The ActivateCX Podcast
Join Frank Rogers on The ActivateCX™ Podcast, your resource for demystifying, clarifying, and providing guidance around AI, CXM, and the modern Cloud Contact Center.
In this Podcast series, Frank interviews Thought Leaders, Unpacks critical AI & CX technology, and addresses the leading Experience topics of the day.
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The ActivateCX Podcast
How Margin and Regulations will Change the Future of Fintech
OUR GUEST...Basile Senesi is the CRO of Arc.tech, a leading FinTech firm, empowering startups with modern financial products
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TO BE SURE...Fintech is a vertical disruptor, bringing radical change and transformation in the Financial Services space. The changes are pushing the boundaries of regulation, security, privacy, and customer experience.
FIND OUT...how Basile and Frank (Your Host from Arroyo360) view the changing Financial Services vertical from the Fintech Perspective. Why the tension between achieving sustainable margins and regulatory compliance pose an obstacle that must be overcome.
WHAT IF...your Financial Services business is struggling with CX change, what technologies to buy, how to light up your culture with customer centricity. Then you need guidance and proven frameworks, combined with your inside knowledge and feel for your business.
TAKE AWAY...Expect to learn what you would from experienced business and digital transformation practitioners. Understand how employing new technologies like AI and staying on point with culture and customer Experience can lead to building a more competitive and sustainable business.
Extra Stuff:
Learn more about the ActivateCX Framework → https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/ActivateCXtoday
ALSO, WE WOULD LOVE YOUR SUPPORT!! * / activateCX@arroyo360
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#fintech, #customerexperience, #employee experience, #podcast, #contact center ai, #contact center solutions, #cloud contact center, #enterprise contact center, #customer experience technology, #call center phone systems, #cloud #call center solutions, #customer care call center, #contact center consulting, #contact center consulting group
Basile Senesi, welcome to the Activate CX podcast. Good to be here. So Basile, the FinTech world to say the least has been dynamic over the last few years. Would love to know your view on the state of the industry. Yeah. Listen, I think dynamic is putting it mildly. You know, FinTech had a bit of a real time in the sun here leading up to 2021 alongside a lot of other industries that did well kind of through that same period, but it was one of the ones that course corrected the hardest come 2022 when, the market started to tighten ultimately, I think there's. A handful of things that drove a lot of that. First and foremost I think investors changed their point of view on the revenue quality and potential of the fintech industry relative to other players that they had also been investing in like B2B SaaS for example. The other bucket was really around regulation and just complexity headwinds, frankly, regulatory headwinds that these startups and companies would be facing as, you know the US regulators were starting to kind of take a sharper look at practices across these businesses. I think we all remember FTX, but then a number of other things happened that kind of further put pressure. On the on the system, including, the classes of S. P. B. And what that meant for regional banks, etcetera. Double click on all that. But I think those two big things together lower revenue quality and, real regulatory pressure explain a lot of the downside. And what it ultimately has meant is that All things being equal, Fintechs have been on average less interesting, less well valued than they have been once before, right? So the same revenue number doesn't get you the same fundraisers it did three years ago. I think all companies have been adjusting to that, but Fintech particularly, so. They kind of moved from sexy to complexy and in a really quick fashion. It's interesting that when you look at this trifecta of compliance, security and experience, customer experience for the industry, they're all big challenges. But I think of it in that order, compliance first. The regulatory challenges, then how do you secure and build trust? I think maybe compliance and security work together for trust, and then ultimately the experiences, being able to to retain or, get that client, do you see it in that same kind of hierarchy? I do. And I think it's interesting. And FinTech gives you kind of a unique lens on that problem because, you know we tend to think of great client experiences, low friction and for a long time that the real benefit that FinTech provided was leveling up the user experience of traditional financial services, better banking, better card, better payments, et cetera. That's right. And a lot of that improvement again, was really just making it easier, making it faster, making it less clicks, less hoops to jump through. Well, great for the end user, but also created a lot of surface area for things to go wrong. Fraud abuse you know, kind of a giant shell game of people applying to a bunch of different places with different identities to get financial benefits that they would not have been able to get with a, a more intensive kind of scrutiny and process involved with traditional banks. So