay there for a minute. There's been a lot in the media and press to be made about banks versus stable coins. And yet you guys are building a stable coin bank, a bank that inherently likes and benefits from stable coins. And I I'd love to better understand how you think about the opportunity that's presented there both in terms of the services you offer to your customers, but also how you you know position against some of the existing very large GIS. >> Well, you couldn't have done this two years ago, right? You needed an OC, FDIC, Federal Reserve Bank that fully agrees that for America to win in the long run, >> we need diversity in the financial services regulatory perimeter. So the allowance of that has has kind of created this opportunity. I I would say in terms of you know can JP Morgan and

Goldman Sachs do everything that we've talked about absolutely but will they have innovators dilemma to go do it at the sort of at the niche levels that we're going at for very specific client bases around uh the digital traders around the investment managers the asset managers that are straddling both Tribe and DeFi >> probably not as fast as we will be able to do if you look at the team you mentioned the team right so we're we're recruiting probably um you know the N of one mix of folks who have run billion dollar P&Ls multiple billion dollar P&Ls uh exregulators but also folks that are um founders or

co-founders of L1's right so we had an offsite last week and they were all sitting in a table like this and just the flow of information and and the ability to then the next day see that in product is um is pretty interesting, right? And you you you'll see like even our chief risk officer >> is probably spending 18 hours in claude, right? You see that in risk, you see that in compliance. And when I say that we have the ability to embed really advanced um artificial intelligence workflows in the front office, of course, in marketing and and underwriting, but also risk compliance and then the back office. M that's ultimately um what you need to really change the profitability of a bank,

right? So 10 to 15% of the good bank, we want to build a 35% RO bank. So I think that's that that's kind of like how I justify it. We talked about trillions and trillions of trapped capital. >> Mhm. >> Guess where it's trapped. And so incumbents, there are economic rents you can earn with some of the inefficiencies that exist within the plumbing and the infrastructure. Um, and we're going to go back to what, you know, we we both have believed for a long time, which is you make money in two places. You can give advice and make money, or you can make money on taking risk. >> And the plumbing, if that becomes more efficient and we focus on kind of eliminating that in those inefficiencies and focus on payments, you'll make money in those two kind of important areas.

And the rest of it, that's just how you want to walk that value. So, one thing I know we've talked a bit about before is this idea that we're seeing consumers and businesses really adopt stable coins in mass. And I think there are a bunch of reasons for this. Uh, but the simple comment would be it's programmable money. We really see adoption both from consumers and businesses, but we definitely see attention with some of the existing incumbent banks sort of resisting stable coins in a way. They're beginning to adopt, but also really focused on tokenized deposits because I I think there's sort of this narrative about deposit flight. Now, if you look at the data, there actually has not been deposit flight. And if anything, stable coins are really expanding the the total TAM or volume of uh things that look like deposits. And stable tokens really

are narrow banks, which I think presents an interesting opportunity both from a business and a policy standpoint to say, well, we don't want narrow banking because that, you know, provides worse capital, worse capital markets. So, we need someone to be lending out or using these stable coins in in the broader economy. Which brings me to, you know, one of the reasons we were really excited to invest in in you both, which is a really strong background in being able to do lending and a deep understanding of how stable coins work and, you know, onchain capital markets work. So, I'd love to spend a few minutes thinking about from the perspective of someone with a stable coin today, be it a consumer or a business that says, I would like to get some yield on my stable coin and from the perspective of, you know, financial

services broadly that says, we want this capital to be flowing through through the economy. what role do you guys have to play as as a a lender? >> Well, look, I think that um first and foremost, our job as a regulated bank is to just provide primitives, right? So, we are not necessarily taking a view on one versus the other, but what we are taking a view on is that both are important for different use cases. >> Um, our Genius Act compliant stable coin, we're calling it Reserve USD, RUSD. It's uh one to one backed of course by treasuries and we're figuring out right now all of the um interesting nuances of the stable coin, right? So if you have a billion dollars of stable coin, it's owned by one person, he wants it back at 3 p.m. on a Sunday. What

