Unlocking the Next Chapter in Global Money Flow

Good afternoon everyone. Yes, feel free. Uh thank you for joining us. Um so we're at a turning point right now in how money moves globally and I wanted to ask each of you I'll come down the line. uh from your vantage point what is a specific shift in crossber payments that makes your organization uh essential right now so we bank Josh we'll start with you

yeah so uh look it's great to be here we are based out of the UAE we are trading hub money moves in from all the places and moves out yeah so payments to us are incredibly foundational yeah I I think there's been a lot of innovation in payments to make sure they are more effective and more uh competitive from a pricing perspective. But I think we're seeing a lot of innovation. I I think we've had some folks talk about stable coins, which I think will be the next big uh shift in uh payments. I do think friction is creeping back into payments. Uh so I I I think there's two big places to innovate.

One is making sure it's there's less friction. Two, bringing the price down. But uh we're at the hub of payments and uh it's one of our core businesses.

Absolutely. Humphrey, from party perspective, I know uh background with DBS, JP Morgan and Tavisk, but where do you see that innovation right now?

Oh, you might need that microphone.

Yeah.

Uh thank you. Uh happy to be here. First of all, um I think it's a a question with multiple answers and it's not one answer that fits all the challenges. I I think first of all it's a time of a huge change in technology. I think if you look at payments historically it was from one country to the other country with many hubs and friction in between.

And I think what you now see with led by the crypto innovation is that existing banks needs to adjust to make use of that technology to remove that friction and that I think is what parture does. So there was until recently a big difference between those that believed in crypto and those that believed in the regulated financial services and I think it's converging rapidly and what we are trying to do is bridge the two.

Nice. And Anthony the bricks and mortar uh of the panel um now very much digital in that space as well. What's your thoughts on that? Well, I would say I've been the CEO of MoneyGram for a little over a year, about 13 months now. And as I look at the opportunities that's ahead, I couldn't be even more excited.

You know, typically when you think about um big technology platform shifts, they happen every 10-15 years and usually one of them at the same time. You had for instance the the internet browser then unleashed the whole uh web boom then you had mobile with the iPhone and and the the latest one that's happened was with the cloud back in the early 2010s. uh what I would say now is we've never seen a situation where you have three big platforms all converging towards each other and I'm talking about AI talking about stable coin and that mer merge with embedded finance and I think it's going to unlock a lot of opportunities the people that are going to win are the consumers I think things are going to be faster I think that things are going to be more convenient and I think things are going to be lower cost for the consumer the biggest question is in light of all this, you know, how does trust scale as we launch these new services, but I would say probably how we think about finance today, there's uh we've only scratched the surface and we've only scratched about the 2% or so. There's a lot more to go here

and I think you all represent a really great part of the ecosystem as well. B TOC, B2B TOC, B2G and you know within that we're seeing this emergence of a new layer of financial infrastructure as you said and especially when it becomes programmable. So going back into the stable coins, tokenized deposits, atomic settlements, all these buzzwords that we're hearing right now. Um but how is it genuinely changing how value moves? I mean you mentioned consumers as well.

I'll come back to you. I'll pick on you there, Anthony. Um but how does it work in production? Well, I would say um a few give you a few uh cases. One is you might be building a home uh in a different country and when you're working there you might send money that's based upon certain parameters before the funds get released.

Um and I think with programmable money that's all going to be available and it could be available in many different apps or services because of the nature of embedded finance. But maybe a more simple one is for all of us that have kids who give our kids allowances. I think that uh in a world where uh money is actually programmable, they might not receive their funds until the chores are done.

That's a great point. And then Humphrey on perspective when it comes to that relevance, scalability and and trust, what would you say on that? Um yeah I I think my use case is a little bit different. It's um we are more focused on the wholesale payments. So a payment is a payment and ultimately it's a means to an end.

The use case that we're focusing on is not parents sending their kids money uh migrant workers sending their families money. It's really the huge trade flows and the bankto bank and corporate to corporate flows. What I think the two thing big things that we are trying to solve for is one is the technology is new and the second thing is the regulators are trying to catch up. I think what you see is that there's crazy developments happening. I think the UAE is very supportive of these developments.

But not every regulator is fully informed of what the risks are of the new technology and that causes a different kind of friction. So I think over time it it's not only solving for what technology can do if we can program different forms of digital money. It's also how to ensure that the governments and the regulators can fulfill their responsibility to society and we need to help them there.

Could I just come back to you on that just briefly? Um obviously you spend a lot of as a global company but you spend a lot of time in the east as well. How are you seeing the progressive and the attitudes changing uh towards that governance as you suggest?

I very good question. I I think it's everywhere. I think initially in particular, everybody thought that blockchain was equal to crypto. Yeah. And it's not.

