Contracts That Make You Bankable: Portability, Tokens, Termination | Adam T. Hark WHF | PEP089

Banking Meets Payments: Capital, AI Reality Checks, and the Tokenized-Deposit Shakeup

Hosted by Leo Arzumanyan and Jeremy Stock. Special guest: Adam T. Hark, Managing Member, Wellesley Hills Financial (https://www.wellesleyhillsfinancial.com/).

Payments isn’t just rails and rates anymore; it’s capital, contracts, and data that decide who scales and who stalls. In this candid, operator-level conversation, Adam Hark maps the real terrain for ISOs, PayFacs, acquirers, and ISVs: how residual streams get valued, why lenders still struggle to underwrite payments businesses, where AI helps (and where it absolutely doesn’t), and why tokenized deposits from major banks could upend stablecoin economics and B2B money movement.

What we dig into

From portfolio trades to full-stack banking: How residual purchases, portability, and ISO/agent structures shaped a niche investment-banking playbook for payments—and what buyers actually pay for when they value a book.

Capital that understands payments: Why traditional lenders misread variable merchant cash flows, the collateral that really counts, and the deal structures that align risk with revenue.

AI without the fairy dust: The practical use case is heavy-lift data processing (merchant-level files that set portfolio value), not judgment or strategy. Generative tools draft; experts decide. Hallucinations are a legal and financial risk without human oversight.

Operating in the tokenized era: How bank-issued tokenized deposits (with yield) could challenge private stablecoins, change treasury workflows, and accelerate corporate adoption of blockchain rails—while cores, processors, and gateways scramble to keep up.

Founder focus: Don’t bolt AI or crypto onto the roadmap just to keep up with the buzz. Start from the problem: auth rates, cost to collect, dispute cycle time, portfolio attrition. Solve that, then layer tech.

Field notes for teams

Valuation is in the data exhaust: Clean merchant-level reporting and cohort analysis beat pitch decks. If you want a premium, instrument your book.

Contracts drive financeability: Data portability, token migration, termination assistance, and audit rights are the difference between “bankable” and “hard pass.”

AI guardrails: Use models to wrangle processor files and KPIs; never ship output without expert review. Treat models as interns—fast, not authoritative.

Tokenized deposits over press releases: Expect treasury to demand speed and yield. If you touch payouts or cross-border, start planning wallet addresses, policy, and controls now.

Talent and trust: Niche expertise compounds. Clients will pay for people who actually understand payments math, not just “fintech.”

Why this episode matters

If you raise capital, buy portfolios, or operate on the sharp end of merchant acquiring, this is your playbook for 2025: get your data house in order, negotiate bankable contracts, deploy AI where it’s measurable, and prepare for tokenized deposits to change how funds move and settle.

**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice.  All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**

Visit us today: https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/podcasts/

A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm

Transcript

Cold Open: Guarding Proprietary Know‑How

SPEAKER_03 0:00

And we all have uh we're all incentivized to say that, aren't we? Right. Um I don't think in uh you know, again, in professional services in particular, where um uh there's a cre uh creativity is important, uh strategy is important. I mean, the you know, we're way out over our skills in terms of what AI can actually do.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

And when you're in a niche industry like we are, you know, ultimately a lot of these models or all of these models are trained on the data that's out there, right? Our our industry is pretty niche. I don't think there's a lot of training material for it to train on, at least at the end of the yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Yeah, and I shut that stuff off like even with the programs we use like uh Google uh Suite, um you know, make sure that Gemini's off because I don't want to teach them either.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 0:41

Yeah, so yeah, I want to feed these guys all out. Like these are proprietary processes that you know, and and we've all wrote you're in the legal industry, we're in the banking industry, we spend years investing ourselves and learning our trade, continue to learn our trade. I mean, why would we just like toss that and give that to somebody?

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Yeah.

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. And our special guest, we got Adam Hark with Wellesley Hills Financial. Adam, it's a pleasure having you in the studio. We're a big fan of what you guys do over there. Welcome. Thank you very much.