happens, right? So the fact that we're a bank makes that on-ramp off ramp uh pretty seamless because hopefully knock on wood, we will have Federal Reserve access and we'll have we'll have the ability to RTP that on Sunday, right? So this idea that the payment stable coin is non-yieldbearing is something that we have to accept as a bank because again that's the Genius Act implementation by our regulator. But that said um the yield element is an interesting one right so if you look at our business plan um the tokenized deposit is an important primitive for us to go raise deposits from folks that want to now move it on a DeFi exchange a centralized exchange. Um you know I think the way we think about it is it's the stable coin

is KYC at the mint and burn and then they can flow freely into permissioned and permissionless wallets whereas the token as deposit is KYC mint burn and every wallet who holds it has to be whitelisted. Um, so they're categorically different use cases, but our ability to program that into the core and allow the treasurer the degree of freedom to keep it into a streaming yield product for a certain period of time and then swap it instantly atomically into a stable coin when that needs to move is a superpower. Our business model is not predicated on becoming the next circle or tether, right? So our our business model is really predicated on uh the bank, the broker, lending and the composability of that stable coin, right? So a lot of our

um capital markets partners are going to be preunding a lot of these financing facilities using our stable coin, right? So again, if you want to work on our platform, there there is going to be ecosystem tie-ins. We would want you to use our stable coin. the ability for our stable coin to then be swapped with all the other ones is going to be an important value proposition as well and vice versa. Any Genius Act compliant stable coin lend against it and I think that's really the big opportunity here as as a bank that has custody capabilities is to custody multiple digital assets and provide release rates on that based on that of course the secured collateral but also any other underwriting we can do.

>> The the additional underwriting is where we come from. >> Mhm. >> Right. So at Moneyline, we lent as a principal or facilitated I think over $50 billion of of loans. >> Um we understand that ecosystem from the bureau perspective, from the cash flow underwriting perspective really well. So at open reserve we'll be able to not only look at the collateral >> but be able to also look at uh what do we know about this client um from their ERP system from their accounting system from their cash flow underwriting and give over collateralized or underolateralized rather the other way around um release rates as well. So the ability to custody digital assets uh built on a blockchain native blockchain

core ledger is a really important part of all this. So, our ability to not only have that kind of continuous banking construct where we're connected into our partners and customers, but the ability to have the as a bank custody rights across any type of digital asset, that's a big difference uh relative to either the incumbents or some new market entrance. And then having the stable coin uh becomes just another element of that which is in order to move efficiently across all of these different constructs. You need some consistent kind of form of currency that's digital and our stable coin on our ecosystem will be that currency. U will we be able to kind of custody other stable coins? Absolutely. Will our

customers want to transact in multiple? Absolutely. But our stable coin will be a core part of the overall ecosystem. >> I think it also goes back to I think the question you asked is an interesting one, right? I the resistance by these money center banks on stable coins and sort of this um boogeyman that deposit flight's going to >> uh limit lending into uh you know rural communities in America which I think is >> correct me if I'm wrong but there has not been deposit flight zero deposits keep going up >> exactly well yeah but but it's their business model it's free funding right I think >> you know 60% of the deposits in America or something like that are non-interest bearing yes >> right you can check me on that stat but something something like that >> so it's free funing for the banks. It

goes back to the fact that our business model is predicated on building a brand new core that gives us multiple ways to uh seek advice across the broker and the bank. So, we're not as reliant on building a multiundred billion dollar deposit balance sheet that we can then go get so plus 100, 200, 300 basis points on. So, it's just fundamentally a different business model. We want to be sort of that co-pilot for the treasurer. you know the the the stable coin and tokenized deposit actually have a lot of complimentary um use cases for us in a regulated per perimeter >> for sure. I think for us like the each of these uh technologies and innovations are just kind of part of the overall solution. The ability to move money very efficiently, the ability to kind of

