Farooq Malik, CEO of Rain, on How a 4-Year-Old Fintech Became a Visa Principal Member Using Stablecoin Infrastructure

What if you could settle card transactions on weekends and holidays, reduce working capital requirements by orders of magnitude, and give fintechs global reach without the traditional banking infrastructure headaches? In this episode, I sit down with Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain, a company that's quietly rewriting the rules of payment infrastructure by bridging traditional fintech and stablecoin technology.

Farooq isn't a crypto evangelist, he comes from traditional banking and international development, but when he saw his first stablecoin transaction settle instantaneously, he had an "aha moment" about the future of money movement. Now Rain is a Visa Principal Member (a status typically reserved for banks), enabling companies to sponsor card programs directly, settle 24/7 using stablecoins, and serve customers across multiple continents from a single API. We dive deep into how this actually works, why traditional fintechs are ditching their BaaS partners for Rain's infrastructure, and why this isn't about crypto replacing fintech, it's about the next evolution of financial infrastructure that solves real operational problems.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Farooq first got interested in stablecoins.
• How he describes Rain to a fintech audience.
• Why they chose to start with stablecoins for card transactions.
• How they were able to become a Visa Principal Member.
• Where they can issue cards globally.
• How they can help their clients launch internationally.
• Why most new customers they are signing up are tradfi programs.
• Why a company like Rain is a good alternative to BaaS banks.
• How the flow of funds work for a Rain-powered card transaction.
• How Rain is able to work with capital providers directly on the blockchain.
• What is involved in getting a new program up and running with Rain.
• Why Rain is agnostic to the number of new stablecoin issuers.
• How they work with banks looking to offer tokenized deposits.
• The biggest opportunity in the future of financial infrastructure.

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Transcript

Farooq Malik:

Being a Visa Principal Number means that we can sponsor our card programs directly. And normally you would require sort of a regional financial institution or a national financial institution in the United States to sponsor card programs. We are somewhat unique here, where we are able to actually sponsor card programs ourselves. We have had a great relationship with the Visa team. They were very accommodating of us when we were in the process of converting our membership to Principal with them. And what this allows us to do is it actually lets us be the actual name on the back of the card. And so it's our bin, it's our processing infrastructure, it's our settlement stack.

Peter Renton:
 This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I've been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives. In this episode, we are doing a deep dive into the intersection of traditional Fintech and stablecoin infrastructure with Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain.
 
 Now Farooq is not some long time crypto evangelist. Instead he has a background in traditional banking, who saw a more efficient way of moving money while working on a side project. And Rain's story is fascinating. The company is not even four years old, but already they are a Visa Principal Member able to settle transactions on weekends and holidays using stablecoins. Farouk explains how all this works and the obvious advantages for traditional banks and fintech companies. He also shares why some fintechs are ditching their BaaS partner bank and creating a new card program with Rain. Now let's get on with the show.
 
 Welcome to the podcast Farooq. 

FM: Thank you for having me.

PR: My pleasure. So excited for this conversation. Now, let's kick it off by giving listeners just a little bit of background about yourself. Tell us what you did before you started rain.
 
 FM: Before Rain, I was in international development banking for several years and mostly focused on international infrastructure. then prior to that, I worked in private equity in frontier markets and started my career in strategy consulting and investment banking many years ago. I've done a fair bit of different types of things.
 
 PR: Right. So did you find stable coins as part of like working in this, in the sort of international development banks because there's been international use cases for stable coins for a while. Or what was it that actually piqued your interest here?
 
 FM: My co-founder and I actually, we were exploring ideas around, ‚Åì micro SaaS businesses just as a side project originally. And from there we actually realized, you know, we built a product call for, for startup fundraising and it was a checkout link on top of safe notes, et cetera. And it was connected to ACH and wire rails. And, we had customers come to us and say, Hey, you know, we have an investor that wants to invest in stable coins, are we able to support that on our product? And at the same time, we were, you know, we were both individually getting into looking into stable coins and NFTs and a lot of a lot of what was happening in the digital asset ecosystem individually. And when we had our first stablecoin transaction take place on the platform that we had built, it really was 10x better from an ACH experience, right? So the transaction was finalized instantaneously or near instantaneously. The money was transmitted from one person to another, there was instant reconciliation of that activity via email that we were able to send. And it actually brought back like memories of when I was in banking and we had a whole team that was sitting around on a daily basis that would, their job was to actually reconcile the money that was coming into the bank and money that was going out of the bank on a daily basis. And they would have to sit there and monitor their emails and tie that into various different transactions in the bank accounts across all the various banks that we were working with. And we just had a bit of a aha moment.

