Stablecoins vs. SWIFT: The Revolution in Cross-Border Payments

While domestic payments are faster than ever, international transactions remain stuck in the past. In this episode, Monex Chief Economist John Min explains why cross-border payments are often slow, costly, and unpredictable.

GUEST-AT-A-GLANCE
Name: John Min, Ph.D
What they do: Chief Economist
Company: Monex
Noteworthy: John specializes in global payments, macroeconomic trends, and helps financial institutions navigate the complexities of cross-border transactions and foreign exchange.
Where to find him: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-min-4941634/

Most community banks and credit unions rely on a chain of large correspondent banks, creating delays and opaque fees that frustrate customers and hurt businesses. This outdated system puts smaller institutions at a major disadvantage, risking the loss of deposits to larger competitors with more advanced technology.

John breaks down how emerging solutions like stablecoins and plug-and-play platforms are set to revolutionize the industry. He argues that by partnering with specialized providers, community banks can level the playing field to offer fast, transparent international payments. Adopting this new technology is no longer just an option—it's essential for protecting their deposit base, improving customer satisfaction, and unlocking new revenue.

Transcript

Wrestling Payments - John Min, Ph.D, Monex

Season 3, Episode 22

[00:00:00] John Min: nowadays you can do real time payments. You use wallets, everything is instantaneous. I just did a transaction on my Truist account and boom, money went out. I was like, wow, that's really fast.

[00:00:11] John Min: ​

[00:00:40] Joe Casali: Hi, welcome to Wrestling Payments. My name's Joe Casali. I will be your host today. I'm very excited. We were just meeting off camera, talking about what the podcast was gonna be about, and I, it there's so much, ahead. It's gonna be very exciting. I would, I just got back from a meeting yesterday, from the Faster Payments Council and when you talk to the Faster Payments Council, we're talking about instant payments, real time payments.

[00:01:04] Joe Casali: It's only one hair away when all of a sudden we start talking about these technologies being cross-border payments. Let's talk about cross-border. The current systems don't do cross-border. So today I have a very special guest, very I'm not gonna even ask him my wrestling questions because this is a very special guest, so.

[00:01:24] John Min: about wrestling. Sorry, Joe.

[00:01:26] Joe Casali: There's some problem solved. John, if you could introduce yourself and the company and, and what you guys focus on.

[00:01:33] John Min: Sure. My first name is John. My last name is Min. I am a PhD economist. my area specialty is productivity, how to improve companies, but, I've been working with Monex for the past eight, nine years at their Chief Economi. And, I do macro analysis, so if you wanna know whether you should hold onto Nvidia or get out, I'm the guy because I try to see where the economy is going six to nine months ahead, whether it's gonna bend this way, it's gonna go that way.

[00:02:05] John Min: And then we provide that as a advisory service to our clients. Second time the Monex. We are international financial institution. We have Monex, US, Monex Canada, Mexico, Asia, Europe, put it all together. We're about 3000 folks and we focus on one thing only, which is we're very good at taking one money and converted to another money.

[00:02:29] John Min: So FX conversion. And we are also very good at sending that money or transferring that money to 154 different. Countries of the markets and, because we're specialists, we're very good at it and we are very efficient. for example, all our wire transfers, let's say, they settle within 24 hours. half the time is the same day.

[00:02:55] John Min: And then our pricing is super competitive. But we're not a bank, so we don't compete against the bank. So our salespeople, first thing they say is, we're not a bank. Your deposit stays with your current fi, everything stays the same. You only consider using us for cross-border payments. And by the way, Joe, I'm not surprised by the cross-border conversation at the faster pay council, right?

[00:03:21] John Min: Yeah. Because what's happening based on our survey is that the customers get spoiled on domestic side of the market because nowadays you can do real time payments. You use wallets, everything is instantaneous. I just did a transaction on my Truist account and boom, money went out. I was like, wow, that's really fast.

[00:03:39] John Min: But now if I wanna do cross border payments, some of the FIS required to come to the local branch. And uh, we actually had a person told us, last week, not only they had to drive to the local branch, they had to fill out a form to transfer money to their supplier in uk. And here's the part that I think is against the dot, Frank.

