MoneyGram Is Bringing Stablecoins to 60 Million Users with M0

Mason Nystrom sits down with Anthony Soohoo (MoneyGram) and Luca Prosperi (M0) to explore the future of money creation and movement, why stablecoins are not the product but the foundation, and how MoneyGram's 60 million customers are about to get access to financial services they have never had before.

Having a stablecoin is not the differentiator. What you need to do is build kickass products and services on top of it. That is what unlocks adoption. MoneyGram and M0 are building those products together with MGUSD, a stablecoin purpose-built for MoneyGram's global network of 60 million active customers.

Key Topics:

- Why MoneyGram built its own stablecoin MGUSD instead of integrating USDC or USDT: control over economics, features, and the ability to verticalize like Apple did with its chips

- M0's infrastructure play: building the smart contract layer that powers, connects, and enables hundreds of different tokenized dollar platforms, from MoneyGram to PayPal and Visa

- Just having a stablecoin is not the differentiator: distribution wins, and why the App Store analogy explains why stablecoin adoption is really about what you build on top

- The moats that survive AI and stablecoins: distribution at scale, regulatory relationships, trust, and the personal connections that no AI can replicate

Stablecoin supply forecast: $500B by 2027, $1 trillion by 2030, and why the real inflection point is large-scale platforms like MoneyGram integrating stablecoins into their payment infrastructure, migrating their entire network onto stablecoins


The views expressed in the podcast are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of Pantera Capital Partners LP or its affiliates ("Pantera"). The podcast is provided for informational purposes only to provide market commentary and for general educational purposes, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The podcast is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You see so many banks are saying, are we gonna have a stable coin? And because we are a famous bank, everybody will like our stable coin. Like that's not how it works.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Just having a stable coin is not the differentiator. What you still need to do is have kick-ass products and services that you're gonna build on top of that stable coin. That's what's gonna unlock the adoption.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Welcome to Staple, a Pinterest podcast, where we talk about everything at the intersection of finance, venture capital, and tech. I'm your host, Mason Nystrom, and today we're gonna be talking about the future of money creation and money movement. And for that, we have two very special guests. We have Anthony Suhu, Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, and Luca Prosperi, co-founder and CEO of MZO. But before we begin, a quick disclaimer. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial investment or legal advice. Please do your own research before making any investments. I think uh maybe a great place to start for the audience who is maybe slightly less familiar with both of the businesses that you lead uh would just be some brief introductions to you know what MoneyGram and MZero do. Uh Anthony, let's start with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Yeah, sure. So MoneyGram is an organization that's or a company that's been around for 80 plus years. Uh we've been known to be one of the largest global payments network to send funds cross-border around the world. You know, the thing that might be different in terms of this place and time is that the company's going through a massive transformation in terms of rethinking all the assets we have, starting with the network. And then, you know, using a premise of how can we better serve our customers as the world is evolving across in financial services. And, you know, one of the latest things that we've done is really embrace uh the idea of blockchain and digital currencies, which, with our recent announcement of MGUSD, was uh one of the big foundational pieces that we wanted to launch to better serve our customers in the future.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

And I will uh I will go next. MZero doesn't have yet uh the long and glorious history that MoneyGram has. Uh we the company was founded by by Greg and me at the beginning of 2023. Uh so three and a half, very, very long and intense years. As we all joke, like crypto years are cat years. Uh MZero is an infrastructure company. Uh we believe that in the in the money is we are just starting to tokenize money. We will have hundreds of different versions of tokenized dollars and tokenized local currency versions of money over the years as they power applications such as MoneyGram. And with MZero, we want to we are building the technology that powers them all and connects them all together. Uh so we are a pure crypto infrastructure company. We are building smart contracts that power the tokens like MoneyGram D. They uh power the issuance and the redemption of those tokens and the movement of those tokens across the blockchain.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yeah. And just for the record, for clarification here, Mason, while the company's been around for 80 plus years. I have not been at the company for 80 plus years. I've been here 18 months. So, Luca, actually, I do agree with his comment that these are like dog ears. And during our transformation, he's more of a veteran than I am, just for the record. But we chose them because honestly, uh, MZero is a very important partner for us. And because we share the same passion and shared values about where we think you know future experiences and financial services can go for the consumer. And in our in our place, we're all about financial inclusion and access. And that's the exciting part about what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Yeah. And so let's talk about that partnership a bit. Moneygram and MZero, you know, recently partnered to launch MGUSD, which is the stable coin that will be powering the Moneygram global network. I mean, maybe, Anthony, you can share for the audience what the driving force behind you know this initiative was for MoneyGram and what does MGUSD unlock for MoneyGram users?

