Stephen: This is your host Stephen Sargeant around the coin podcast. And we're talking about two things. I love crypto payments and maybe a third thing regulation and compliance. It is an important episode with Tim Ferland, the CEO of LetKnow Pay their EU based company are doing crypto payments, helping merchants.

Conduct transaction using stable coins and a variety of other cryptocurrencies. We get deep into the micro regulation, how that's impacting them, their plans to expand to places like potentially El Salvador and others, and how they're opening up their suite of services to help more people, even a little bit of corporate responsibility, how they're going in and supporting those refugees.

In Estonia from the Ukraine. This is an amazing episode, especially for our payment tech and crypto people that listened to this episode. This will be an important one. Get a sense of what regulations are going to impact you and your business. More importantly, your customers. Hope you enjoy the podcast.

Stephen: Welcome to another edition of the around the coin podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Sargent. Today, we're going to be talking about crypto payments. What I love in this industry is being able to move funds all around the world in a safe and secure, but inexpensive way. And we have Tim Ferland from LetKnow Pay.

You're the CEO. Tim, tell me a little bit about yourself. Then we're going to go into your background, talk a little bit more about how you got into foreign exchange and FX. Thanks. And now how you're into crypto payments specifically, they're based in the EU.

Tim: Okay. Well, I originally came over here to Europe back in 1997. I was working with an American corporation here. I married in Estonia and that's how I ended up in Estonia. So I'm located in Tallinn, Estonia for 27 years. And after that I just ran some of my own businesses got involved in lots of startups.

The way I got connected with crypto is that I was working with an advanced material company who wanted to fund building of a new factory. And they wanted to use crypto as a crowd, crowdfunding source. So it was my introduction to crypto. I knew nothing about it at the time. That was two thousand end of 2016, beginning of 2017, and it took, it took them a little while to get everything organized to build their own token for crowdfunding.

By the time they launched it, it was 2018 and everything was crashing, but through that period, through that process, crypto. I was then brought on to LetKnow Pay by the owner. And that was back in 2018, as far as Forex goes, I'm not directly involved in Forex, but our company is a, is a big service provider for a lot of the tier one Forex companies.

So the interest there is obviously just providing a strong, payment provider solution for those those poor forex guys who get turned down by credit card companies and other things just to make sure that they're connected with their customers and are able to, you know, process those payments and, and fund their business.

Stephen: Let me talk, there's two points you mentioned there, Forex and Estonia. Why does Forex have such a stigma to it? You've been around the space long enough. You probably, you know, you may have even made a joke about it. Why does foreign exchange have like this stigma of like You know, sleazy type companies are operating under the guise of regulation. It doesn't make sense to me when everybody uses Forex in some way or fashion.

Tim: Yeah, when it's, when it's happening in a bank, people don't think about it. There's like, oh, it's just, you know, part of the process when you are actively trying to trade fiat currencies. You don't do that through a bank. There's forex brokers who are speculating on what the values will be and, and things like this.

So they give leverage and there's, you know, probably little tricks behind the scenes of how they. Manipulate things so that things can go more their way sort of like a casino, you know The house always wins in the end sort of thing I think there's been a lot of fraud in in that industry. I mean, there's a lot of very good companies Don't get me wrong, but there's a lot of people who just see this as a you know, a quick money scheme and they get in, build something, get what they can and then run out.

So I think there's been some situations like that where it's created a stigma of, you know, these people aren't honest or things like this, but we're, we're dealing with some very good people in, with our merchants. We're very cautious about the companies that we onboard for our services. So that helps as well.

Stephen: And I think, you know, similar to mentioning casinos, like online casinos, online poker in the early days was exactly that, right? People coming in. Trying to pull as much setting the algorithm so that they would only win. And then eventually, you know, that those companies are weeded out as the industry matures and evolved.

But you're in Estonia. You've been in Estonia since 1997, but you're also in crypto. Tell me about the evolution of Estonia and crypto. You know, at one point it was going to be the, the hub of crypto in the eu and then it went through a little bit of a landslide when it came to regulations. The regulators really got a lot more strict and a lot of the companies couldn't meet the requirements of the, you know, the regulator, which kind of like moved Estonia to the back.

I don't hear the them in conversation as much. I think it was Estonia that used to have like the. You could be a resident those like e credentials to become and maybe you can explain it to me better than I could.

Tim: It was a bit of a house of cards that Estonia built for itself. They decided at one point that they wanted to issue crypto licenses when, you know, back in 2017 or something and just started giving them away. And initially for companies that were here and then they attached it to, as you, as you alluded to the e residency program that they had started where you could live anywhere in the world, but have.