[00:04:01] John Min: He didn't know how much it was gonna be

[00:04:03] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:04:05] John Min: wait for the confirmation or until the account got debited. So he had to put extra, cash into his, operational account just to make sure it got covered. So there's a huge disconnect. Yeah.

[00:04:18] Joe Casali: Yeah. Let me ask you this. So we, as we were talking earlier, scoping the when I think of, my everyday life. I live in Massachusetts, which I think we do in a lot of international. I never think of that part of banking and business. can you talk a little bit about, for folks who aren't aware that there's a lot of, you know, imports, exports that need to be paid for, can you scope that issue?

[00:04:44] Joe Casali: You said you were in 49 states. Talk about that.

[00:04:47] John Min: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're in all 50 states. in order to operate, we need to get a state banking license. We're fully regulated, audited. And we gotta maintain performance bond in various states. So in many respect, we kind of joke around, we're actually, safer, more secure than with the banks because with the banks, you're, the licensed national state.

[00:05:08] John Min: We're at the both levels. That's number one. Oh, by the way, only reason is 49. I believe it's Montana is only state that doesn't require state banking license. That's that. Now, in terms of the import export, cross border payment business, I'm super nerdy numbers guys. So if I go from top down, roughly about 15% of the US economy is international, either import and export.

[00:05:32] John Min: That's one way to look at it. Another way, look at it is there are about 250,000. Registered importers scattered all of the United States. According to US Census. That's like 1% of all businesses in the United States, but then 95 to 96% of the manufacturers they buy supplies from overseas. it may not be the major supplier, but they do import parts from overseas, so that's roughly about another 600,000.

[00:06:01] John Min: Businesses, put it all combined. if you have about a hundred businesses in your market, in your area, two to 3, 4, 5 are actively involved in cross-border payments. Now, for those people who are, more in tune with how much revenue potential is possible, according to McKinsey in US, we're looking at about $60 billion.

[00:06:23] John Min: That's the size of the pie,

[00:06:25] Joe Casali: 60 billion.

[00:06:27] John Min: yeah. And then there's, uh, super cluster centers. I call it. These are retail. What I just described are just businesses. Retail. Are these, are people just walking into a branch? My son is studying in Cambridge. I need to transfer money too. I'm an expat. I'm working in United States.

[00:06:46] John Min: I need to send money. I need to pay for my mortgage while I'm buying a villa. Whatever might be in Europe or, oh, now big thing is Asia, Mexico and Canada.

[00:06:56] Joe Casali: Hmm.

[00:06:57] John Min: to send money to Canada. I need to send money to Mexico. When you put that together, we're looking at, a significant amount of business opportunities, but they come in clusters. So if in Washington, DC is a big cluster, that's no surprise, but North Carolina Research Triangle, there's tremendous amount of retail business, Huntsville, Alabama. Woo. There's a lot of individuals doing wires. San Jose, California is one, and I just found another super cluster in the United States, Wichita, Kansas.

[00:07:30] Joe Casali: C Kansas. Really? That's, this is

[00:07:33] John Min: Kansas. Well, that's because there's so many international engineers involving aerospace, so they're sending money back at, back and forth for personal reasons. On top of that, if you put the businesses, I suspect that NF i's listening to this podcast. there's significant amount of cross border business opportunities in the market.

[00:07:54] John Min: And if you don't see that in your internal business operation, it's because they're not coming to you.

[00:08:02] Joe Casali: So I have to, Stop myself because I just want to kind of listen to you

[00:08:06] Joe Casali: So, let me ask this. So, we would, again, we were talking before and, it is not, I'll, I'll use my words. you can definitely use your words.

[00:08:16] Joe Casali: It's not a level playing field. Not every institution has the same buttons and machines and, and all of that. can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:08:25] John Min: Yeah, so I think, I believe there are 4,400 banks that, that's the latest account. Out of 4,400 banks, 20 are what I call the first tier banks. They do their own foreign exchange, cross border payments. They got the infrastructure that tap into SWIFT and whatever it might be. What that implies is that most of the fis, community banks, regional banks, credit unions, they're not doing their own cross-border payments.

