I know no one wants me to talk and crucify myself for the next 20 minutes, so I'd like to make this as interactive as possible. Um, raise your hands. How many of you have used Robinhood? Good. How many of you use AI agents in your banking or financial affairs every day?
One person. Good. Has anyone here used HSBC? Okay used HSBC? Okay .
Er, JP Morgan Chase. Good. Has anyone used an unknown local bank in addition to stablecoin wallets, a currency platform, paper checks, and a separate debit card to make a single transaction? Good. So, the good thing is that most of you didn't do this.
The bad thing is that, unfortunately, 99% of the world works exactly like this . I think if you look at fintech and the banking industry in general, it seems like they've missed the real economy. And when you think about the real economy, people think of AI people think of AI startups, high growth, mega-cap, A16-backed companies, public companies, etc. And fintech was being built in San was being built in San Francisco. You know, if you're in the US, consider yourself extremely lucky.
Not just because you're in the US, but because you have a world-class financial infrastructure, you have instant Stripe, ready to go. You have more options and more tools than you need. For the rest of the world, it's exactly the opposite. And everything starts to break down. No offense to anyone from Canada, but things start to fall apart as soon as you leave for Canada.
And then you go to India, Nigeria, Singapore, and the situation gets worse and worse . Look at a manufacturer in Singapore who waits 5 days for a SWIFT payment to be credited, and then side effects occur. The manufacturer cannot make its payment. They delay the shipment to the final recipient final recipient , and this creates a huge " bottleneck" in everything. An exporter selling coffee in Medellin, Colombia, hedges against currency fluctuations of 20-30%.
And we use the US dollar every day, and that's what they consider a luxury. Even crypto enthusiasts don't have it so easy. How many of you have a crypto fund or work in a fund? Again, very lucky. If you worked in a fund or managed a crypto fund, had layer 1 or layer 2 in 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025, you could not be served anywhere.
If the fund was in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands Virgin Islands , Singapore, or Switzerland, you were using the strangest patchwork of banks and financial platforms. It was the only way you could fully conduct your business. And when we talk about who fintech works for, they work for AI agents, because now we don't want to touch our money. We want to entrust them to AI to entrust them to AI agents who will do everything every day, day in and day out. They build for companies like Anthropic.
They build for the world's global companies. And by global, I mean companies and banks listed on NASDAQ. You know, I spent nine years at JP and Citi, and we worked for the same audience. We weren't too concerned about local manufacturers, local businesses, or even mid-tier companies. We were most interested in the owners of multi-million dollar deposits.
And fintech has once again grouped around them. It is now fashionable to serve crypto-native companies, and neobanks are popping up everywhere. If you are constantly online, you will see six more new neobanks by the end of next week. And they are all focused on crypto vaults with stablecoins and crypto companies. But no matter how big a crypto is, it is still infinitely smaller than the normal business that spans the world.
And then we build for startups and large enterprises. Again , fintech partially served crypto as well. When I worked at Mercury for three years, the week after the SVB collapse, no bank wanted to deal with crypto. My thesis was that the crypto industry is very underserved very underserved . We must support these companies.
And we did it. And now being in a crypt is fashionable. It is fashionable to serve crypto businesses. JP Morgan is starting to get actively involved in the game. Every local bank says, "We'd love to accept crypto deposits," but even then they're hunting Solana and companies with hundreds of millions in their coffers.
And the neobanks coffers. And the neobanks that are going into crypto, to be honest , have never done real banking. They have almost no compliance teams, and they try to convince that lack of compliance is a good thing, but in the real banking world it is a sentence. All this time, we have seen these banks build highly specialized systems and make money on currency exchange fees. They made money on transfer fees, on everything , because big companies could afford it.
And then we realized over the last few years that the fastest way to transfer money is to not actually transfer it anywhere. It was access to a standardized currency, which happened to be the US dollar, that you could access at any time. But while stablecoins can facilitate the movement of funds, they do not solve operational challenges for most companies. And I know one of the clichés in the cryptosphere is how do we increase cryptocurrency adoption? How can we increase the use of stablecoins, DeFi, and crypto infrastructure crypto infrastructure ?
But the problem again is that we are developing products for the same customer base that Robinhood already has. You already have instant settlement on transactions, and the money appears in Zelle as soon as you click “send.” And we continue to work for the same types of clients. And then we scratch our heads and wonder why the adoption rate isn't skyrocketing. And if you look at the adoption of stablecoins, 90% of it is happening overseas.
And it never occurred to me why we weren't developing solutions for complex foreign cases until you started studying what companies were actually building. And you see what's missing: if you send a payment in stablecoins, do you include an you include an invoice? Is there an ISO ISO memorandum attached? Is there currency conversion into local currency? Are you sending money to Nigeria and expecting the recipient to hold it in USD indefinitely, which is also justifiable, or are you expecting them to find their way into fiat themselves or go to someone who suddenly needs USDT?
Do you deliver to their local bank accounts? Do you have partnerships with local banks to offer direct accounts? Can you provide 30- Can you provide 30- day payment terms? Can you provide credit? Lending, you know, in the US—it's something we take for granted.