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Yeah, so I want to maybe the very first thing I want to clarify for people is that we did not build MGUSD for trading or institutions. It was specifically built for MoneyGram's 60 million active customers in our network right now. And the reason that's important is because we started off with a use case of saying our customers want to send and receive money, and they want to do it by saving time, effort, and money and money. So, why did we launch MGUSD? The key reason is that we believe we can develop a better customer experience for them. And using MGUSD is just the foundation of what we can build future applications around. So we're at the first phase, we're talking about allowing our consumers to receive funds that's anchored or pegged to a US dollar balance, which is very important, I think, for a lot of our customers that live in economies where there might be high currency fluctuation. In addition, it allows them to have some level of protection and access to financial services that they previously did not have. And so our use case for our customers with MGOS, the very first use case is what they're doing now, which is sending and receive funds, but doing it in a stable dollar balance. And then the second thing we want them to do is use it so in the future, hopefully allow them to earn rewards as well as giving them options to spend with MGOSD through some type of mechanism like a card to help them, you know, spend that's anchored to this stablecoin US dollar denominated balance.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Right. And so, you know, stable coins can expand the capabilities that a lot of you know inaccessibility exists across, you know, whether it's cross-border payments or just being able to like custody and hold US dollars. One thing that I I think people you know often think about like stablecoins is it's like very simple to issue a stablecoin uh and that it's it's not like a complex problem. And so, Luca, I think it'd be helpful to elaborate on you know how MZero's technology enables MGUSD. And and you know, more broadly, you know, you mentioned kind of in the intro that there's gonna be hundreds of USD denominated uh stable coins. Like, what is the subset of criteria for a company or fintech that you think needs to exist for them to be able to launch their own stable coin like MoneyGram?

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Yeah, I I think this connects also with the last question you had is why we think there are gonna be thousands of stable coins. Because I think most of this is gonna be abstracted away from the consumer. The consumer will continue to see a dollar balance in an application. But I think every application will like to control certain features of the money they have. It's not very dissimilar for what happens today. Like we all see a dollar balance in the banks or the fintech apps we use, but behind this balance, there are very convoluted connections, API, open banking connections with part sponsor banks, et cetera, that now are gonna be token centric. Now, obviously, as the market gets more sophisticated and complicated, brute forcing the interoperability is not a solution because you cannot have market makers or exchanges just providing liquidity to this stuff. You need different sorts of infrastructure, and that's what we're trying to build. Is it is a difficult problem? And we also uh is also a moment where we are facing the monopoly or quasi-monopoly of very, very large issuers that do not have really the interest in this. But we think that in the next five years there will be massive ecosystems like MoneyGram that will use their own versions of digital money and obviously they want to be in a position to control not only the economics, but also the features of the tokens that power those ecosystems.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Right. The like kind of through line there is like enabling programmable money like gives some of that feature-rich uh feature-rich aspects of being able to like stream rewards more more simply. Anthony, as you kind of you know, took a bird's eye view and eventually like landed on a single solution, you know, one of the counter-arguments to there's gonna be like hundreds of stable coins with thousands of stable coins is that you know, there's only so many distribution services and you know, liquidity tends to coalesce around you know several assets. And so I'm curious like how you thought about you know the decision matrix of you know going down the MG, just integrating, you know, more vanilla stable coin like USDT, USDT or USDC, and you know, why you guys kind of eventually landed on wanting your own, you know, stablecoin platform, as Luca calls it.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Well, the main reason is that what we already have a network. We have 60 million active customers, as I mentioned. We think we can benefit those customers by offering MGUSD. I think to Luca's point, and it's very important one, we try to abstract the fact that they're actually on MGUSD. All they need to know is that they have a US dollar balance. And I think it's a really important point because, you know, outside of maybe some of your podcast listeners and us here that are geeks about this type of stuff, when you go up to a normal person off the you know off the streets and say, hey, what kind of processor do you have on your iPhone? I bet you 99.9% of the time they're gonna say, I don't know. Um, and that's if we think about MGUSD in that way where it's like a processor on your phone that you don't know actually the type of processor you have. You just know you need a processor to be able to run your iPhone. And um, it's kind of that same approach. And it our idea in terms of why we created MGUSD is the same reason that I think Apple decided they wanted to create and uh verticalize their own chips. And the main reason is we have more control, we actually can share more of the economics with our customers in terms of savings pass-through, as well as capabilities that we want to have. We can't rely and go through a committee saying, Can you build this for us? We see ourselves as a product company and we want to build those features ourselves. And I think all those are very important points. And I think we spent a lot of time, we're very thoughtful about it. Because I know there were a lot of companies over the last maybe three years that uh and MoneyGram's been in, you know, look working on uh crypto for about five years in terms of stablecoin, but there's been a lot of companies out there that put out a press release saying they're doing it, but they aren't really sure why they're doing it. It's the same thing as what we've seen over the past two years of people saying that they're jumping into AI without actually understanding the problem they're trying to solve. The problem we're trying to solve here is to provide a better service to our customers so that we can put more money in their pocket and enable new sets of services we can build on top to allow them to store, earn rewards, and spend. And those are, and if we actually had verticalized it where we have full control over that currency, and was why we created MGSD. So that's a really important distinguishment. It doesn't change, by the way, how we run our business on this, it does not go off our network. So to Luca's point, there's gonna be hundreds of these coins for different networks. We just happen to have a network with 60 million active customers where we know the use case and we're trying to build around it. And we still do KYC on this. And so it's, you know, in terms of how we operate, does not change how we operate. It just gives us better control and allows us to leverage it as a foundation builds future products and services that we believe our customers want and have never had access to prior to this point.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