[00:08:54] John Min: They're outsourcing it to so-called corresponding bank and. Right there, it causes tremendous amount of problem because you're servicing a business in your, like a wine importer in your area who imports a container of wine every other month. Each container is about 30 to $40,000 worth of wine if you're getting it from Europe.

[00:09:15] John Min: what that your payment has to be made. And now that person comes to your retail branch, or they call in, or they, do it online. Well, that transaction is now outsourced to your corresponding bank

[00:09:29] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:31] John Min: bank. Based on their cutoff, their batch system, there's automatically one day delay or second day delay.

[00:09:38] John Min: Additionally, the corresponding bank doesn't care about the pricing on exchange rate because a lot of people don't know. All conversions, and we call it FX conversions. They're over the counter. That's the technical term, over the counter. What that means is they're negotiated, so whatever corresponding bank says, we're gonna mark it up 1%, 2%, 3%. That's the price. By the way, in the United States, typical markup by corresponding banks, it's up to three to 4%.

[00:10:07] Joe Casali: can you, Dig into that just for a second.my daughter went to Italy and, and this, she did go to Italy, but, um, I'm gonna pay for her hotel and I need to do it right now. I'm gonna do it. how does that transaction work? and I work with a, a very local, institution.

[00:10:25] Joe Casali: How, how could that work?

[00:10:27] John Min: Well, so. Here, here's my advice. If you're doing small transactions like that, credit cards are okay, except there's a markup in the conversion rate charged by your credit card. That's anywhere from two to 3%, unless you have a very special credit card. But your annual fee is like now $800 a year, whatever it might be, maybe one, one and a half percent, but.

[00:10:52] John Min: Yeah, that's fine if you're paying for like three, $400 worth of Euro. But the whining quarter

[00:11:00] Joe Casali: Yeah.

[00:11:00] John Min: whose invoice is 30, 40,000, paying 2%, 3% on that. That's significant. So they avoid, they don't use credit cards, they want to send a payment. It,

[00:11:12] Joe Casali: and that's happening at the time, right after he filled out the form, if you will.

[00:11:18] John Min: he filled, he'll filled out the form. W What happens usually is you don't even know as a business person how much it's gonna be until you get the confirmation

[00:11:27] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:28] John Min: because the bank cannot tell you unless the corresponding bank comes back and says, this is how much it's gonna cost. If that's the type of relationship.

[00:11:37] John Min: So they're literally saying, this is what I need to send. Lemme know how much it's gonna cost. Corresponding. Bank marks it up, it's not their customer, so it's not gonna be competitive pricing, and it gets. Uh, the transaction gets done and now you get the confirmation. At that point, there's nothing you can do about it.

[00:11:57] John Min: And then of course, a lot of business in the United States, uh, they're captive to their bank because if you wanna do cross border payments, where do you go? You go to a bank.

[00:12:06] Joe Casali: right,

[00:12:06] John Min: Uh, in Europe there're many, many, many, many more companies like us, because I don't wanna say Europeans more sophisticated, but when it comes to foreign exchange, they're more aware.

[00:12:16] John Min: It is just a. they're used to it because they go to Switzerland, they gotta convert, they go to Poland, they gotta convert United States. We think everything is done in dollars and if you need to do any type of financial transaction, you go to ufi. And reality is most of the FIS in the United States, they don't do a foreign exchange.

[00:12:35] John Min: They outsource it. So really the entity or that's making most of the revenue taking advantage of this type of system in the United States at these big 20. Maybe top 10 banks and their revenue on the foreign exchange is very significant.

[00:12:52] Joe Casali: I'm not gonna be creative at all. You were mentioning, um, current, a couple of studies that just came out about, the rates that these 20 top guys can charge versus the everyday bank. Can you

[00:13:04] John Min: Yeah, so again, I'm a nerdy economist. I get the regular studies published by NEBR. That's the national economic. Bureau of Research out Boston is a conglomerate of Harvard and some of the schools in New England area. And one of this, research, the peer reviewed, study that I'll share with you after this podcast is fascinating because what they found is that these top 10 major money center banks, they have a unique advantage.