create yield for our customers, the ability to lend and help them unlock more and more liquidity and capital. app and I think that's going to give us a significant edge versus just having this this kind of vertical that kind of stands in a silo as some tokenized deposit offering. >> Yeah, I think it's uh really an achievement that we've gotten like an hour into a discussion about onchain lending and we haven't said the word vault. So I I'd love would love to spend a few minutes talking about sort of the opportunity presented there. I think Vaults means many different things to many different people, but at at least in my mind, one interesting opportunity is that it's it's still relatively unclear when we go talk to big private credit shops or, you know, other participants on Wall Street exactly how

they would launch a vault, what the sort of regulatory burden is, what the vault should be. And then I think about the opportunity to launch a vault on uh a bank that looks like an L1 as opposed to on, you know, something like Ethereum or Salana. really solving a lot of those challenges, the opportunity to to take the innovation from DeFi and bring it into a more regulated context. Now, that's worked incredibly well in things like prediction markets and, you know, we're optimistic about that in per I think there's, you know, maybe an interesting opportunity for for that in vaults, too. And >> I I I know you guys have thoughts on this.

>> Look, a bank has lending authority, right? So, we have paper where and it's part of our business model that we will be originating receivables that have real world use cases. It could be financing pizza ovens. It could be installing the loans. It could be working capital receivables. It could be trade finance. Our ability to then tokenize them. So again, you have full legal privity in those tokens. They the covenants. >> Mhm. >> Uh any leans. So now you're making real world receivables um really visible in terms of what's going into vaults or how they're being hypothecated, right? So that lending authority is incredibly important as a bank, right? So, I think that's the service we want to provide. We're

effectively creating a three-sided the sort of a marketplace, if you will. It's it's the person who needs capital. It's the private credit capital providers, the Apollo, Pimros, Blue, Sound Points, thems Out there that that do that. And of course we as the bank um will provide all of the servicing capabilities the Sakas the DACA the tripartite accounts because again we have the payments authority that we can run realtime AC we can do RTP we can do wires we can do again stable coin backed settlements um and we'll of course want it all to be an R USD or stable coin but that whole apparatus really kind of gives stamps of approvals along the way and the bank can

also step in and do underwriting. So now people are investing into these vaults um have um significant opportunities. So you could see us potentially being curators, you could see us being servicesers, you could see us be, you know, be back leverage, right? So there's lots of different ways for us to be participants in that in that ecosystem. You call vaults, financing facilities, what have you. But >> yeah, you know, my view on on all these fancy words that the crypto bros have uh commandeered. When when you hear vault, what does that just translate into in in your brain?

>> Facility. >> Facility. >> Financing facility. So, when we were at Money Lion, uh we weren't a bank. Yeah. >> So, we did not have access to customer deposits to be able to lend. >> So, by definition, for us to be able to offer credit um or advances. What we had to be able to do was to move that into these different financing facilities. Uh, and of course there's a period of time where you're having to kind of manage that cash flow just like the trap capital that we talked about earlier. For us, it was incumbent for us to be able to move these types of credit receivables off of our balance sheet >> within days.

And so we were very early pioneers in having what would have been kind of daily type of securitization. So we built a lot of machinery to be able to do that. Not because we thought we needed we wanted to innovate on vault but because we just couldn't have afford not to move these uh receivables off balance sheet and they performed extremely well for 10 years. Uh we never had a kind of a down day, week, month, quarter on the performance and so we knew how to underwrite. Uh we knew that we were doing it in a more innovative way. And if you kind of then compare that to how it works today, typically there are kind of monthly and quarterly stale statements that most lenders are getting access to to be able to underwrite. And we want to change that to a continuous underwriting. We want to

have transparency into that information. And now we get to leverage smart contracts to imprint that information into the tokenized credit receivable. We can now even fractionalize that credit receivable and put it into these financing facilities. And when D says we can curate them, we can have different flavors and genres and um and create different targeted returns or we can just kind of sell them directly into a vault and let the pimos, the blue owls and the and the Apollo of the world curate. And so we're incredibly excited about that part of the business because now we're going to have access to both customer deposits. U and there's a lot of guard rails around that that we have to we have to adhere to and we get to complement that with a large machinery that we've built to be able to move

these these credit receivables into these vaults. I I think one thing we've seen in our journey from Soho South into Fidi is that a lot of more traditional financial institutions are interested in blockchain, interested in moving some of their business on chain but struggle to find the specific opportunity in an immediate sense. And I I think a concept you guys have talked a little bit about is this concept of a forward deployed engineer, forward deployed banker. Maybe you can tell me a bit about how you guys will look to support your customers. This is really important to us because you know we are being positioned as that that kind of continuous bank construct.