KYC, AML, all that regulation, frankly, I think fintechs did a masterful job of streamlining and arguably simplifying and removing a lot of the traditional barriers, but it also then created problems that got regulators to pay attention. And so it's, it's ironic because. I do think, you know, on the arc of 30 years, what's happening to the industry is healthy. It's good. It's, it's necessary pressure to hold, bad actors accountable and ultimately make sure that companies invest in the right things, compliance and policy and procedure. But I think a lot of companies hadn't been rewarded for that. They've been rewarded for growth. They've been rewarded for less friction. They've been rewarded for you know, making it as easy as possible for people to use their products. And they solved for that for a long time. There's a bit of a reckoning around that exact user experience issue that's, that's driving some of those. FinTech is a product led growth type of industry. And that means that you come to relationship with your customers in a different way. How do you go about ensuring that your business is converting pivoting, right? Listening and pivoting and building relationship with the customer. How do you do that? Yeah, it's, listen, it's, it's a really valid call out. An example I like to think about quite a bit is opening a bank account with a traditional bank, right? You're a company, you want to open a bank account with JPMorgan Chase. Nine times out of 10, you're going to have to go into a branch to do that. You have to actually deal with a retail banker and that physical brick and mortar location, probably about as far as you can get from, product led anything Fintech, on the other hand, has tried to, make it as kind of self service as possible with avenues for involving humans and adding them in the loop when it's valuable, but ultimately not necessarily having that be the default and on the one hand, that's created great UX, but I think if you think about Fintech more specifically, right, the, over oversimplification that I like to think about banks ultimately still manufacture financial services. They're, they're the ones that are making the products, whether it's providing the capital or opening bank accounts, right? To be an FDIC regulated deposit account, you need a bank charter and you can't do that if you're a FinTech that starts up tomorrow. So banks continue to manufacture the product. You've had a whole host of middleware kind of infrastructure players helping distribute those products with the front end, that kind of retail equivalent being a lot of these FinTech startups. And in that environment you know, the whole idea, the whole reason that FinTechs have been able to do as well as they have is they've gotten very, very good at customer acquisition. But again, there's not three players in the food chain. It's not just bank selling to you and me, it's bank selling to a middle player who then sells through a FinTech to an end customer. Every one of those hands takes a cut. That means the margin for every player is narrower. By definition, FinTechs don't have the same margin profile as a bank does, nor do they have the same margin profile as you know, B2B SaaS company does. They're, they're a middleman. And that means they have to be really thoughtful around their unit economics. They have to be really thoughtful about Where the costs are because the average customer they acquire is a lot less profitable than it would be if they own the whole vertical stack, right? PLG and call it like lack of human involvement in onboarding is both a good user experience, but it's also a great way to make the unit economics work for an industry that just can't afford. To build physical branches and have bankers handling every transaction. And by the way, I think it's also what, kind of created a lot of this pressure post post 21. A lot of the realization that look at scale, fintechs are not going to look like Salesforce. They're going to look like JPMorgan Chase. Their margins are going to look like that. They're, they're a bank with you know. Expanded margin because of technology, not a software company that happens to deal in banking services. And I think that that's helped people rethink what good looks like. That's also, by the way, I think Frank, and this to me is the most exciting part, meant that this trend purely towards PLG and purely towards self service in fintech, in service of wider margin for, the fintech. Has kind of lightened up a little bit and there's more willingness across investors and ultimately then management at these companies to staff up where we need to, to, you know, meet compliance obligations, to meet regulator requirements, and more importantly, to meet customer needs at ARC. I think about this all the time, right? Like , the art. It's figuring out what the expected value of a customer is so that we can proportionally invest CX resources against that particular customer. Not every customer is going to be created equal. And so we need to be thoughtful in how we dial that investment, but I don't want to build a business where there's no human in the loop. I want to build a business where we're really responsive and including a human in the loop. When it adds value to the customer and the customer side supports that. So a lot, lots to think about in this space. That's a ton to think about and I, like your comments about distribution and margin because behind the