[00:13:32] John Min: In other words, what they found is for the same amount of deposit for their customer. Larger banks offer significantly less yield or interest on that versus small fis. The implication is in, in offer smaller fis to hold onto that deposit base, they have to provide more yield. So they looked into the reason why there's a delta market should be efficient and people should. And what they found is that bigger banks can get away with it. What? They don't have to pay higher yield because they offer more advanced, innovative products. So if you don't have, a very efficient up to the market industry standard services when it comes to cross-border payments, you know, there's local importers and manufacturers in your market.

[00:14:24] John Min: Even the individuals who are doing significant cross-border payments, if you wanna hold onto their deposit, you gotta almost bribe them, provide them incentive by providing higher yield on their deposit. Now, other implication is, those businesses will go to National Bank in your market to open up an account, not because they don't like your service.

[00:14:45] John Min: it's not that they don't like your history with them, it's just that. They need to send the wire out. It needs to get there fast. I need to know how much it's gonna be. But here's the trick or either trick. In order to do that transaction through, let's say Wells or Chase you, you need to open up a bank account.

[00:15:04] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:05] John Min: Now, if you do, then I guarantee you that there's gonna be siphoning of the deposit because in order to the transaction, you need to have cash in your operational account to cover for it. So now your deposit base is at a risk. So I think it's really, really important for smaller regional fis to recognize.

[00:15:27] John Min: it's not that you want to make money on the cross-border payments. If you wanna defend and hold your deposit base and be competitive, then you need to keep up with the innovative products and services. That's why pretty much all the small fis are going real time payment and fed now and things like that.

[00:15:45] John Min: But again, cross-border payments, they're far behind. Compared to big money center banks.

[00:15:51] Joe Casali: Yep. RRTP and Fed now are not doing, cross-border payments.

[00:15:55] John Min: No. No,

[00:15:56] Joe Casali: and I, I don't actually see it on the horizon, but, super interesting. I wanna be conscious, conscious of your time. I also wanna be, so for the listening audience, John is a con, an economist. We could talk about lots of topics. I, I don't wanna impose on him, but I do wanna touch on, just touch on, it's not gonna be a stable coin episode, but I do wanna just touch on it because I've always thought the, the easiest way for me to understand a cryptocurrency was to think of it as a different.

[00:16:31] Joe Casali: and it a different currency, right? Just like a Frank or a a euro, it, it was a different currency. There's an exchange rate with the passage of the Genius Act. How do you see that affecting your business? Is are you gonna incorporate that?

[00:16:48] John Min: If, if my answer is gonna be based on what's gonna be like five to 10 years, I think it's gonna affect the industry significantly because technology itself is beautiful. So, by definition with the Genius Act, the idea is the stable coin is stable because it's a backed up dollar for a dollar. On a trust.

[00:17:09] John Min: So the market, there's no volatility. It was very difficult to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange because it just fluctuated so much. So as a business, if I'm gonna pay you on Bitcoin, I may be overpaying You, underpaying you based on what's happening in the market. With the stablecoin, I know it's almost pegged to the dollar, so it's fantastic right now.

[00:17:33] John Min: Second part with the Bitcoin. it's a stablecoin, I, I should say, if you're going to send stablecoin to India. So we are actually looking into a case where, you as a customer can sell dollars fiat currency by us, stable US, A DCC, let's say, and then you send that to a wallet in India. So instead of taking three to four days to send funds by Swift, with the markup exchange rates, this would be almost instantaneous transfer.

[00:18:03] John Min: And it's fully transparent from a compliance K-Y-C-A-M-L perspective. it's not only transparent and the cost to doing a transaction is not gonna be 50, $60. It will be few pennies, assuming there's no markup to it. Only challenge right now that exists is that recipient of Indian would be in my wallet in India, Delhi, new Delhi.