Stablecoins really are the future of money because the experience is significantly better. The transaction finality is a lot quicker. The data fidelity of what is happening for that transaction is a lot richer. And so it mentally just like clicked in my head that this could be a solution to many of the challenges that we had in this institution when I was both in the banking side of things, but also prior to that, when I was in international private equity, we had significant challenges of figuring out, you know, where certain payments were when they were mid flight, what we were receiving money for in some cases, because the velocity of payments could be very high. And so it really just clicked in our heads that, like the future of money is going to look like this if this is not in fact the future of money itself. And so that's what got us really interested in exploring stable coins. And then we dug deeper into it. I did some research and I realized that, well, central banks globally have been having like little skunkworks teams focusing on digital ledger technology and tokenized money. And that's when we were thinking, that's when we kind of became aware of the fact that central bankers globally were interested in technology. Economists globally were interested in technology, stable coin infrastructure was becoming fairly pervasive, at least in the digital asset ecosystem. And there was original like sort of transactions happening that were traditional economic value exchanges, right? Like startup investing, fundraising, things like that, that are not speculative in nature. They're just a transaction for a business between a business and an investor. And that's when we started realizing, wow, like the future is actually here already. That got us interested in exploring it further and building solutions for it and thinking about what this means from institutional adoption lens, from institutional adoption lens. then we could, that's what eventually led into us building Rain.
 
 PR: Gotcha. So then, you know, considering that obviously my, my audience is primarily FinTech. It's not really a crypto stablecoin audience, but everyone's interested in stablecoins these days. How do you describe rain to a FinTech audience?
 
 FM: Rain is at the intersection of fintech technology solutions as well as stablecoin infrastructure. So our thesis has always been that the enabling technology of payments and money movement is changing. We didn't really think about this as, this is crypto and that's distinctly different from fintech enablement technology or payments or fintech products. We always thought about this as there's a technology shift that has taken place and there's going to be an opportunity to upgrade the backend infrastructure that enables fintech solutions with some of the efficiency that digital money and programmatic money movement and composable money movement bring to the table. And that's been the lens by which we've been building our solution. So the core audience for our products today is largely fintech solutions or fintech partners or platforms that are building some type of fintech app, whether it's a payments app, whether it's a payroll app, whether it's Earned Wage Access, whether it's a marketplace. And then stablecoin technology is being added on in the back, powered by Rain, so that they can address the larger global audience, because stable coins are global dollars, in addition to being programmatic dollars. And then similarly, we have a number of programs that we partner with today that are traditional financial services use cases, like we have a high net worth credit card product partner in the market. All of the warehouse lending for that program is actually happening on the blockchain. And we're able to do that seven days a week.
 
 And we can borrow per swipe. So there's no working capital or the working capital requirement is significantly lower than it would be if it was a partner financial institution in the back end, subject to traditional five day banking, working hours and weekends and holidays. so there's the way that we would encourage folks to think about stable coins is that it's not crypto writ large versus fintech writ large. It's really about this technology infrastructure that has the promise and potential to actually upgrade many of the challenges we've taken as table stakes challenges in fintech for the last several decades.
 
 PR: Right. Right. I've heard you described as like the Marqeta for stable coins because you do a lot of like card issuing and stuff. Tell us a little bit about exactly the products that you have in market today and how, like, is it primarily a card-based product suite?
 