scenes, that's such a motivator for why these companies are taking the action that they are. And it's interesting when we talk about relationship as well as, being a critical point in developing and growing a business. Banks I think left that. That particular level of dominance in 2008. And then I think in COVID as well, those two markers right there specifically changed how a bank treated a customer and how the customer viewed the bank in turn. Yeah, I agree, I think that the reality is this, this industry is very, very old and has had a lot of time to figure it itself out, reinvent itself. At the end of the day, it generally is a seesaw between consumers holding the power or the end customer rather holding the power versus the banks consolidating that power. Right. And I think COVID and the erosion of Fintech in the last few years, to your point, have moved a lot of the mass back in favor of banks. I think, when you look at the SVB crisis, basically exactly a year ago now, deposit flight towards big banks following that event was very, very real. Not just by the way for, for businesses that bank with SBB, but across the whole sector, it, it shook things up in a way that when they chase bigger, it made a bank of America bigger. And that's meant right. Frankly, that they haven't had to work as hard to retain customers that had. Been getting picked up by more innovative UX focused and customer focused kind of emerging players. I hope that we see, you know, that those types of innovative players are the ones who get to win again. And we're starting to see that, a year on from the bank crisis. We're starting to see that this system, this ecosystem is warming up again. I think that's for the benefit of the customer because again, for the last three years, it's really not been. A great time for the customer and banking banks has really held most of the cards. That makes perfect sense. So when you think about maybe this whole world of finance and banking and this long tail industry and this fintech emergence, do you see a merging towards a center between these two poles? I do. Look, I think ultimately you know. Vertical integration generally comes after separating out the supply chain. And so we've gone from banks owning everything to banks being the manufacturer and fintechs the end distributor. I think we're going to see some consolidation in this space. You're seeing kind of the trend, for example to put a finer point on it, banking as a service as a category, which is the, the middle layer that connects banks to fintechs and kind of. Owns the bank relationships, manages the fintech clients and acts as the gatekeeper between the two. There's been most pressure there out of any sector in fintech, I would say, because of regulatory kind of scrutiny because of this feeling that those gatekeepers were not doing their job and were kind of, you know, shirking their responsibility and KYC and improving specific users and enforcing controls. And so you're seeing a lot of just. Bad things in that space that will probably lead to some of those companies, the worst of those companies dying off. That's good. We need, you know, a more resilient, kind of more robust ecosystem. We don't need 50 players with differentiation being purely pricing. We need quality to kind of dominate that, that middle space. And I think that's what we're starting to see. What it will lead to is a few different models. One of them is closer integration between that middle player and the bank, what you can call the headless bank model. So, for example Column Bank is a great example of this, where the bank is the API middleware player all in one that gives them way more control and puts them way closer to the end customer. Regulators like that better than the current models that are most popular. But I think we're, we're going to see just a lot of interest in evolution in that direction. I think more generally, part of what drove, the contraction in FinTech is the fact that two years ago, everyone wanted to be a FinTech. If you were a software company, you wanted to offer payments, you wanted to offer bank accounts. You wanted to offer everything. If you're FTX, you wanted to give customers a checking account. I think a lot of that has a lot of that thinking of FinTech is another line of business rather than a core driver of a given business has lost its luster a little bit, it's less sexy today to add a FinTech component to your otherwise non FinTech business in the same way that people were doing a couple of years ago, and so you're going to see probably, Some consolidation in the space, you're going to see players dropping that kind of extra appendage that didn't necessarily make sense, but was monetizable in favor of players for who banking is existential for who FinTech is existential for who it is, their core revenue model, and they invest in that revenue model correctly with the right frontline and backline teams to support it with the right kind of focus on meeting regulator obligations building truly delightful and innovative products. Less players, but the players who will stay are going to make this their life's work rather than kind of a side project, which I think many startups have been guilty of in the last couple of years. That makes perfect sense. That's almost kind of a natural market movement, right? There's a creation of a new market. A lot of people rush to the gates for that. It's almost that 49er type of mindset, in terms of the gold rush. And then ultimately things become productized, democratized, and becomes an actual industry that has to stand on its own two feet and deliver. Speaking of delivering, people are looking at using all sorts of new models to, in essence, create greater margins and AI as part of that AI is everywhere. So how do we create self service? How do we use conversational AI, conversational bots, chat bots in the world of finance where compliance we've already kind of established is like top of the mark where we have to look at that, where do you see AI going in the near term, for the fintech world? Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question, right? I keep coming back to the same kind of topic, but the reality is the biggest problem we've had in fintech in the last couple of years is this tension between margin and regulation. Doing the right work historically in the eyes of regulators has meant having the right headcount to investigate and do things that are required to make regulators feel like they're banks are paying attention to who they're allowing it. I think you look at the consent order that the FDIC issued to one of Mercury's sponsor banks a couple of weeks ago, and it basically says one of the, one of the requirements from the FDIC that this bank says, you have to staff up your compliance and legal teams to pay closer attention to these problems, you have to just be more equipped for the size of deposits and client base that you now have. And we're going to enforce that. And we're going to monitor headcount size and investment in this category. And that is. an archaic way of thinking about solving the problem. I think what we're going to see is that AI tries to solve the problem of KYC probably more than adding headcount solves that problem. And there's a lot of really interesting companies in this, in this space, by the way. I think of Ethos AI, I think of Greenlight, which is a YC company that there's, there's a bunch of players trying to think about How do you replace your massive backline compliance team, your AML team, your fraud investigation team with kind of an AI engine instead. So I think that's probably the single biggest area that I'm tracking and I'm excited about. I do think there's also another big example here on just end client service. Whereas a lot of what I talked about is really fraud and kind of investigation focused. The same thing is also true, I think, on supporting the end client. Unfortunately, even if things are PLG and,, relatively hands off, people are going to need help at some point, and they want to know that someone's there to help them. Well, the reality is another big cost item for banks, historically, and fintechs, more recently, has been client service. That cost center is not trivial. I don't know if you saw the news around Klarna a couple of days ago, but Klarna basically implemented a, an AI chat bot. I forget who the provider is to replace, part of their customer support team, and they've been running it for a few weeks. And that one software line item is doing effectively the work of 700 chat agents. They put out a whole report on this with, kind of. Comparison of metrics and numbers relative to their traditional CS team. Yes. This one chat bot is able to deflect the equivalent of 700 agents worth of caseload. That is remarkable. And I think we're also going to see a lot of innovation there. There's so much of that. If you really look at that relationship between a human agent and a digital agent, something that's AI based, the price relationship is somewhere about.$5 per call for a human agent versus 0. 40 cents per call for a digital A. I. And so if you think about that, if you have user stories out there that succinctly you can solve for that, the impact of the organization is huge because that's a fixed cost inside the business. I mean, everything that you're trying to hit numbers wise, right? All your, your net new business and your retention business is all based off of, how do we cover that fixed and variable line? And at what point in time does that, volume intersect? And we start making a profit. It's quintessential business 101, but if you look at the dramatic impact, like what you just spoke about there, that allows an organization, perhaps if they were on the brink of survival to survive, perhaps if they were in a competitive situation where they needed to go up against, two or three of their their top market competitors, they now have a differential advantage. Yeah, I agree. What you just said is really salient to it. I think about this a lot. You know, Torch, which is a venture capital firm out of New York, put out a whole white paper thesis a couple months ago around how the future of FinTech is below the gross profit line. And what they meant by that, right, is the way that, a lot of these businesses think about accounting is improving their actual operating margin, whatever is considered COGS. Service is traditionally not considered cogs backline support is not considered cogs. It's all just part of your op ex. It's, it's nicely below all of that. That's right. You can show a lot of improvement at the top line and, the kind of gross profit level. But it doesn't matter if you're still sapping away all of that money to support these customers below, below that line. I think about this all the time. We, we have a small business up in, up in Napa and the way that we run that business has nothing to do with