Why Neo Banks Are Quietly Selling Themselves (Full Interview)

Transcript

there will have to be some questions like well will Robin Hood be fine with representing uh them as like a proxy agent or something >> but that's not a conversation you can have if you've got like 5 or 10 mil a month on your card you know you've got to get into the hundreds of millions a month you before and it shows some scale >> just like the streets of Manhattan I'm going to keep this quick over 70% of our viewers are [music] not subscribers yes you every week we interview some of the best entrepreneurs and investors [music] in the financial industry the easiest way to support our channel is to hit the like and smash the [music] subscribe button. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy today's show.

Welcome back to Stabled Up, our premier weekly stablecoin show powered by our friends at FX. Sam's here with us today, the CEO of Fra. And we've got Ragulan Pathy of Cast, the CEO of Cast. Um, amazing show today. Neo Bank super cycle, tokenization super cycle, people are spending stable coins on credit cards. I'll tell you that much, gentlemen. Great to have you. Sam, good to have you back. and rags. Welcome to the show for the first time. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, guys. >> Happy Friday. >> Absolutely. Happy Friday. How uh I mean, things have gotten rerated here in the last month. Are you are you guys seeing that reflected in uh activity in business as well, or are we just seeing it on the on the price charts on Twitter?

>> I mean, yes, we've seen definitely a little bit of an uptick, but um during the last year, whilst we've had a bare market, we've grown 3 4x anyway. So um I think there is um a lot of users that we have who are independent of crypto prices now. I think people just think about crypto cards but actually they're like stable coin cards as people just trying to move money and do you know everyday banking stuff and the demand for that is exploding. So >> yeah, I I I think uh we've we've seen the same excitement honestly uh every month increase since Genius. We work with uh a lot of both companies but also you know web 3 teams but even web 2 and the the price excitement is is obviously

makes everything uh even more interesting. But on on the back end on business deals and stuff like uh like Ragalon said, I we we've seen the same excitement just month over month growing regardless of the exact price. >> Yeah. Um look, I think a a good place to start here because it's relevant and I think stable coins naturally flow into NEO banks and these stable coin cards kind of as as you alluded to rags. Um but where I think you know it's important to start is look stable coins are becoming a national priority here in the US. Like I I read the Satrini article the other day. You know, they're talking about buybacks. They're talking about this Treasury Fed Accord 2.0. The point is that, you know, they're trying to unleash liquidity and deregulate

banks. And uh in order to finance, you know, uh Scott Besson's bills, they need people to be buying these bills. And it seems like stable coin companies and issuers are uh potentially going to step in and be the buyers of these short-term bills. And then obviously, you can extrapolate this in a few different ways. Uh the meme on this show has been look, it's a national economic priority to to pump crypto because when crypto goes up, we issue more stables and then those stable coin issuers buy more bills. Uh that's kind of just a fun little extrapolation that we've been we've been playing around with here. And so Sam, maybe we could start. I just want your general reaction to how deep you think this goes. Have you personally gone full macro? And then racks, we'll

kind of get into, you know, what the stable coin buildout means for the NEO bank and the stable coin card. uh part of the ecosystem. >> Yeah, for sure. Uh I think honestly um the the main thing is we before we've always said, oh, as as the crypto price go up, more stable coins are minted. That's one part of the flywheel. But honestly, all of the the neo banking I've even heard the term neoor brokerages now because of of Robin Hood's uh you know big rise, right? Where people can integrate just direct stock buys, sells and and everything um into the stable coin supply going up, right? Like one of the things actually I think it was Rob Hadock from Dragonfly uh and our friends there, he actually

said it really well. He said banking is being unbundled, right? Every part. So we we usually talk about the the stable coin stuff, the settlement and everything. Before Genius, right, banks essentially had to participate in some capacity in the settlement process, whether it was a fintech like Venmo or PayPal. When you move money into your like Venmo account, you're actually just wiring the the deposit your deposit into the the Venmo Inc. bank accounts deposits, right? With stable coins, you don't actually have to do that, right? You can hold a stable coin. Like you guys said, it's it's a treasury. It increases the demand for short-term treasuries. uh and and money market fund securities. But as more and more banking features and and like like brokerages and other financial features get