How Adam Fell Into Payments Banking

SPEAKER_01 1:24

And welcome, Adam. I you know, usually I like to start these podcasts out by getting an understanding of who we're with. So can you just let us know how you got into this space? Because everyone has a really unique story from what I've learned. Like, you know, I've done a couple of these as Jeremy's said now. And I'm realizing everybody has very unique stories of how they got into payments. So I'm just kind of curious how you got into this industry and from there if you could tell us, you know, what your role is at the company and what the company does as a whole. Sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

So um, you know, if I'm gonna be uh very frank about it, I I kind of fell ass backwards into payments and investment banking at the same time. Right. Um I uh originally teamed up with a relative of mine who was working for a merchant acquirer. This is circa 2006, I think. Um uh I'm based out of Boston. Uh uh this relative was, and the acquirer was uh small publicly traded OTC company, and their business model was um inorganic growth. So they would bird dog uh portfolio deals and residual deals, and that's how they grew their company. And um uh my, you know, after that ultimately became my partner in my first business. Um he had observed internally, you know, working as um, you know, a salaried person, that you know, he was doing a lot of the MA work. He was identifying the targets and all this, and then it um, you know, uh at the consummation of a transaction, inwalks the investment banker with and walks out with like multiple six-figure payday, and he's like, okay, this something's not right here. Um he had the idea uh at the time I was looking for a career change, and we just kind of it was such a really it's so niche that merchant acquiring payment processing space. Like you you couldn't help but think there was some opportunities there, especially given that um what was super interesting is uh most of the transactions were not enterprise, they were asset transactions. So people are trading, they're buying residual streams, they're buying portfolios, they're portable, they're not portable. Um and it's happening all the time. And there wasn't at the time really a well-established intermediary who was um brokering those transactions, representing whether it's the buyer or the seller. And so we saw Elaine and we ran in it. So um I cut my teeth in banking and in payments in the merchant acquiring space with the processors, working with ISO's sponsor banks. Um and uh over the years, uh I don't know how much you want to I I I can run you up all the way to the yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

It's always interesting to know. Yeah, it is because one of the things that's the more detail the better, usually. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Okay. You know, one thing we've noticed is in similar it's funny how your story is starting out the same way is people just keep finding themselves in this industry. It's not that they thought it out. People fall in all the time. All the time I interview someone here, they always fall into it. It's never like I save for me. I didn't become an attorney in payments knowing what I was going into.

SPEAKER_03 4:19

It it it's a really I mean, not purposefully, but it's an opaque industry. I mean, we as consumers, okay, you know, all we know about payments is that it either works or it doesn't. Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Exactly. All we know. We never thought about surcharging or this or that.

SPEAKER_03 4:34

Pull back the curtain, man. There's so much going on. There are so many different uh participants in the ecosystem. I mean, it's wild. And so um that's how I I fell into investment banking. That's how I got into the payment space. Over the years, we flattened out the practice to appeal more broadly to financial technology, all the species uh they're under. And um fast forward to 2020, in comes the pandemic, blows out, you know, whatever our pipeline was at the time.

Building A Niche Intermediary In Acquiring

SPEAKER_03 5:01

Um there's nothing and and and the reason why that's relevant, because there were no deals in the offing to keep myself and two of my younger teammates. I think Anthony's been here on a podcast before, uh Shabong's back in the uh headquarters in Boston. Um, there was nothing pinning us in anymore. And what we were kept bumping up against as um advisors, MA consultants, doing investment banking work was the fact that we weren't actually an investment bank. Um and that um created a constraint for us because we had developed this expertise in this really niche area of financial services. And you know, the biggest groups out there, from publicly traded companies to financial sponsors, private equity groups, they would come to us, you know, so we could analyze what they were doing if they were looking at these types of assets and wanted to acquire them uh or build one, et cetera. But, you know, you know, we would uh respond to requests for proposals, you know, uh and bid on engagement. It's gonna be investment bank, investment bank, investment bank consultant, you got DQ'd right away. So um it it was really frustrating for us. And then when the pandemic came in, blew up the pipeline, it interestingly created an opportunity for us. Because there was nothing pinning us in. We're saying, you know what, we're gonna do it. So um at the same time, we stood up Wellesley Hills Financial, which is the operating company, the one that the market knows. I stood up Wellesley Hill Securities, which is our broker dealer. So now we registered with FINRA, and that really opened the doors for us because now, you know, 70 plus percent of investment banking is raising capital on behalf of companies. Sure. It's not MA. Um, and it just opened the doors, and we've been running, uh we ran through them and we've been running ever since. So um that's kind of the background. Today is what currently constituted, um, you know, we have that payments practice, it's still probably a uh