We're the ones who are focused on bringing a lot of solutioning but it's really hard for a treasure. I've been in that role. >> It's really hard for the CFO to be able to think about one what's the right answer and also when you try to implement any solution it is not necessarily like an academic financial problem. You've got to get through compliance. You've got to secure engineers to help, you know, build out the integration. You have to kind of think about kind of product and workflows. What we want to be able to do is to show up to the to the treasure of the CFO with our four deployed solutions team made up of a compliance person, made up of the of course the engineering

team, um, a strategic finance person. We want to be able to have a a person that's going to help with the actual um business model and business case so the treasurer doesn't have to kind of go and assemble an entire team. And so we're going to do that so that we can help be the on-ramp for the CFOs and treasurers to be able to take advantage of our solution. And then we'll be able to give them things that they don't currently have. simulations around what could their liquidity look like, what would their cash flows look like if you were to integrate um if we could integrate into these subleddgers and that's a gamecher and that puts us in a completely different position as a bank as I kind of said earlier which is we come to you versus you having to come to

the bank. >> Yeah, I I think that's a a very interesting model. I I would say crypto has meant many things and there have been many eras but it was maybe of the the research era with things like Ethereum. I think you had sort of an engineering era epitomized by things like Salana. There's maybe a partnerships era 2023 24 and it seems very clearly now that there's a real interesting opportunity to excel at go to market or even at sales to use sort of a a dirty word that is maybe the the literal thing you're doing. You guys have a lot of experience here. If uh you can outline for us what does it take to run an effective institutional sales team? H how do you how do you build one?

What's the essential component? I think part of it is is what we just talked about which is there is no one who has expertise across risk compliance engineering techn isn't we call them unicorns but they don't truly exist and so first is the ability to assemble that team >> and so in fact for us almost every person that we've hired in any one of our functions knows they wear two hats. >> Yeah. >> The first hat is of course you have to be kind of a functional expert. The second is expect to be on the poor deployed solutions team. So the answer is everyone is selling.

>> Everyone has to be part of that. >> At least it's your senior folks. Yes. Right. Your seuite and down. >> Yeah. Absolutely. The second is it's got to be repeatable. >> Mhm. >> There aren't a hundred uh databases to integrate with. So we want to have the blueprint which is how do we approach uh a CFO of a $10 million company, a $50 million company, a billion dollar company, a $10 billion company in terms of helping them uh use us to be the on-ramp to what is a confusing time for them. Uh and so the blueprint's important. And then the third is to ensure that we're helping unlock and realize >> the value proposition.

>> Yeah. >> Right. like it's really easy to kind of have someone become a customer, but what they've typically sold internally is that it's going to reduce their COGS. It's going to help drive revenue. It's going to be kind of more efficient on their cash flows. And so, we are focused on the ability to be able to help them unlock and realize those synergies that they've promised internally. in talking to you both, getting to know you well, what what comes through is that you're both clearly patriots and that a sense of Americana is an essential part of you and clearly an essential part of of the company you're building. I I'd love if you can tease out a little bit why capital markets, financial services are so important for the US and you know,

what has given you such a sense of of of patriotism? Well, look, I think I I think my story is, you know, I came to America in the 80s when I was four years old and I, you know, my parents kind of lived sort of the American dream, right? And we're embraced very nicely by this country. So, I've got a lot of amazing great things to say about it. Um, so that that's kind of like the foundation of, you know, why we want to build society. And I think even at Moneyline, like I said, you know, 20 million customers, 95% of them were first-time investors. So >> um you know we've we've always had that north star. The biggest export of the United States is its capital markets.