unbundled and then essentially rebundled in different places like in in Cast in Fracket in in Etherfy, right? And in all of these new platforms, you essentially have new demand for places that can hold stable coins, right? And other places that we're seeing is the the companies that we're working with that will, you know, announce in in the coming quarter, uh, is that they want to just hold a treasury of regulated stable coins for running their business for both payins and payouts, right? And so that's actually really powerful, too. It doesn't just have to be when crypto goes up. So, it's really exciting and interesting to see what the features that are being unbundled are and who are

the teams that are actually rebundling them in the web 3 capacity, right? Is is it the stock, brokerages, stablecoin, payments, all of these things. And uh that's that's what I'm really interested in is how they're being rebundled with web 3 features, right? Whether it's like earn with with like Morpho, a uh stock buy and sells and things like that. Yeah Rex anything to add there? >> No, I mean I what we see I mean we have a very global platform, right? So we use we're actually pretty evenly split across the world >> and what we just see is that people need to it's people just discovered it's a more efficient way to move money and so

they just do it. I mean I I I think of it from very simple terms. It's like, you know, in the '9s you had online shopping and um, you know, there was a big boom around it and everyone's like, everything's going to go online and it didn't all go online and be still people go go to normal shops. But what you knew was that that growth was just once once it was out of the bag, then people were going to get shopped more and more online and every year like retail might go up 2% but online shopping was going up 20%. You know, it's just eating away in that broader ecosystem. And that's the simplest way I think about stable coins as well. like they're just going to continuously grow eat in they're going to digitize dollars. they're going to move from moving from banks to moving

through stable coins. And that's what we're there to sort of capture because the traditional fintexs and banks don't really offer um stable coins within their platform so easily. And um a lot of people want to move money much more efficiently around the world and we're there to provide a a neoank style service, not just card, but full stack of services so people can get that with us because the current bank doesn't offer it. >> Yeah, man. >> Yeah. Do you do you also agree with this framing that Sam mentioned I think from Rob Haddock that the banking system is being unbundled and how do you reconcile so this unbundling you know and and teams that are hyper specializing on one part of that stack versus kind of verticalizing and being the full stack

neo bank neo brokerage offering for your customers. Yeah, I mean look, I think onshore here in the US there, you know, I think the unbundling is is correct and you know there's you know I mean to be honest with you there's just so many layers here right like this everything from the GIS to the community banks that now these like stable coin only fully reserved banks um all the new OC charters and so much innovation happening at that layer um but ultimately like these are sort of larger infrastructure plays right I mean what is really happening with the end customers. They're just like, "All right, that's really nice, but I just want to move money. [laughter] I just want to store money, move money, pay people, collect money if I'm a

business." >> Yeah. >> And so, if you can just make that simple for me, great. Like, that's all I want. And we're kind of at that layer, right? So, we're taking advantage of all the infrastructure work, the unbundling of the banks and all that stuff that's happening. And then we're trying to wrap it into something that's very clean and available globally, not just here in the US, right? But the thing is that the insight you know I was with the SEC yesterday and the insight I was giving them was that the world essentially wants to bank in America and traditionally very hard to do that right they want to have access dollars they want to have access to US dollar bank accounts they want to have like everyone in the world wants to have a bank account in America but they can't all

come to a bank community bank and open it so stable coins and all that infrastructure we're providing is basically a way for them to do that And there is unlimited demand for that. There's massive massive demand for that. >> What's uh what were you doing with the SEC? Anything you can share? >> Uh nothing you can share was just a general catch up, you know, just to um with with some senior folks there. I won't mention the names. Um yeah, >> but um yeah, pretty senior just to sort of just share perspectives on the work that we're doing and um you know, just a global perspective as well whilst being a much more global company. Um we're he very very supportive of what we see the the current administration doing. Um because like from a very simple

