The Future of Payments: From Card Swipes to Stablecoins - Iyanu Faleye

I will be calling on Yanu Fali to speak to us on the future of payments from card swipes to stable coins.

Um Ianu Fal um I think my my surname was misspelled on the on the profile design but it's okay. Um I'll be speaking about feature of payments right from card swipes to uh stable coin and um I mean for us to talk about future of payment we have to talk about evolution of payments because payment is basically like everything we do we need value and we need to pay for the value that we need right can you guys hear me okay is it better now all right I don't want to leak the microphone. Okay. Yeah. So, we need to talk about evolution of payments in order to get to future of payments.

And um I don't know how many of us have I don't know traded yam for rice before. Okay. Obviously, we are young folks, but I don't know if anybody went to boarding school because I did. And I traded bread for rice and beans. I I don't really like the spaghetti they cook in my boarding school.

So I traded it for jolaf fries and stuff like that. And um that is um you know by butter. But uh our our forefathers obviously there was no you know currency then and and they did that a lot but it created problem and the the problem is you know a situation where they like doubling it right I need rice you need rice like we can't necessarily you know exchange and that that becomes like a big issue and um we we left trade by batter to you know dealing with cries to curry I mean right now carries used to be currency but now they're like fashion accessories. Um okay. Yeah.

So yeah from from carries we we move to coins. From coins we we we move to cash. I mean we still use cash now. We still use coins even for for countries with you know good currency. Right now I can't remember the last time I saw five naira.

Not to talk of 10 cobble or 100 co something. Uh so from cash um you know banks came into play. We started looking at um you you own a bank account you have check for people that have a current account and um that that seemed you know advanced at the time. Uh because that means you don't have to like keep cash at home right it means you can write a check for somebody and the person will just you know go to a branch of that bank to to get the money. So that that improved you know this the problem of safety or carrying money at home and stuff like that.

But of course another problem to came up from that. I don't know if you guys know when a check should bounce. I I mean I don't have an account that has a check but I I remember my father used to like talk about oh check bounce or something like that you know. So that's when you probably go to cash in the money late and the money had already left the account. So that that's one of the problem that um came from from using checks right then we move to digital payments which is what we are we are currently doing right now like you have your op right before you you know press send or your money point actually I should say money point I work at money point so yeah um you you use your money point app and and you send to maybe APS terminal and you know almost immediately you get the money um that that has actually signified the growth from trade by B to you know to digital payments obviously that's is faster now right um but I I think despite like this significant progress that we've made over time there are still like big problems right um I I don't think you can okay yeah money point we have like a I'm not advertising for money point now anyways but there's there's an app that you could use to you know send from UK to Nigeria right but you cannot necessarily send from Niger to UK, you cannot send from Niger to Canada.

Like, so there's still friction when it comes to payment. You can't I don't know you, for example, my my friend's birthday was on on Monday and she's in the UK. I was just thinking, oh, am I going to send money to her, right? Because I'm here in Nigeria. It's it's difficult, right?

And um that's that's where, you know, web 3 comes in. And um I was able to send USDT to my friend because of web 3 and I sent it in like seconds. And where am I going with this? Uh the introduction of um web 3 which obviously brought about like stable coins. Um G gave us like the the leeway to to send money to people in any part of the world as long as you know they have they have a wallet address in seconds.

And also it's it's also cheap. Yeah. So very cheap. Uh so another thing that um I I'm basically talking about paying points now. Anyways, high transaction fees.

So when you want to send from from your bank, maybe you have a dumb account, you want to send from your GTB, you want to send abroad, the the the fees will kill you to be honest. It's always very expensive. and it takes days because it's it's actually based on um Swift and you want to send maybe $2,000, they might charge you $150 or something like that and it might take 3 days before you get the money, right? Um there's also chargeback fraud um in in card that's you know a situation where you make a payment with card and you can claim that oh you did not make that payment and and the card scheme that's Mastercard or Visa in this case they would refund you the money. So that that's a common um way that um you know people do fraud with with um with cards excluding the unbanked.

So obviously people that don't have people that don't have um banks, they don't know how to send money. They cannot send money to China. They cannot send money to to Egypt. Um crossber limitation. I've explained that there's a lot of friction around you know around sending money outside the country.

Um so I know we we all know what stable coins are. There are crypto assets that are pe to fiat currency. example, USDC and um USDT. So, what are the pros? Like I said, um for example, if you were to send $2,000 to somebody, uh if you were to use, you know, a stable coin, you probably get charged $1 or $2, right?

That's low transaction fee and you can send it to anybody as long as the person has u USDT address or USDC address. And um there's also transparency obviously because it's built on blockchain availability. you can send it anytime. Binance doesn't close by 5:00, right? So, you can always send money anytime.

So, what are the challenges with um web three stable coin um regulatory uncertainties just sometime was it three or four years ago when you know Nigeria banned crypto and it crypto a lot of people's businesses. So different policies arise based on who is in charge really to to disrupt um the web 3 space and another thing is adoption right I remember when I was young my my uncle wasn't really open to using cards because he thought it was fraudulent and he would prefer to use check but now he uses card a lot so people are not always open to change right and that's that's one thing that we are still struggling with you know in web 3 you can't really tell people that oh um use this they just find weird like uh what are you talking about but and that's that's the challenges that like one of the challenges we are trying to you know solve um let me let me let me just skip through so what's future of payments um I see governments um fintech companies and um web 3 like converging to to build like stuff and you would see a use case of that for the is it inra even though I don't really know much about it but like you could say like an initiative anyways seamless cross border payments. Um I think that's happening already. Um inclusion at scale. Anybody with a phone can really send money using using um web three.

And um the the important one that I can't wait for it to like start happening is the interoperability of um of you know normal payment right now and web 3 you know where card schemes like Mastercard or Visa card are using web3 rails. It means instead of depending on Swift just like I said they can you can use your card and you would send money to somebody in you know a matter of seconds. So yeah basically yeah that's it. So, um, this is me. Um, I'm Yanu.

In case you have any questions, um, you could you could check me out on Twitter, right? Um, or X. I'm always talking about Manchester United. That's I think that's stressful than payments these days. So, I need to I need to do better.

But yeah, thank you guys. And um, let's enjoy the rest of the talk.