[00:18:27] John Min: If I wanna convert that to fiat, my local currencies, I can go to a local shop. And by my cup of tea, whatever it might be, not all financial institution would be able to do that. So it, right now it's very narrow application. There are few financial institutions in India that will do that, but then it's not gonna be as liquid.

[00:18:49] John Min: I cannot send stable coin to China, Vietnam. we have, we worked with a lot of nonprofits and a lot of folks in Africa, working on. Different NGO projects, they wanna get paid in stable coins. It's the problem is when they receive stable coins, converting it to local currency, that's the challenge. But a lot of people wanna receive their stable coins because they don't wanna hold onto the local currency if there's high inflation.

[00:19:17] Joe Casali: So I, I think of this all the time. and you just gave a great example of it. So everything's connected, right? Everything's connected. but different, right. And stay with me for a second. I know I sound a little weird right now. the idea of a stable coin is wonderful. You know, I'm gonna exchange money from a wallet to another wallet and poof, it's there.

[00:19:38] Joe Casali: It's like, it's like magic. It's there. But when you get into the reality of, of, well, in India. Here's the, the facts and the, the, the way you, you may not be able to transfer it in China. There may not be a market to you. You, you'll have a wallet full of stable coins,

[00:19:55] John Min: What are you gonna do with it?

[00:19:56] Joe Casali: won't be able to do anything with it. Can you talk a little, I was just on the edge of understanding, following your story.

[00:20:03] Joe Casali: Can you visit that again as far as, the intricacies of a, a country and, and how, Stable coins work or don't work or even, is that true with dollars as well? Would, would, in India, would there be a challenge exchanging dollars in rupees?

[00:20:21] John Min: No, because pre, pretty much all the financial institution in India, they can convert. Dollars to Indian rugby.

[00:20:30] John Min: And that's true for China as well, except in China you have to give a lot of paperwork. This is mainland China, not Hong Kong. There's A-C-N-Y-C-N-H two different Chinese currencies, right? If you send it to the mainland, the recipient has to provide paperwork to the government to say, I'm getting paid because of this.

[00:20:52] John Min: Because there's, capital control in China. They wanna make sure no money comes in and out with the government noticing it. Now going back to stable coins, there's a lot of demand for stable coins, but if you actually look at the common profile demand comes from countries with high rate of inflation like Argentina,

[00:21:14] John Min: other, the inflation has come down recently, Brazil, Turkey, the suppliers over there wanna get paid in stable coins.

[00:21:22] John Min: And it makes a perfectly economic sense because when you get stable coins, it's pegged to a dollar. I don't have to worry about depreciation due or loss of purchasing power due to inflation, so I'm not in rush to convert that to local currency. In fact, if I'm buying something from overseas, it's better for me to use stable coins to pay for it instead of using local currency to buy.

[00:21:47] John Min: The foreign currency because my currency is depreciating by 12%, 7%, 8% every year. So if you look at it, that's where the demand is for the stable coin right now.

[00:21:59] John Min: But

[00:22:00] Joe Casali: that's not a new concept, right? Because before stablecoin it would've been dollars or some

[00:22:04] John Min: no, no, exactly the payment. Dollars. Dollars, right. And they don't convert dollars to local currency. if they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it to black market.

[00:22:13] John Min: You get better exchange rates. Right. So it is, it's, it's the same process. Ultimately, the technology of stablecoin is so much better than the current network of messaging, which is really a swift,

[00:22:26] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:27] John Min: 4,000 institutions almost emailing each other. Now, it's gotten a little better with the ISO 20 0 2 2.

[00:22:34] John Min: They're standard standardization in the fields and messaging. But again, it's just global commerce being run. But why don't you debit this and credit that for me? You debit this and credit that for me. And yeah, that's the pipeline, versus fully transparent, instantaneous public ledger that says, you own this, you own that, you own that.

[00:22:57] John Min: And there's a track record transparency. So technology is superior, but I think it's gonna take long time

[00:23:06] Joe Casali: And,

[00:23:06] John Min: to really take over the swift.

[00:23:08] Joe Casali: and for folks who don't understand, and this is again, my interpretation of Swift. Swift is a, is a message.

