MoneyGram CEO on rolling out MGUSD to its 60 million users, globally

Transcript

I don't think in the history of my career in tech have I ever seen a new platform shift happening at the same time, kind of converging all at the same time. It was always one platform. What we're talking about now is the the maybe the convergence or the mature the evolution of blockchain with AI and really agentic commerce all happening at the same time. The tough thing is when you have all this is how do you get distribution and guess what? We already have distribution across the world. >> Welcome everybody to the Converge podcast at The Defiant. Here we discuss the latest in tokenization, real-world assets, stablecoins, and institutional

developments. And I'm really glad to be here with Anthony Suhu. He's the chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, and it's a pleasure to have you here on the show, Anthony. Welcome. >> Yeah, great to be here. Thank you. >> Nice. Well, MoneyGram is one of those companies that really don't doesn't need an introduction. I think it's a household name everywhere in the planet. If I'm not mistaken, it's about, you know, like 60 million users globally, half a million locations worldwide in practically every place that you can think of, countries and other types of jurisdictions included. So, it's a company that that matters globally and also a company that has been in the digital asset space for

quite some time as well. And for those who might not be familiar with the journey, MoneyGram, if I'm not mistaken, was the first if not one of the first companies in the remittances space that allowed people to off-ramp their digital assets into cash globally. If I'm I recall that being taking place around 2022 or so with self-custody wallets on Stellar and people being able to cash out from their crypto. This year we have seen more news coming out from from MoneyGram with first integration with Kraken to help people cash out from crypto. Then we had a MoneyGram becoming a validator on the Temple blockchain and

now we have the announcement of its own proprietary stablecoin MGUSD. So it's been a quite a busy journey, but it's it seems to be accelerating. So my first question Anthony would be why put so much effort into digital assets and why now? >> Yeah, thank you. I think that's a good context. Maybe what I would say is that I've been at the company for a little over 18 months and the company's going through a massive what we call refounding. And the way to kind of think about a refounding is we believe that as part of our transformation we want every one of our employees to refound the company with us. You hear typically when employees to think like owners. Well, we

want we want our employees and our teams to think like founders, which means that we want to rethink how we do business and ways we can be better as an organization and as business. And so going through this refounding journey what I would say is in terms of stablecoin crypto as you mentioned we've been doing it for over 5 years at MoneyGram. And what we saw was an opportunity to leverage a stablecoin to build and you leverage as a foundation to build future products and services for our customers. And we believe that by doing so it's going to allow us to deliver products and services to our customers that are better, more functionality. It's going to offer allow us to operate much faster and it's going

to be able to enable us I think in the long term to operate at a lower cost. So all those same reasons made us really embrace the concept of blockchain as well as launching what we call MGUSD. And I think what you mentioned about it seems like our pace of product rollouts is accelerating and that's absolutely true. And the reason is that, you know, we spent the first 18 months of our transformation really rebuilding and focusing on improving our infrastructure. And so as you think about it, you hear a lot of transformations where they focus on the front end. We really focused our transformation on the back end so we could enable us to when infrastructure's been built that we can then accelerate and run faster on the front end be able

to deliver on the promises that we want to deliver for our customers, which is a seamless experience globally for our customers to send receive money as well as other financial services and do it for them while helping them save time, effort and money. Uh there's a reason behind, you know, what we're doing with the MUSD. Be happy to kind of go into more detail if you want, but maybe I'll just kind of use that as the intro. >> Yeah, no. And it's exciting to hear, you know, digital assets being part of a fundamental refounding of the company. So and and if I read you correctly, now they're being integrated as part of the core transactional services for for MoneyGram because when when people think about remittances and especially, you know, like household names like MoneyGram, you think about the retail

window, the cash window, but not necessarily about the rails, the the core systems that go behind it. Um if I can bring you back to, you know, the first launch of stablecoin enabled services with with MoneyGram. You know, and and and and that leads us to use cases where people were able to take their crypto and, you know, like cash out or, you know, a cash in into cash or local currency. What is the rationale for, you know, digital assets in remittances in particular? What what's broken? What's being fixed? Where is the value coming coming from?