Residency in Estonia electronically, which means you could open a company here. You could open a bank account here. You could run your business remotely because Estonia is very and technocentric so everything is online. You can sign your documents with an e signature and all these kind of things here. Once they had built up a certain amount of crypto licenses and that were associated with the residency and all these things. They started to get worried about possible money laundering issues. And this sort of was around the same time that Donska bank was caught money laundering 400 billion euros. And the local Estonian branch was involved with that.

And then shortly after that, you had Svedbank laundering 40 billion and, you know, they get their billion euro fines or whatever, but, you know, slap on the wrist for those guys. And. They had done a research paper with the EU that was saying that crypto is the greatest threat to money laundering in the world today.

And we're just like, what? So at that moment, they just said, well, we gotta, we gotta back out of this crypto problem. We have too many licenses out there. We can't. Actually monitor them and regulate them because it was issued by the financial crimes unit of the Estonian police and they don't, you know, they didn't have the, the funding or the personnel to monitor, you know, almost 2000 licensed companies, most of which were held by companies who didn't even reside in Estonia.

So they..

Stephen: It's kind of the double edged sword You want to give access to everyone? But if you're at home and you can just set up licensing get licensing that was a crypto company's dream at the time really

Tim: Yeah, well, they, you know, it was a, it was a danger and they recognized that and they started to walk it back, but they got a bit too aggressive in the end and even though the, the financial crimes unit actually became its own separate entity away from the police in order to monitor the licenses that remained there was a plan that they would remove all the licenses from under the supervision of that group and put it under the banking regulator, which is the FSA.

Okay. They're still kind of working towards that. And this is where the very aggressive turn in the regulatory environment came. They started requiring a lot more reporting I'll be straightforward. We were in the throws with everybody else trying to keep up with what was being demanded. And at what one point, the, the, the FIU is the regulator here.

At one point, they started approaching people and telling them we're going to cancel your license. And you're just like, why, what? What happened? Like, Oh, you're not compliant. It's like, well, where's the notification? You know, the law says you have to give us a notice. It doesn't matter. And, you know, so this happened with many different companies.

We decided that we would withdraw our Estonian license. And we had gone to Bulgaria to open a branch office and we opened a license for that organization and then started another company there as well and got that licensed. So we operate under our Bulgarian license rather than an Estonian one, and the Estonian government still kind of pressuring the remaining few.

I don't know if there's more than 20 left out of the 2, 000, but it's been a culling of the herd for sure. And it's just purely just for regulatory purposes that they still are pushing everything to the, to the banking regulators in that Micah will be applied for under the bank regulator.

Stephen: Awesome. Talk to me about, you know, you talk about this and that was like a big time, especially when prices go down in crypto and the novelty kind of wore off and then everyone's looking at Estonia like, Hey, you have all these licenses out. The price is going down. Usually when prices go down, people don't blame themselves.

They start to look at the regulators. They start to look at the service providers and say, how could you let this happen to me? Not, Hey, I was trying to make a million dollars on a random ICO token. Curious about, you know, at this stage, 2018, you're on your crypto path for offering payments. What problem were you trying to solve?

And, you know, seeing how challenging crypto was at the time, what made you and the rest of the team decide to continue down this path versus maybe going back to some more traditional ways of moving funds cross border or just even around the EU.

Tim: It's an interesting, it's an interesting start because we weren't actually looking at purely payments processing at the time. What we wanted to do was build an ecosystem. And this started with. We wanted to create an you know, basically a crypto education portal. We had a news portal where people could go in and see, you know, the news that was coming in from different sources about crypto blockchain and other things, get, and, and have an educational element to that to teach them what the value was of it in terms of not just in payments or value stored, or, you know, things like this, but also the potential in, in manufacturing or, or you know, the, the supply chain management and things like this quality control and such, there's lots of, lots of different uses for blockchain.

Crypto as a store of value has its uses, but also as utility for being used, for example, as rewards for, for loyal customers or things like this to be spent, things like that. Anyway. So that's how it started. And we wanted to build. a messenger portal that was connected to this and then the wallets that would be used the exchange that would then connect to that so that people would start to be able to build internal profiles, kind of a social media site.

That would provide the access to crypto stored in a wallet that's protected in our system that you could send to other users in the system instantaneously and freely. So you could, we were looking at targeting like the independent contractors artists, you know, things like this, where you want to invoice somebody and get paid instantly and that sort of thing.

So that was the idea behind it.

Stephen: easy to transfer funds around and then you have the social media, you know, community aspect of it as

Tim: Yeah. So that was the idea behind it, but we got bogged down in trying to build All of that at once, rather than build one piece and another and another and then link them together. It was sort of a big snowball that that ate up a lot of money and time. And in the end, we were just like. We've got to do something that actually is making money and we brought in some consultants who are just telling us these are the things that are happening in the market.