[00:23:14] Joe Casali: It's not, it's not a it's not a payment. It's not like cash

[00:23:17] John Min: No, no, no. Cash doesn't leave. Yeah, e, exactly. I'm literally sending a message to another bank or the side of the pond or other side of Pacific and say, you have my money debit tier credit. This account in Tokyo.

[00:23:32] Joe Casali: Excellent. Alright, I um, I know you have to go, but let's pivot right now for the problem. So the problem. I think we defined it pretty well. The problem of, maybe having access to the tools or having a, an efficient, you, you brought me back to my economics days with, an efficient market, but an efficient system to not only, service the international payments we have today, cross-border payments we have today, but as stablecoin onboards, could any advice for.

[00:24:03] Joe Casali: Member, my, I like to think of my members, but financial institutions, the savings and loans, the, the community banks on how to approach this problem.

[00:24:14] John Min: I think the key word is partnership,

[00:24:16] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:17] John Min: but with the right partner.

[00:24:18] Joe Casali: Sure.

[00:24:19] John Min: with the API technology and everyone going to ISO 2 0 0 2 2, it's almost becoming a plug and play.

[00:24:27] John Min: And literally as a fi, I can plug into the best in Kind services and then put it all together and provide that level of super competitive efficient services to your customers.

[00:24:43] John Min: So when it comes to cross-border payments, there's no reason why you can. White label, if even our platform or our competitor's platform. at Monex, we can white labels a platform within two weeks and then you can just plug into API. Then you can offer cross-border payments as with the service that's actually better than these money center banks.

[00:25:09] John Min: And here's the best part. Now, instead of. Uh, just giving the transaction and let the big banks make all the money on cross-border payments. You can monetize your cross-border payment, uh, customers transactions, and that could be significant because that wine import I was talking about, it's about $30,000 a euro.

[00:25:30] John Min: you can charge about 2% markup instead of 3%, so you're super competitive. That's $600 worth of fee income. Forget about the wire fee. Everyone focuses on the wire fee. to me that's like a petty nuisance revenue. Real revenue comes from the markup and exchange rates, and these wine importers, they import once a month, twice a month.

[00:25:53] John Min: So you're looking at $600 with the recurring fee income coming from wine. Wine importer every month or twice a month. And multiply that by all the importers and manufacturers in your market. It is a significant revenue flow that's gonna make a difference to your bottom line. That has nothing to do with the yield curve.

[00:26:16] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:16] John Min: That's the best part. Yeah, it's not, has nothing to do with the interest rates.

[00:26:20] Joe Casali: I sort of, I pride myself on, on having a podcast that goes a little bit. A little bit deeper. So, I know in the past there have been logical things. the easiest one is, is, the, in the a CH, they implemented this IAT transaction. No, we're not talking about cross-border at all. Just, just, they implemented this new technology and they had to delay it because in the industry, the financial institutions were not up to date.

[00:26:52] Joe Casali: In their software releases. So all the cores said our, our software does it except all the financial institutions were behind. So they all had an upgrade to be able to take advantage. You say, you said, if I can, repeat it back that, this is, is with all the technology available today, it's an easy onboarding, you know.

[00:27:19] Joe Casali: Hmm. Given vendor management for onboarding, all of that, what's the difference between, between, yeah, it's easy today. It could work with, they should do something about this because it's not a, a could. It's a, this is happening. Stable coins coming along. This is already, cross border is already a big deal.

[00:27:40] Joe Casali: You may not know about it. Because it's being taken care of in that corner of the institution. We don't know what's happening over there. any, any, any deep dive?

[00:27:49] John Min: uh, well, okay. Deep dive under the hood. If you're using any core processor like Q2 Jack, Henry FIS, Pfizer, we're already in there so it's just matter of flipping the switch. That's easy if you have your any banking platform. Then we can plug in our API and provide cross-border payments. So if you have a treasury management system from a third party, pretty much everyone, our standard fits there.

[00:28:20] John Min: So you're just adding a tab that says cross-border payments. When you click, you're literally coming to our platform. At that point, it's a single sign on, so seamless, uh, that day. Your customer doesn't leave your environment. And we do all the transaction K-Y-C-A-M-L, everything else.

