Mike Townsend: Thanks for tuning into another episode of Around The Coin. Today's guest is Charles Rosenblatt. Heis the president of PayQuicker. Previously, he spent time as the Chief StrategyOfficer at Payoneer and many other payment companies. Before that we talkedabout what life is like as a Chief Strategy Officer for a large paymentscompany.

Mike Townsend: What he's doing day today, how he's thinking about. The landscape, the competitive landscape, the,the market flow, the changes really diving deep into what it takes and whatit's like to be in payments as Chief Strategy Officer, which I find incrediblyinteresting. They have raised, they being paid quicker about $5 million in seedfunding.

Mike Townsend: We discussed thefuture. Payments in the traditional landscape, what payment orchestration is,how it works, both on payments, coming into companies and coming out ofcompanies and why and how things are changing in this area. Lastly, we endedwith crypto, we talked about when and how crypto will undercut the existingpayment rails, how it'll happen and what are the triggers or signals.

Mike Townsend: That people shouldlook for when crypto comes into play. So hope you enjoy this conversation. Hereis Charles Rosenblatt.

Mike Townsend: Charles man. I'm excitedto chat with you. Welcome to Around The Coin podcast. I was looking throughyour background. You spent some time at Payoneer you've advised a few paymentcompanies. It looks like you've spent a lot of time in payments to kind of kickoff the conversation would love to learn from you what your experience has beenlike, you know, just kind of a brief overview of your background.

Charles Rosenblatt: Sure. Yeah. It's it'sbeen been interesting, I guess when you've been in payments for such a longtime and Mike it's, it's a pleasure speaking to you and enjoy the, the podcaststhat you do. So it's a pleasure to actually be on with you. You know, I've beenin payments for now 20 plus years. I started in the credit card space withcapital one and Washington mutual and chase, and then joined this new FinTechspace over the last.

Charles Rosenblatt: 10 years you know,working with hyper wallet pre to sale and helping with the sale to PayPalPayoneer, as you had mentioned with the going public via spec over the lastcouple years, and, you know, worked with a bunch of small fintechs during timeas advisors. You know, it's, it, it's amazing the change that's going on.

Charles Rosenblatt: If you're, if you'renot staying up to speed every 10 minutes on something different listening topodcasts, like yours, reading articles on websites, things will change beforeyou know it, and it's amazing all the innovation that's going on out in thespace.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. And when you,when you think of what you spend your time paying attention to, do you spend iton specifically within payments or crypto or kind of, how do you, how do youregiment your information diet?

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah, it's it, it'sinteresting. My probably lead with payments. Right. And payouts, even morespecifically, given the markets I've been in the last few years I still do lookat what the traditional players are doing, cuz even though you have the JPMorgan chases and the Barclays and the capital ones who are not as quick as theyou know, fintechs in the space, they still are making, you know, reasonablygood advances in different areas, especially in the more traditional paymentsareas, as far as crypto.

Charles Rosenblatt: You know, I keep myear to the ground. I probably do a little less reading in that space. Butunderstanding as, as we need to do about money movement around the globe. Andwhen you start looking at crypto as a way to move money in a faster, quickerway, that is something that I do keep top of mind and try to, you know, read asmuch as I can from that perspective and talk to folks in the industry.

Mike Townsend: Mm. And what was yourtime like? Maybe more specifically, what are the responsibilities of a ChiefStrategy Officer at Payoneer?  

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. So my, my, myduties there varied, right? So I, I ran the product organization there, sohelped build the new products around the globe. I helped build our corporatestrategy, which helped lead to our spec transaction that we did in June of lastyear.

Charles Rosenblatt: I led our M and aefforts which before I left, there was no M and a, that occurred. There was oneM and a transaction before I got there. And, and we, we, we were very cautiousand wanted to make sure we had the right sort of infrastructure in place beforewe made another. And I'm sure they're gonna do great things from thatperspective.

Charles Rosenblatt: And then building theoverall corporate strategy about where we're headed, where we wanna spend ourtime, where we want to allocate resources and things along those lines, youknow, from my perspective, it was sort of the culmination of. Running a lot ofbusinesses like I did at capital one and JP Morgan, chase and Washington mutualrunning part of the business that I did at hyper wallet before that, which isclearly another player in the payout space.

Charles Rosenblatt: The Chief StrategyOfficer sort of is one who gets to sort of look at and encompass and sort ofplay different roles. There was, you know, no chief revenue officer for aperiod of time while I was there before they brought in a really good one inRobert Clarkson, I pseudo played that role within the organization.

Charles Rosenblatt: So I, I kind of am aJack of all trades for good or for bad, I guess when you get old enough andhave done enough things, you wind up. Okay, playing a lot of different roles.And it was a lot of fun and, you know, I, I have a lot of faith and belief in,in Payoneer going forward as well.  

Mike Townsend: So if you were to joinhypothetically, a new large, you're to join existing large payment company, andyou have a very similar responsibility as a Chief Strategy Officer, I findChief Strategy Officer an interesting position because it is such a Jack of alltrades and it's, it's really such a, you know, it's the navigator to the ship,right?

Mike Townsend: It's like someone thathelps steer and make the determination about where to go. You mentioned M anda, you mentioned product, you mentioned the I P through the spec. How did yousay we'll take the strategy of the company? How did you sort of go about this?Did you kind of prepare some report? I mean, tactically, what are you doing todo that?

Charles Rosenblatt: So it's interesting,Mike, I, I use the phrase a lot Strat, right? And that's my sort of belief. Iam McKinsey and Bain are amazing at what they do as companies, but a lot of thetime they present decks that wind up, you know, sitting on shelves andexecutives, offices. And because those companies don't have the ability toexecute on the strategy that those guys are recommending.

Charles Rosenblatt: My belief isunderstanding a landscape meeting with all the leaders around the company,understanding the operational blood and guts of a company, and then creating astrategy based on ability to execute and able to do that. And so that was a bigpiece of my time at Payoneer was actually learning, understanding the greatleaders that they had at that company.

Charles Rosenblatt: And also the abilityto, you know, execute on things and building a logical strategy both internallyand externally on what they're doing. And as I moved to PayQuicker, took thatsame sort of assessment overall, needing to understand exactly what we can doand what we can't do and what resources we have as a company, and then creatingan execution strategy based on that, I think strategy as a, you know, a lot youstrategy offers may go on and create the best vision that they've ever seen forthe next five to 10 years.

Charles Rosenblatt: But if the company hasno chance of hitting that vision, then all you do is paid someone a lot ofmoney to not actually help push you forward.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. So, so like ifyou bring it almost down, even a level from a abstraction from that and saywhat makes a great, what's the difference between a, a good or even averageChief Strategy Officer and a great one.

Mike Townsend: Is it the detail ofthe report that they're providing, or like how, how would you think about theevolution or development of a chief strategy position?  

Charles Rosenblatt: I, I, I think someonewho plays in the chief strategy position should be able to take the jobs of thechief revenue officer, the chief operations officer, the chief product officer,maybe even the CFO from a, you know, probably not the details, but the generalunderstanding of the business.

Charles Rosenblatt: They need to be ableto understand how to play those roles and how their strategy will affect thoseroles. If you have someone who only knows something from a very conceptualbasis, they're gonna come in with conceptual answers. Right. And I think thefact is that, you know, from my history, I've played those roles at differentcompanies before.