So we said payments processing. We can do that. We've got connections. We can we can make this work. So we just started off small. built our own infrastructure and have been, you know, growing it since then. And then we're able to acquire some, some first customers through affiliates, you know, people who just introduce us to the merchants and say, these guys are good.

You should go talk with them. it went from there. So once we built up a small base of customers, we refined our services. So that we were actually getting better and better. And our customers were giving us more and more compliments. And we're like, Oh, this is actually going the right way. So we've just continued growing from there.

Stephen: I love it. And as a bootstrap company, how difficult was it? Because, you know, if you're born in 2018 creating a company at that point, you've dealt with multiple bull and bear markets since then, as we're heading into 2025, what seems to be one of the bullish markets we've seen in, you know, history. How have you dealt with the lows where I'm assuming not that many people are paying in crypto or needing crypto all the way to like the highs now, are you seeing trends correlated for activity based on the price of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies?

Tim: I mean, there is a tendency that the, the, the volatile currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, there's more spending when the value goes up people are, are holding them a little bit more tightly when the value is down right now it's up obviously from what it was. Two months ago. So, we're seeing that there's some consistency there usually in, in the Forex industry, for example people are, are leaning more towards the stable coins because of the volatility.

So, you know, when it's, when the value is high with Bitcoin, obviously you're getting more value for the money you bought it lower, it's more, you know, you have more value in it. You're more willing to spend it in order to, to get something out of it. With the stable coins, it's just like, you know, using your dollar or euro account.

It's there. There's some minor volatility about, you know, five decimal points over, but it's fairly stable otherwise. And yeah, but we were, we were originally insulated anyway from the volatility because we're just providing the service. And for us personally, it was, You know, we're just charging a transaction fee so it didn't matter if Bitcoin was up or Ethereum went down or whatever was happening with the crypto.

Yes, it, it, there, there historically has been some changes in volumes depending on what's happening there. But again, people are just shifting to a different type of, of token that's, that's more stable in those

Stephen: Exactly. You're almost like a crypto exchange. Doesn't matter if its price goes high. I'm sure there's a lot more activity on the crypto exchange versus when the price goes down. There's probably a lot less people trading, but to the crypto exchange, you're just taking your transaction fees. Very similar there.

How are you dealing with like this space? Cause it's opened up a lot. We've seen BBNK build, you know, stable coin infrastructure company, other crypto payments companies like BitPay as well. How are you keeping up? How are we like, or maybe what's your competitive advantage or focus? Maybe that those other companies aren't focused on.

Are you more kind of on the merchant side where you're helping support merchants? You know, tell us a little bit about your competitive advantage in the space where there's a lot of players in this space.

Tim: Our main advantage is that we have built our own infrastructure. We have complete control over all of our blockchain nodes, so we've chosen the different the different cryptos that we're going to, that we process for our merchants, and we built the nodes for those. So we listen to our merchants.

They, they, you know, Give us the feedback of what they've seen as far as their customers, what they want to pay with. And we have built those different nodes for those and we have some more coming out you know, all the time, new ones coming out this year. And I've forgotten the basis of your question.

Stephen: No, no, I was just saying, like, how do you

Tim: Oh, yeah. The competitive

Stephen: as players move into the space? You know, when the price goes up, everyone wants to open up a crypto exchange or a payment processor because they see that target market, that TAM, go huge. How do you, like, kind of navigate the space when there's so

Tim: well, again, back to the back to your question about the competitors, which is where I got lost. our competitive advantage is that we have control of all that. So one of the things that we're able to do very efficiently is when a customer makes an end user customer. Makes a mistake in sending a cryptocurrency through the wrong network or with XRP.

They forget to put a destination tag on it or something else is done incorrectly and the merchant gets a, you know, gets a comment from them like, Oh, you know, I don't know what happened. It's not credited to my account and they ask us and our team is able to go in and actually see that. Oh, you know, he sent, he was supposed to send us DT.

ERC 20, but he sent Ethereum instead. You know, he sent the wrong token. We know where it is. We'll go in and we'll get it for you. We'll credit to your account, you credit to them. Another advantage is that we have static wallets. So, the merchant always has the same wallet for every cryptocurrency and their sub wallets, which are designated for their users, are also static.

So when the, when their customer sends a deposit, the first time they're, they're given a specific wallet address. So every time they send that I. D. that's connected with their account with the merchant is going to the same wallet in our system. So they know, even if they send manually and bypass the payment page, it goes into that same wallet.

And it's, it's there. It shows up in their system. So it's another advantage where they don't have to worry about these dynamic wallets that change every time somebody is sending a wallet. Because there's questions coming from PSPs that they're working with. They're like, are you, you know, you have to show us where this money came from.