Pandemic Pivot To A Licensed Broker‑Dealer

SPEAKER_03 6:45

30 to 40 percent of our business. Then there's fintech across the board, and then we have a uh burgeoning B2B software practice internally as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

It's really cool. Uh you know, one thing I wanted to ask you, and it's something I like to ask a lot of our guests, because I'm kind of like a, I don't know what you want to call it, like an AI nerd. I'm really interested in like how AI is impacting society in all sorts of industries. So we'd love to get your take on are you seeing AI impact what you guys do? If so, how? And you know, are there any challenges front and center for your guys' clients that are maybe being resolved by AI? Just kind of walk us through that and what you're seeing, because that's a big topic of everything now.

SPEAKER_03 7:20

It's expansive. Um I can approach the answer in two ways. I mean, one is like what are we seeing as it relates to our clients um in the payment space? I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward at the moment. I I think um it has value, immediate value um to companies as it relates to uh repetitive uh tasks um and automating them.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Yeah, agentic AI, right? I believe so.

SPEAKER_03 7:51

Even generative. I mean, I think AgenTic is still I mean everybody's talking about it, it's all over the place. I think uh you said society, uh you know, I I think everybody's a little bit out over their skis on this. You know, there's a big difference, whereas uh generative, you're you're prompting it, and it's based on Bayesian reasoning, which is statistical, so the past predicts the future. Um that is that is you know what I think people are using now. Um they're prompting these massive LLMs and they're getting outputs, and they can do stuff that they would have normally had, you know, higher persons, real humans. Right, right. It pops out, and there's efficiencies there, clearly. Um as it relates to our practice, that's really interesting because um, you know, uh getting back to the expertise that we've kind of honed over the years and this in payments, um there are certain analyses, uh especially KPI analyses, um valuation work that you know you just you can't get at other places. You're not gonna get it really at a lot of consulting shops that aren't banks, at the true middle market banks. They have fintech divisions or payments divisions, but really what they did, they they parachuted in bankers and they said, Okay, you're in the fintech spot. But they they don't have that background or their ex that expertise. So there's some really niche things. Uh one of the places that we're looking at AI um implementation specifically is in or with um the processing of the massive amounts of data that the processors kick out, um, which basically define uh what a portfolio is worth and and feeds or informs the financial model that tells you what the business is worth.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Just to jump in real quick on that point, I'm curious how are you guys handling AI hallucinations? Because just for an example, we've had clients come to us and be like, hey guys, we use, you know, let's say it's ChatGPT or Google Gemini to draft this contract. Can you take a second look? And when we look, we have to completely redo everything because they don't actually know what they're looking for. So what they see to them sounds like a good contract. I take their one-page contract, turn it into an 11-page contract that has all the bells and whistles, that has everything that they didn't know needs to be in there. And when I looked at their contract, it has it cites the provisions that are not actually or cites the laws that don't actually exist, for example. And they're like, you know, they don't look. And I'm just wondering how you guys handle your hallucination,