just purely gross margin. Of course we care about that. But the reality is we look at how much cashflow we're throwing off the business, right? That's right. At the day a FinTech with. Wider than average gross margin, but ultimately still burning cash is burning cash, and I think what the industry is going to want to see in the long run is improvements across the entire cost basis, not just cogs. But also the OpEx line there's just so much headroom there. I mean, a lot of things do get pushed down to that OpEx, but it really is a cost of delivering that product. So even if you're looking at, SG& A that sales component or that support component, there's a case for pushing that above the line into cost of goods sold. Because it really is what it is, even though it's not variable. And it's, a real challenge. And we see that in, the whole experience industry, people are. concerned about removing people, but there is a, an aspect to delivering a product, whether it be upfront in setting an expectation in the sales side or whether it be post sale and supporting it from a adoption and advocacy side, regardless. You, you have to be able to meet the customer where they are and really not everybody's wanting to have a conversation. That's the first thing that is, it's the same reason why somebody doesn't want to drive down to the branch. It just takes them out. They'd rather hit some keystrokes and, and go through. And, typically, there's also things that can be delivered much more effectively through these various different AI and omnichannel. Capability. So let me ask you real quick from the standpoint of everything about experience and you look at FinTechs across the board and we think about, how they work to clients and keep clients. What could the industry be doing from the standpoint of experience? Yeah, I mean, it's a wonderful question, right? Ultimately FinTech and financial services more generally, it's fairly commoditized. What makes a great bank, right? I think about that a lot. We're basically trying to replicate the bank in a lot of ways. And so that means we try to. Think about the playbook that they've applied, what's working, what hasn't. I think there's one thing that's very clear. People are in any commoditized market motivated by price. And so that continues to be probably the single biggest lever banks and non banks think about. But it can't be everything because back to the other point of this conversation, right? If the only thing you're differentiating on is price, it's a race to the bottom and there's no business worth having at the end. So experience does, I think, provide the answer to a lot of that. And it means very different things for different players. I posted a question on LinkedIn the other day that was something along the lines of what is the most unique perk you've ever seen a bank offer to get you to sign up for a bank account. And someone reminded me that First Republic Bank in their heyday had fresh cookies baked every morning at their Bay Area branches that anyone, First Republic client or not, could come into and get a cookie from. Super random. Not sure who came up with that idea. I'm sure there was zero line that you could draw between that investment and ROI, but people are still talking about it, a decade later, just like the first Republic umbrellas that saved more than one San Franciscan from an unexpected rainstorm that were available for anybody that happened to walk by a branch. So they, have done a lot to care beyond the customer base. And I think. That's created a lot of loyalty because traditionally the way that most banks win customers is by giving cash bonuses and by giving, reasons to sign up that are very monetary and kind of ephemeral. But I think delivering value in an unexpected way seems to resonate with people, the things that a bank shouldn't do, like baking cookies seems to stick with people years later. I'm not sure how scalable that is, but I found that interesting. You know, beyond that anecdote, a lot of what has happened in at least digital banking in the last couple of years is just pure raw emphasis on product experience. And so back to the PLG comment and back on the, where does like experience kind of play a role here? People have come to know Mercury, for example, as Making decisions that don't necessarily make ROI sense, but that are beautiful and elegant and taken together, create a really delightful product. Ramp is another good example of this, just this, this idea that you invest in R & D in ways that build experiences that are absolutely delightful to the customer that don't necessarily help retention that don't necessarily help acquisition by themselves. But that kind of as a package deal show customers that you're so invested in their success that you'll invest in even the little things that are hard to justify. So I think that that philosophy is important. I mean, and look, finally, and probably most importantly we're back to the topic of AI, right? I don't personally want to go down the road of. Non fiat currency and crypto, which I do think, there's a whole world here in fintech that can be used for differentiation, good week to be talking about that, if anything. Yes. But, but I think on the stuff that I am comfortable kind of talking through, like traditional financial services evolving towards fintech and how experience plays a role there. Look, it's all about, I don't want to have to ask my bank the question. I don't