So it does help in those things. The, the competitive market went downhill when BVNK came, came into the market because they, they obviously got well funded and they went on a price chopping spree and we went in an industry that was normally starting at about 2 percent for payment processing dropped down to 0.

5 percent in a month. So their impact was kind of devastating, but it was, it was, you know, they wanted to be a lost leader to attract. the market share that they that they enjoy right now. But we know from listening to our customers who have worked with them and come back to us, their service is not up to par because their focus is on.

They have an E. M. I. license as well. So they have sort of a couple of different verticals that they work with, and they're bringing the crypto payments into their system under the E. M. I. So they're probably making good money in the E. M. I. And they're still using this as a loss leader for You know, the crypto payments and it, it doesn't, it doesn't hurt us so much, but it hurts the industry in terms of being able to grow, innovate and things like this, if you're, you know, having to compete at such a low level with, without significant, you know, relatable profits.

Stephen: kind of like a mom and pop shop trying to compete when a Walmart comes into town. It's like, you can compete only up to a certain point. But if they're, if all of their prices are lower than what you're charging, eventually it's going to have an impact on a lot of the companies. I think that's where, you know, branding and having those initial relationships that you probably have with a lot of those merchants provides a competitive advantage because they know exactly what the process is.

And they know exactly, you know, you're able to kind of provide services directly to them.

Tim: Yeah, of course.

Stephen: And I would love to know, like, what are some of the biggest use cases? Like, I know you have merchants, and you might not need to give us the names of the merchants. But is it specific things? Is it like, okay, a coffee shop? Or is it more of like merchants are like, hey, we're running. Maybe a certain gaming site and people need to pay in gaming.

What are some of the industries that you're servicing that you see the most amount of track transaction volume from?

Tim: The majority of our traffic is coming from the forex industry. So, as I was mentioning before, we serve a lot of tier one forex brokers. That makes up the bulk of our business. We opened up to licensed casinos, online casinos Couple years ago. It's been a little slower. We did some more digging. We realized that, you know, trying to market directly to these online casinos isn't necessarily the best tactic because they most most of them don't even have their own system.

They've purchased. A system from somebody else, which already includes some payment solutions. So we ha we're, we're, we're moving upstream in that, in that industry, trying to get in bed with the, the companies that are producing those systems and, and, and get in there with our foot in the door to be one of those payment solutions that they add.

Stephen: So these online casinos pretty much have like a white label. Someone's, you know, create the infrastructure for them and they maybe add their own marketing or go into a certain region with those

Tim: Yeah, they'll, they'll even provide them with, they'll even provide them with the license, you know? So this, this package is actually a package you, you can go buy yourself a casino and just. start processing. It comes with the, the, the software, the games, the, the payment solutions, the license, everything.

They sign it over to you, you pay them whatever millions you have to, I don't know. But yeah, so that with the, with the gambling site, it's, it's a lot lower. Forex, the interest with Forex again is, is they want a lot of smaller payments, not, not too micro, but You're talking some small payments using crypto and you have blockchain fees to cover and other things like this.

So it's not, it's not all clear how things will, you know, keep moving forward because the, the end users get, you know, more price sensitive as time goes on because they see prices drop. The merchant wants to make sure they have as much volume as possible. So they want to keep prices low. We have merchants who decide they want to pay all the fees.

For their customers. So their customer says I want to put in a hundred dollars merchants like let him put in a hundred dollars We'll pay the rest, you know, take it out of our balance. Well, you know, it's fine. Okay, that's fine as long as we get paid But you know

that

it's it's price sensitive it's surprisingly a very price sensitive industry this Forex that you know, they they don't want to upset their customers with Extra steps or you know extra fees or things like this.

They very price sensitive it.

Stephen: Yeah, because then people would just go through the bank, right? Like, if they, if they get to a certain level of fees or friction, people are just like, oh, I might as well just stay with the bank and hope that these wire

Tim: Well, I mean, again, you have to under with the Forex industry, sorry to cut you off, but with the Forex industry, they're not, these are not your, your like normal business people who are just trying to exchange euros for dollars because they have to make a payment. These people are trying to make money on, on the difference in, you know, this is why they have CFDs.

You buy a certain amount of euros and you're speculating that it's going to, you know, fly against the Japanese yen and they give you leverage.

You

know, so you can, you have 100 euros, but they'll leverage it up to some of them up to 1000 times. You know, if you see 100, you're already high risk, but you know, there's real players out there really trying to make money on people.

So you, you leverage that. And then if, if, if your guess is right, you've made money and it goes in your account. If you, if you guess wrong, that eats up your balance that you've deposited and then they're like, Oh, you're short more. So you need to deposit more, you know because you.