Charles Rosenblatt: And I felt like atPayoneer, we had great people who were either in those roles or, or gettinghired into those roles. And we were able to look at the strategy, the storythat we shared with wall street, during the spec and the, the post back period.And we were able to tell a story and drive the company to something that was,again, as I said, executable, right.

Charles Rosenblatt: Not just sort of theup and to the right story that you may do in a VC presentation that, you know,hopes you're gonna get there. But isn't really in a lot of cases based in.  

Mike Townsend: Mm. And how muchunknown goes into it. I mean, a whole idea of strategy is like similar towartime strategy. There's just, it's really being able to process and makesense of a limited amount of imperfect information and then take the, thecorrect course of action.

Mike Townsend: And I I'm personallyfascinated by, you know, kind of old wartime generals and stories. Yeah. Causeit's, it's, I mean, it's obviously it's a different, it's a differentbattleground entirely, right? Where no one's hurting each other physically, butthere is healthy competition between companies, especially large companies.

Mike Townsend: And I wonder likewhat, what are, what's it look like in the war room? Like you're, you'repulling in, you know, what, what are the things that yeah. You, you really wantto have access to as a Chief Strategy Officer?

Charles Rosenblatt: So essentially, youknow, it's one really important to be surrounded by people who can thinkstrategically as well. Right. And that's not necessarily members of yourstrategy group, but it's the business line leaders in different. and I feellike the best way to understand strategy is about, as you said in the war time,do I attack to the left? Do I attack to the right? Do I attack at night? Do Iattack during the day?

Charles Rosenblatt: Do I attack throughthe air? Do I attack through the water? Well, in business, you only have a setamount of resources. There's not unlimited resources, whether it's people ordollars, and you need to understand if you're gonna attack one business, youknow, you're not gonna attack another. And what are the opportunity costs for oneversus the other, both in the short term and the long term, both in the publicmessaging versus the private messaging, how are you allocating those resources?

Charles Rosenblatt: And so in order tomake those decisions and provide that guidance, you really need the bestunderstanding from your leaders within each of those. To say, if I gave you 10million to put towards your business, what kind of return on investment could Iget? What's the timeline on the return of investment that I could get?

Charles Rosenblatt: What would you do withthat 10 million almost as if they're all small little companies within yourcompany and you get that feedback. And as a Chief Strategy Officer, and as anexecutive in the company, what you need to then do is you weigh all of thoseand figure out what's the best course of action.

Charles Rosenblatt: Not only for revenue,which may be your goal, which by the way, take a step back. You could havemultiple targets as a company. You could want revenue, you could want EBITDA,you could want client growth, right? You could want diversification ofgeography, which was something that was, is very big at Payoneer.

Charles Rosenblatt: And they've, they'vetaken steps forward, right? So you have to figure out what your target you wantis right. You may not, you, you may care in a war like you talked about. Iwanna win the war without losing any soldiers. Well, if that's your goal,you're gonna take a very different. of, I wanna win the door war in the nexttwo days.

Charles Rosenblatt: And if people die inalong the way, that's fine. As long as I win in two days, it's again the samething in business. Thank God that people aren't dying nor should they in war,but that's a whole separate, you know, conversation. But it's about how do youwanna meet your strategic goals, which is then the overlying strategy that wespoke about a minute ago.

Charles Rosenblatt: And how do I allocatemy resources in the best possible way in order to meet those goals in thetimeline that we wanna hit? Mm-hmm I think that's the fun of it, right? I mean,when push comes to shove being a Chief Strategy Officer or being a president ofthe company, now it is a lot of fun because you're getting to make those toughdecisions.

Charles Rosenblatt: As long as you havereally good people working with you side by side, under you, over you, whateverthey happen to be, to be able to get the right information. Because the key inthis, you kind of talked about information here from it is having. the rightinformation and inputs, right? Yeah. How do you know when someone's beinghonest with you?

Charles Rosenblatt: How do you know whensomeone is full of it? How do you know when that they tell you that 10million's gonna be worth 50 million? Mm-hmm what's the likelihood, you know, I,I tell a story, take two seconds. Mm-hmm when I was at capital one way backwhen, you know, we used to go through it prioritizations and we used to have acutoff at some cases that were like 576% ROI and anything below it, we weren'tmoving forward.

Charles Rosenblatt: And I used to jokewith my boss at the time, like, can I write a check for a hundred grand andpick up this 458% ROI project and funded myself. And, you know, the, the artand science to that was understanding who was inflating, their numbers, whowasn't inflating their numbers, what was the likelihood of it to occur versusthe optimistic side of it to occur?

Charles Rosenblatt: Because the fact iseven in that case, We didn't have enough resources to work on projects that intheory, and I say, quote, unquote had 476% return and it's all about choicesand what I, what I pushed very much as a Chief Strategy Officer, I pushed verymuch at Payoneer. I push at PayQuicker as well is making conscious decisions,right?

Charles Rosenblatt: A lot of businessbreaks apart because people aren't making conscious decisions and don'tunderstand the outcomes or the unintended outcomes of those decisions. And Ithink as long as you're making conscious decisions, no matter what companyyou're at, you're gonna be in significantly better shape as a leadership team.And as a company with its value.  

Mike Townsend: As opposed to justdoing what you have been doing, keep pushing kind of negating the whole idea.Like I think of. Maybe a quick essential company that has, I almost think ofthem as being famous for not making any any decision to change beingblockbuster, right? Like the Internet's coming, Netflix is coming content ismoving to, you know, digital formats yet.

Mike Townsend: Blockbuster is like,Hey, we got a store come on in rent the DVDs. It's like, it works. And youknow, maybe they moved too. Obviously they, they tried to at some point, but itwas too little too late. And I would imagine that just gotta be a function ofthe lack of sophistication from the executive team.  

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. And I can't, I,you know, I don't wanna bemoan the blockbuster executive team as I it's, but,but, but you know, the bottom line is if they said, Hey, look, our numbers are,are growing in certain areas and this is how we're growing. They're lookingblindly at the fact that the number is growing. Right. And, you know, justbecause you're growing at 1%, if the market's growing at 40%, you're losing.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. Yeah. And, andthat's where people need, you can't have blinders about what's going on aroundyou, you know, if you had an investment portfolio and the stock market was up40% for the year and your portfolio manager told you, you were up 3%, you'dprobably fire him or her. Hmm. Right. Yeah. But if you look generally and said,well, the interest rate on the savings account is 1% and I'm making 3%, sothat's good.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right? It's adifferent way of thinking. And so understanding competition, understandingwhere the market's going, making sure you're on top of the market, both from anM and a perspective people you want to add on and people who are doing greatthings. I mean, if you look at the banks today and Jamie diamonds come out witha lot of comments that JP Morgan has made recently about fintechs andadvantages and disadvantage.

Charles Rosenblatt: But what happenedrealistically? And I'm gonna date myself a little was in when oh 9, 10, 11, 12.When that sort of economy went down the last time, what all of these largebanks did was went and fired all of their innovation people, right? They said,we need to invest in our core business. We need to be able to issue creditcards or open bank accounts or whatever it is.

Charles Rosenblatt: And all thoseinnovation people left and created all these FinTech startups that now thesecompanies are going back and buying for 80 times the cost of what it would'vedone to just build it themselves. If they had held those exact same people attheir company. Yeah. Right. And I think there's a fear of repeating itself insome ways, especially as the economy may or may not hit a recession coming up.