standpoint I know there's lots of domestic politics which I won't get involved with. Um but from a very you know simple point of view um you know opening up the US economy the US banking system the US capital markets to the world is something that the rest of the world wants desperately. They want access to the capital markets. They want to be able to trade US stocks. They want to be able to bank in the US. They want to be able to hold uh, you know, regulated stable coins. And so all of that, you know, is a no-brainer, right? As I say, the world is pretty much dollarized. And um, uh, the US has won pretty much that the global global dollars banking tokenization capital markets won the whole thing. But now it, you know, the the barrier is that people

don't evenly have access. In some countries, they have great access, in a lot of countries, they don't have good access. And so um it's really encouraging I think for the rest of the world to see you guys progressing the the [clears throat] legislation sort of gets to a point where you know you everyone gets even access you know from someone down in uh Peru through to you know country in Africa through to Asia um even in Europe where they use euros that you know people still use dollars. >> Yeah. Yeah. I saw a chart of the Genius Act at uh um timestamped and following that there's just been this explosion of you know stable coins, treasuries um you know these types of funds on

chain and so you know we're coming up on the clarity we're coming up on a potential tokenization exemption and I mean we've seen just this rise of Robin Hood chain as of late with regards to their tokenized assets. You know, Sam, I'm curious from your perspective. We got Vlad on, you know, national TV in the morning show, which means that it's important. And he's talking about exactly what Rag is saying here about this global access to the US capital markets being like the biggest selling point for tokenization. You know, he's taking questions [snorts] from the host as to why the AMC CEO hates what he's doing, right? why there's this divergence and where allocators are being able to buy equities that it's not just in your brokerage account through

the DTCC DTC anymore. And so you kind of get in this world where there's this push back from tokenization, but it's also just happening and I know that you need to be positioned for it. Just curious kind of from the FRA perspective, what is what is the tokenization of equities and more asset classes coming on chain? What does that mean? like what is how do you kind of wrap your head around this and execute on capturing some of that market? >> Yeah, it's a good question because I think there's a lot of new emergent behavior that this stuff will actually create. Like you see it on Robin Hood chain where uh there's like people that are now pairing trading against different equities. I'm actually really curious to see, you know, things like what if there's onchain activism, right?

Like what if there's like Dows that try to acquire a specific large amount of uh you know like onchain Carl Aon, right? Like there's a lot of questions that'll have to be answered about that, right? Cuz like the there's different structures to tokenization. There's like the the Robin Hood uh tokenized stocks are kind of like debt instruments, right? So Robin Hood is is like technically the on you know on ledger uh thing. Is is there going to be like a uh like the first time that happens, right? like where a DAO has a bunch of like uh assets and says like we we want to propose this um there will have to be some questions like well will Robin Hood be fine with representing uh them as like a proxy agent or something or how is this stuff going to work and so you

know at at FRA the most important thing with uh with like our FRA neo bankank platform is to basically create this uh platform where businesses whether they're web 3, web 2 or just people they can actually uh have this new new bank account. They can invest in equities. They can uh get, you know, credit against it, save, earn, all of this stuff. And one of the things I think that's going to be important because of how fast-paced everything will go is we're actually looking into essentially creating kind of a frack app store, so to speak, on this platform where essentially other people can actually add features and hook into the KYC identity, right? like the accounts be able to actually offer uh different kinds of like rewards or like you can

have multiple cards. You can have a cast card if if you want to import it into your like praxet account and an you know etherfy card for example and and we don't actually you know in our ethos like try to compete in zero sum in in terms of on layers where we don't really see uh a need to improve really really great products like cast or or etherfi or things like that. We actually want to add value in terms of being able to build on top of some of these these these products like we're not obviously gonna tokenize like Nvidia or something like that. We want to give access to people accounts businesses that want to hold them and be able to do things with them, compose with them. And our view is how can we bring more value? How can we

bring more liquidity more credit? Uh one of the things is to allow people to actually build applications into this like Neo bank bang fraet platform. So we're going to announce that a little bit later uh how it's going to work. You can just add like different applications or features that'll get added to the actual workspace, right? like your your actual uh platform uh will change in in terms of looks depending on whether you do like invoicing if you're a company or if you are a person you have like you want to have multiple cards you want to have uh these things and and it routes to the best rewards um we're not really digging deep on uh things that for example CAST is really great at right like they they have really really great relationships um and and and wide coverage why should we reinvent that