Stephen: That's a, yeah, that's a crazy, that's a crazy industry. We can't talk.

Tim: This is, this is, I just wanted to be clear on what the industry is.

We're not talking about traditional Forex where, you know, you have somebody just exchanging money for a little commission and that's it. This is people who are trying to speculate and win money on it. It's a gambling. It's a different form of gambling.

Stephen: Yeah. It's not like the currency converter at your local airport. That's like taking your a hundred dollars and then giving you back a hundred and 30. Yeah. So this is like high stakes, large amount of funds and the volatility there would be huge for them. And that's why you're saying stable coins is, is preferred because the volatility will also crush them trying to leverage as well.

Tim: Yeah, it'd be. That's a funny analogy that I just pictured in my mind, like going to the airport, wanting to exchange money. And then the, the girl wrote, breaks out some dice and says, you want to go for, you want to go for double

Stephen: That's hilarious. I want to ask you about regulation. We can't talk crypto payments at EU without talking a little bit of regulation with Micah coming in, Dora, TFR, talk to me a little bit about some of the regulations or licenses that you carry and the regulatory impact of obviously Micah, which is the most comprehensive.

I think digital asset regulation to date, but also one of the most onerous as well.

Tim: The, the micro regulation is is something we were informed about. a year and a half ago. It had been in legislation for quite a while, but they didn't really inform the industry until they were ready to drop the bomb. And it's, it is onerous. It, it's it's a large legislation, but I mean, the, the idea is sound.

As much as everyone thinks that the EU is unified on things, it's very fragmented as far as crypto goes. So, one country will allow you to operate with crypto, and they don't care if you, you know, have a license, as long as you have another license, a license in another EU country. But certain countries want you know, only local licenses like Germany or Italy or France.

And so you have to, and Estonia, by the way. So you, you have to have a local license if you want to provide any services related to crypto in that country. So the harmonization of the laws related to crypto processing or other crypto services is a good thing because you can passport that service now all over the EU without

Stephen: you don't have to fight to go after each jurisdiction and go through that process similar in the States, right? The United States, you have to

Tim: right? Yeah,

Stephen: by state, which makes it just so hard to deal with versus like, hey, we have a legislation that now we can use our license here in Germany.

Use that in France, Italy, Estonia. You don't have to keep continuously go through all these processes.

Tim: Exactly. It's, it's, it's a huge headache. There's still some questions as far as the Micah legislation, because they haven't finalized specific things. There's no true solution for the travel rule that they are imposing. The exchanges and other service providers are already sort of. Implementing their own version of what they think they want.

But the EU themselves haven't been able to come back with a real answer as to this is exactly what should be. This is the technology you should use. You know, it's, it's just not there. So everything is more or less manual now. Sending emails with with names and places or providing access to a specific cloud or something like this is, is what certain places are requiring right now.

We have a lot of customers sending us. Questions like, why do I have to fill out this form in Binance? I don't understand. It's like, well, because Binance is trying to be compliant with the travel rule under MICA. And this is what they came up with. They're emailing you a form to fill out for who's the recipient of these funds that you're sending, you know, and why are you sending them? So this is, this is the one thing. There's a huge technical Push as well, but that's a positive thing. There will be, I think, more security for end user funds and things like this under MICA, because there is a lot of information security and technical requirements to protect the systems and the funds and all this, so there's a lot of good things there, but going through all of them and the distraction of having to reinvent a license for your own company and deal with everyone else doing it at the same time, it is, it is a huge distraction from business growth.

It's just, we hope that it will make everybody stronger for the future, us in particular, and this investment in time and money and personnel to go through this is going to be worth it in the end.

Stephen: And, you know, I work with companies like Nota Bene, which is a travel service provider, and even they have to put out a ton of content because there's a lot of confusion between the microregulations and the EBA guidelines, where people are confused about grandfathering periods and EBA requirements. To your point, that all gets expensive when you start having to bring in consultants and lawyers and, you know, resources internally.

You're like, this is expensive. And anytime you're going through any kind of regulatory thing like that, there are going to be government companies that are charging you for things like licensing fees and, you know, submitting documentation. What jurisdiction do you think that, based on the new regulations that we're seeing in places like the UK and the USA, Is there anything that you were like, Oh, we can pretty much expand our organizational reach because these regulations are becoming more clear and specific and it's easy for us to adopt to them.

Is there any jurisdictions that you have your eye on?

Tim: Actually, we are opening a company very soon in El Salvador, so El Salvador is very crypto friendly. Bitcoin is legal tender. We have a company lined up there that has been set up by a law firm for us, so we're just going through that process right now. The main reason for that is to make sure that we have.