Today’s Practice: Payments, Fintech, B2B Software

SPEAKER_01 10:14

you know, with the AI.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

So what we're we're we're doing, excuse me, uh we're currently working on a project um with the University of Toronto. Uh we're working with an AI team at the school. It's a joint venture. That's cool. Uh we're doing it through uh one of our executive advisors, uh, Michelle Bao, who uh based out of Canada. Um it's it's it's a collaborative effort. We're feeding them the data, um, and they're supposed to be uh basically simulating the analyses that we would do internally. Okay. Um and and again, this goes back to fundamentally you know processing these massive data files, the raw data reports that the processors kick out on the merchant level activity, whether it's for the ISO or for a bank, et cetera. And um it's not so much a hallucin, I wouldn't say it's hallucination issue, there's a trust factor here. So where we are in the project is we're really trying to determine you know to what degree of accuracy the outputs that the model that these kids are working on with an AI program are to what we would come up with. Right. And to answer your question, um perhaps more bluntly, um I, you know, as much as I find generative AI an extremely useful tool, to me, it's

Where AI Helps And Where It Doesn’t

SPEAKER_03 11:33

still stupid.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Agreed.

SPEAKER_03 11:34

This is not this is not smart AI. Smart AI is deep learning. Okay, that's when you get into the agentic stuff where you know it's actually, you know, you're not prompting it. It's looking at data, it's finding patterns, it's processing that information, it's drawing conclusions, and then it's acting on it. That's different. I mean, right now we're still in the generative uh uh universe, and so I think it's really important that you have that human oversight. You cannot send something out the door that's something that's kicks out of a model.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Yeah, and I always tell our clients. You'd be negligent. If you're gonna use it without us even looking at the internet, you can use pieces of it. But you have to verify. And you know, one thing I try to explain to people when I'm trying to kind of explain what AI is in a simple way is the way I view it, let me know if you think differently, but for generative AI specifically, I kind of just say, hey, it's like it's like a word predictor. It predicts the next words.

SPEAKER_03 12:22

Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean that's exactly what you're doing. You're prompting it, saying, hey, listen, find find an answer that would map to this input, which is the prompt of the question. And it kicks it out based on, again, it's basiness statisticals. So it's just saying, you know, there's a 90% chance that the answer should be this.

SPEAKER_04 12:39

Right.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

Right. Um, but it's not 100%. Yeah. And it's not verifying it. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah. And it, you know, if I think, you know, if you're especially if you're in the professional services industry, like you are and we are, you can't you can't just kick that out the door and say, yeah, this is what, you know, here we go. Um and I think clients too want to know or make sure that there's someone eyeballing these these outputs before it gets kicked back. Because I mean, if you told me, you know, I mean I'm sure there maybe there are uh AI lawyers out there now. I don't know. I mean they're doing document processing and all that kind of stuff. But that doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies. Right. I feel like I'll be back in court for something. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

I'm definitely I don't think it's at that stage where I would be comfortable doing that at all. There was one I I didn't really look into, but I remember a headline like a PIAI attorney. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. I don't even know how that passes any sort of like ethics standards. How does you know how do you go to core with that? I don't really get how that works. I don't know. I don't know.

Human Oversight And Data Trust Issues

SPEAKER_01 13:37

I don't want to know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:38

Um but like but I mean I think it can it is effective in doing, you know, it can take like eighty, you know, 70 percent of that heavy lift, do that piece, and then you can fine-tune it with oversight and uh just kind of back testing to make sure that you know the outputs are um they're coming out where they should come out if uh you know we did it, a real human did it.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. It really is. It's it's but what I'm hearing you say, Adam, is in essence, we're not at risk of our jobs being taken over just yet. Not yet.

SPEAKER_03 14:08

Well, I mean, listen, we all have uh we're all incentivized to say that, aren't we? Right. Um I don't think in uh you know, again, in professional services in particular, where um uh there's a creativity is important, uh strategy is important. I mean, the you know, we're way out over our skis in terms of what AI can actually do.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Aaron Powell And when you're in a niche industry like we are, you know, ultimately a lot of these models or all these models are trained on the data that's out there, right? Our industry is pretty niche. I don't think there's a lot of training material for it to train on, at least at the end of the yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:41

Yeah, and I shut that stuff off like even with the programs you use like uh Google uh suite, um, you know, make sure that Gemini's off because I don't want to teach them either.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

So I want to feed these guys all out. Like these are proprietary processes that you know, and and we've all I mean you're in the legal industry, we're in the banking industry, we spend years investing ourselves and learning our trade, continue to learn our trade. I mean, why would we just like toss that and give that to somebody?