 FM: Yeah, look, I think, no disrespect to our friends at Marketta, think that they have a phenomenal business. think the way that we think about our product, right, is that we're providing utility to money itself. One of the use cases we power is connecting stable coins as an interoperable switch onto payment card networks, right? And the big reason for starting with payment card networks is because payment transactions on card networks are the most complicated type of transaction. And we are big fans here at Rain of trying to do the hard things first. And so we wanted to focus on getting the blockchain account infrastructure and the technology and our backend APIs and our wallet coordination technology to support all of the various edge cases of CardPin, Pending authorizations, incremental authorizations, settlements, partial settlements, refunds, chargebacks, all of the various different tools and all the various types of transactions that Card Networks experience on a daily basis, right? And being able to reflect all of those into account technology on the blockchain, on the various blockchains we support across all the different tokens we support as store the value was very important for us to start building the enabling technology to be able to do a lot more. And so, cards was where we started several years ago, but a big part what we do now is actually providing all of the utility, all of the authorization, all the information, all the settlement for every type of transaction that can take place in the backend infrastructure. 

So a part of our business looks like something like a Marqeta, I think, but we partner with several card processors under the hood. know, we can coordinate, you know, regionally diverse programs where our customers in the U S on a single processor, and then they're in Latin America on a different processor, or they're in Europe on a third processor. there we've essentially abstracted away a lot of the complexity on a global customer base because our native technology and the store of value is actually a global stablecoin balance, right? And then on top of that, we can connect into pay ins, pay outs. We can coordinate settlement transactions on multiple blockchains across multiple tokens or currencies. And so it's much more complex than what a traditional payment card transaction would be. But we started with payment cards because it's a very complicated way to transact today.
 
 PR: And it's also something that everyone kind of understands the concepts.
 
 FM: Well, mean, almost 90 % of payments that any person does on kind of a daily basis can be done on a car these days.
 
 PR: Exactly. So I do want to dive into the card piece for a little bit, because when I was doing my research and I didn't realize that you were a Visa Principal Member, and that is a very big deal for a company of your age and shall we say it's normally reserved for banks. Tell us a little bit about how you were able to become a visa principal and tell us a little bit what that means.
 
 FM: Yeah, being a Visa principal member means that we can sponsor our card programs directly. And normally you would require sort of a regional financial institution or a national financial institution in the United States to sponsor card programs. We are somewhat unique here where we are able to actually sponsor card programs ourselves. We have had a great relationship with the Visa team. They were very accommodating of us when we were in the process of converting our membership to Principal with them.
 
 And what this allows us to do is it actually lets us be the actual name on the back of the card. And so it's our bin, it's our processing infrastructure, it's our settlement stack. And the other advantage that we've been able to have, over the last several years, regulated banks in the United States were actually in a very difficult position when it came to novel technology, right? And there was a lot of banks that had been really interested in moving the technology industry for here on stable coin settlement and on chain technology, distributed ledger technology, et cetera. But it was very difficult for those institutions to actually engage with partners like Visa to actually move the industry forward from a settlement perspective. And so because we are a fintech, we're not a bank, we were able to actually use stablecoins as settlement infrastructure with the card network. And we were the first person, I think, globally to ever settle transaction on a weekend. 
 
 We're the first company globally to settle a transaction on holiday with the card network using stable coins. And so we might even be the first company to have received settlement volume directly back into an account where that was spent again, because Visa has partnered with a number of merchant acquirers to the settled payment volume to them. And we work with some of those very folks that Visa actually settles stablecoins with, and then it comes back into a Rain-powered account and then goes back into Visa.
 
 There's a lot of really cool stuff that we've been able to do because of our unique technology focused structure. And it's allowed us to move quickly and really build the technology infrastructure in the backend. And there's trade-offs, right? Like we can't take deposits, we don't take deposits. We work with financial institutions for deposits, but stablecoins have historically been for the last several years a like, you know, stablecoins and a self-custodial wallet are bankruptcy remote deposit effectively. It's issued by a third party. We don't control who issues it. We don't control the redemption mechanism. And then similarly, the user controls the keys and they can actually move their money to wherever it needs to go. we're essentially, they're never beholden to us to actually send their money back or move it anywhere or anything like that.
 
 PR: So does that mean that you can issue cards globally, not just in this country?
  

FM: We have regional licenses that we've applied for in some markets and received them in others where we're onboarding clients in a variety of different jurisdictions. We currently have frameworks in place that let us cover, I mean, we can onboard about 2 billion addressable consumers in the global marketplace today based on our regional licenses, as well as some dispensations for the car networks. And, you know, our business has been built because, I mean, you know, aside from the stablecoin thesis, one of the things we started realizing was, that businesses and fintechs have been global for a long time, right? Like if you look at some of the largest companies in the United States and the largest technology businesses over the last several decades, they're global in nature, right? Like you look at Deal or Rippling, you look at Airbnb, you look at Amazon Marketplace. These are global businesses, Upwork, Fiverr, et cetera. And the challenge has been that there's been no global enabler. Like nobody to enable a global customer base for global financial products.
 