It's liquid. It's deep. It's innovative. >> Um you know the Genius Act was bipartisan. I think you know both sides of the aisle agree that we want to maintain um hegemony over the dollar. We don't want innovation to happen in the Cayman Islands or abroad. We want it to happen in the United States. So, um, you know, I think that if we want to kind of maintain that innovative spirit, the American spirit going into the next 10, 15, 20, 30 years, we have to make sure that we're leading in a lot of the infrastructure buildout, right? So, I think that that theme is kind of um really what kind of motivates me to go build open reserve. And a lot of the a lot of our early team members kind of share that. You know, it was once in a lifetime in 2012. It's second in a

lifetime opportunity now to go build that infrastructure again. >> I never thought about this, but yeah, you're the East Indian immigrant. I'm actually a West Indian immigrant. My family's from the from the West Indies. Uh I came here uh by way of Canada in the '9s and um and I've always been in in finance >> and one of the things you just get to watch and experience is that it is the leading industry in the entire world when it comes to financial services. And so you can trace almost anything that we accomplish in this country back to how amazing our financial infrastructure is.

Um, and we should wear that incredibly proudly. And in fact, what happens, I think, I I I just assume that everyone believes and feels the same way. And then every now and then I get stopped in my tracks with some some politician or someone who basically um tries to throw some sand in the gears. And I and I'm thinking, how could we not go and execute on this? How could we not build the next level of infrastructure? And so we want all of the ecosystem to win. um everyone who's launching into Novo Bank, everyone who is launching kind of parts of the overall ecosystem, u we want everyone to win because when America wins, then we unlock lots of value from all the different kind of companies that rely on us. And so for me, it's almost like a of course we're going to go and

do this. But I do have to remember that we have to kind of help fight the fight because sometimes, you know, there are antagonists within the infrastructure >> and we're building sort of the the platform that any legitimate business globally, of course, you have to go through our KYC, CIP, AML, BSA processes, but any legitimate business globally should be able to have a dollar account day zero. Yep. >> Right. So I think that exporting the American dream, if you will, is kind of like what we really want to do here with the continuous bank.

>> Yeah. So we we've talked a bit about the future. >> We understand your your past. Help make the path forward very tangible for us here. You you guys have been able to get one of the first new Denovo bank charters. You're moving forward. What What is the next year look like for for you? Look, the the master plan is to secure the full national banking capability, right? So, we got multiple milestones. Um, we want to be we want to then basically um open the broker dealer next to it as well.

>> We want to make sure that all of the operations of operating a Genius Act compliant stable coin are fully copacetic along with tokenized deposit that we talked about. >> We want to then um start building that deposit base. We want to start actually getting some facilities vaults financed uh right off the bat and then I think it's acceleration from there. It's really getting our forward deployed bankers or solutionists out there. Um in you know of course we'll have a couple of beach heads that we'll use. Um you know I think the the the digital asset investing trading uh community is going to be an important constituent for us and then um as we kind of really harden the systems both from a operations

perspective but also just get making sure that our regulators are fully aligned with the with the vision and sort of the execution we'll continue sort of that growth curve uh going forward. I think that our a year out um we touch every industry from health care, entertainment, consumer products, energy, u industrials, hospitality. I think we're built for helping every treasurer, CFO, institutional investor um in any space. And so it sounds like a kind of a big bold space versus oh go kind of pick one vertical. But um you know we were told that 15 years ago with money lion and if you you know in terms of like just do one thing and we're like

no platforms work um having kind of built a consistent technology one stack allows us to serve a really broad demographic um of businesses and so that's what we look like a year out. Um, I think we're going to continue to expand the kind of regulatory perimeter as we continue to kind of think about how do we just keep pressing on being able to offer that full spectrum of financing to um to yield. And I think if we keep that as our our north star, we'll continue to help our customers. >> Well, uh, a cogent and exciting plan forward for the future. Thank you both for joining me.

>> Thanks, Scott, for having Thanks for hosting us.