One, a company that's outside of the EU jurisdiction and the applicant application of Micah that will allow us access to USDT and other stable coins that are going to be illegal in the EU after tomorrow. So, we want to have access to those to serve our customers that are not in the EU to make sure that, you know, there isn't huge disruption in our global.

services. We will take the workarounds that the EU has provided of using switching us D. T. For us D. C. Things like that. But yeah, just that that's one main one. El Salvador seems to have very, very good. Legislation as far as the tax obligations for crypto companies. They offer what they call a DASP license, a digital asset service provider.

So they provide a digital license as well as a a Bitcoin license. So we're

Stephen: feel like El Salvador, they're more, the governments there work closely with the industry, right? They're, you know, the Lightning Network, they have their Tether, you know, they're doing a lot of events and education around there. So, like, the government's very much on the ground versus, I think, a lot of other governments around the world.

Talk to me a little bit about, you know, the big, you know, narrative around Tether. It's pretty much, they'll never be able to keep up with the regulations in MECA, especially when it comes to housing funds within. A certain entity or having it in the reserve, but people are also saying, well, like Tether doesn't really need the European Union based on, you know, the amount of traffic they do all around the world.

What are your thoughts are that how quickly can you, you know, take from Tether and move into other places like Circle and Ripple and PayPal and other stable coins that we're seeing

Tim: because, yeah, we're already doing it because our, our exchanges and others, they're, they're already being proactive and, and cutting it off. They're allowing some, some time lag for removing funds or exchanging them and things like this, but January 31st tomorrow is the last day that USDT can be used in Europe legally.

For payment processing, for trading, for this or that. So, you can still hold it, but then after, I think it's March 31st, has to be converted into something else if you're in Europe. So, this is why I said, like, the El Salvador company being outside. We're looking at some other jurisdictions as well because we like redundancies.

We like to make sure that we have something to cascade down from. If something goes wrong here, we have another. Catch all to to move to. So we're looking at other jurisdictions as well.

But

yeah, as far as the tether goes. Yeah, it's it's widely used globally. So I don't I see it being a significant impact for the European countries, but not necessarily for tether themselves.

Because it's a, it's a global, globally used payment method, but it's, it's also going to grow in popularity because of, you know, all these other things going on. People are beginning to wake up to the joy of a decentralized economy and they're looking for those ways to, you know, benefit from it. And I think that the stable coins that are coming through, banks are accepting them globally and, you know, so it's, it's a, it's a whole movement.

Stephen: and we see kind of like 2025 feels like the year of stable coins. Would you agree with that statement? Now that you're like on the ground dealing with merchants and, you know, banks and institutions,

Tim: Absolutely, the panel I was on in Dubai was talking about payments and of the panelists was talking about, which I hadn't thought about, but makes sense, she was talking about the shipping industry and how the traditional, you know, financial institutions and the system is built to slow things down.

If you don't have everything right in your paperwork and the bank won't release the funds and all this. You can send stable coins, you know, send crypto to the guy and your ship's going to get released. So, you know, it was an example I hadn't thought of, but there are a lot of people now using crypto for purchasing property and, and other.

Tangibles. So yeah, why not? It's I think that, like I said, people are waking up to the joy of a decentralized economy and the speed and efficiency that you have in terms of making payments and the transparency as well, since you got the blockchain, it's immutable. You're, you're, you want to see what happened on that, in that transaction and, you know, 1995, well, there it is, you know, well, not that

back but

you know

Stephen: a little too early, but definitely, you know, you definitely see the examples of that versus like, you know, cash or other forms of payment. And, you know, you mentioned that panel in Dubai, what are your thoughts on, you know, Dubai and the UAE and their progressiveness with, you know, the ADGM, VARA having the first ever digital asset regulator or virtual asset regulator, what are your thoughts about, you know, potential opportunities there?

Tim: Well. We have, we have friends in Dubai and, you know, we, we enjoy going to the IFX event there because a lot of our customers are there. We need to face time with them because it's a competitive industry. But Dubai itself, I mean, I, I haven't been there that, that often. A lot of my colleagues have, I believe that they're hungry to get the attention of the financial industry and just say, you know, hey, we're here and we're ready to do what's necessary to get business coming here, you know, in the financial services industry, whether it's crypto or traditional finance.

Mostly in the crypto and EMI's and this sort of neobanking era and that sort of thing is what I've seen because they have these the, the financial zones that they're building up, which allow them to provide licenses, you know, independently and that sort of thing. It seems to be moving in that direction.

Stephen: I love it. And, you know, I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about, you mentioned like payments and the rails, like with banks accepting stable coins now. Why is the traditional payment rail so fragmented and archaic? Like, why in the last 30 years, especially with the advent of fintech, does it still feel really difficult for me to send funds from, you know, Canada to the UK without going through wire transfers and the difficulties and the information not being absolutely correct?