 And so that's where we really aspire to kind of fill that gap. it's a difficult endeavor because we do have to engage with local regulators and make sure that we're being mindful of local requirements and regulations and making sure that we have proper disclosures for the people and the sundry markets that we're onboarding or supporting clients.
 
 PR: Yeah, when you think about it, it is a very inefficient system when you've got like, you know, Airbnb and Upwork and many others you mentioned, they've all had to go and create their own or create their own partnerships and do all that heavy lifting because there hasn't been anybody like you out there. Right. And so I imagine that you're, when you think about this, those sorts of companies in the future won't have to build all that stuff from scratch. Right.
  

FM: Yeah, and that's definitely our goal, right? Like we've had a number of our customers where because of our unique sort of global footprint or multi-market footprint, we're able to actually support them to go live and onboard customers in a variety of markets that look or feel similar, right? So we partner with clients in Latam, for example, and if a partner wants to launch in Argentina, for example, the language is similar to Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Colombia, et cetera, the advertising that they can do or the product marketing that they can do, can talk about it across the region. And so we've had a number of clients that maybe they were just incorrect about the ICP and the specific market, the specific vertical that they wanted to target. then because we allowed them to actually have cast a wider net and be able to service a larger customer base, they've been able to find the market where the current is stronger and have now become quite successful. so, you know, having been around the tech ecosystem for a little bit, I mean, one of the challenges, you know, historically has always been, you know, like if you're a founder, you're experimenting with early ICPs, especially in FinTech, you have to kind of be right about what you're doing first. And the risk of getting it wrong is quite high. Whereas now, because we can enable you to cast a slightly wider net, you know, within reason, right? Whether you have to make sure that you're doing things correctly and disclosing things correctly. But that has created the serendipity for people to actually find opportunities in markets that they would not have even discovered otherwise. And then they've been able to double down and then grow rapidly. And we have several customers that went from being in a very difficult spot to then being number one app on the app store in their category very quickly thereafter, right? Just because they were able to target a slightly different customer segment and maybe the adjacent country.
 
 PR: So the companies that you're working with, your customers, are they primarily in the stablecoin space? Are there some just fintech companies that are just using this because they want an international credit card? I mean, who is it that's actually using this?
 
 FM: That's a great question, Peter. So we started off originally ‚Åì servicing stablecoin native businesses, right? Where they knew what wallets were, they knew what stablecoins were. They had a thesis around, or they had an existing distribution that was multi-market, because of the core business, whether it was a wallet or a crypto protocol, et cetera. And over the last year, most of our customers now, so most new customers that we are speaking with actually trad-fied programs. We've actually converted existing programs from a traditional sponsor bank paradigm to a rain power infrastructure. In some cases, as an add-on to service a larger global footprint, or in some cases as a complete rip and replace because we have the ability to provide significant economies of scale because of seven-day settlement, because of the stable coin nature of what we can provide on the backend, because of the ability to actually face a much larger counterpart if you're using a Circle or a Paxos, the balance sheets of these institutions is in some cases significantly larger than most of these partner banks in the market. And then subsequently you're facing like a Bank of New York Mellon, which is as the asset custodian for somebody like Circle. And so you're actually ending up in a position where there's several kind of larger G-SIB type institutions in the backend. You're not facing a regional financial institution with $200 million of assets for a fintech product that has 3 million users and $5 billion of deposits. So there's significant advantages that people are sort of realizing on their own. And then they're coming to us and saying, Hey, this is our use case. Can we slot rain infrastructure into this piece or that piece? And that's been actually one of the most interesting learnings for us over the last year is that, you know, the demand for stable coin powered solutions is not coming from people that have spent the last 10 years or so in crypto or digital assets. It's actually coming from people that, know, 12 months ago, if you were to ask them, Hey, are you exploring stable coins? They would have said, God forbid. No, absolutely not. We wouldn't touch that with a barge pole. And then now they're like, Hey, actually, this is a lot more flexible. We have a lot less risk because we can work with an entity, which is specifically set up for global customer base or a multi-traditional customer base. 