>> Well, the way we think about uh digital assets and I want to be clear is that we see the reason we came up when and decided to embrace and build and create our own coin with MGUSD is that we see it as a foundation that should be able to unlock and build future services and products for our customers. That was very important. And if you, you know, the question that typically comes up is that, well, aren't there a lot of stable coins that are out there right now that we can leverage? There are. Um but what we are trying to do is we started with the end user use case, which is our customers that eventually have 60 million active customers. That's a very large number. And what we want to do is

build MGUS US MGUSD specifically for these customers to access specifically on the MoneyGram network. You still go through the standard KYC process with all these customers. And in addition, this is a product with MGUSD that is not built for traders or institutions. It was specifically built for our customers and specifically as a foundation to build future products and services for them. So, we see this end state where consumers will use MoneyGram to leverage stable coin to do send and receive, but in addition, they can store and have stored value. They can also earn potentially rewards. And then also leverage MGUSD to help them spend. And

all of those wrapped around the use case, when we think about it for our 60 million active customers, is geared towards a billion this use case of people around the world where the financial services that you and I might take for granted are not accessible for them. And we think that we can leverage and provide them with much more financial access and inclusion as a result of by leveraging MGUSD. And so, we're going to build all these products and services really on top of that. >> Now, that makes total sense and I would love to get deeper into MD USD in just a minute but getting back to like stable coins themselves, do they make remittances cheaper and and and why or faster or better or more secure or more

accessible? Because you read the headlines 10% of the you know like US Mexico corridor currently is you know settled in stable coins either directly from stable coins but the majority of that through like the stable coins 100s model. And one of the the the typical questions that you might get is why what is with stable coins that makes them you know like worth using? If if I were to think of myself as MoneyGram like a huge organization with very liquid flows across multiple corridors, I would assume I would be able to get very attractive effects rates from you know like trading desks and I would be able to use you know fast like rails for

traditional settlement, you know like Swift GPI or what not. So is there actually a benefit there and what is it? >> Yeah, I mean let's take a step back. What I would say is that there's a few big benefits of leveraging stable coin. I think one is that real-time settlement nature of stable coin. So a promise in terms of we can settle 24/7 including weekends which is not always the case when you actually have to go through more traditional financial rails. That's Number two is I would say because we can be more efficient with our with our cash and what I mean by cash is cash is really our inventory at any point in time with billions of dollars that are

floating around the world at MoneyGram through our network. And when you think about that cash or those funds as our inventory, the opportunity in terms of settling in real-time allows us to turn that inventory much more frequently. More inventory turns means that that cash is more used more efficiently, which allows us hopefully to lower the cost and that's the promise on it. Especially when you think about some areas where for many of these markets you talk you're talking about pre-funding sends to make sure that you have funds in the right market. Here you don't have to worry about being forecasting the right way. You just do it when you see demand. It's a little bit more like a just-in-time opportunity when you think about inventory versus what the traditional ways of

send funds. And then I think as these rails become much more mature what I would imagine you would see is with scale besides the real-time settlement nature, the timeliness, I think that it's going to be even more liquid than any other forms in the background. And again, that means it you we can offer more timely, it saves time, it's going to be all trackable, and it's going to be lower cost. And I think that all three are big attractive benefits to leveraging stable coin in the areas that you're talking about for back office or settlement.