It It's a kind of technology that can also be used for other forms of digital money. And what you now see, so it's getting the market to understand what the semantics are. So what is the real meaning of the word and how can it be used? And then looking at if you look at tokenization of certain assets, what are the controls to mitigate risk in the traditional world and what is the role of the regulators and how can that be transposed without adding friction that you had in the prior world into the new forms of money and making use of programmability of money. And and coming back because J you mentioned friction as well.

Um as the the homegrown uh innovation that we see here uh in Abu Dhabi you've taken that and you've ran with it but where do you see kind of that trust coming back in affordability where do we go from here?

Yeah look I I think you know one of the biggest shifts people don't talk about is consumers. Yeah. While technology has shifted, policy has shifted, consumers have also moved on. Uh I think consumers are smarter, more informed uh and I think more empowered to make decisions uh than they've ever been. Yeah.

So I I think consumers the friction to changing systems has become a lot easier. The I think the switching cost is lower. So if you can't offer consumers the right services with the right capabilities, they simply shift over to a new platform. Yeah. And the opportunity I see is building value before and after the transaction.

Yeah. Uh how can you build in financing on a payment transaction? Yeah. How can you spit the payment for them? How can you build loyalty or guarantees on it?

Uh so I I think as the payments become cheaper faster, I think there's a great opportunity to make money move faster and churn an economy and that's what we are trying to do in the UAE. We servememes and individuals and uh we want to enable our thememes to grow faster and one of the things we have to do is make payment simpler, better and cheaper for them.

And while you're wanting it to to grow faster, is that being driven by the conversations you're having with your customers?

Yeah, absolutely. Look, we work very closely with uh our customers. Uh the UAE is a hub of innovation. Yeah. Everything from regulations to capabilities in the entire ecosystem are moving very quickly.

So I think it's opportunistic and trying to figure out what are the new advantages that we have that we can uh uh take part in also you can see e-commerce AI some of these other capabilities growing I think it's seeing this opportunities and saying hey let's build a service for theirs yeah uh so we work with the consumers and the ecosystem to figure out where the next big opportunities are coming from

and Anthony you've made a lot of movements in the space recently what's that been driven by is that again going back to your customers or do you just think that right now you have to get into it and and be one of the first adopters.

Well, there's a few things going on. I think one is uh going and taking over CEO of a company that's been so established where money just to give everyone a context operates in over 200 countries and territories across 20,000 corridors. And more importantly, we have over close to 500,000 retail locations around the world. To give you a sense of that, we actually uh our physical retail agent network is bigger than Starbucks, Subway, and McDonald's combined. And then that combined with uh uh our 5 billion digital endpoints.

These are all things I came into when I joined the company. Allows us to kind of rethink uh what can we become when we grow up and especially in this world where uh you got this convergence of AI with stable coin embedded finance and it's allowed us to really rethink the experience. So we embraced um stable coin in a big way. We've launched uh we've started all these things starting with the customer problems that we were trying to solve and then worked backwards instead of starting with the technology and going find a problem. Uh the biggest thing we saw was in areas where there was going to be a lot of currency e economic volatility.

I think the consumer wants to be much more rest assured that whatever they get sent they can receive in that terms of buying power. And so we launched um a receiver side wallet in seven LATAM countries so far. Hopefully by next year we'll blanket uh many poor parts of the world. And a big part about that on the receive side is it allows uh the receiver to receive those funds in via a stable coin wallet. So they get stored value and they only convert at the point that uh they're ready to receive and convert it back to fiat which is a big thing.

And then, you know, as you kind of play that out, you can probably imagine all the other things that we can introduce uh as a result. But we're very excited about it. We just launched it back in uh September. And uh I think well that's just the foundation of all the other ambitions that we have to build on top.

And if you think about the the consumer at the heart of it, where do you see the um the touch points coming from in the next few years? How do you see them utilizing the products and services that you're developing? Well, what's interesting is I'm going to tell you I might only know 20% of what's going to happen because that's what we can see today. But the beauty of actually working in this industry is that we get a firsthand view of how everything is being developed. And what I would say is that uh things are going to be much more open.

They're going to be much more developerled and they're going to be much more interoperable. So if we believe those to be the cases, what I could see is that features and functionality, but you might not go up to a swipe card. You might just swipe your watch or maybe you don't swipe at all like a lot. So I think that the idea about payments might borrow a little bit about kind of how uh the Amazons of the world are thinking about commerce too. You have to kind of think about uh some of the new ticketing companies and how they're thinking about that type of experience because I think all these things are going to be much more converged.

But all I know is that things are going to be much more open. they're going to be much more interoperable and I think it's going to be a much better experience at a lower cost for the consumer which I think we can all cheer for. So consumer adoption is rising in part by a lot of the the frameworks that we've seen put in place recently, but from an institution perspective, Humphrey, I know that's [laughter] on your part. What what do you see in terms of attitudes? I mean, we had asset Abu Dhabi here yesterday.