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Yeah, just to just to one of your points, Jeremy. Yesterday I was reading an article. So Google just released their latest Gemini 3.0 model, which is crushing all the benchmarks in terms of job losses, right? Radiologists, uh, there's this exam for radiologists where they you know take a look at the scan and and whatnot. The average radiologist that was part of this study scored, I want to say like 81%. Gemini 3.0 now scores somewhere around like uh high 50s, low 60s. So they're bridging the gap. The last model was in the 20% range. Wow. So we're really bridging the gap on a lot of these things.

SPEAKER_03 15:40

Aaron Powell And that's probably one of the best use cases there for generative, because I mean you think about a doctor, uh, you know, what they're doing is they're processing information from what they see, from what they hear, from tests, and they're making a prediction based on it. And it's probabilistic. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, you feed it the scan, you you run that scan against the others.

SPEAKER_03 15:59

They're not 100 percent. Never are well, I mean, hopefully they are. But I mean, that's what you would wish. I mean, bear, I would expect uh AI at some point to exceed uh the human capabilities to uh you know in prognosises and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah, I could go on this topic forever, but you know, just sticking kind of with payments and what you guys do. Yeah, we just wanted to help. Right. Uh what kind of challenges are you seeing, let's say, in the immediate to you know, short-term future for your clients, the industry as a whole. Anything that's coming up across your radar that you're thinking about.

SPEAKER_03 16:31

I I think there are two things. I I think um, you know, making sure that good companies are well capitalized is is a constant challenge. And I, you know, I think payments, again, um maybe a victim of its own specialization because a lot of lenders out there, um, whether they're bank or their private credit funds, uh still have a lot of difficulty getting their heads collectively around the business model. Um, um, if they're lending, what is it secured against, uh, how much risk there there is there. You know

Are Jobs Safe From AI Right Now

SPEAKER_03 17:05

about this because a lot of that risk is baked into the contracts, which doesn't map to, you know, they understand SaaS model recurring revenue because, you know, here we got, you know, software companies sell to a business, there's a contract in place, the business base, X amount of month. Yeah. Okay. Payments processing is different.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

It's variable. And so many different industries are implicated. Yeah, so is that.

SPEAKER_03 17:25

So yeah, I I think that's a um a challenge that uh persists. And then I think on the technology side of things, and I think this, you know, this is AI, this is now crypto. I think people are struggling to understand where they're gonna be, what their business is going to look like, what the world is gonna look like three years, five years from now.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Yeah. And I think what do you mean by that? You are are you saying digital is gonna replace fiat, or are we talking about it?

SPEAKER_03 17:53

Um well, I think I I think there's a place for all forms of money. I'll I'll say that. But I mean I think there's like this i it it it's in the um it's it's infecting the

Capitalization Challenges In Payments

SPEAKER_03 18:05

psychology of founders right now that they feel pressure. Okay, how are we gonna use AI? Yeah, you know, and I think a lot of them panic and they they they look for an AI solution without actually understanding the problem that they needed to solve. So um and I think that's distracting and disruptive to the core business. Um crypto, I think, um completely different technology, but I think that's also you know, uh has has creeped into the mindset of the founder in the payments space. You know, how is this going to affect us? What do we need? Um prepared to provide our merchants with everything they're gonna need, you know, in the next three to five years as it relates to payments acceptance.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah. So I was actually that's perfectly ties into what I was gonna ask you. Before this uh podcast, you brought up, you know, JPM and then base network. Uh we're talking stable coins, all these things. I'm gonna need your expertise on it on this because I just had a little bit of time to look into that. But you know, correct me if I'm wrong. What I understood was, you know, they released JPNM released this base network for tokenized deposits. And just from my kind of brief look into this, it almost seems like is this going to undercut the Genius Act and the utility of stable coins? Because with stable coins, you can't get interest off of them, but with these tokenized deposits,

Founder Pressure: AI And Crypto Choices

SPEAKER_01 19:31

you can. So why even use stable coins? That's that's kind of how I see it.