wheel right we we should give people access and then supercharge and and like superpower those kind of things. Um and so that that's essentially how we're thinking about it, right? Bringing value on top of these things and actually bringing a platform that can kind of act as the global uh identity layer essentially for neo bankanking, neo brokerages, you know, however you want to think about it. >> Yeah, global identity layer, which is interesting because, you know, that's something that we're continuing to hear like there is a lot of kind of disparit platforms. you know, we're going to have a DTC, we're gonna have a Robin Hood, we're going to have Ethereum, we're going to have other brokerages. NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange are building out their alternative trading systems that'll trade, you know, tokenized

things 24/7. But all of those are going to need to share KYC in some way, shape, or form. And then there's going to be these allow lists and proper books and records of, you know, who's on these cap tables when these things are really tokenized equities and not just like you said debt, you know, equity linked instrument securities like actual tokenized equities. And so Sam, what I'm hearing you say is kind of like starting from that identity layer and building outwards. Are you building like one cohesive product that is going to apply to all of these different facets of onchain finance or are you building like these different hooks like these different apps that are going to be you know curated products that are going to

apply to like you'll have a different frack product that'll look a little bit different for tokenized equities than it will for serving neo banks like CAST like are you going to build different products for different facets of the industry are you focusing on building one thing that is then going to be portable and flexible to apply to different facets of the industry. >> Uh yeah, more more like the latter, right? Basically what we're doing is essentially all the features that you see in like FRANET like if you sign up right now there's like earn right move money similar similar things to kind of you you'll see in a lot of them they're actually going to be structured like standalone applications even though they look like features and a tab uh they all conform to a specific schema. they all

actually use the the fractionet identity which is like one single KYC. Um and then eventually like if you want to add cards or things like that, you just actually route the KYC that you've already done once, right? Into the same kind of KYC that some other product is asking for, right? We will essentially build tons of these applications, right? We're not going to like wait like kind of like the old school ecosystem kind of chain kind of uh idea, right? >> Give out a bunch of grants. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. we're we're we're not uh it's not 2022 any anymore, right? And and so the the idea is all of these are structured as like applications and then you can have a you know a cast application, right? And then it imports your transactions, your things and then

with that you essentially get built-in builder codes, right? Because each of these uh applications and calls underneath will have originators, right? like you you it'll be originating from the cra app or the or the you know Robin Hood equities app that we can build ourselves right that'll route to buying and selling uh Robin Hood stock and so then you're able to actually create uh builder codes and and reward systems built in right like if you use this more then you'll get more from on the fractionet layer if you uh invest in equities during this month through during this campaign you'll get you know 2% cash back similar to kind of what Etherfi is doing with their campaign, but as like kind of they're doing it as singular campaign in the app. We'll be able to do that in a higher layer,

right? We'll be able to actually incentivize different kinds of behavior. >> I've got what one quick followup here, which is like, and we've got this written down. It was a question from Preper IT team. I think it's a good one. You know, like Cast Fracks, even Revolute, Coinbase, Venmo, Zel, like all of these things seem to be converging, but we're also unbundling. And so the question here is like where who are you guys all kind of are all these players in this in this general area competing for the same user to kind of hook them in and then get them in their product suite or is there a different way to think about this? And if if it's more so the former like what is the moat? What

is the moat? Because we hear a lot about distribution. I can understand how like if you own the relationship with the end customer, you're the one that does KYC on it, then you're kind of like people have to go through you in order to, you know, sell something to that customer. But there's a lot of different ways that, you know, these customers can kind of get looped into a particular product. And so I guess that's my question. It's like are are all these companies in this general banking, even though we're unbundling it, is all the companies in the space competing for the same user? And if so, who owns the moat in that in that space?