>> And and today I completely see a point around, you know, managing liquidity globally. That's a huge problem. You have those exposure to shocks, you know, during weekends and other moments where you probably don't want to provision so much the capital into a given corridor. But that also on the other, you know, like on the final cash leg if you want, you depend on there being deep enough liquidity against the the currency pairs that you operate. Uh is where is that the case currently for the scale of the operation that you have and where, you know, stable coin off-ramp liquidity is not there yet. And I'm asking this in the context of, you know, now we have these aggregator networks like Bridge or

Borderless where you can select source different source of liquidities. You don't have to go one by one. Uh but really curious about, you know, if you're MoneyGram, you really want to be able to, you know, settle, I don't know, tens of millions of dollars that you give in in a day, and is that liquidity there? Does it dry out? What concerns do you have around that side of the operation? >> Well, we're really in the early stages of of these type of FX tradings because when you're talking about these type of settlements, we are talking about these trading partners who can conduct do business. We're working and focusing on specific corridors or easing into it.

What I would say is that based on our volumes right now, you know, we're trading on a run rate of above little close to two two billion dollars or so. Right now, we've just started doing this earlier this year. It's a little early to tell, you know, how high it will get up to, but what I can tell you is that we've been happy with it. What we want to do is bring more and more trading partners, and our goal would be to move as much of this onto stablecoin for trading, running our back office because we just think it's a good for our business. >> Now, that that makes a lot of sense. And it's also one of the things that the ecosystem has been waiting for because if you have, in a way, through remittances companies, you have retail liquidity that sort of like seeds these

corridors, and I think it's it can become like a building block for other use cases. Right now, in emerging markets, some of the the companies they work for, they're seeing now that once the path path has been settled by retail users, now you're able to get, you know, wholesale and banking clients operating on crypto rails, and and and I see the point of, you know, this is what crypto has been waiting for in terms of having, you know, like actual use cases that are not traded, not linked to trading, that can help seed the the liquidity in different markets. And >> Yeah, and maybe one thing maybe one thing I'll add to this is it it has not been talked enough about, but the the

programmable money nature of this in terms of having smart contracts is going to be something that over time will get more and more sophisticated. I mean, I could see a day when you are talking about even for consumers sending funds over putting some level of contingency before full funds are released. You know, I In fact, I It's a great day I could see in about three or four years being a parent in this type of market that you know, my kids are a little older now, but I can imagine when they were doing their chores if I could map it to a payment system that actually has smart contracts. Probably most of the stuff would not have been paid out until the lawn was mowed. So, I think that there's and I'm just using that as an easy to understand use case, but when

you think about settlement and you think about the B2B nature of it, it just makes money a lot more intelligent than right now the way it's handled in the analog world and I think that that's really the exciting part and we're just really starting to understand the capabilities of what they can do. >> And to characterize how MoneyGram has been using stablecoins in remittances so far, could you give me a sense of the relative share between actually crypto-to-fiat and fiat-to-crypto versus like the stablecoin sandwich model where, you know, the end parties never really know that their remittances were settled using stablecoins. What What's like the relative share if you want if you can share anything along

those lines? >> Well, I think it's a little too early for us to share relative share, but what I will tell you is that what I believe on the consumer side of the business, the majority of customers will not know that they're actually settling in stablecoin. Over time, I think that that's where it's going to go. I think on the back-end infrastructure side, obviously, large majority of the parties, both counterparties, are going to know. And I would say that, you know, there was an estimate someone just asked me, you know, how hard high would liquidity be in this market. I think in the future it could be in the trillions of dollars. Right now, I think the number that I hear that's being traded around 300 million or so or billion or so. I could see that, you know, that number is probably going to double or

triple over the next 3 4 years. >> Right. And and most of it today is still trade linked to trading and there's like very little of it that's linked to actual payments. The other thing that like comes to mind when people think about remittances and I know you often hear this in like the crypto narrative is they say, "Oh, you know, like the the average cost of remittances is 5% or 8% in this corridor." Um but that often ignores that, you know, most of that like those extreme costs or like high costs come from the last leg of the transaction because you are and I think we'll get to this when we get to speak about a MDUCE but a lot of that has to do because recipients of remittances are

not banked and don't have access to financial services and that means that they actually have to grab physical currency uh at at the end of the of the of the remittance leg. So, and and before getting to MDUCE, like how would you characterize the potential like the end consumer potential in terms of cost savings that might come from, you know, wider adoption adoption of stable coins in in remittances. So, I don't know. Is is is it something that people are going to see net as a reduction in cost and like how much?