want to have to take the action. I want the action to be taken for me. I think. A lot of automation is what people are expecting. I don't want to move money around manually. I want the money to be in the right place automatically. I don't want to have to issue a payment. I want the payment to be issued automatically. There's a lot of work and thinking across all these players going into eliminating, like making your bank. Less present, more invisible, and more working in the background for you and in your service. There's some danger to that. There's also a lot of value to that from just a client experience perspective. It's interesting that you bring up that you're modeling your organization after a traditional bank. That you want to incorporate a lot of those same values and this PLG structure, which is very engineering focused. And you also have the componentry of how you're packaging almost from an e commerce perspective, these bank related products, how is. Culture and the concept that many businesses are struggling with right now about being a customer centric business. How do those fold themselves into a fintech? And do you think that is something that the fintech industry needs to lean more into? It's a wonderful question. I remember I had a boss when I worked at Funbox that told me a story of his time at Capital One that really stuck with me. Capital One, back in the early 2000s was really kind of the poster child of Fintech before Fintech. It was the bank doing things differently. It was really reinventing the wheel and challenging the incumbents and service was a big part of that, right? They wanted to serve underserved customers and they wanted to do it in a way where service was just paramount to the brand they were building. He managed out of, you know, many of the teams he managed, client service was one of them. And he actually ended up carving out budget for that department that translated to each agent having individual budget they could spend on a given customer to do little things. And the story is just like, it's never gone away. He, he tells the story of one of his agents talking to a customer whose keyboard had broken. They just spilled coffee on their keyboard. This agent had, a hundred bucks a month they could spend towards customer satisfaction, went on Amazon, ordered the keyboard to the guy's house, was delivered later. The guy, was incredibly grateful and it's made for wonderful stories, but I think it highlights just how the little things go a very, very long way. And culture starts there, right? It starts with telling people what's important and actually empowering them to make the important possible. It's one thing to tell everybody a capital one, you should care about your customer. It's another to equip them with tools that let them show that appreciation and that care beyond a couple of of nice words. So yeah, I think FinTech has a lot to learn in that area. And I think that model, that playbook right there is probably one to be emulated in a lot of ways. I think incentive design is probably the other biggest piece that I see as essential to this. There's a number of banks where this is true, but thinking in wealth advisory, for example, I think Raymond James is famous for not paying actual management fees, like performance based management fees to to their wealth advisors. That means that, on the one hand you could argue that those wealth advisors are not going to care about the performance, but it actually means that they'll do what their client believes is right. Not what the wealth advisor necessarily believes is right. And I think just that the little ways that they've designed. The incentive plan has rippled on the culture. I think marrying very intentionally what you want your customers to feel with the tools that you're equipping your team with to deliver that level of of experience and service is essential, whether it's budget, whether it's incentive plans it boils down to, you actually need to put some, some real investment behind making that stuff possible. And unfortunately I think you're right. You know, PLG and low touch have generally been ways to window dress low cost. I think that's changing and we're, seeing that. I'm a little biased when I say this, but I think about it a lot at Arc. Well, we can't afford to invest in every single customer the same way. Just by, by sheer value of the fact that they're different sizes and, different LTVs, I continue to think it's fundamentally important that we have a relationship manager that understands and knows and works closely with, our key accounts, that there's a cell phone number. Somebody can call when a regional bank has gone down and it's Friday night in New York, and they're trying to get ahold of someone to figure out what it means for them. That's not going to go away. And you don't want AI. You don't want to chop out at that point. We still want to be able to provide that level of care. I think the industry values that and will continue to value that. I agree. In fact, there's a, there's a term for that inside the industry for anybody, whether they're on the sales side or customer service side, and that is high value agent. So it's really just the recognition that ultimately there are problems too complex and so nuanced that it requires a human being that actually has deep understanding of the industry, deep understanding of that client, and a process to be able to navigate a resolution. It