Why are we still, you know, at this stage where it doesn't feel like we're much further ahead based on how much technology has been invented in the last, I would say, two decades.

Tim: I would say that the issue is that the legacy financial institutions are still using legacy technology. I know that they, you know, in some cases they're updating software and things like this, but they still use the same processes. So if you're using a centralized, an old fashioned centralized financial system with financial regulation and financial steps you have to go through, you know, you have to go through a correspondent bank if you want to send some SWIFT transfer.

You know, it's 2025. Why, why do we have to still send U. S. dollars through a correspondent bank? Why is it not possible to go straight to another, another country without having to go through a third bank? You know, it's for fees. It's for the they say it's for regulatory oversight, for, you know, making sure that, you know, money laundering isn't happening.

Things like this, but as we discussed before, you know, we still see that, you know, very large banks are making very large mistakes or purposeful money laundering actions and getting fined for it. And they still continue with the same process. There's, there's no desire to change it because the central banks are running all those systems and they want that system in place because that's how they're making money.

Keeping a centralized economy and a centralized financial system is how they make money. And this is also why I think that the stable coins are a threat to them,

Stephen: yeah,

Tim: in the EU, because the, the European bank. European Central Bank has been wanting to launch their own Central Bank digital currency. They want to have a digital euro, but they want it for a different reason. Not because they see that people love crypto, but they want to maintain control. So if you have centralized control, you control the people, you have their money, you can, if it's all digital, you know, I mean, look what China's doing with the The social credit scores and things like this, you know, it's like, oh, you said something bad about the party.

Your money's locked

Stephen: they have access to your money. They have access to the way you communicate. They have access to the way you travel. And that's a tough thing with these super apps. There's one in Dubai. I can't always. Kareem, I think, is in Dubai. Everything is done through a super app. But if the government has access to that information or access to stop the access, like, You won't even be able to, you know, get a lift from one place to the other throughout, without these super apps.

One thing that's interesting is that you were awarded your, your company was awarded best crypto payment gateway. What does that mean for your company when it comes to like pushing and motivating your teams and how do you keep up with it? Like, what's, what do you guys focus on to make sure that you're receiving these type of acknowledgments by the industry?

Tim: First and foremost, we go to those events. We have FaceTime with our customers and with the, the, the promoters of those awards and things and make sure that we're visible. The, the main thing is just maintaining that connection with the customers and, and Knowing that they're receiving the best service they can get the prices, of course, being knocked down.

Help. They're helping everybody to have a better opinion of of crypto payment processing. But the main thing is the services you're providing and how well you can help the customer being a merchant maintain their relationship with their customers. If you can help them grow that relationship and grow their business with their customers.

You're invaluable. And you know, so these awards, they're great. It's a nice little, you know, thing to show. It motivates the team that we have. But I think the biggest thing that I get out of it is when I go to these trade shows and we're talking to customers or even potential customers, they'll tell us, Oh, I was talking with this company.

They told me to come talk to you, because they said you guys are the best. It's that kind of feedback that we thrive on, that we love.

Stephen: And it's not just about, you know, being the best in the industry. You're also doing a lot when it comes to corporate responsibility, giving back, especially to places like Estonia. Why don't you talk about some of the programs that you're working on there? Because I think, you know, in an industry that has such tight margins, as you say

Tim: in Estonia, we've we've launched a sponsorship for language courses, English language courses, with a local language service center called ILS, International Language Services. And what they've done is they've launched what they call, what is it, E4. E4R. Yeah, E4R. So they have a little logo of E4R. And what it means is English for refugees. And, and they've launched this program to provide English language services for incoming displaced refugees out of Ukraine, so they can learn English as a second language to help them get into jobs in Estonia.

Estonia, although, you know, Estonian language is very difficult, so it would take them much longer to, to learn that language and, and, assimilate into the, into the society, but with English, they can get at least local jobs with their basic English skills. And so we've sponsored a couple of courses through that through that school, it impacts somewhere between 40 to 50 people.

So we'll be doing that going forward. We do do a couple of courses a year. And so as incoming people go in, they're able to move out back into the society and, and, and find jobs and work that way.

Stephen: I love that. What are you seeing? You're, you know, you were in Dubai. Dubai is usually the most forward thinking type of conferences. What are you seeing emerging in the future for crypto payments?

Tim: Well, I can't speak for everybody, but for us, the, our main direction going forward is moving more into the retail side, into the brick and mortar side. So one of the things we have, I'll show you an example awesome machines. So we're breaking into the, the crypto payments with. People who have Binance Pay accounts or with other crypto payment solutions that they have, crypto cards or other things.