Charles Rosenblatt: You know, thesecompanies who are laying off 10%, 20%, I just saw CARNA did another round oflayoffs today. You, you have all these people who are laying off really smartpeople. Who are going to go found their own new fintechs in some way, shape orform. And those companies are gonna come back and now buy them at 50 times thecost of if they had just held those employees and innovated internally.

Charles Rosenblatt: So, I mean, I thinkthat happened 10 years ago. I think that's gonna happen again.  

Mike Townsend: Well, in some way, Ialmost think of it as maybe those fintechs just could not have been startedinternally in those companies, like many of the projects within Google. I mean,Google specifically, you know, is kind of famous for allocating one day ofemployee time to do whatever you want, you know, go explore and brainstorm andbuild, and then people go and they leave Google and Google will say, great go.

Mike Townsend: And you keep usupdated on what you do, because I think there's a, a recognition, a healthyrecognition within that company. Google is saying we can't create the culture.Of this new product, like to wrap it into our existing sales funnel and ourexisting go to market strategy. Like it, it just doesn't have that same popthat a new brand and new founder and new excitement and new capital would have.

Mike Townsend: And so I think it'salmost like it's like offshoots, you know, you, you kind of need fresh brandsand fresh perspectives outside of the umbrella. Like I, you know, could capitalone realistically have started, you know, all the fintechs that came out of it.Prob I'm guessing probably not maybe some of 'em, but probably not.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Yeah.  

Charles Rosenblatt: I mean, it'sinteresting. We, we had something called the invention factory, which was thefirst place I worked at at capital one, which had its own building. It was inits own area. It was fully staffed from call center to operations, tomarketing, et cetera. And we came up with some pretty cool new products, butyou're right.

Charles Rosenblatt: They were within thescope of what the business was today. Right. I mean, they were credit cardproducts, right. They weren't. Brand new, you know, lending things. Mm-hmm thathad nothing to do with credit cards or things along those lines. So I thinkyou're right inherently. But I think the question gets used, there's gotta be abetter way for corporate America to harness that.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. And I'm notsure I know the answer, but to go and pay multiple billions of dollars a coupleyears later, from the same people that were sitting in your innovation group afew years earlier, there's gotta be a better way for JP Morgan to be able tosay, Hey, I'm gonna let these 15 employees go, let's strike a deal.

Charles Rosenblatt: Let's cut. 'em a checkfor XYZ as startup capital. And we're gonna take 5% of their new startup with aright to purchase it down the road. Yeah. There's gotta be some innovativethinking along those lines from these larger companies, or it's gonna repeatitself, which again, as someone who's at a, you know, at a smaller companytoday and have been in a smaller company, whether it's a hyper wild or even aPayoneer from that sense, Have gotten to take advantage of that, right?

Charles Rosenblatt: There's gotta be asmarter path for these larger companies to invest in people. Cuz really that'swhen push comes to shove, when VCs start and they're raising, you know, seedrounds of capital, it's probably 50% the idea, but it's 50% the inventor.Right. And it may even be in some cases, 95%, the inventor and five, 5% theidea.

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. And you wouldthink that these large companies would figure out that when really good talentis leaving and leaving to go to the FinTech or the startup space to startsomething new as a way to get involved in that much earlier than they do todayto save them a lot of down the road.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. I heard onetime. The interview it was an interview with the CEO of Stripe. PatrickCollison. Somebody asked him why is there not more innovation and successfulproducts coming out of existing, you know, banks and FinTech companies. And hegave like, why are they, why does Chase's website to this day still clunky andugly?

Mike Townsend: Like, are they not?What is it? And he said something along the lines of, they just can't attractto the kinds of people who care enough to build great products. And I thinkthere's a cultural element. Like you could have all the money in the world andyou could pull in one or two people, but ultimately you're still kind ofpushing a rock up hill constantly.

Mike Townsend: Whereas it it's. The,so I think companies who try to create this in-house culture of innovation, ifit's not rooted in the DNA of the company, then it's difficult to really pourpeople in. And I, I think Google was kind of one of those companies that seemsto have that as like the core foundation, so they can launch all thesedifferent products and services that, that work.

Mike Townsend: But to your point, Ithink this is the middle ground, which is companies that are large, take somebudget off the balance sheet, hire some VCs or take 'em within the company andsay, we're just gonna put this capital to work investing in outside funds likefidelity does that. I mean, they're, they're kind of one of larger VCs out therefunds out there investing in, in companies and at least that way they getaccess to it.

Mike Townsend: They could see what'sgoing on. They get access to like the pitch decks, the deals it's anintelligence arm.

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. Well, and that'swhat, that's what, I mean, sorry to interrupt you, Mike, but mm-hmm, , youknow, when, when I was at capital one, we had a VC firm that was part ofcapital, one called north hill ventures led by some really, really smart VC.

Charles Rosenblatt: And really what itwas, was the ability for us to start seeing deal flow at capital one in thosestartups back in 2000 and 2001 and 2002 that no one else did. In fact, my firstjob at capital one was actually the interface with the VC where I would actuallylook at the VC deal flow that was coming in and evaluate it for capital onecorporate deals while the VC was evaluating it for a venture capital deal.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. Yeah. And I, Ithink that's a really smart way that some of these companies have gone to, infact, there are some companies out there and I'm gonna leave the one I'mthinking of unnamed. Who have started VC funds to look at other stuff, which isactually better than their core products that they are today.

Charles Rosenblatt: And that's whatthey're using their private equity or VC money to do is invest in other peoplecuz they feel they're better at spotting talent than actually buildingsomething themselves. Yeah. But you know, I I'll go back to another story. Sowhen I was at a company called de Shaw, which is a large hedge fund in New YorkI think they're third or fourth largest hedge fund in the world today.

Charles Rosenblatt: And they started Juno.So I don't know if you probably dating myself. Juno was like the first freeinternet service when they used to have disks around and it was free. And therewas this gentleman who was there, who left there in 1995 who had this idea. AndI, I, I hear this story anecdotally to be fair.

Charles Rosenblatt: And he went up toDavid Shaw who is a very, very wealthy man. One of the most brilliant peoplearound and said, I have this idea to start this online book bookstore. Youwanna build it within our company and the in theory, the response was, what doyou mean just books? And he said, I'll invest in you cause I trust you, butwe're not gonna do it as a company.

Charles Rosenblatt: And of course, JeffBezos at that point got in the car and went across the country and startedAmazon. Hmm. Right. Yeah. I don't think Amazon, even as innovative as de Shawwas as innovative as it was starting, the first internet company would, youknow, I'm not sure Amazon would've become Amazon. If, if Jeff hadn't goneacross the country, taken some really good people from de Shaw with them andgone and started Amazon and built it to what it was.

Charles Rosenblatt: So I, I think even themost innovative companies somehow may need a release from that corporatestructure, but it doesn't mean that corporate structure can't be financingbehind it. Right. So they, they get their share. Again, I don't know the exactstory. My understanding is David put money in that and probably has done quitewell from his, his, his early pre-state in Amazon.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right? Yeah. But Ithink that's something that people need to look at. And if you're not alwayslooking at new deal flow, right. And no city has city ventures and JP Morgan'sJP, like if you're not looking and seeing deal flow, you're never going to beable to be as cutting edge and innovative as, as you wanna be.