There's a lot in that space adopting, working very fast. Um, where is the attitudes coming from? What what's what's building this momentum at the moment? Um, I I think what's also new is it's not only about speed. It's not about translating what we did on traditional means of technology to a new widget.

I think what blockchain really allows is new use cases and new kinds of products being developed to help the money move faster or money move more efficiently. So it's not moving only from old to new, but it's really also creating new things that were not possible with the old stack of technology. And I think that's the super exciting part of it that's largely developerled. It's it's the unknown and the almost like the world of unlimited opportunities because things couldn't happen. If I talk about the institutional side of things, there's still payments in the institutional world that are t + three.

Yeah. And and for those that are not in the industry, it's three days. It's not 3 milliseconds. It's doing the payment now and getting the credit on the other side three business days later.

That's longer on the weekends too. Don't call it get that.

And and I think what you will see is also again payment is a means to an end. It's a settlement vehicle as well. It's not only a debit and credit for trade. It's also capital markets that are supported by payments. What you will see, what we can do is intraday swaps, all kinds of new financial instruments that will unlock so much capital locked up because of limitation of the old technologies.

So, it's super exciting, I think. Yeah. So, I'm I'm I'm stoked. Yeah.

Do you want to add to that?

Yeah. Look, I agree with you. Look, banks borrow money from each other. Interbank. Yeah.

24 hours, the shortest term you can get. Imagine borrowing $100 million for two hours because you're getting money in. Suddenly you're able to do stuff a lot faster and turn it around. Reduces your cost, increases efficiency. Yeah.

So I I I think asset management and movement of money at corporate level is going to become so much more efficient.

Yeah.

So let's just tackle the elephant in the room. Um AI, it's reshaping every layer of the financial stack from onboarding and fraud to liquidity and user experience. Where do you see AI driving the next meaningful leap in global money flow? Who wants to go first?

Well, I think it's going to touch every part. So, in terms of running the back office, I think that uh AI is going to we what maybe I we should take a step back. The way when we think about AI, we sometimes typically think about using AI as part of a job.

And I think that that's kind of human beings, we think of a a job as something we need to do. But when you think about a company, it exists to deliver an outcome for the customer. And I think that the lines between functions are going to get really blurred, especially as we go to an agentic world. So what I mean by that is when you're thinking about the transfer of funds, I could see a time when you do fraud detection, authentication, customer service, as well as actually doing the FX trading all at the same time with separate agencies all kind together. What that means is the organization is going to operate a lot more smoothly.

it's going to be a lot more efficient and I think to the consumer uh they're going to have much more consistency of experiences because I think human beings you can catch them on a good day you can catch them on a bad day when you go to an AI world I think it's going to be much more consistent and I think that uh again the consumer is going to win out

yeah so look I I I look at we look at it uh as an opportunity to serve our customers better yeah I I think there are many things human beings can just do. If I just call the call center and ask how much did I spend on my last trip to London, it's just very hard to do. And how much did it change? I I think AI brings all these capabilities together. Uh should I send money today or should I wait?

Where's the euro going? It can bring in the data. So I think it helps you serve consumers better to make decisions better. Yeah. and and I do think it goes all across your organizations from operations to marketing to actually your customer proposition.

So I think it's all over. I think it's a lot of learning right now. It's a lot of experimenting. Some things work, some don't. Sometimes it hallucinates.

So I think you need to figure out the other big thing is you can't solve everything with AI. It's super expensive. Yeah. You need to figure out what gets solved by AI, what gets p solved by coding and where is the human the best person. So I I think there's a lot of discovery left but it is going to change the way organizations deliver everything they do.

Okay.

Okay. Um let's disagree at this point in time. So what what I don't think is that AI will solve everything for everyone. Agree. I think there's unrealistic expectations about what AI can deliver and especially in the space of institutional crossber going back to the theme crossber payments and trade flows there's also elements where in particular in the space of privacy you know if we have this openness and there's no privacy anymore and we leave it all to AI it becomes a a tool of risk for participants in the chain and there's also not only good people doing trade we also need to protect the financial system and that's I think AI can help but we cannot completely outsource it to AI so if you talk about anti-monering KYC anti-terrorist financing there's all these risk mitigants that have been in place that that we need to think about very carefully before we outsource it all to an LLM.

That's a good jump to our last final question. In one sentence, what haven't we talked about today that will matter most in the next chapter?

You know what? I'll repeat something we talked about. Stable coin.

Um I I I think it's we should talk less and and do more. I I I think that's what we didn't.

Yeah. I think things are going to be better, faster, and cheaper. Uh, and then the open question is how quickly does regulator regulation catch up?

Perfect. Great way to end. Thank you very much, everyone.