>> Hey, Robbie, can I ask you a question, man? Are you like a NFL fan or like what's your favorite sport? >> Oh, favorite sport. The one I like to play the most is ping pong, but they don't really have professional like leagues for ping pong. >> I'm going to have to >> I would probably go probably NBA. >> Probably or >> he's a Miami Heat fan. He's a Miami Heat. >> Miami Heat. I love the I love the Heat. Grew up in South Florida. I like college football. >> Miami Heat fan. So, what's the mode the Miami Heat have on you? >> I grew up in the area. >> Yeah. But you you're not going to like go and support somebody else. You're still attached to them in some way, right?

>> Yeah. I grew up, you know, following them since I was a little kid and, you know, they were easiest to access and go watch. So, yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. [snorts] Look, I I have a thesis. I'm going to It's going to sound horrible the but like your point is somewhat correct. I mean, I don't think financial services have that much of a moat as long as they build like we're very focused on product velocity and delivering as many products. So once you're on with us that you can do as many things as you can with us with the best experience. We're trying to not make it clumsy like some other apps have we're going to be the everything app but they're the nothing app because you do so much. It's such a horrible experience. You're like just stop sending me like >> you know betting on on the weather

today. I'm just trying to do my banking like services. >> Yeah. >> You know, >> I hear [laughter] you. >> So, Coinbase catch and strays. >> Yeah. I didn't mention a name, man. You know, so but what I'm saying is is that why I mentioned the sporting analogy is like our marketing and our ethos is to build a culture around our brand and around our service and the way that we deliver it. And that becomes the moat because people, you know, will go to someone and say like these guys just deliver service differently. They connect with people differently. They where they deliver their platform is different. Their culture is different.

You know, we're in the process of signing with a number of like celebrity partnerships as well with musicians and others. We're, you know, unraveling a lot of experiences so people can have special experiences. I'm here in New York this week for fashion week because we're looking at a number of partnerships. And that's the difference. I think of us very similar to a sports team. We want to build the best sports team, like the best platform with the with the best players that it's a winning team, but we also want people who are fans of us to essentially be like, I just really only want to use this platform because I love it and I want to tell everyone else how good it is. Very similar to a sports team. And that's the mo. And the reality is is that you can go and vote. You can go and

support someone else the next day if you want to, right? There's nothing really stopping you. But at the same time you feel attached to a brand because you really really love it you know because of everything that they do you know and that that ultimately becomes the mode because if you in reality if you go and look at your forget about the fintech space or the brokerage or everything you talk about just look at your bank like most of people were attached to a single bank for a long time right um even though they've had the choice of a JP Morgan or Bank of America or City Bank or HSBC you've you know you probably had the choices but you end up with one and you tend to stay with one. Most people do, right? And um I think the moat is just how they make you feel as a person

and you know why you got there in the first place, you know, and that's that's in financial services that that's the mo. It's how you you know you you're how much you resonate with that company effectively. >> As long as >> as long as the company keeps shipping all the great products and everything that you need, you know, that's >> right. And so who does that really well? cast or rags from the cast like who can you point to that you're like damn like they've done a damn good job. >> I think globally like obviously like there's it's it's obvious why Revolute and New Bank have done well to win.

>> Um but they're regional, right? They're in their regions like very dominant in Europe for for New Bank, very dominant in Latin America, sorry, very dominant in Europe for Revolute [laughter] and very dominant in Latin America for New Bank. But I don't think the reason I built cast and I wasn't afraid of these companies was because my thesis is that the dollar is global and people are moving money globally and there's a new audience of people who are global first. They're internet native. They're building solarreneurs and people building businesses online. They work uh freelance. They're creators. They're social and you know there wasn't like a brand a financial services brand built fintech built for them. you know, >> with stable coins and being able to be global, you know, almost from day one,

>> there's an opportunity to do that and that's essentially what we're building, you know, but I think these two companies have from the digital bank perspective have shown that they've done it well. There's probably smaller regional ones or country ones, you know, in other parts of the world who've delivered a great experience as well. But these are probably the two larger sort of regional like Europewide, Latanwide ones. Maybe in the US it's Chime or Sofi. Robin Hood is obviously stand out here in the US. Um, >> Sam, do you agree? Do you agree with the brand as a moat thesis or do you think otherwise? >> How do you think how do you think of this?