>> Yeah. Yeah, so what I will say is at first, I don't think remittances right now, at least on MoneyGram, are at 5 6% that you're talking about. It's a lot lower than that, I think. But there is this uh concept that remittances is expensive and and what I will say is that it does when you think about remittances, the people the thing that people don't understand is that you're talking about a the sending's going through a lot of different intermediaries in terms of correspondent banks and more parties that touch it. First, the more expensive it gets. And in addition, out of any forms of payouts between cash, account deposits, debit cards, cash is always going is the most expensive form of handling of payouts.

And that's just due to the nature of the fact that cash is just expensive to manage, but it is, you know, for large majority of the world, the the the fiat or the currency that they typically the user and wants to use for their daily spending habits. So, what we would say is that when you think of take a look at these things and you broke it up by a supply chain, sending money from one end to the other if you're doing it digitally within your own network, there's actually no cost to do it. Really, it's just a change on a digital ledger. Where the cost ends up is due in the actual conversion cuz you have to pay a bank to either put money in or you have to pay to handle that cash to get it paid out. I believe that what stablecoin or digital currencies allows

us to do is send funds from point A to point B much more efficiently where you don't actually have to go through so many intermediaries. And just like if you think about supply chain, if you had to actually skip a step or two where you don't need an importer, an exporter, or a plant or anybody like that, what ends up happening to the cost of the product is the cost comes down. And I think that you're going to see the kind of the same case here. I would imagine that it's too early to tell exactly how this is going to play out, but our goal would be that we want to lower the cost as much as possible for our consumers. And I could see a day in the future where if you want to send within stablecoin, it will be the most most cost-effective way of

sending funds. Uh and then the consumer can make the choice how they want to make that conversion back into fiat, their local fiat. And they get, you know, and between the three, cash is I believe will always be probably the most expensive just because the cost of handling cash from security armored cars to actually counting cash is actually just a very expensive endeavor and I think people kind of forget about that that it's a lot of manual work to to manage cash. >> And every shop owner would know about the you know the cost of handling cash and a lot of the the value proposition often from you know being an agent of a money remittances network is that you get

something to do with your excess cash as well. So >> Yeah and you know that sorry to interrupt you here but you know what's fascinating about that is it's absolutely true and consumers in every market eventually do want to convert their funds into cash. As you mentioned we had a recent partnership with Kraken and they are probably the most digitally native digital currency native company around and here they are for their consumers they wanted to offer them the ability to have a cash off ramp so they convert it to cash and so at any point in time within the Kraken app you can actually say I want to pick up cash in these hundred countries and you can go through the MoneyGram network and pick up cash wherever you want because I think for a lot of times when you're

traveling when you're working markets where there are cash discounts consumers actually need access to cash for one reason or another. I was recently traveling through Europe and I was actually even for as as as digital as as as the countries that I visited were from you know from from France to the UK and Spain there were a lot of instances where having cash is just much more convenient. >> And the the Germans there as well are notoriously attached to the cash as well. I think that's that's a great segue to discussing now MDUSD and you're essentially giving native dollar accounts to millions of people. Can you

tell me a bit more about the rationale you know everybody's issuing their own stable coin. We have been covering so many stories around, you know, so many fintech technology companies, payments companies getting into the stablecoin issuance. It's being facilitated by issuers like Bridge. But, can you tell me about like the rationale and the like the value proposition that that you want to deliver with MGUSD? >> Yeah, so MGUSD was a stablecoin that we all announced about 2 weeks ago. It's a native US dollar stablecoin. And specifically, it sits and lives in the MoneyGram network. Maybe the one thing that's different about this stablecoin versus some of the other announcements out there is we created the coin specifically for our network and our

