Building for Scale: How to Take Advantage of This Crypto Winter - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

good morning everybody I know I'm uh sounds like the all but one between you and lunch so um I'll make this hopefully brief and hopefully entertaining um I'm Jess hallgrave I lead crypto strategy and go to market at checkout.com um welcome it's really nice to to be here today and I hope that everybody's having a great conference and the atmosphere I think has been amazing um so a quick intro I've been in crypto since 2015. I joined checkout in 2020 as the chief of staff and then moved over to be dedicated full-time to crypto earlier this year when I'm not doing this I sit on the bank of England engagement forum for cbdc's and I run a social impact project to encourage more women into the crypto space I don't think we can quite say that we're have enough right now so um let's check out so we're we're a payment services provider that has been since 2012 providing Fiat payment capabilities to the web 2 industry um it's our mission to enable businesses and their communities to thrive in the digital economy and since 2012 we've been processing for uh companies like wise curve Netflix share and Sony and then since 2018 we've been processing for many of the world's leading crypto providers too um so you'll see on the screen people like binancecrypto.com and in addition to these we process for a number of nft marketplaces on an off-ramp you name it if you're a crypto company and you need access to Fiat capabilities to onboard your users that's what we're here to do and to start supporting and this year we released our first Native crypto product which is a product called stablecoin settlement what that does is it allows you to take all of those funds that you're charging via Visa Mastercard alternative payment rails we convert those funds into a stable coin and settle them to Merchants over crypto rails and this has been really revolutionary for a couple of reasons um number one we can do it 24 7 365 where the bounds of only being able to transfer money from nine to five Monday to Friday have been released from the payments ecosystem which has been a pain for many many decades now and the impact that that has on Merchants is that from a liquidity perspective they're able to access funds which are rightfully theirs over the weekend rather than waiting t plus two t plus three that they might today and I think as we go and I'm going to talk a little bit about like preparing for growth in the crypto Market going forward I think as we as we think about how we as crypto companies can prepare for the next wave of growth thinking about those liquidity sources and how for example being settled in stable coins might really unlock that growth for your business to date we've just done about we have about seven or eight Merchants using that product all crypto companies and we've done over a billion dollars of settlement on those rails uh my team loved this screen and we use this as a bit of an analogy internally which is that this painful process of waiting for your iPhone to update is very familiar to us all right and there's nothing worse than when we see this right at the moment that we really need our phone and you set a new weight and we see this with all our software updates my personal pet hate is zoom because every time I go to use it it needs to do an update um and there's a reason that we as consumers now elect to do this overnight well you know when we plug our phones in overnight when we're taking a nap when things are quiet our phones are updating and we use this as an analogy internally to say that right now while maybe the markets are a little quieter this is the time to be thinking about your operational stack your technology stack updating your systems and processes to make sure that when the growth comes back you're not having to do this work then but you're really ready to you to take advantage of it despite the fact that we are in a crypto winter I don't think it's all bad news and so before I get to some of these actions that we can take on an operational and Technical perspective I just want to share some of the reasons that we at checkout are really excited about the long-term future of the industry and why we have dedicated so much resources and continue to hire into our crypto team at checkout I think obviously the use cases of blockchain Technology are expanding we're seeing real world action and activity which is very exciting and specifically on the payments side too I think we're seeing real interest and applicability to The Wider payments ecosystem um we did a survey earlier this year we're just about to rerun it so I don't have the latest stats but in our survey from February um this is what merchants and consumers told us so we talked to 3 000 Merchants um and 30 of them uh said that they were already able to accept uh cryptocurrency as a payment method um and 40 of 30 000 consumers that we spoke to um said that they actually had a desire to use cryptocurrencies as a payment method rather than just uh as an investment asset and Merchants are really beginning to understand also the upsides of crypto in terms of their payment stack so um two in three Merchants surveyed said that they had six or significant upside in holding crypto on their balance sheet 82 of merchants who offer crypto say it had brought them new customers and 70 said that cross-border payments on the blockchain would be cheaper and faster for their business so we're really seeing a lot of traction in the payment space which is why we continue to be very very excited so when we think about what our Merchants what we're seeing are crypto Merchants do today we're really getting asked two questions like how do I make more money how do I reduce my costs and how do I prepare for the next wave of growth which I think judging by how many people are in this room at this conference there's a huge expectation that like this is uh this is incredibly powerful industry and it's going to come back and it's going to be very exciting in the Years so we think that there's five main things that companies can do right now to prepare themselves for that phase of growth prioritize what they're doing and think about how that how regulation is going to impact and then also try to influence that regulation update their technology Stacks prepare to how to onboard new users and finally educate those users and make sure that we're building trust from the ground up so when you think about prioritizing your business strategy I think that there's three real questions to ask yourself which parts of our business are making us money which parts of our business are not making us money and maybe that's okay maybe we're doing that for a purpose in order to build a market enter a new market but as long as we're being very deliberate about that that's important and then where does that cost sit within your business and this I think is something that the industry is really starting to Grapple with to make sure that the unit economics of of the businesses that we're building makes