We can open a credit card, get a line of credit, but again, once you go outside the US, none of that actually exists. Have you ever made payments using stablecoins for your business? Maybe you're a consultant, you paid someone overseas. Did you pay them in USDT or USDC? And how did you do it: did you have to explain to them how to withdraw the funds, or did they already know whether it went directly to their bank account or wallet?
What was that about, sorry ? Oh, so you know exactly what I'm talking about, thank you, because companies like this are really trying to solve the problem. Most people think, "Okay, I'll make payments in stablecoins." Just let me send the funds to this, you know, private or ready-made wallet that the customer created, they'll hold it, get a RAIN card and spend it, and everything will be fine, and, you know, that's the whole point of crypto. But in reality, these people have to pay rent.
These people need to pay their bills. These people need to pay for transportation, and it all happens in their local currency. If you look at a business that is completely, you know that is completely, you know , disconnected from the consumer, the needs there are only growing. A tire manufacturer in Singapore uses HSBC, and they use HSBC not because it's a world- class product -- if any of you have used HSBC, you know -- but because it's become the standard for global banks. They need multi-currency accounts.
They need to be able to hold funds in different currencies at different currencies at any time, and these should be live currencies, not static ones. They need multi-jurisdictional structures. So, they have a Singapore company. They have a company in the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands Virgin Islands . They have a company in the US and need to manage it all from one place.
They need trade finance, right? So, they have hundreds of millions in accounts receivable , and they need to borrow against it . And of course, we don't have that experience, because we can go to JP Morgan and say, "Here's my receivable. Can I borrow such and such a dollar amount?" They need local exits to fiat.
They need real credit lines. And they need real compliance. Not just "we do KYB and KYC checks and approve your account", but compliance that truly understands the industry. Compliance that won't say, "Oh, you're doing crypto, you're high risk." We will not serve you, or we will open an account today, and in six months we will kick you out.
And today that doesn't exist because we have neobanks that are emerging without real banking DNA. And they're, you know, great for simplifying global spending for consumers, but that's only a fraction of the global economy. We need neobanks that have real banking DNA and infrastructure, that understand that stablecoins are not replacing banks, but rather augmenting banking infrastructure, filling gaps filling gaps , not replacing the entire stack, right? I repeat, it is very easy to launch a RAIN card and allow people to spend stablecoins. It is infinitely harder to offer local bank accounts, multi-currency, hybrid channels, and lending.
And if you're building it from scratch today, you're essentially having to build everything from scratch. You need to form local partnerships. You need to work closely with licensed organizations in the jurisdictions you want to support. You must understand billing processes. You must understand the user permission system.
You should understand that even outside of wallets, there is a whole layer of permissions that applies to business applies to business payments. If you have an owner who decides owner who decides : I need to send a million dollars. It won't give anyone the opportunity to send a million, you will have three levels of approvals. It's difficult approvals. It's difficult , and it takes time.
This requires understanding user concerns. And that's exactly what we're really missing. We lack the ability of these neobanks, who can genuinely change global finance, to sit down and have a real conversation with customers who may not be as profitable today or have workflows that seem too costly to address right now. So we are targeting crypto enthusiasts and crypto active users on Twitter who are big spenders and this is what they want to offer. What we are building at Flex Global we are building at Flex Global is not a new product launch.
So if anyone has feedback, or if you think my ideas are weird or I'm completely wrong, I'm open to hearing that feedback, but we don't view stablecoins as a product. This is not the product we expect to sell. We will not go door to door and sell stablecoins as a product or crypto- product or crypto- neobank as a product. We see stablecoins as a way to complement the years of banking infrastructure we have built and the years of lending experience lending experience gained from serving over 20,000 mid-market clients. And it's about how to take this successful recipe, combine it with a phenomenal product— product— stablecoins—and add it to solve real-world global payments problems for customers who have traditionally been underserved.
Is n't that right? Because fintechs are building for OpenAI and AI agents and they are rebranding themselves as banks for AI themselves as banks for AI agents. We want to be there to serve the clients who actually move funds. You know, last year it was a hundred trillion or close to a hundred trillion dollars a year. And we will do this with local currency accounts in over 100 countries, with built-in invoicing , treasury, foreign exchange, and lending capabilities.
So, real credit on the network and natively integrated stablecoins, but that's not the main feature for sale. You don't have to use stablecoins. There is a moment of redundancy and a moment to expedite payments, we open a waiting list, and most importantly, we communicate with a bunch of design partners design partners . So if you have complex workflows or think your product could be useful for ours, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn, Telegram, or Twitter. I'm random bank guy on Twitter.
So feel free to write to me, I'm always happy to have a coffee and talk about what you're building, what we're building, and how we can create a better product for the spread of crypto together. I hope if I can get one point across, it's that we don't just continue to build for those just continue to build for those who are already online and have world-class products. I hope we start building for people for whom such a product would be a real luxury. You know, if you offer someone in Nigeria or Argentina just the opportunity to hold US dollars—for them, that's a luxury. There are companies that charge crazy fees for depositing funds just to get those dollars.
So I think as an industry we need to build for the people who really drive the global economy but don't have access to these kinds of products. Well, okay. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.