Yeah, what do you think about the rate of adoption that you'll see? You mentioned MoneyGram has 60 million customers. You know, how fast do you think it will be before, you know, 80% or 90%, even 100% of MoneyGram customers are using MGUSD? And then, you know, Luca, I'd be curious, you know, how how fast do you think we'll see the number of stable coins kind of proliferate?

SPEAKER_00 11:52

I think that as we roll out more services, there will be more use cases. The first use case is for customers that live in countries where they have a high level of uh currency volatility. Um, but I think that as we build more services around earning rewards, ability to spend, I think you you'll see this completely take off. I don't think it's gonna be 100% adoption, though, on our network, because not everyone wants to hold uh currency that's pegged to US dollars. I think, you know, depending on where you live, they might want a different one for political, whatever reasons. But we'll see. I think that the adoption rate, once we figure out the right services kind of attached to this MGSD, it can, I think it can really hit some inflection point where you'll see it kind of slow rate where you can drive very fast adoption. The reason we feel confident about that is because it's on our own network. And we're we're trying to do it and offer it to these customers that already use the service, but we're gonna be able to give them more.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

Yeah, makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Go for the I just to add on what Anthony just said, and just also going back to one of the points he made previously, is I think there is uh there is often if you come from the banking world, and you know, I used to be an investment banker, uh an investment banker in the financial institution team, so a banker for bankers, the worst kind, uh there is some sort of misunderstanding from traditional finance where there you you see so many banks are saying, ah, we're gonna have a stable coin. And because we are a famous bank, everybody will like our stable coin. And you will like that's not how it works, right? Distribution, to Anthony's point, distribution wins. So the reason why we were very excited to partner with MoneyGram, I think there were two reasons. First of all, they had a clear use case. So this they have a need and they want to have a tool that powers uh those needs uh as they are modernizing and revolutionizing their platform. And the second one they have been, to give credit to the guys, like they have been very intentional because instead of like renting a piece of technology that is entirely verticalized and provided by someone, they have been picking their the partners they want at different levels of the stack. So it's not only MZero who has been working and uh in uh in the MGUSD initiative, but it's been also Fireblocks and CrossMint and Bridge and uh and Stellar and other and others. Now, so this was uh this was good for us because this is how we see the word. And we want to play a very specific role in this word, but this is big enough for many to to play a part. I think the other the other thing I wanted to say is this idea of control is very theoretical, but as you start digging into things is not theoretical anymore. Because every time you want to do something, you want to use rewards in a very specific way. You want your stablecoin to exist in a blockchain and not in another, you want to do bridging in a certain way, you want to off-ramp with a certain banking network, you need to be in control of all those features. Otherwise, you always need to rely on somebody else's choices. And often the other parties may have conflicting interests with you, right? And we have seen this co-petition happening in fintech all the time. Now, going back to adoption, this is actually very interesting. I would have expected way more alternative stablecoin activity for now. And I think the reason so what we have seen is still a crypto-dominated phenomenon. And the reason why there are a lot of alternative stable coins in crypto is that if stable coins are tokenized bank deposits, whatever product you build in crypto that requires a so-called bank deposits need a stable. And you know, at M0, we powered i, usual, Saturn, uh, noble, and many other stable coins uh soon PayPal. B, and there are many other stable coins that have crypto use cases. When it comes to traditional use cases, I would have expected adoption to go much faster. But you know, A, I'm impatient, and B, to Anthony's point, these are dog ears. So I for me, one month, oh my god, is like seems forever, but for the rest of the world, probably is not the case. But in my opinion, there is there is an inflection point. As we we're seeing uh so many financial experiences being built stablecoin native now that were not existing too much two years ago, a year ago. Stablecoin power credit cards, stablecoin power neo bank experiences, global dollar accounts, local currency stable coins. So this is like universal asset is trickling down the whole financial fabric. And we I think this is going to accelerate massively over the next uh the next two to five years.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah. And maybe one other key point here I'll call out, because I I think you know, people just having a stable coin is not the differentiator, it's an enabler. What you still need to do is have kick-ass products and services that you're gonna build on top of that stable coin. That's good what's gonna unlock the adoption. And like I said, if you if your iPhone, if you owned an iPhone, going back to that phone analogy, and all you could do was calendar and email, you'll get some adoption. But you know, it was really the app store that really unlocked new capabilities. And I think it's gonna be the same thing. Some people have just checked the box on stablecoin, say they launched a new stablecoin and assume that that's the day. I mean, I think that's when the work actually does start in terms of driving user adoption. And that's a key thing for us to also remember. It's it's it's again, it's not a differentiator from a standpoint you do this and all of a sudden you have a competitive edge. It's what you build on top of it.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