sense for future growth it makes sense from an investment perspective regulation seems to be one of the kind of hot topics we've talked about it a lot in the last couple of days and I think that when we talk to the merchants and the companies that we work with this is often the number one barrier for them launching new products entering new markets accessing new consumer bases and so how do we think about um about regulation I think that there's three real things that we can do today and and I would encourage anybody who's building in this space to be really educating themselves about how regulation is going to impact their business going forwards so understanding the state of Regulation where we are now and also where it's going and the where it's going piece is most important for me because this is where we actually have the opportunity today to influence this and at checkout.com we have a big active public policy program where we engage with regulators and policy makers around the world to try and ensure that like the views of the industry are being represented and are being put forward in a sustainable and kind of way that we think can be beneficial to both customers and businesses and so anybody who isn't participating in an industry body or actively kind of thinking about this as part of their business I'd so encourage you to do that today we have found Regulators to be incredibly receptive to engaging with us and learning more and I think that as an industry we can do an awful lot more to update and educate policy makers on some of the issues that we face because that's how we're going to grow and that's how we're going to help consumers going forwards finally I think uh thirdly sorry I've got five two more points um thirdly I think that one of the things that crypto crypto companies can be doing today is thinking about how to update their technology stack um do you have the right security layers in place are you really offering a best-in-class user experience and from the payment perspective because I'm biased how do you know that you've got the right payments provider in place to help you to grow and are you able to really optimize that acceptance and when we talk about acceptance what we're talking about is the chance of a single transaction going through we've all been on an e-commerce website or tried to buy crypto with a debit card and had that transaction fail we get an error code your your payment didn't go through please try another card these are really painful experiences that mean that consumers often fall out of that buying journey and so if you don't have the right payments provider in place and you aren't optimizing your payment stack what you're seeing is that you're actually losing consumers from that Top Line again having that getting that in place right now doing that work today is what's going to make sure that you can kind of grow and get maximize your customer adoption going through for it and this is again like where we think about how we onboard new users I think I can't count the number of crypto companies whose mission is to onboard the next billion users into crypto which I think is a an admirable and an exciting way of positioning your company but like how are we actually going to do that and how are we going to enable um the users who are maybe not so excited about the technology itself but excited about their use cases and applications that it can provide how are we going to enable them to onboard in a seamless way in a way that they are comfortable with that they trust and that they are used to from a user experience perspective and this is where we think that providing Fiat onboarding capabilities whether you're at the application layer whether you're a crypto exchange whether you're a Marketplace it's something to really be thinking about right now as a way to make your business more accessible to a wider user base so what should people look out for when they're thinking about a payments provider Geographic availability do your does your payments provider operate where you need them to be um do they allow you to access customers where you want to access those customers and to do it in a regulated and compliant way do they have the right product availability and this is where I go back to this stable coin issue that we were talking about earlier can your payments provider settle you in the currency or even cryptocurrency of your choice to make sure that it embeds seamlessly within your operational stack um acceptance rates how do we maximize this to make sure that we're not getting declines on our um on our transactions and that we're really able to maximize Revenue as a business um and this is ultimately is what builds that Top Line uh top-line growth for us as businesses and then finally I think that when we think about these new users these next billion people who are going to on board to using cryptocurrency in their what I think is going to be everyday life it's going to be incredibly seamless um how do we make sure that they are comfortable and that they are excited with this and I think this is where everybody has an incredible opportunity to build really strong education programs and invest in that now so that as we start to onboard these uh these users we're not playing catch up we're not having to do that in real time but we have these things in place so that we can really really ramp up those user experiences when we start to onboard new users so whether that's building crypto incentive programs to educate your users and actually get getting them to interact with the user experience of using cryptocurrency whether that's being incredibly upfront about what we do as a business the risks associated with it and actually just being honest about how our business works and some of the associated pain points that we might might experience I think there's nothing worse than I find as a kind of user of crypto apps that that kind of they are over promising and under delivering and I think that's one of the worst things that we can do right now in the industry rather than being rather than saying we are early and this isn't perfect yet but here's why we think it's great and here's why you should start to use it we're saying it's already brilliant and you should be using it and then when new people come in they go oh it doesn't feel great and we start to book we start to break that confidence that we're really trying to build with consumers so I think really we have five key things to be focusing on how do we educate people how do we build ourselves up ready to onboard people how do we update our technology Stacks how do we position ourselves and also the future of Regulation to support the industry um and then finally how do we think about growing our business and accepting new customers if you want to talk about that payments piece anymore there's a lot of the checkout team here today you can find some of them at the back including amazing technical people and people who work day to day with our with our crypto consumers so please find us um obviously you can find us also at checkout.

com thank you