[00:28:39] John Min: the easiest way to do it is just white label our platform.

[00:28:43] Joe Casali: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:44] John Min: And when the business says we wanna do cross border payments, I don't want to come to your branch or your services. It takes three to four days. Your pricing is not competitive.

[00:28:53] John Min: You don't have the currency that we are dealing with. That's a big issue right now because, you know, supply chain has moved outta China and has gone mostly to southeast Asia. Vietnam being a hot destination and Philippines. And now they're looking for, uh, Vietnamese Dong, that's the name of the currency, Philippine Pesos.

[00:29:15] John Min: And you don't offer that because you only offer G seven, the common currencies. You can simply take the, our platform, white label it, it takes two weeks to white label. You put your logo, color, everything else on it, and you just extend that service to your, business client and they will just get on, they do all the transactions, K-Y-C-A-M-L, everything else is done behind the scene.

[00:29:40] John Min: And we do get audited by state banking Commission. So we actually have a higher standard than most of the fis when it comes to cross-border payments. And the, again, the best part, you monetize it immediately.

[00:29:53] Joe Casali: Right. Excellent. Excellent. Now, some housekeeping stuff. Do you know, uh, I know you're speaking at our, upcoming conference Faster Payment Symposium. Yes. FPS, are you speaking at our conference? You, you are

[00:30:05] John Min: is the podcast. I got my full schedule. yes I am.

[00:30:10] Joe Casali: I could. And what, what would you be speaking on? 'cause I, I'm gonna be in that session. I know. I, uh, I don't know if people wanna meet

[00:30:15] John Min: It is gonna be cross border payment landscape. Oh, mine. I'm a keynote speaker.

[00:30:22] Joe Casali: Ta

[00:30:23] John Min: It's uh, November 3rd, I believe, in Boston. Right.

[00:30:27] Joe Casali: Yep.

[00:30:28] John Min: And then. Oh, and in addition to talking about the payments, I'm gonna be talking about the, uh, US macro economic conditions because one of the areas my team has been looking at is how is tariff is affecting the, uh, our growth.

[00:30:45] John Min: and today it was crazy. We only created 22,000 jobs. we usually generate 120, 130 jobs, a thousand jobs per month. And, last two, three months, we. On average generated about 30,000 jobs. So does that mean you con US economy is going to recession? Is something else going on? And, I'll share my research on November.

[00:31:10] John Min: How's that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:31:12] Joe Casali: cliffhanger.

[00:31:13] John Min: No, no. I, I, I have, I, I found some data that's very insightful. It has to do with the productivity. I don't know whether you notice the productivity is surged

[00:31:23] John Min: in the

[00:31:23] Joe Casali: I, it, I, I would imagine it has, because I think more and more people are definitely onboarding AI stuff. What's supposed to make it easier? I don't know. Anything else? Not an

[00:31:34] John Min: It, it searched after the COVID. So, when we were forced to work remote and then every business had to look at their own business processes, and we evaluate that ever since we got out of COVID, it's a us on a steroid economy. Which means we don't need to create a lot of jobs because we're productivity's high.

[00:31:58] John Min: And of course immigration is a big story.

[00:32:01] Joe Casali: Sure.

[00:32:02] John Min: last two years we were getting two to 3 million immigrants a year, so we had to create 200, 300,000 jobs to absorb them. But now immigration is close to zero, so we don't need to create that many jobs. And if we are being smarter, more productive, the businesses don't need to hire as much.

[00:32:21] John Min: The good news business is not laying off because if you look at weekly jobless, wait. So I, I may have a good news,

[00:32:29] Joe Casali: Yeah, this is

[00:32:30] John Min: in November.

[00:32:31] Joe Casali: Excellent. Yes. please come to the conference to get that news. Excellent. Thanks for joining me today.

[00:32:37] John Min: It was very nice meeting. You're looking forward to the conference in November.

[00:32:40] Joe Casali: Excellent. All right. Thanks everyone.

[00:32:42] ​