Taking a glance maybe at the future, you know, one of the things that you're talking about, Luca, of the pace of innovation increasing is also, you know, the other way to say that is like the value of motes are also decreasing because it's easier to build the same types of products faster, easier to get to you know, the same type of compliance because AI can improve those workflows. And so, you know, one of the things that you know I think about as a as a you know investor on a day-to-day basis is the types of business models that are going to evolve and change. Uh, Anthony, if we look at you know, FinTechs historically, you know, you make a lot of money on transaction fees, FX spreads, but these two technologies, you know, or or even like three if you include agentic commerce, are kind of compressing maybe the costs to service those or the potential revenues that you can earn from it. And so I'm curious how you think about AI and stable coins potentially expanding these revenue lines or creating new revenue opportunities in the future.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Well, just as you mentioned, the fact that this is gonna unlock, I think, you know, new services that can be created on it pretty quickly. I think distribution at scale is gonna be a huge differentiator because a lot of people can build this stuff, but consumers typically, even when you think about the internet, when there are more websites out there, guess what? They've all gravitated towards the top eight or ten. It was in a they have the ability to look at more, but I do think that becomes a really important point. So having the scale that we have, I think is a huge moat to be building off of. Also, you know, in this day and age, I do think that distribution is a moat. It's a mass moat, especially when you work in a regulated industry where you have to have relationships that connect the world with strong relationships with each of the local governments and central banks. I think that also becomes really important. And then I think along that way, as we think about those two things of distribution, compliance as an infrastructure as being a really important moat, our question is what are the use cases our customers uh want to do? And what we're talking about in our space is billions of people that currently have limited access to uh financial services that you know, us on this call probably take for granted. And being able to provide that for them. And hopefully the idea of that they have a very strong relationship with our brand because in our business, trust is also another mode. I think it's gonna be even more important as there are more and more services that are coming up. So we're not trying to build this for everyone, but what we are trying to do is we started off with the intentions of solving a problem for our customers around the world. And we want to provide them more financial access than they have now with more financial tools, again, for them to be able to store value, earn rewards, and spend. And if we can do that, I think we'll be fairly happy. And I do agree with your point, Mason, that the I think the cost of like how we think about the send and receive relationship will probably be different depending on what type of relationship we have that customer. If they use three products, you can imagine the cost for their service across send and receive will come down tremendously. And if they want to use one service, maybe that cost is a little bit more. But I do think that we're not talking about a day where the customer will use one service. I think that we're gonna give them options and they can pick a la carte what serves them well. But we want to make sure that giving them financial access to more services than they have now while saving them time, effort, and money is ultimately the end goal.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Yeah, Luca, reactions to how you think about kind of revenue opportunities evolving.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Yeah, I so first of all, I think that it's so dramatically early, and we are completely revolutionizing an industry that has a lot of vested interests and rent seeking globally. And so there is a lot of juice that we can extract as early builders in this space. To me, it's one of the most asymmetrical opportunities in the life of any business owner or business uh executive, which is very exciting. Suddenly, we are breaking barriers, we are breaking barriers with the possibility of breaking monopoly. Across the world and providing the world with a more equal access to financial services, which is positive for the consumer. And also this surplus is going to be distributed across a few innovating companies. Now, I think also, obviously, I agree with Anthony that the power of distribution ultimately is going to be critical. Even going back to the Tether example, the reason why Tether is Tether today is not because of any technological feature of the USDT token, but it's because what they are actually offering is distribution and trust on the asset and liquidity across the network. This is the product. The product is liquidity and acceptance, is not the token. But connecting to that, building networks, it is very complicated. It's connecting also what Anthony was saying, like connecting all the nodes, whether nodes are companies, distribution platforms, financial institutions, central banks, license, licensing platforms, etc. It's a relentless job. And I think has a lot of value. And then I think that in the age of AI, as we were mentioning before, it's also the age of AI slop and is the age of mediocrity. And in the age of mediocrity, personal relationships that are based on professional excellence make a huge difference. If you look at the way SpaceX has probably done the book building for their IPO, we will probably see a lot of personal connections of Elon Musk that go back 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. There is no AI there. There is no artificial intelligence, it's human intelligence, emotional intelligence. And I think this is stuff is absolutely under undervalued and underestimated. We still do business as human beings. And creating connection takes time.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