>> Well, I I think from from a retail perspective, I think rags is right. I I think that that it is it is really to do with like brand and and and trust Lindy, right? But from essentially just to define it, right? And in my opinion, from coming from like a crypto mechanism design perspective, right? A motor like a network effect by definition means like if uh a million people are using it, the the millionth and oneth person gets more value out of being in that like like a user or in that network than uh it just being the exact same thing for for 1 million people, right? Like if if the more people are using the platform uh if they are all better off,

right? Essentially. And so there there's either things you can maybe offer them that are better off, but also if there's just a service that it doesn't matter if if there's like 10 people using it or like 50,000 or a million, it's pretty hard to justify that there's there's a mode at least in in in my opinion. So when when we think about it on like for example Fraxnet or like just looking at other kinds of neo banks I think the most valuable thing is essentially the direct relationships in in the in the roots or in the businesses and things like that like we've we've signed some exclusive deals right for for things that we're going to announce uh in in the coming months. that you can't vibe code that or you can't someone else can't actually have that direct kind of

uh resources like that kind of rewards that kind of exclusivity. So what I actually think is on the retail perspective rags is totally right. What I actually would love to ask and uh kind of know from their perspective at at CAST is how do you guys kind of uh negotiate these like cashbacks or these campaigns or these relationships on like a large level compared with like other neo banks? Um, I'd actually be curious like do you guys have direct relationships at Cast with um, you know, either either the hotels or the or the software companies, the large kind of cashbacks that that you guys provide. You just, you know, or do

you subsidize them or how how does how does that work? >> Because I don't believe that the all these neo banks are going to survive. My my thesis is that it's a go big or go home, you know? So, I I I believe that cast will be a hundred billion dollar company or we'll fail. I don't think there's any in between, right? And um so my thesis is just foot to the floor, capture as much market share as you can. And um you know, we we try to run lean team as efficiently as possible, but you know, our job is to squeeze out absolutely everyone and win. You know, it's a it's a it's a market grab situation, right? And so luckily I've got supportive investors who also believe in that. Um but you know like we

will accumulate losses to to get scale you know and uh >> and so when you say subsidize it's like the rewards that users are getting Sam is that kind of what you're asking about? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Like I I think like first of all I love it. Uh move fast and break things right like that that that is the the name of the game. Um but yeah like one thing I we can tell you is like when we announce uh some some of the things in in the coming uh quarter or two um you won't be able to get these things anywhere else other than having uh like a fraet account or like a fra mobile app account basically like that that is going to be kind of unique to us like uh everyone else will have to subsidize by buying those things for example or or

going through uh so it's like a different philosophy right it some some of it takes a little bit longer right others Yeah, >> you can go and have a lot of conversations, but it's like a catch 22, right? They're like, "What scale do you have?" So, we just go maximum for getting scale. So, once you get scale, so even though it's subsidizing now, then you can go to have a hotel partner or you know, now we're introducing airline miles whatever. And you've got a certain scale by which they'll be like, "Okay, I got that scale then I'll cut you this deal, not that deal." Same thing with our card partner, same thing with our on and off partners, banking partners, everything. The most important thing is to get scale, right? And that's what we're absolutely pushing for is like how do we get maximum scale as fast

as possible. Um because the people that have scale will have better economics and that better economics will allow them to do, you know, so we can afford to lose money on certain things because we don't make money on other things, right? like overall we we're not actually burning that much money but like we can afford to take losses on certain things to bring people in because we can we can make it back in other things or we can we know that we're going to add more products which which will subsidize it in the future right and so um but yeah I think that's you know we we are negotiating with certain partners to give incentives like discounts and hotels and things like that but you kind of have you know once you got the scale I can be like hey like do you know how much we our users just

spend on this one vendor. We can go to them like they spend us so much already like and by the way they also spend a lot on your competitor and so why don't you give us a discount so we can offer it to them and then they'll come and spend even more on you, you know. So, but that's a not a conversation you can have if you've got like five or 10 mil a month on your card. You know, you've got to get into the hundreds of millions a month, you know, before and show some scale in your business. So you got to get into the tens of billions, you know, a year in platform scale before this becomes a relevant conversation. >> Well, there there's your answer, Robbie.