It's not a financial institution, which is sort of saying one MSA in a state in the United States, and then also happens to have 5 million Nigerian customers and 4 million Brazilian customers. And, you know, has, you know, that model historically over the last several years has not been proven to be sort of long-term reliable, right? Like a lot of large fintechs in the US have kind of had to go play hopscotch, go from one partner institution to another, to another, to another. And, you know, I think that people are open now to actually exploring an alternative that, you know, we're trying to be thoughtful and mindful of how quickly we grow and what we do. And we don't want to do all of the things that people are asking to do. But, and you know, we've learned a lot of lessons from partner banking, right? We really have invested heavily on the compliance side, making sure that our customers, we are facing the end user directly, right? And so things like that, which...others have gotten wrong historically. We've just learned a lot of these lessons and thankfully, regulators have created very clear guidelines on how they want you to face a global customer base. We've been listening and we've been applying lot of those things to how we operate.
 
 PR: Makes perfect sense that the BaaS Banking Model has had its challenges over the last three or four years for sure. And it sounds like you might be a beneficiary of those challenges. What I want to do now is, you're working with, let's just say a traditional FinTech that has a card program or what have you. But I want to understand the flow of funds because you say you can settle seven days a week, which is great. It's the way it should be done in 2025, right? So can you just take us through all the steps in a just a typical swipe transaction that you do? And particularly, I'm also interested in the sort of the back end of that of how the money is funded for that transaction.
 
 FM: Yeah. So, I mean, let's work on like a credit card use case, right? There's a charge card or credit card product and it can be secured or unsecured. doesn't really matter. We have different couple of partners that are happy to take the risk on either side of those. And so let's say a rain powered card is tapped at a point of sale at Walmart, for example, right? Somebody is buying goods and services at Walmart. They tap the card, $100 transaction. That transaction will come in, we can authorize that or there's a collaborative authorization mechanism that we have in place with some clients depending on who's doing the underwriting and decisioning of each individual transaction. So we were able to pass that through or it'll run against our ledgering and authorization metrics. And then once that transaction is the closing transaction comes in from the network. At that time, we can actually go to our capital partners, which have contracts on the blockchain. So we have smart contract loans that we have access to.
 
 There's usually a charge being posted from a third party that says, hey, this is the daily settlement obligation to the network. We can actually draw that balance just in time. So, we can pull that money programmatically from a capital partner that is deploying a loan on the blockchain using smart contracts. And then we have, let's say we owe a million dollars to the network for that day. We can borrow a million dollars and then it comes into our wallet. We can send it directly to the network to settle the daily settlement obligation for that. Separately, what will happen is that, let's say it's a fiat program, right? Our partner can actually surface a account number, routing number to the end user for a repayment. That money will come in and through our partners will get minted into a stablecoin. It'll actually go through the cash waterfall to repay the lender principal and interest. And then everything that's remaining at the bottom end will be our revenue. And we can withdraw that programmatically seven days a week, 24 hours a day, whatever cadence of payments are on the backend. And so what this lets us do, right, is that there's no, like, we don't have to have this like reserve sitting around of our money that we're fronting. And then we have to put together a packet that when we email to a back office somewhere with a capital partner, and then they review it and then they validate these are eligible transactions. And then separately a couple of weeks later, then they'll send us a wire for the loan. And we would have sold that into a warehouse.
 
 So like it's a bit of a difference from how traditional programs would normally work. It's just because the capital that we're able to borrow is deployed programmatically on the blockchain and we can pull those balances and stable claims based on the daily settlement report that comes in from the network.
 
 PR: Then when is Walmart getting their money, right? So like Walmart might have, you know, hundreds of these transactions every thousands, tens of thousands, who knows every day, when are they getting their money?
 