Charles Rosenblatt: Mm. And that'sexciting for us, you know, we just launched a brand new platform ourself, whichI'm happy to talk about later, but as part of it, we're getting people comingto us saying, Hey, we'd like to be part of that platform. Well, that's greatfor me because that then opens up the door to investors partners, no matterwhat they're gonna be right down the road, who wouldn't have been involved inthe, in, in any other fashion.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. So let me ask youabout your, your current endeavor in this way. So you're now with PayQuickerwhich you joined, didn't start operating as a president. What was it in themarket? What sort of market trends coming from almost a, a chief strategyperspective? What market trend did you see that got you excited enough aboutthis business to join it?

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah, so, I mean, thebusiness has, has two pieces to it. One of which I was involved in many, manyyears ago which is global payouts in a couple industries, including the directselling space, which is considered the multi-level marketing space where, youknow, I think in sometimes people consider it high risk or frowned upon becausethere's the one or two cases of people who have acted badly in that space.

Charles Rosenblatt: But in general, theconcept is the same. They were the first set of gig workers that were ever outthere and they are still the gig workers today, right? The person, the womanwho sells Tupperware. Is a gig worker, right? Not the same way you think of anUber driver, but in the same sense, what I looked at was the technology thatwas built behind it.

Charles Rosenblatt: And the technologythat PayQuicker had was world class. And it was world class serving a sector offolks who candidly probably didn't need world class technology. They could,they could probably use really good technology, but didn't need the world classtechnology and being able to level, take those bones and look at opportunitiesin the market, which I'm able to do using my strategy lens.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right? What we, whatwe figured out was there's no sort of there's payment orchestration. And, andif you're not familiar with that term payment orchestration really is the ideaof creating a lowest cost routing among a bunch of players who are bidding foryour business. It's a very common business in the pay in space.

Charles Rosenblatt: And I, I talk aboutpay ins, which is. You know, needing to buy things. So if I'm Amazon, I use apayment orchestration service, so I can run certain transactions through oneprocessor and another transaction through another processor.  

Mike Townsend: And, and no oneinterrupt you pay in the idea of pay in is money coming into a company.

Charles Rosenblatt: Correct. So you go andbuy one of these lovely speakers from Amazon. You give a credit card, they havemultiple processors of which they choose from to run that transaction. And thatis what you call a payment orchestration platform for pay ins, right? So theychoose the cheapest routing. They cheap choose the best se the quickest reply.

Charles Rosenblatt: They can do it on numberof variables, but they use multiple partners. So Amazon, for example, likelydoes not use one company to take all their pay ins across the globe. They usemultiple of them and they use a payment orchestration layer in order toessentially decide which on every single transaction, which ones it gonna go.

Charles Rosenblatt: Hmm. Okay. On thepayout outside of the house, which is paying gig workers marketplaces 10 99,workers, insurance payments, clinical trial payments, gaming payments foractually the creator economy is a great example, paying out to the creatoreconomy from a, a platform like a a sub stack or someone along those lines,right.

Charles Rosenblatt: They basically have tojust go with whoever they sign, right? And there are multiple players, butthere aren't a lot of players who can do us and global. There aren't a lot ofplayers that can pay to someone's card someone's bank account someone'se-wallet crypto, etc And what the bones of the PayQuicker technology allowedwas actually creating this payment orchestration layer for payouts.

Charles Rosenblatt: So we have over 10banks, we have over 200 countries over 40 currencies. So if you need to payoutsomeone, Mike. You would basically take our API and be connected to all of themthrough one API, like a common application for college, right? So if you applythrough a common application, you can fill out one application and apply to 15schools at one time.

Charles Rosenblatt: Well, when you fillout our application become a client, we hook you up with 15 of the topproviders who do payments all around the globe and they actually proactivelybid for your business on a market to market basis. So if you're paying someonein the us, you'll have 15 people bidding for the lowest price for you to beable to pay out or to do it the quickest or to do it, you know, in multipleother ways, based on your funding currency.

Charles Rosenblatt: And then let's say youwant to pay to Vietnam. We have a different group of folks, or maybe some ofthe same who will bid for that. And so on a market to market basis on atransaction to transaction basis, we have a technical infrastructure basically.That allows you to route in the cheapest way. So we've basically created awholesale model that businesses can get to do payouts all around the world,whether you're a marketplace, a gig economy, et cetera, that's something that'snot out there today.

Charles Rosenblatt: It's never beenestablished. And based on, you know, my view of the market, I thought it wassomething that was necessary. It's also completely white labeled. So if you'rean Uber or you are a meta or you are a, you know, sub stack or whoever youhappen to be, it's completely done within your ecosystem, all you're doing ispulling APIs and doing in that way.

Charles Rosenblatt: And what's funny isthat's the technology that was built kind of like AWS was tested at Amazon. Andthen it was relaunched to the world. We tested this technology in the DSO spacehave over 300 DSO clients. We what's DSO billion direct selling, sorry, themultilevel marketing space. We pay out over billions of dollars with millionsof.

Charles Rosenblatt: And now we're takingthis technology have turned it a little and offering it out to everyone. Andthat that's formed from years of, of reading as you talked about. Totally.  

Mike Townsend: So why do you thinkthat this technology, if you almost take a step back from the individualcompany So why is it that today? This is as relevant as it is, is there, Iimagine that the company started building this years ago, but was there somestructural layer that made this possible today where as you explain it, itfeels kind of obvious.

Mike Townsend: It's like you want anefficiently routed payment system for money coming in and money coming out. Weall live in different countries with different payment options. Was it somekind of just no one went after it or...?

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah, I, I, I thinksome of it is mindset, right? So let me give you an example. A lot of our partnerswho are great, usually go sign people up.

Charles Rosenblatt: They think ofthemselves as how what's the transaction volume you're gonna send, whatminimums are you gonna pay me, et cetera. And no one really has said to them,no, I want you to sort of compete for the business. Right. I wanna create anopen market. Usually a provider, you know, XYZ company will go and they'll signwith one of our 10 partners and that's it.

Charles Rosenblatt: They'll sign withthem. And that's who they do business with. And I think what's happened. Andthere are companies out there who have basically in other industries, like I'lluse an Expedia. As an example, Expedia has done an amazing job as doesbooking.com and others of saying, why in the world should you search for onehotel?

Charles Rosenblatt: Don't go to Hilton'swebsite, go to our website, tell us the criteria that you want and we'll beable to do it. And I think that's, by the way you asked about research. Most ofthe time I spend researching things, I look at other industries to see what Ican port into this industry. Right. I read as much about travel and hotels and,you know, sales of cosmetics and you know, what Amazon's doing and others as Ido about.

Charles Rosenblatt: You know what otherpen payment fintechs are doing, because sometimes things like this are actuallyextractable. And so I think inherently, this was sort of an idea based on whatI had seen in the market, the ID, the desire for white labels, the desire, andwhat's worked in other markets like an Expedia, and then looked at thetechnology that PayQuicker, had underlying it and said, my God, we can do thiswith this technology cuz candidly, a lot of the companies in this space have 15year old technology that I joke is a bunch of rubber band balls all over eachother.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. And they can't,they couldn't sort of pivot. I, I hate to use the word pivot cuz the companydidn't pivot, but, but they couldn't pivot their technology from one industryto another or one application to another. And we've been fortunate enoughbetween the leaders at our company and my relationships.