Anthony, on another podcast, I heard you mention MoneyGram becoming a more open network. I'm curious like what that actually means to you. And, you know, is this a trend that you see in the broader, you know, financial and payment markets happening? Or is it unique to MoneyGram?

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Well, I can just speak about ourselves. What I would say is that we believe we want to connect the world uh by making the movement of money really seamless and accessible for everyone. And so if we want to do that, what we need to do is be as open as possible because not everyone's going to have one preference in terms of a network that they want to use. They're not going to have one preference in terms of the type of blockchain that they want to use. So it's really important for us to give our customers choice. And I think that the idea of open is that it provides consumers choice. And every time you look at it, closed networks versus open networks, I think open networks almost always wins. And I think it's going to play out the same way here. And we just want MoneyGram to be able to be an accessible point for everyone. You know, being open also means that allowing our customers or partners to bring new more people into our network for that use case. And a recent deal we did with Kraken is an example, where we allow them to leverage the MoneyGram network as their cash off ramp is a really important point because in a closed network, we would say, well, you can't access our network unless you're a customer of MoneyGram. Well, in this case, if you're a customer of Kraken and you're a partner of ours, you can access and go to any location that Kraken wants you to and be able to get cash out through the MoneyGram network. I think that those there's gonna be different flavors of being open, but certainly our goal would be as open as possible as long as it increases value for the customer and also it's compliant and safe.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

Luca, you're a uh a philosophical guy. How do you think about the broader opening of the financial markets?

SPEAKER_01 25:50

I mean, first of all, going back to what Anthony was saying about trust is you know, money is a human phenomenon. Machines do not care about money, machines do not buy Rolexes or they do not need food. So ultimately ends up to the human. A human is leveraging a machine to satisfy a human need that is financially uh that has a financial aspect. A word of the machine doesn't care about, doesn't care about money at all. Uh, money is an incentive system for us. Some some for some weird reason it works for us. I mean, I think that to me it's just like a process. We are continually, continuously opening up our financial system, making it more connected and uh and just patching products in a in an easier way. It's uh it's a process that has started a long time ago. It's also a process of disintermediation. Uh we we have seen the up to 30 years ago, our economy was commercial bank-centric. The commercial banks where you parked your money, where you were buying your financial products, where you were getting your loans. And this has been the disintermediation that has been happening over the last next 30, last 30, 40 years is capital markets led, technology led. I think anybody, I don't know how I am 43, and I probably have stepped into a bank branch twice in the last 10 years, and I was always in a very bad mood because of that. I think that people under 30, they never stepped into a bank branch, right? So the way the way we are dissembling the financial life of people and just merging it with the data layer, the social layer is already happening. It will continue to happen.