SPEAKER_03 19:34

Yeah, so so so a couple of things. Uh so stable coin to me, um, you know, uh it's here. It's not going away. It is going to be part of the future. It already is, it's part of the now. Um, that's just the way it is. Um what I think is uh amazing um just from a from a high level, um, is just the speed at which you know uh the technology is evolving along With the regulatory regime, along with the use cases, along with demand, all different segments. You know, I was doing uh hosting, I was a moderator at a panel in New York City uh about a month ago. And that was on stablecoin, and I was making a case um not just for, you know, everybody talks about the B2B cross-border, which is so objectively, as a release of stablecoin is an objectively better solution. With one caveat, it doesn't have the throughput yet that the Swift system has. I don't think it can handle the amount of transactions. But I mean, the technology itself,

Tokenized Deposits Versus Stablecoins

SPEAKER_03 20:38

I mean, there are still intermediaries there, but a lot less of them, uh, which is what reduces the time. And when you reduce the amount of intermediaries, you're also reducing theoretically the cost. Great. But I mean, there is a case to be made for the B2C at some point, um, especially as it relates to big retail, like the Walmarts and the Targets and the Home Depots of the world, um, who make up maybe 60, 70 percent of all card transactions uh you know that are running on Visa and MasterCard are big retail. So um but but just in between that point in time, which is roughly a month ago and now, I mean, the JPM Morgan press release that came out two weeks ago um with their not a stable coin, so it it falls outside the purview of the Genius Act, which is fascinating in and of itself. Because now you're talking about it is a tokenized deposit. So if I'm a corporation and I have money in my bank account, um it's essentially now I still haven't figured out the mechanics of this, like the in it, you know, uh with granularity. But um, as I understand it, it's interchangeable. So um and and then the big and I I read this press release three, four or five times because I'm saying to myself, it's like, I think this is like a really big deal, and nobody's talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

You were the first to I yeah, I hadn't heard of it until you raised this.

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Yeah, and I was like, wow, this is huge and nobody's talking about because it it turns to me, it turns the whole stablecoin business model potentially on its head. Because here you have these um non-bank issuers uh who generate revenue primarily from yield. I mean, from the securities that are backing the coins. Now, if I I I think about if I was a corporation and I have my accounts at JP Morgan, and I have you know at least two accounts. I have an operating account and have a money market account. And even for a small company, you can do basic treasury management where you're you, you know, if you've got a balance in your checking account, you're switching it into your money market, you're getting yield back and forth into checking when you need it. Yep. Okay. Why would I ever take money out of my bank account and convert it to, let's say, USDC. Right. Which you can't get USB. Where I don't get yield on. No yield, yeah. Why would I do that? Now in JP Morgan, they have, they're now they've two networks that they're operating. So the base one, I think, is some sort of joint venture with Coinbase. That's uh uh Ethereum level two solution. What's relevant about that is it gives JPMD their deposit tokens access to public blockchain. Um and then internally they have a Connexus

Why JPM’s Move Could Reshape Treasury

SPEAKER_03 23:08

network, which is their own proprietary uh permission network. They so you have to be in the JPM network to um have access to that, have a wallet and whatnot. But you get all the benefits of stablecoin without having to give up uh yield, which to me is a game changer.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:26

Um and I uh again, I'm just a I I'm very surprised that you know the financial media, um, you know, the pundits that we typically you know listen to on LinkedIn and everybody's like it's almost like the whistling past the graveyard on this one. And as a scratch in my head, I was like, I I I'm not sure if they understand what I mean, this is the biggest financial institution in the world. Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

I think it's a big deal. I think it's a big deal.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

I'm curious how you think, because you just said it's a game changer. If you just had to, you know, a really short condensed version, game changer how? Like what what do you think is the biggest thing that's the same thing?