Uh the mode is economies of scale. >> Yeah, the mo sorry that that is actually very true as well. So the mode does become the economies of scale. There is like a flywheel that we see, right? um like the more users we have uh the more scale we have the more we can negotiate better discounts the more we can give back in incentives that brings in more users and then you get this you know massive flywheel and I think that's why it's really like we were once that company but I think it's really we see this like proliferation of neo bankanks and but we're seeing also a ton of them shutting down recently and um every day my in I think I would average I reckon I'm not even lying to you probably two to five emails a day from companies

asking for discussions on M&A like throwing their hands up saying hey do you guys want to buy us you know >> really >> it's frantic right now right because we had this whole wave right like we had this whole like I mean neo banks were so hot call it 18 months ago right and it was like everyone wants to be a neo bankank >> but the market quickly realized that if you don't have a regional edge if you don't have a customer acquisition edge if you don't have a subsidy edge if you don't have a ton of cat like there's got to be an edge. It wasn't just like let me make an app. I mean they were going around in the VC circle was like crazy.

It was like every it was a new neo bank on our desk every week. >> Yeah. Well, it's not only the neo banks, it's also uh orchestration companies. Um there is like >> yeah sure >> narrow smaller you know apps as well. Um there's people who've gone and acquired licenses but never actually built out you know there's just I can give you every variation on it. Like I haven't even checked my email today. I'm sure if I opened it I'll be like you I got this type of company that but it's amazing like companies that I saw that were way more funded than us and way bigger you know but just didn't get the scale you know what everything else they often got licenses they got VC attention but they just get the liftoff on scale. Do do you

think do do you think rags there's uh some critical things that separates like cast and others that did manage to get to scale in terms of like uh tough things to know in hindsight like like for example um a lot of people say in in like neo bankanking and this stuff your service providers are very important right like if you're trying to for example onboard you know 100 new users you know per per day or something and like half of them don't you know pass KYC because the service provider for example is very risk a averse or or something like that or they just have too many um like extra fields that aren't necessary for example right are there any of these things that you guys >> we spend a lot of time making on

boarding as smooth as possible and I constantly I used to do this thing where I would make everyone in the company like rip out their KYC so they have to read KYC into their cast account so that if it's so it's then they're going to feel it so I used to make everyone like recyc you know every few months and they're like a until eventually our providers like you can't do this like you've got people who've KYC too many times like it looks like a board problem you know I was like no no no I'm just meaningfully ripping the KYC out so we just we just like cared a lot about that we always try to have one minute response times for our concurge we would hire heaps of people unlimited amounts of people so it would happen so people just felt like oh I've got a problem

like someone can now we weren't always accurate on the one minute But you wouldn't wait hours or days. Now sometimes people had problems of you know imperfect company. Sometimes we go around for a few days and but you know that >> but we just you just got to care about the customers you know and then they would trust you and then they will tell people that >> you know these guys will look after you and then that trust you know trust is the other mode as well to be frank Robbie like >> more you can more people >> see you out there you know um they know that you're a real company backed real people they know that they can get customer service you know you're going to get looked after if there's an issue um that that that becomes a massive mode as well. So I think like

>> that you know that exper the user experience definitely on sign up and usage of product that followup customer service the transparency and knowing that there's real people behind the products these things all you know start compounding over time as well you know >> well gentlemen I think we're coming up on time appreciate you both uh great episode thanks for joining the show Sam great to have you and Rags pleasure to meet you as well I know we're trying to do this in in person but it's been I got another pre-recording really starting at now. Okay.

>> So, I mean, it's just I mean, this is never ending here at the rollup. So, really appreciate both of your time and uh look forward to chatting soon and seeing you guys both grow. >> Thanks, guys. Thanks. >> Cheers, guys. >> Appreciate it, guys.