Charles Rosenblatt: when you've been infinance for a long time, you know, a lot of people and my feeling is I've growna immense network of people who trust me and I trust them and they know that Ican help their business cuz I've grown businesses at other places. And luckilya lot of them are in leadership positions at some of the companies that werepart of our network.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right? Yeah. And Ithink they believe in this model because inherently, if you think about it, I'ma retail channel for them. So if I have Vera as a partner, as a great exampleof one of our long-term partners, I'm bringing them business. They don't haveto do directly overall. So I become a channel for them.

Charles Rosenblatt: It may be a littlelower margin because we're doing it wholesale and we're passing the wholesaleonto our clients, but I can become a channel for new business for them from asales perspective. Meanwhile, my clients are getting best in class rates thatthey wouldn't get from Vera alone, because I have volume of seven times theirsize because of all the people who have joined the platform.

Mike Townsend: Got it. And so itsounds like a lot of the relationships with people, the people that you'rereferring to would be the, both the customers, which is the businesses thatwanna send money out to their vendors typically or other yeah. Vendorsprimarily. And then it would be the pay, the merchant payment processors, forwhich typically there had been an individual one-off relationship.

Mike Townsend: But now you're saying,it's kind of like, it's not an open marketplace, but it's a, like you saywholesale, you have a bunch of different payment providers and differentcountries. And then they give quotes and,

Charles Rosenblatt: and I'm happy to bringany of them. Mike, anyone who comes to me and says they want to be part of mynetwork to provide payout rails.

Charles Rosenblatt: All I say to them isI'm not gonna sign a contract with a minimum. Yeah. You put your rails outthere. We'll connect to you. I can connect you in less than six weeks with,with, with what we've. Yeah, right through our APIs. And if you provide thebest price, you're gonna win a lot of business. And if you provide a crummyprice, yeah.

Charles Rosenblatt: You're gonna win nobusiness. Got it. That's up to you. So I am, you know, I don't have any sort ofanyone who wants to join, we were just presenting it innovate as we launchedthis product and I had five or 10 different people say, Hey, can we join thenetwork? And I said, sure, you're welcome to join the network.

Charles Rosenblatt: Here's the deal. It'swholesale pricing. And we're gonna provide this marketplace and you're gonnawin what you, you, you get to win what you kill, right?  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. So where doesthis go? I mean, when I look at this from a high level, I'm like, all right. Sowe have in, you know, probably decades ago we have credit card companies, theywanna build a network, they pay people a percentage to go and sell the creditcard, terminal, sign up the merchant, sign up the, you know, restaurant to usethis device to accept credit cards is like a new idea.

Mike Townsend: Then you have allthese people, these merchant payment processor, businesses that basically arelarge sales organizations that sell into merchants. And then that grows andgrows and grows. It becomes kind of a whole industry and it gets extremelycompetitive and commoditized because no one's really offering much value overthe others.

Mike Townsend: And so they focus onthings like support or, you know, business coaching or things outside of theactual transaction, but it's still largely. Like yellow pages, like it's, it'skind of a pivot from the existing commoditized business. And then now you'reeven further pushing this down the pipe, which is you're making it morecommoditized.

Mike Townsend: You're like, you don'teven have to do anything. You, you know, you as a payment processor, you justbolt onto us except the bid in the ask price, you're creating a marketplace forit. Now I would imagine they all have relatively the same cost. You know,they're all at the end of the day, they're all just connecting banks to banksand using the credit card rail.

Mike Townsend: So I would imaginethis kind of gets converges on like, you know, bare minimum and then maybe itgets consolidated. Like what's the end game here. Do you think? Does cryptocome into play here? And like...  

Charles Rosenblatt: I think crypto, Ithink crypto could come into play here as a, as a method of moving money.Right. So as you said, Some of these folks have volume that is more thanothers.

Charles Rosenblatt: Some of them haveprice advantages. Now some of them have markets, right? So mm-hmm, some peoplework in Vietnam and other people don't work in Vietnam. Right? Some people inthe us, if I'm doing a us ACH transaction or you RTP transaction you're right.I probably have 15 people who all have the same exact cost structure andwhoever's willing to come in at the lowest margin on their cost structure, butstill profitable is gonna win that business.

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. But there areother areas of the world where there are differentiations, whether it's speed,whether it's accepting in currencies. So we accept in 30 currencies across theglobe. Believe me, not every provider in our ecosystem can do that. That'sgotta be if I start being. Yeah. And if I start being able to accept in Bitcoinand E you know, doge Bitcoin and all these other things, again, I'm not takingthe risk.

Charles Rosenblatt: I never hold thefunds. I don't have those licenses.  

Mike Townsend: Who's you, when yousay you say I, you mean  

Charles Rosenblatt: I PayQuicker, so,  

Mike Townsend: okay. Got it.  

Charles Rosenblatt: So I'm a, literally anabstraction layer in the middle mm-hmm that routes things mm-hmm overall, I'mtelling you, we talked about actually, ironically, I'll go back to it. Wetalked about the strategy and that chief strategies officer's job of creating decisiontrees, right?

Mike Townsend: I'm the decision treein the middle here. Yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah, no, I get oneither side.  

Charles Rosenblatt: Totally. Yeah. Arethose are those outputs? I do believe so to go back to a point I've believed formany, many, many years, that FX was something that was gonna converge down tonext to nothing over the course of time. I believe banks, aren't gonna be ableto get away with charging their customers three to 5% every time they take inSD and Europe, I think transfer wise, which is now wise, did a great job manyyears ago on the consumer front.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right of saying, let'sget the rates down to 1%. You can do transactions at 75 basis points. I shouldbe clear that our platform is a B to B platform or B the small B. So I count,like for instance, Uber paying an Uber driver, Amazon paying a marketplaceholder a, you know, sub stack paying a creator that is B2B in my considerationbecause the person on the other side may be a small B, but there a Bnonetheless, right?

Charles Rosenblatt: I think that FXinherently my hypothesis and my belief is FX over time was gonna get condenseddown. If I'm part of the story that helps get that condensed down over time,that's fine with me, cuz I believe it was gonna get there anyway. Right?Eventually in an open market, people are gonna compete. If you're the only onewith Vietnam, by the way, even on my system, you can get away with a two and ahalf percent FX charge to Vietnam.

Charles Rosenblatt: If you're the only onewho's doing it. right. If you look at a company like Delo, who has created avery interesting business in south America at huge margins, right? Someone'sgonna come in and try to cut those margins down. I don't know who may, who theplayers may be, but it will happen. And so all I'm doing is pushing thatcompetitive nature to drive the lowest possible cost.

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah, yeah. For ourclients who are the people making payments around the globe and I think itwould happen anyway, Mike, I think it's just a matter that we may be making it quicker.

Mike Townsend: Yeah, no, I thinkkayak is a good example and it's, it, it frankly feels like there'll be acouple kayaks out there, but ultimately probably not more than two or threebecause you, you just need some what would you call that like comparability,you know, kayak like to keep kayak, honest, you need a like Google, right?

Mike Townsend: Google has a, I thinka similar service or who's a competitor kayak, like I can't think of thename.  