SPEAKER_03 24:04

Well, because the biggest concern. The reason why, you know, um you know, when they did the Genius Act, that, you know, they legislated it in that, you know, private third-party issuers couldn't share the yield was to protect the banks. Because they didn't want people the banks want to make sure the deposits stayed placed. They didn't want money flowing out of deposit accounts, which they need to do their primary, you know, business, uh, which is lending. They don't that money has to stay there. So they didn't want it flowing out into stablecoin, private stable coins. That's why you know they legislated it in that banks can't share yield. So now you get this tokenized deposits which falls outside the scope of the Geshect, because it's not a stable coin. I wonder if this is going to prompt other companies to start doing this and doing partnerships with the that's you know, I don't know if it's uh exercise in reductio ad absurdum, but uh you know you're thinking about like the small, tiny financial institutions, the banks out there. Uh what is it? Bank of North Dakota put out a press release or something like that, uh uh maybe a month and a half ago that uh what was it, the Buffalo coin or something?

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Everyone has a coin right. What else to say?

SPEAKER_03 25:14

But but I mean if you think about smaller financial institutions, I mean the biggest threat to them with stablecoin, again, is outflows. Okay. If they lose a deposit base, they lose their ability to lend. Right. So imagine them being able to

Core Banking, Wallet Addresses, And The Future

SPEAKER_03 25:28

keep the, you know, there's no need to go outside um for a uh to to convert deposit funds into uh a private issuance like USDC or Tether or something like that. It's it's it's it's a great solution. Now, that begs a whole bunch of other questions um as to core banking core capabilities now, you know, and I think that's also why you saw FISERV and FIS jump right in the ring, um, you know, kind of at the same time as Genius or right at right before, right after it passed. Because people sometimes forget they're not, you know, a lot of people in our space think of them as acquirers. Okay. They're banking core technology providers. Right. Thousands of banks run on FISERV and FIS cores. So um it's natural for them to have to address this. Um I think they they you know, they came right out and they said, We have we're gonna address this, which they had to do. I'm not sure exactly how they're gonna do it. But all banking cores in the future are going. I mean, listen, everybody what every merchant, every merchant on the planet's gonna have a routing number still, a checking account number. What's different is now they're gonna have a wallet address. That's that's the future.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

I want to end it off with two things. One, I don't think you told them where they can reach you, like the specific email or specific contact info.

Contact, Personal Note, And Closing

SPEAKER_01 26:47

And two, something I want to start doing with our podcast, Jeremy. Yeah, yeah. At the end of each podcast, I want to ask the guests one thing they're looking forward to. So either if it's a trip that's coming up, I don't know if a good movie you're gonna go watch, whatever the case may be, just let us know one thing you're looking forward to in the near future.

SPEAKER_03 27:03

Okay. So uh as it relates to contacting myself, um, I think the simplest way to do it is just find me on LinkedIn, uh Adam T. Hark, uh uh Wellesley Hills Financial. Um because we kind of have a long domain name. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. Link control the easiest. It's too easy to misspell.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

And I'll reach out to everything to us and we'll we'll give you the best content, whatever the case may be.

SPEAKER_03 27:25

Um in terms of things I'm looking forward to, uh, this is a very selfish thing. Um I love being right. All right. So um I want to see, I want to see in the next 12 months, you know, where we are at the end of 2026 with stable coins.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

No, no, it can't be work-related. It's gotta be a personal thing you're looking forward to. I gotta cut you off there. Oh, that's personal. I want to be right.

SPEAKER_04 27:46

Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_03 27:50

Um, I I I think um for me personally, uh I I I take a lot of I'm a builder. Okay. Um, you know, when um people, especially uh people applying for like an internship or something like that, they say, why did you get in this business? You know, what is it that brings you into the office every day? What is it about your personality? I said, I like building things and I like doing it with teams uh and my teammates. And I love my teammates. Um, I love what we're building, and you know, to be able to continue that trajectory is extremely fulfilling and rewarding. And um I'm looking forward to that. Cool. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

You still tied it to work, but we'll let it slide.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

Yeah, no, it is. It's it's a it's a great answer. Um, Adam, it's been a real pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. Visit us online today at Global Legalaw.com. Matters discussed are all opinions that do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.