makes perfect sense. And I think that is where the industry is going. I love your, your thought about incentive because really it's at the crux of just human beings, like human beings require an incentive. But ultimately I think in the experience economy, people are looking at., not so much what you say, but what you do and your example of sending the keyboard, to somebody literally said everything to that customer about how you feel about them, how you empathize with them and how you're supporting them in their journey. If we think about journey across the board, just globally, people moving towards a cashless society. And then this concept, which seems like a very simple two words, that roll off the tongue easily, but has ramifications, "open banking", you know, taking things that we're , starting to get tucked away nicely, like privacy concerns and everything else, and it's popping that back out of the box. What are your thoughts? Yeah, man, that is a, that is a very, very big topic. And, and I heard two things in there you know, a move towards a cashless society and generally what open banking needs for, for control over our information and our, our privacy. That's right. Look, on the cashless point, I don't know if I'm the best person to ask because I'm vehemently anti cash. Not that, that I don't think paper currency is invaluable or anything like that. I, I'm very much a traditionalist when it comes to fiat currency, but it's frustrating. It's annoying. It's not useful. It's a pain, it makes my wallet too big. I, don't like carrying cash if I don't need to. I can't tell you the last time I paid with cash. And in fact, the funny anecdote on this I did a wine tasting dinner a couple of weeks ago and you know, people bought bottles there. They, this was a, an older crowd, they didn't necessarily want to pay with the Venmo or with their card, they all paid cash. And I ended up with a couple hundred bucks worth of cash that I had to tuck into my wallet and then try to figure out, okay, great, how do I then recognize those sales? We use Shopify, we use QuickBooks, we happen to be an ARK and a Mercury customer. No neobank has an ATM that you can deposit money at that I know of. So I'm not sitting on this cash, I have to figure out how to make it show up in my business bank account. And it, maybe I'm recording, go through all the rigmarole of what it takes, but basically it's a huge pain. I think we need to continue supporting cash as part of a wind down of cash as a traditional way of payment, but ultimately 30, 40 years out, it's going to continue to be a decreasing part of how we think about money movement. It doesn't have much of a long term role. Paper currency doesn't. I think that does require though, we continue to invest in and build out infrastructure to make. cashless payments more possible. And we think, you and I are in a bubble. We live in a world where it's seemingly very easy to use Apple Pay or tap your card. But the reality is that's not representative of the whole, you know, US, definitely not the whole world. Arguably, what I think is really ironic to me is some of the less developed Countries in the world are way further along on this journey than we here at Omar which tells me, which gives me a lot of confidence and optimism that it should be pretty doable for us to kind of close the final mile out pretty fast, but we'll see look on open banking, I'm all for it. I am, a big believer in the fact that this direction for the industry fosters better competition and allows. And, and eliminate sort of the, the moat that some of these incumbents have had that have prevented them from innovating and ultimately supporting their customers in a better way. There's been this whole debate lately, which I find just absolutely wild. In fact, this happened before the latest open banking regulation, where a financial institution who shall not be named was wanting to charge the end client and ultimately the FinTech for API access to their data. So. I want to give you bank balances through plot or through finicity or teller or something else. This, company was expecting that the fintechs building on these systems and ultimately the plots and the aggregators of the world would somehow. Pay the bank for accessing that customer data, even though the customer is requesting to share that data, obviously, by authorizing a connection. And that just, to me, is so exemplifying of the weird power dynamic in the financial services, kind of ecosystem. The data is ours. It's your data. It's my data. It's not the bank's data to monetize and manage. And sure, while there might be costs to supporting APIs and to making data available for external consumption, Not providing that should be a reason people don't want to use your bank. Charging them for that should make them want to run away from your bank when others understand inherently that that's something that they need to provide because the average consumer today wants control over their data. So I don't actually view it as eroding privacy and concern. I view a lot of those concerns as Financial institution interest masquerading as consumer concern. I genuinely think a lot of the average consumer today wants more control and more access, and this does that in my view. I love that point of view. And there's a reason, Basile, why you are a national leader in the FinTech space. Thanks for joining the podcast today. Happy to be here, Frank. Thanks for having me.