SPEAKER_02 27:27

I would love to move on to a quick fire round. This has been amazing. And so a few last quick questions where uh I ask a question, you give me your immediate thoughts. So, first I'll start to you, Luca. Uh, what do you think the stable coin supply by the end of 2027 will be? It's currently just under 300 billion.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Difficult. I would have said 500 billion, but it's very it depends really on the macro. I would have said one one trillion for 2030, though.

SPEAKER_02 27:51

Anthony?

SPEAKER_00 27:53

I think it could be one trillion. It's gonna be a lot as long as you know you have players that are coming in with business already that they're kind of migrating it onto uh stables.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

What's the best piece of content you've watched or read recently?

SPEAKER_01 28:08

I'm um sorry guys, I'm a nerd, but in this era of AI, I've been trying to go back to fundamentals. I'm a mathematician, so I'm back studying axiomatic set theory with some just very, very nerdy first principle mathematical stuff. It's my mental gym in the era of Claude. No AI can fake it.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

Anthony, are you uh also reading mathematical theory uh on your free time? Or what's the best piece of content you've read or watched?

SPEAKER_00 28:37

I I like doing math actually on when I'm sitting by the pool or the beach because it relaxes me, but I'm not sure if I get to put it level, the Yoda level that Luca is talking about. You know, a book I recently reread actually was a book called Uh Different by a prof Harvard professor called Young Yi Moon. And the premise around it is that if you listen to too much research where you can actually where everyone built products can revert to the mean and you have no differentiation in your product. You know, she starts off with this argument that if you think about 30, 40 years ago, there were in the car business, for instance, there were clear differentiators. Volvo stood for safety, it stuck in terms of style. But if you wanted to have the safest car, you go to Volvo. Well, everyone goes to market research, and everyone's now instead of having a nine in one place and other factors, you have a three or four. Everyone's trying to build a car to meet the seven scale. So every no nothing now is differentiated at all. And I think it was for me, I read the book years ago, and as the idea of being able to build more products easier, as Luca pointed out, especially with AI, I reread that book under different lengths and said that uh, you know, understanding what you want to do, but also being intentional and very clear with yourself and your organization on what you will not do is going to be even more important as we look ahead.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

And then Luca, feel free to start. What's something you changed your mind on over the past year?

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Everything. I try to re-underwrite uh things all the time. But you know, I um like when we started, when I started MZero, the stablecoin market was not $300 billion, it was probably $150 billion and declining. And uh and there was and the incumbents were under serious threat because they were not sharing economics and they were making a lot of money and everybody was looking at it. And my my working thesis was that duopoly was a matter of months before it would have got broken. And uh and then I realized on my skin that network effects are actually much stronger. So we are still in like everybody talks about stable coin, but there are just now very few uh big players like MoneyGram that are taking this seriously to create an alternative platform. So network effects are very powerful, much more powerful than what you expect. And uh so, like you know, when when you're building, especially in crypto, when we are like we are very first principle oriented, you think you can change the word in uh in two years, it takes much longer to change the word. So yeah, it reminded me that I need to stay patient and uh be relentless, much more than what I had anticipated.

SPEAKER_02 31:21

Patience and relentlessness. Anthony, what have you changed your mind on over the past year?

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Well, I've been the CEO of Undergram now for about 18 months. I think when if you talked to me before, I thought the journey and how quickly we could evolve and transform the company would take a lot longer. And I do think if you know, Luca's a good point, and you can ask him maybe at some point when you see him at a bar or restaurant. But what I would say is it is possible and make quicker to be able to transform a company in this day and age to operate a lot more like a startup in terms of the speed and agility, too. And I think that you know, if you ask any partners that work with us, I think they would tell you that uh they're probably surprised that we can move with such speed. Well, I've always said people to our team, we want to be slow in strategy, but really fast on execution once we lay out and figure out what the strategy is. And that's actually, I would say, surprised me how quickly we were able to adapt from that standpoint, which has been a big plus for us. I mean, if you think about how quickly we can launch products now, how quickly we learn, I think we're gonna start accelerating more and more. And it's all due to all the evolving technologies that's out there right now, as well as our will to uh evolve and refound MoneyGram in a different, completely different company for the next generation.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

I love it. Um, Anthony and Luca, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about the future of money creation and money movement.