Charles Rosenblatt: I was gonna saybooking, but booking. I'm sure they would consider something.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah, yeah. Somewherelike that. Yeah. So that makes total sense. And then do you think crypto willjust patch onto that or just add onto that as a payment option that effectivelyundercuts the market by being cheaper and faster?

Charles Rosenblatt: Just like a virtualcard is a form factor for a physical card, right? Mm-hmm crypto becomes a formfactor for another payment around the globe. The problem with crypto today, whyit's not gonna undercut anything anytime soon, is these exchanges want to takehuge bid ask spreads, right? What do you mean? So until meaning, if all I'mdoing is if I can buy Bitcoin at 2,800 and sell it at 2,900, I'm making it or19,000, 19,100, that's a much bigger spread than I can trade U S D to Euro whenI'm only paying 15 basis points of FX spread.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. So why in theworld would I choose to use Bitcoin as my method of, of movement? When thespread on that is larger than the FX transaction spread at 15 basis points nowto the common us person, who's paying 3% to a bank. It's really easy forBitcoin to come in at a 1% FX spread more or less and beat a bank.

Charles Rosenblatt: But as you starttalking about corporate payments, which we're doing, where people are paying10, 15, 20, 25 basis points, unless Bitcoin or the other cryptos begin tochange their bid, ask spread for conversion. I don't see why anyone would usethat other than people want to get paid into that currency.

Charles Rosenblatt: As you look atmillennials, and this is a strong belief of us at PayQuicker in general is webelieve in beneficiary directed payments. The beneficiary who's, the pay shouldbe able to choose how, when, where they want their money. Crypto is an additionthat people want their money that way. But if it turns out crypto is a lot moreexpensive than regular currency or getting it on a card or getting it intotheir EWA at, you know, Paytm in India as an example, right.

Charles Rosenblatt: There's not gonna be amad rush to crypto. Right. And so I think crypto, and again, this isn't myexpertise, but I think crypto needs to move to a point where the bid ask spreadis down to five or 10 basis points between it. And if they get to that pointwith the general public and with businesses, I believe a lot of thistransaction volume can move there.

Charles Rosenblatt: And we are very happyto add crypto exchanges. We use the MasterCard network for crypto today. So asyou know, anyone with a MasterCard can buy or sell crypto on any wallet, wehave a MasterCard that links into our platform that anyone can use. But as faras crypto, the crypto transactions until the FX is competitive with the FX marketsout there externally and by banks.

Charles Rosenblatt: I wouldn't, I'm notsure why anyone would want it. Well, do you see it?  

Mike Townsend: Tell me if you see itdifferently than, than how I'm about to lay it out. So I would see Amazon forinstance, is gonna man manage their books, using us dollar, everything in theiraccounting system. U S D say, one of the vendors wants to receive Bitcoin.

Mike Townsend: Now they're gonna usea tool like yours to orchestrate the. Now it could happen one of two ways.There could be, there could be a company that Amazon interacts with thatprovides the actual exchange itself directly, or they can interact with anorchestration payments company who then has various liquidity providers thatoffer different exchange rates.

Mike Townsend: Cuz the, the, the,when you say the bid NAS price is 5% or some large amount, that's justreflective of the amount of liquidity in the market. If there's not a lot ofliquidity, then the transaction costs are high. But when there's a ton ofliquidity, people have, you know, millions and billions of Bitcoin and millionsand billions of us dollars, then those transactions can happen much cheaper.

Mike Townsend: So I would imagineyou'd have, there could be an orchestration layer that pay that Amazoninteracts with and that orchestration layer like, you know, analogous to, orcould even be PayQuicker then says, okay, we're gonna open up these variousliquidity pools. So if you wanna provide Bitcoin, exactly. And, and you wannaget paid for that.

Mike Townsend: We're gonna have amarketplace and you could say, well, put in, you could have wallets and peoplecould deposit Bitcoin, and then you could set up those exchanges and thenpeople could set their transaction costs. They could, there's like a floatingbid ask price where it's like, okay, it's 0.2. And then, and then the, thedollars go from Amazon through you guys into, and then you pay out the theliquidity provider and then the liquidity provider sends a Bitcoin to the endvendor.

Charles Rosenblatt: That that's right.That's exactly what would happen. Right? So Amazon would pay, you know, the ahundred dollars to the person. Our, our lowest cost routing mechanism wouldtake all the, what I call FX brokers. But if you think about as crypto FXbrokers, right, would take all the crypto FX brokers take their rates for the ahundred dollars.

Charles Rosenblatt: It would tell Mikewho's receiving the money that we found someone who is, you know, a hundreddollars equals 0.0 X of a Bitcoin. we would ask that person where they wanttheir money, what coin, whether it's Coinbase or any of the other wallets, wewould send the a hundred dollars. Or actually, since we don't touch the money,Amazon would send the a hundred dollars to whoever that, you know, exchangeprovider is.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. And then thatperson would give the bank instructions for their crypto wallet and they wouldmove it. There that's exactly how our platform works today. It just doesn't doit with crypto. The interesting thing is this. I don't want you to pick Amazon,so I'm just gonna say company XYZ. Sure. A lot of our clients today pay out in30 different currencies.

Charles Rosenblatt: So if they have a usoffice, they pay out in the us, but if they're taking transactions inAustralia, they don't wanna actually, as a corporate convert their money fromAustralian dollars to S D, which then they need to go back and pay their folksin, in Australian dollars. So we take in Australian dollars and pay out Australiandollars.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. And so all of asudden now, between adding crypto to the equation and adding the ability totake in through our partners, 30, 40 currencies around the globe, you now havecreated ubiquitous market, regardless what you're paying in on, and regardlesswhat you're paying out on. And it's just the best company who provides thatrate wins.

Charles Rosenblatt: And all I'm doing asan exchange owner is I'm charging a flat SAS fee of my corporate clients whouse it and passing through for the most part, the wholesale rate. Soessentially we're a market maker in a way we're, we're not a market whip makerin a way that we're gonna share the different exchange rates.

Charles Rosenblatt: we're just gonna takethe parameters and tell you who wins  

Mike Townsend: mm. On the back.Right? Right. No, I understand your, your position feels very clear. You'remore like the, the router to the system. I'm, I'm interested in, in how cryptoundercut, like when and how, what did the indicators in which crypto would allof a sudden, like break the dam and just, you know, all the water flows throughand it's like, this is just a better option.

Mike Townsend: And then it's a madrace. Like when visa, MasterCard came out in the, I think eighties or so it wasjust, everyone realized like light bulbs just went on. It's like, this is justbetter. And there's a thousand merchant processors that will, that will happenin crypto. I'm convinced. And what I wonder about is what will be the indicatorsis that, you know, one thing I think about is a slightly different dynamic,there is a liquidity provider for, you know, call 'em like a, they're notreally a.

Mike Townsend: Processor likeliquidity provider is doing is doing a different thing. You know, they'rebasically putting up a pool of Bitcoin and they're saying through this pool,I'm willing to accept trades at this price. Whereas a merchant processor issaying, I have a relationship to a bank in this country and that bank is gonnacharge me a fee.

Mike Townsend: And so I have somemargin that I'm gonna add to that and quote your price. So the cost to dobusiness is different. Like one is a cost of capital in, in the form ofBitcoin. The other is a contract with a bank. So you see it is different inthis.  

Charles Rosenblatt: If would happen withbuy now pay later. Right? So if you think about what buy now pay later is donein the us and globally is there's disintermediating, the visa, MasterCardstructure.

