Bridging TradFi and Web3_Grace Berkery

hi everyone nice to meet you my name is grace bergery i am joining from mastercard so i actually recently just started mastercard not too long ago i was sitting where you guys were i was at a blockchain startup since 2019 i did bd and my role was to help our company grow and expand into traditional finance so i worked with a lot of banks and mastercard so i recently switched sides and i'm really passionate about what i do so i'm here to talk to you today about how i believe that we can bridge traditional finance with web3 through startup partnerships so in the last five years we realized that mastercard working with fintech so not crypto companies but working with fintechs that there was a shift and the shift was from competitive competitors to collaborators we think that that same shift is going to start happening in web 3 and we're already seeing it at mastercard and a lot of the major corporates that i talk to on a daily basis everyone's looking to embrace innovation and they're looking they're excited to partner with you i mean i don't need to explain this to you guys because you're all here for a reason but arc expects crypto assets and digital wallets to command a nearly 50 trillion dollar market cap and that's what is getting people so excited it's all the work you're doing it's the noise you're making it's making the traditional companies wake up just in the last month there's some really huge headlines so jp morgan last week announced that they're going to be the first bank to go into the metaverse facebook as a testament to all the work you were doing changed its name to meta and google cloud just launched a dedicated digital asset team to partner with companies in the space and they're not alone there's hundreds of companies who are looking to get into this space and build out this practice and they can't do this on their own and they're looking for startups to partner with so why does partnership matter from a from a corporate perspective startups can help corporates learn grow diversify and build specifically learn like you guys have incredible companies you have a fail fast ethos you're agile you're growing amazing teams with diverse cultures and just by partnering with you and getting close to you corpus can emulate what you're doing in the space and become better organizations grow and diversify kind of goes hand in hand um corporates are constantly looking to grow and diversify their product base whether that's creating new products growing into new markets joining new sectors et cetera and they can use partnerships in the space to do that build this is one that is really interesting because corporates and traditional finance companies can and should not build everything themselves there they need to partner with companies in this space to move forward their uh internal initiatives and address some of the challenges that they're facing so why does this matter for startups um me being on the other side i know this firsthand as a startup you're always looking to see how quickly you can grow your product how quickly you can get to market and partnering with a large corporate who has an established network that's oftentimes global reach uh can really help you bring your go to your product to market a lot quicker so a lot of what i focus on in my role at mastercard now is helping startups scale quickly and effectively through mastercard's channels and customers additionally like i said on the last side build this is like one of the biggest things um this comes down to a corporate using your software product or you using a corporate's product or vice versa just building something new together in the industry it's really at a moment where i'm kind of the preaching the collaboration here uh support with expertise as a startup you're small organizations you're strapped for resources we know that many of you wearing multiple hats so you can rely on corporates to help give you some background so for example if you're looking to expand into a new market and you need some support with regulatory like lots of corporates have those teams set up on the ground they have the legal support they have the companies who can help guide you through that process and make that a reality for you and then finally provide investment this is something that's really interesting in the space in the last year we've seen a huge uptick in corporate venture development teams investing in startups and we expect that that trend is going to continue into 2022 which is really interesting because not only can you look at corporates to form commercial partnerships that help you scale but you can also look to them to be either financial or strategic investor to help you with your product so at mastercard this is kind of the equation that sums up our relationship with startups so we really believe that scale for startups plus acceleration for mastercard equals better together so the team that i sit on is called start path it's been around for six years it's an award-winning fintech engagement program in the last six months we realized after talking to companies in the space that blockchain crypto and digital asset companies required a different level of needs so we actually launched a specific specific track dedicated to supporting these companies and that's what i managed here i'm really excited to talk about it we are a global team so like you we're distributed across the world so we can host in-person meetings in any of our offices but we also work entirely virtual a little bit more about the program it's a three month virtual program that provides high potential startups equity free access to mastercard's channels and customers so like i said how can we help startups in the space scale through introductions to our teams we also provide that subject matter expertise so the regulatory talks we'll bring them in we'll also help you with hr whatever you need we'll support that and we also host throughout the program weekly knowledge sharing sessions where we bring you in uh to different parts of the organization so like i said i'm kind of new to mastercard one of the things i've really valued about my position here is that my team sits at the intersection of all the different groups with a mastercard so we can help you navigate the organization and find really great opportunities for you because it can it's a big place you know so i sit at the intersection of the product team the regional leads uh the cyber intelligence team the data and services team etc and we try to identify the best place for you to partner we also help with brand endorsement so we host demo days and we provide media exposure through press releases inviting you to conferences um and sessions with our customers and then finally the big one that i keep hitting home uh technology collaboration so it's us building on your software us building something new together or just looking to see what we can identify in the space so we have 12 amazing startups in our portfolio today i'm really excited about this class um we just a little bit more about the program we launch in waves so we've launched two classes so far we hope to launch a few more this year um right on the slide you'll see since it's a new program we're still determining our strategy not everything for our program is about issuing a card as some people might think um so we partner with protocol layers like ava labs nft marketplaces like mintable and nifty key oracle providers like super oracles and so on and we're looking to expand this into other areas in the web3 space to get involved in the program we're really looking for startups who are seed to series a and we're also looking for startups that have a proven market a product out in market because like i said the main goal here is to try to scale together so it's easier when you've launched for us to work on collaboration so how does this actually work in practice i think a great example of bringing this to life is uh the work that we've done with mastercard's digital currency enablement pilot so mastercard had a hypothesis that um mastercard and others had a hypothesis that it would be faster to settle from crypto to stable coin to fiat than it is from crypto to fiat and so in order to do that we partnered with a bunch of players in space like paxos and circle and others um and what was exciting for our team is that uphold who's one of our start path participants was able to be selected for this as the wallet provider in that pilot so we're really looking to partner with these companies bring them in and find new ways for all of us to work together so that's it short and sweet um thank you for listening to my talk today i just want to really hit home that there's a lot of space for collaboration and a lot that companies can do together um i'll be around so if you have any questions feel free to come find me after this um or check out our website and there's an application link online thank you