So it's based on USDT so it's an invoice system that a merchant can connect. With our system, they get an account with us and they're, and if a customer has a Binance account, they can pay their invoice with, with their Binance currency, because we're a Binance pay global channel partner. So we're able to do that sort of thing.

We're, we're focusing mostly on the hospitality and food and beverage industries, you know, restaurants and such, because those have the most turnover in terms of people who can take a moment. To pay and aren't in such a

Stephen: Right, right. Exactly.

Tim: I think that's, that's something that will continue to move forward.

Other industries like airlines we're talking with different airlines to move a similar type of system, but digital into their, into their payment pages so that they can just click a link. And it opens up a QR code for the person to pay their, their airline tickets, things like that

Stephen: And that makes sense, especially in the crypto industry, a lot of travel, a lot of digital nomads. So things like, you know, travel, airlines, accommodations, restaurants, or things that are frequented by people that actively use crypto on a regular basis. So that actually makes a lot of sense. Where are you in the team with AI or where do you see AI maybe impacting some of the, the things that you're seeing, whether it's, you know, writing code, whether it's, you know, adding in a lot more customer service aspect, because you're able to create these AI agents and bots, where do you see AI working in your business?.

Tim: For us. We've, you know, having our own system. We're, we're pretty much tight inside. We're not using AI. I can see in the future, though, because of the requirements under Micah for automation. Of different reporting and things like this, that there may be a strong case for using AI in some of those cases.

Also as we expand into more languages and things for ourselves, we expect that we might be using AI bots or things like this too. To initially engage with customers to find out what their specific needs are before passing them on to, to, and this is not obviously groundbreaking. Other companies are already using this for a while, but for us, we've.

We've got live real people talking to people all the time. Our chat bot is not a chat bot. It's actual people writing back. So

Stephen: Which is helpful when you're dealing with money, right? I think a lot of these companies can get away with AI agents, but if I'm calling about my money, I need to be put on the phone with somebody ASAP to be quite honest. Right.

Tim: right.

Stephen: I'm curious as we close out the episode, where are you seeing things like, you know, you mentioned the POS system, you mentioned maybe expansion to El Salvador, is there any other features or things on your roadmap that you're kind of eyeing as we go throughout 2025?

Tim: Well, we're always looking ahead and we haven't ruled out the idea of expanding into Fiat services. So we will consider in the future the EMI license, but we're not, you know, I don't know exactly where. But that, that's something we're considering. I think that a lot of companies will, that are in this business right now, will move in that direction to have a broader scope of services available.

Stephen: I love it. I know we talked before the episode, we're not too technical, that's not really our area of expertise. What are some of the technical people doing on your teams like in their free time? What are some of the nerdy things that they're playing with that you think are a little bit interesting

Tim: Oh, we see a lot of them, you know, doing gaming and things like this. A lot of, a lot of these developers, they, they need that release from that coding drawer. You know, this, you, you, you spend all that time going from code to code and you, you know, you need a break for your brain to just let it. Let it play.

So yeah, gaming is one of those big things that that they do. I don't know exactly what games they're playing as long as they get the job done.

Stephen: I would love to understand, you know You talked a little bit about bvnk and the massive amounts of backing that they had from vcs As well as this being a very low margin industry, but your company is bootstrapped. So you're the ceo of a bootstrap company What advice would you give to other CEOs that are bootstrapping a company, but they also have competitors or other, you know, players in the space that are coming with a lot of backing and able to drive down prices significantly?

Tim: You know, work more spend less. You know, being a bootstrap company, you, you have to make your. Profit when you can, you know, it's it's not like buying and selling cars where you buy it cheap and you and you sell it high. You're constantly negotiating with banks with liquidity providers to get that extra margin to lower it.

So you have something a little bit more. Good people obviously helps who are, you know, willing to, you know, when we first started, we had to have people who were willing to work at perhaps a lower wage and then build themselves up, things like this. We're now Very well funded, you know, low, you know, by ourselves, but we have a, we have a nice war chest built up because we have plans that we, you know, we need to have money set aside for, as I said, if we go for some other license or build the company into something bigger, we know there's going to be capital requirements or other funding requirements.

And we don't want to be reliant on going outside of ourselves to, to bring that in. We're willing to, but it's, it's much more convenient, safer to be able to make your own decisions without having an investor looking over your shoulder to, see

Stephen: Breathing down your neck, asking for monthly reports. I completely understand. Tim, this was an amazing conversation. Where can people find you if they want to connect with you or get to know more about LetKnow Pay?

Tim: I'm mostly on LinkedIn, so that's probably the best place. We have a LinkedIn page for LetKnow Pay as well.

Stephen: Awesome. Thank you so much Tim for joining the podcast.

Tim: Well, thank youu for Stephen. It was a pleasure.