Charles Rosenblatt: Mm-hmm right, becausethey have a different relationship. Right, right. And so if crypto becomestransactional on the pay inside, right. And now people are paying like to like,meaning. you sold your, your scarf on Epsy on Etsy for one Bitcoin or oneEthereum or whatever it happens to be. And you get 80% of that.

Charles Rosenblatt: What you sold all of asudden, I'm now not doing multi-currency transactions. Now I'm just movingmoney. Just like it's a dollar overall. Right? The struggle came in the examplewe were talking about before, when everyone was funding in SD, as you sharedwith Amazon, and there needed to be a FX transaction to move it to crypto.

Charles Rosenblatt: Once crypto becomes amore accepted inbound currency overall. And so companies actually are holdingthat crypto because they took it on the inbound side. Then having crypto as anoutbound rail through an exchange or any other place will dis intermediate cuzit's the same thing as a us to us transaction a S D to USD transaction costssense mm-hmm it costs in the sense and.

Charles Rosenblatt: You know, companieswill charge a couple bucks, but the fact is depending on the volume you'redoing, you know, a JP Morgan chase probably pays a 10th of a cent or half acent to send an ACH transaction.  

Mike Townsend: But now, yeah, goahead.  

Charles Rosenblatt: So, so what I'mgetting at is if I'm holding that's because they're holding USD and paying USD.

Charles Rosenblatt: So if I'm a corporatewho's holding a crypto and all I need to do is transfer that crypto to someoneelse. All of a sudden that rail doesn't have an FX on it, and I can send itover probably equal to the sense that I can move things on in the us D and nowI've created basically an equal comparison overall, the rails price has todrop, right?

Charles Rosenblatt: Hmm. And I, you know,I, I, again, this is where my maybe novice nature and crypto gets in. Myunderstanding is like Ethereum rails are really expensive. right now. Right? Soto move Ethereum, if I want to pay you Ethereum, Mike I'd get charged a decenttoll until that toll disappears and becomes equal to a fed now or an RTP costor an ACH cost.

Charles Rosenblatt: It's gonna bedifficult to compete as a unless, except for people who really want crypto.Once that toll cost goes down, once it becomes a ledger transaction, like astable coin transaction is today where it's all done on a ledger. At thatpoint, it takes over because ledger transactions cost nothing.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. And what are,tell me if this is correct, the rough, approximate cost to make a, make aconsumer to business transaction. If you were to go full cycle, like consumerto business, business to vendor, I mean, Amazon comes to mind cuz it's asimple, you know, business that everyone understands. But when I make thattransaction, that's, that's 3% on the inbound.

Mike Townsend: Like am maybe Amazoncan pay 2% or some lower.

Charles Rosenblatt: Amazon probably pays alittle less, but a typical merchant will pay 3% in discount rate. Yeah. Whichis interchange plus what the folks make on a transaction using a card.  

Mike Townsend: Yep. 3%. Yeah. Andthen on the outbound, something slightly less than that, cuz there's less risk.

Charles Rosenblatt: On the outbound it'sslightly less. Yeah. So if, if, you know, if they're sending an a, if, if theperson who, you know, you know, apple, they were selling an iPad on Amazon andthey send the money to apple, they're doing it for, you know, At Amazon'svolume, they're probably doing it. Go a nickel. Yeah. So they, the interestingthing and a small merchant, they may be paying a dollar for it and right.  

Mike Townsend: The interesting thingis that on crypto, there's not the, there's not this concept of like atransaction percentage fee. It's, it's, it's really a mining fee to do atransaction. The, the thing, this is, what's probably the opportunity thatopens the gate a little bit is when I move, when I say I wanna send you Bitcoinin order for us to make that change on the ledger that the mining miningbusinesses are effectively providing mining services for the network, theydon't there's no.

Mike Townsend: Difference, whetherI'm sending you a dollar or a hundred million dollars, it's like, it's the samecost to make, to propagate that change. And that's where I think it's probablygonna start to affect like larger companies who sell, you know, cars or grillsor, you know, high ticket items that transaction fee is, is significant, youknow, compared to like a coffee shop, it's just not gonna be as big of atransaction fee.

Mike Townsend: So I think smallerticket items will have crypto. Won't be as good initially. I mean, I, I, Iwould converge crypto at approximately, you know, zero. There'll always be somefee you have to pay the minor is to propagate the everything. like visa,MasterCard, all these banks, like there's so many people that live off of thetransaction fees and I think it'll start taking their, taking their, yeah.

Mike Townsend: They're taking theircut. And I think that, I think it'll start to eat at the high ticket itemsfirst. So I'm think if I'm in your shoes or anyone's shoes doing this kind ofbusiness, I'm thinking it's probably because of that. The, because crypto andtraditional banking rails have different costs to make those transactions, orthey have different prices really have to be more precise, then it's gonna behigher ticket items get disrupted by crypto first would be my guess.

Charles Rosenblatt: I, I think it makessense, right? Because cuz where global payout providers came in more so was abank is ready. A bank is really great for United airlines to buy a Boeingplane, right. It's one 50 million wire and any bank in the us can handle it.And the odds of an error aren't that high. Right. The error rate, by the way,on wires in the us is like 1.5%.

Mike Townsend: Wow. Really? Thathigh. Yeah, that seems high to me. It's huge. Yeah. That's...  

Charles Rosenblatt: It's a lot of, a lotof people, fat finger things. There are buildings in New Jersey of full ofpeople who all they do is do error, wire error processing.  

Mike Townsend: We can ask a quickquestion. If I send a, if I send a wire to a non-existent bank account, whathappens? Where does that, where does that go?

Charles Rosenblatt: It gets rejected andthen it gets researched. And then it, it, it essentially goes back to thepeople who sent the wire and then there's a major fee attached to it. But moreso sometimes what happens. And I'll talk about cross-border wires for a secondis people expect 5,000, but the conversion rate comes in and they get 49 92.

Charles Rosenblatt: And so when they get49 92, their accounting department has no idea to reconcile that with theperson they expected to send them 5,000. Because there was a conversion rate ora fee or something attached to it. And so then it gets sent for 45 days ofresearch sitting in somewhere before it finally gets rejected.

Charles Rosenblatt: And then that personlooks like they never paid the money. And that other side is out the money for45 days. Right? Major problem overall in general payments. That's why a companylike plaid is so valuable, right? With their ability to look up the account numbersand all that before you send the money mm-hmm

Charles Rosenblatt: And the, the point Iwas actually making is now I have to pay an Uber driver and I want to pay anUber driver after every ride, or we have a client who sells goods and afterevery single sale, their salesperson gets a commission, literally within anhour or two of making the sale banks were not built technology wise to be doinga hundred million payments in a short period of time.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. And so it's thesmall dollar payments that have led to the innovation and the creation of a lotof these fintechs to solve this problem, both domestically and internationally.I think the fee structure of crypto you're right. Works on the big payments,but I gotta be honest. The big payments are in a system that kind of workstoday already.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right? Not many peopleare using a credit card to buy something for half a million dollars.  

Mike Townsend: Maybe it's like, maybethe ideal is like a couple hundred, you know, not, not an airplane. Where's thesweet spot.  

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. Right. Of whereit will be. And then of course, how does the person has the merchant acquireradd crypto to the exchange and still make money?