 FM: So that that's that of the transaction is staying the same. So Walmart's getting the money in the same way that they would get any other transaction closer visa. Visa is actually receiving that stable coin from us. And in some cases, they may be settling that to merchants that accept stablecoins on the other end. But in the case of Walmart, they would be converting that into Fiat through their partnerships with the stable coin issuers and then sending that through the traditional financial system the way that they normally would. And so that may be a five day payout, right? But the way that we work, right? I mean, and maybe this is something that the Visa team is exploring, right? Like, they now have seven day money from us and they only have a five day payment obligation. So now they're actually potentially sitting in a float position. But I think that this is an important primitive that needs to exist, like from a SEND perspective, so that potentially we can move to a seven day merchant settlement on the other side. I'm not, I don't work at Visa and I don't know what their long term plans are, but it stands to reason that merchants should be able to receive money seven days a week if issuing entities are able to settle seven days a week.
 
 PR: The V's have a pilot stablecoin settlement program. Is that for merchants that accept stablecoin payments? mean, is that pilot program doing things seven days a week?
 
 FM: So I'm not sure if they're doing things seven days a week. I mean, we don't work directly on the acquiring side of the network. We do work with Nuve, which is a settlement partner of Visa. And we provide the account infrastructure for Nuvei merchants to receive stable coin settlement. And we see transactions there five days a week. so I imagine it's probably five days a week, or at least in the substantive that we see it's five days a week. But those merchants that we're powering, they're receiving a stablecoin.
 
 It comes in from Visa to Nuvei, Nuvei just versus that to the merchant wallet. And then that can happen whenever, and those funds are instantly spendable on the rain powered card. Because again, like that settlement takes place instantaneously. They don't have to be worrying about a swift payout or something like that. Cause a lot of the merchants we're servicing are, mean, some of are in the United States, but others are in South America or other markets where they would have to have received that money through like a Swift Pan into their local bank account and local currency. And there would have been a fee attached to that on the receiving end. would be FX attached to that on the sending end. And so they're receiving dollars now because they're still getting settled for dollars. 
 
 PR: Gotcha. So, if a FinTech is listening to this and thinking, well, I'm curious about exploring this, what's involved in getting up and running a card program with Rain and is it less expensive than what they would normally get with one of the BaaS banks?
 
 FM: We don't know the addressable pricing for every best bank. We try to think about ourselves as like optimizing for speed to market. For us, our core principle is really about our customers should be able to validate a solution powered by stable coins faster than any other institutional partner anywhere else. And do so in a way where if it's successful, what you're trying to build is useful. You can then expand that addressable market of customers to be as wide as possible. And so our goal over the next 12 to 18, 24 months or, you know, for the next several years is really about expanding the breadth of services and addressable markets that our customers can only, that only have to implement one API solution and they can onboard clients in all variety of countries that they currently either service today or aspire to service later. And so for us, know, costs is significantly improved. I one of the biggest improvements that we're able to provide our partners is, if you're willing to use our stablecoin settlement infrastructure, we have 7 day money and so do you. And so that means that your reserve requirements with us are fractional, what they would be with any other partner institution.
 
 PR: Gotcha. Okay. So I mean, with the passage of the stable coin legislation this year, the Genius Act, and there's going to be potentially a lot of stablecoin issuers coming on board in 2026. Are you agnostic to who you work with? I mean, how, like, obviously you're working with the big guys. How do you think about what stable coins to work with?
  

FM: We're a technology infrastructure player if you peel back all the onion, right? And you see kind of what's really inside the hood is we're a technology infrastructure player. Our thesis here is that as the universe of stablecoin issuers increases, that's going to be good for market adoption, lots of different services, lot of innovation may take place. The reality is that with this proliferation of stable coins, the way the consumers are paying is going to probably stay the same. Like when you go to a till to buy a product, you're doing the same activity and you're expecting to do the same activity. So unless that stable coin is openly accessible or openly accepted, it's no better than a closed loop gift card. And so one of the things that we really focused on here is that we are token agnostic largely because it's a key linchpin of us continuing to be a bankruptcy remote partner. Right? A big reason why we don't issue our own stablecoin is because we don't want to consolidate all the risk for our counterparties or our clients onto us. But we don't want to be the only place that you have to go. I mean, we've seen a lot of these challenges with banking as a service where a bank may lose track of some of the funds or in a bankruptcy scenario, your enablement technology player may become jointly and severally liable for the money that your clients had placed in their trust. And so our goal here is to try to learn all the lessons that we've seen in the market and try to take that to heart and say, hey, how do we avoid becoming a systematic risk for our customer? Because the reality is, is that we are a newer company. We're still relatively young and we are being trusted by larger and larger players about some publicly traded companies. 