Charles Rosenblatt: Cuz you need someoneto accept that money in the middle. Right. And so this is, you know, this isthe whole whole con for P to P transactions. Crypto's really easy, right? Like,Hey Mike, I owe you $50 for dinner. It's like, I Venmo you instead. I just sendyou the money. A crypto. Right. But to pay people out from a businessperspective and utilize that crypto to buy things, that's where the gap istoday.

Charles Rosenblatt: And, and, and myfeeling is on the payout side, it's actually gonna be a lot easier to bringcrypto in. If someone wants crypto for their U S D we don't, I can do thattomorrow, right? Yeah. I'll find someone on the back end who will be in FX.It's the people paying in, in crypto. That's going to be the harder side,because that means they need to accept it for their goods.

Charles Rosenblatt: And you can see whileTesla accepts it and the Dallas Mavericks accept it. You know how many years ittook, PayPal is still searching on a daily basis to try to get people, toaccept PayPal as a way of payment into merchants. And they still aren't evenclose to where visa, MasterCard, or others are. So who's out there advocatingfor crypto who's who's the visa or the MasterCard or the PayPal.

Charles Rosenblatt: Who's advocating forcrypto for all of these global merchants around the world to actually acceptcrypto as an inbound payment. Well, I think that, to me, that's where the gapis.  

Mike Townsend: I do those companiesdo exist. There's a few of them. Well, a couple of that I've interviewed. And Ithink the other thing that could really put pressure on this transition fromFiat, particularly us D to cryptocurrency is inflation of the Fiat currency.

Mike Townsend: So as the, as weassess the VA the cost to move money from business to vendor, if you just lookat the transaction cost, maybe crypto is not even close yet. But I do thinkthat if the Fiat currency, you know, if us dollar were to have inflation,massive inflation hyperinflation, then there's gonna be pressure on both sidesto get out that cuz just holding it, moving it costs money to be other thing.

Charles Rosenblatt: And absolutely we seethis and we saw it at hyper Walt and Payoneer among others. when people getpaid S D into India, or maybe not India, let's use a different country into youknow, Chile, right? A lot of people, actually, a lot of the SMBs keep theirmoney in SD rather than turn it into the Chile in currency, because they feelit's the safer Haven.

Charles Rosenblatt: They keep their moneyin that area. Right. And so if you get to a point where people, ironically, I'mnot sure people believe that, well, you know, more crypto people than I do. I'mnot sure people are at a point where they believe holding Bitcoin is morestable than holding us D but if it gets to a point where people find thatholding Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these other are more stable than USDthat's when this thing explodes. Yeah. Because all of a sudden, now it becomesthe safe Haven. Today it's more speculative.

Mike Townsend: So I, I could justcouple reactions to that one. I think that, that that's largely dependent onthe job of the federal government, the United States. And when they start to doa poor job, inflation starts to go crazy in us dollars people internationallyin particular, start to feel that USD is not the place to hold.

Mike Townsend: Then other optionsbecome much more viable, namely Bitcoin and crypto, although it could be otherFiat currencies. The other thing is when, when that, when that does happen,which to me, it feels like an inevitability. I have no idea on the timeframecould be anywhere from like 10, 10 years, a hundred years.

Mike Townsend: Like, but there is sometimeframe it feels. Yeah. Just because people that have access to print to themoney printer will. Hit the money printer, like say the, the pandemic was 10times worse. Oh, we needed to print 50, 50 trillion. Oh, 60 trillion. It'slike, yeah, you, you do all this. And then people are broad are like, screw theSD.

Mike Townsend: Right. But you'll knowthat we're in that situation when people price things per BTC. So now you thinkof like, what's the price of BTC? You say, oh, it's 19,000. So denominator atUSD. And once the denominator becomes BTC for prices, like how much is thiswater bottle? Oh, it's like 0.2 BTC that, that once people start saying that,you're like, that's, that's my trigger.

Charles Rosenblatt: Absolutely. And, and,you know, I'll go back to this and, and, and you ask me, you ask me questionsat the beginning about Chief Strategy Officer and, and what you're thinking, myjob at PayQuicker. My job is wherever I, wherever I am, I want to be there andhave the platform ready for when that happens. I'm not in the business ofpredicting when that happens.

Charles Rosenblatt: Right. And so whatwe've built is a technology that the moment that people start calculatingthings in BTC, I already have five Bitcoin FX providers on the back end,allowing it to go to wallets, et cetera. It leverages the exact same technologytoday for me to do it with Columbian pesos and us dollars.

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. Right. I amcompletely indiscriminate on what's the hot currency at the time. What's thehot, you know, crypto at the time, right? What I'm trying to do is facilitatethe transactions in whatever anyone wants. Again, going back to beneficiary,directed payments. People want their money on Venmo. They want their money onAlipay.

Charles Rosenblatt: They want their moneyin cash. They want their, you know, people can take cash out today, right?There are some people are still St sticking USD cash under their mattresses. Soto speak. It's not for me to say who and how they want it. It's for me to. I'mgonna make it available when I can. And if, if you asked me to tell you whenpeople are gonna start calling things in BTC, like you just talked about, I, I,I couldn't even fathom a guess.

Charles Rosenblatt: It's my job to makesure we're ready when that happens. And if it happens for it not to disrupt theway life is going on as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, that's, and Ileave it to people who have a lot more intelligence around crypto and, and thatside of the business, like yourself to advise me and tell me when that's gonnahappen.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Well, TBD Charles,are you a writing or tweeting anything personally that you wanna throw outthere?  

Charles Rosenblatt: You know, I, I, I dodo some, some blogs on, on, through the website through PayQuicker and we'repending some thought pieces. I must admit I'm probably more of a Twitter readerthan I am. Tweeting things out.

Charles Rosenblatt: But yeah, no, I'm moreof a consumer than I am probably a, a a publisher, but you know, I'll let youknow if, if, if that changes I'll, I'll send it through your your Twitter feed.

Mike Townsend: And what people orbooks have influenced you the most. Would you say the most in or outtapayments? I certainly no emphasis on payments there.

Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. Yeah. I try notto read payment books if I, if I can you. I, I, I, I really, the thesis behindMoneyball, I'm sure you've probably heard that before from other folks, butthe, the, I, I, when push comes to shove, when I started the Shaw, it's astatistical arbitrage hedge fund that did 15% of the trades on the us stockexchange in a day.

Charles Rosenblatt: I am purely andcapital one, as you probably know, is a very, very data centric, you know, testand learn company. And I think Moneyball actually shares that in a totallydifferent realm of sports, which I absolutely love and follow all the time.But, you know, the ability to look at something analytic analytically, and getyour use case out of something analytically, then to add a layer ofpracticality on it, sorta tends to be huge to me and something I think I'veused to to learn and apply in, in the rest of my life.

Mike Townsend: Awesome. Awesome.Thanks, Charles is so much, this is a really fun dynamic conversation. Iappreciate your time and hope you guys keep crushing it. Hope you guys becrushing.  

Charles Rosenblatt: It absolutelyappreciate the time and look forward to chatting again and learning, seeingwhat happens in crypto. I'd love to see if your theories theories pan out.

Mike Townsend: Yeah, let's see. Imean, see ya. Thanks. Sweet. We did it. Sweet. We did it. That  

Charles Rosenblatt: was fun. That was fun.Good. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, it.

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