And so for us, it's really important that we socialize the protections of our diverse system to our customers and have them have the strength of being able to say, hey, you know, they can face any number of partners they want to for stablecoins. They can face any wallet partner that they want to for wallet or custodian for custodian services. And then they can use us as part of their issuing stack or part of their payment stack. It's not a one size fits all narrative on our side. We think that the universe needs to have this diversity of token issuers. And, you know, we also support tokenized deposits. Like we have a number of programs that we're working on right now, where we're working with FDIC insured institutions to add utility to a tokenized bank deposit. And there's a lot of really cool stuff that we can see happening in that segment as well, aside from the stable point segment. So like, our thesis very much is that as this proliferation increases, everybody is going to have to create that interoperability natively. so Rain has been over the last year or two years, a great partner for new stablecoin issuers entering the market or stable token issuers, because we can give you instant utility globally at a point of sale terminals without having to worry about having to go to merchants directly and figure out how you're going to solve for that problem. Like we were a big partner of the Wyoming stable coin token launch, because on the first day of the token launch and the first day of public availability, the token is instantly accepted at every Visa terminal that accepts Rain cards today. No one has to opt into it. No one has to do anything to figure out where do I take my frontier token? Where can I spend that? What can I do? It's just natively built into our settlement infrastructure as a core currency that we support. And so because we support it, now it's supported on top of the Visa network globally.
 
 And as we expand network coverage or as we expand merchant coverage, every token we support just gets that access to that global network and that global interoperability that a consumer or a business, they don't really need to worry about: is this something that I can use or not?
 
 PR: Yeah. Having that, the Visa network makes it suddenly, ‚Åì it looks like a mainstream product now. It just feels like a mainstream product. I would have loved to dive into the tokenized deposits, but we are out of time. But before we go, maybe we can close with what's your vision for, you know, a lot of people in this space talk about the, you know, the next generation of financial infrastructure. What's your vision for that and what will Rain's place in that be?
 
 FM: One of the biggest opportunities in the future of financial infrastructure is reducing the working capital requirements of operating, right? Stable coins and tokenized deposits, digital money really brings with it the capability of being able to have a non-fungible money transaction for the first time since cash, right? And that increases the throughput of markets, the throughput of programs and increases the actual efficiency of these programs meaningfully. And so a big thing that we really focus on here is really about how this is not two different industries trying to fight it out and figure out what's happening. We think about this as this is just the next evolution of money. And whether it's stable coins, whether it's tokenized deposits, whether it's CBDC, the reality is, that it's probably going to be a mix of all three across the world and all of the different markets that have different regulatory approaches to this. What is not going to be different is that tokenized money is going to be the future of a lot of the financial infrastructure over the next decade or two.
 
 And we recommend everybody start thinking about what that means for their business. If you could reduce the working capital requirement, increase the capital efficiency of your programs, what would you be able to do that you can't do today? And that is the most exciting part of thinking about this technology infrastructure is that what are the new solutions, new products that you could design or deliver? What are the cost savings that you could push to consumers or businesses that you're not able to do today? And that's where we think all of the really interesting things will be built over the next decade.
 
 PR: It's so interesting to be a part of this now, because right now we're still working on 20th century technology for the most part of the banking system. We're in this process now of rewriting that and it's going to be fascinating to see how this evolves over the next decade. I look forward to following Rain and seeing how much movement happens towards this infrastructure that you've built.
 
 Really been fascinating having you on the show today Farooq, I really appreciate it.
 
 FM: Thank you for the opportunity, Peter. Great to be here.
 
 PR: I don't know about you, but I learned a lot in this episode and I love the way Farouk made the case that this is just an evolution of existing financial technology rather than a replacement battle between crypto and fintech. When he said this is not two different industries trying to fight it out, but rather the next evolution of money, he positioned stablecoins as infrastructure upgrades that solve real operational problems like 24-7 settlement, instant reconciliation, and reduced capital requirements. Because at the end of the day, that is how this new infrastructure is really going to go mainstream, when there are obvious and tangible economic benefits. 

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