customers. We don't plan to take it outside our network. It is strictly used as a foundation for us to build products and services on top of this for our customers. So, kind of wanted to make sure that in terms of when we think about use case, we are thinking about it for the traditional either remittance customers or customers that travel that access MoneyGram. Now, why would we do it? It's the same reason maybe I would say is that when you think about any technology decision or any of these platform decisions, why do you want to go vertical and own that stock? It gives us a lot more control over the the the currency or the stablecoin that we're managing. It allows us to reap, I think, more economics that we can then lower

the cost for our consumers. And we're going to have much more control in terms of the products and services that we can build because it is a stablecoin that's owned and managed by us. And the best analogy for it is when you think about the iPhone, you know, Apple's made more and more of headway going vertical, being vertically integrated, and there was a reason why they created their own processors for their own phones. It's because what they find is if they can build a chip, a micro you know, their CPU that's specifically centered around the use cases of the iPhone, they can create much more, I would say, customization specifically for the use cases that they're trying to build for versus if they actually were outsourcing and buying a chip from the outside, they

would have to convince that other partner for their use case and that other partner typically would try to build things are a little bit more I would say horizontally built and we wanted a specific use case because when we think about a stable coin, we see it as a platform to build new products and services. So just like in this case of having a microprocessor developed or this phone if you were Apple, we see MGUSD as our foundational maybe you we call it our own microprocessor or our own ASIC chip specifically for our use case.

>> Right. And as we're going through the analogy, you can also think about it if you want Apple they with you know stable coin issue yield being the equivalent of the App Store fees if you want from the monetization side of things. But um wanted to ask you about you know, there's a few benefits. It's your own stable coin you can sort of like tailor it to your use case. You also get the yield. That sounds great. But there's also some drawbacks and I'm trying to understand from you know the distributor perspective which in this case is MoneyGram and how much of the issue burden are you taking on? So for instance when we had the Dow hack only like couple weeks ago a month or so ago,

you know, there were questions around circles involvement in freezing wallets, you know, having a say in terms of which address gets you know like blocked, implementing you know, KYC KYB for primary market. So can you talk to me about the the this issuance model where you know Bridge is the regulated issue and you're using M zero contracts for for the process. Where's the sweet spot and and sort of like how did you make that decision?

>> Well, what we wanted to do is work with we went through a build by our partner analysis and decision framework for this. And what I would say is that we know that we wanted to do a lot of the governance in terms of thinking about how we were going to use this coin for our own needs and design it for those needs. But there are things for instance in terms of issuance and management of it. We think that there's good great solutions out in the marketplace right now with what Bridge is doing. We knew that we wanted to leverage M0's smart contract infrastructure for in terms of managing the flows. And then, you know, we built it on top of the Stellar network also in partnership with one company we haven't mentioned is

Fireblocks leveraging them to help us manage really the treasury aspects of it. Now, how we came to these decisions was the fact that I think there's different use case of having different partners do different things that are the best nature developing the best experience back for our customers. And that's kind of why we chose those those partners the way we did intentionally. In terms of how they're all orchestrated, obviously Bridge plays a very important part. Uh and but we wanted to do it where it was as hassle-free for the consumer and also gave us flexibility in terms of how we architected it. So, as things evolve, we have the flexibility to build on top of it as well as the manage it in different

ways, maybe even in the future as we figure out more and more of our use cases and needs for our consumers. >> I I want to ask you about, you know, the things that you're hopeful to build on top of this. But as you were describing this, I was reminded also about MoneyGram becoming a validator of the the Tempo network. So, the rationale for for Tempo, as I understand it, is a, you know, blockchain purpose-built for payments where you can have things, you know, like memo fields to describe a transaction. You can do batch transactions. There's a lot of like privacy is also native to to the blockchain. But, why would MoneyGram be interested in becoming a validator of a

blockchain? Why would you need that? Why is it core to your like strategy and what does it mean? >> Well, I would say without disclosing too much here yet, what I would say is that our goal is to map the world and connect the world through the idea of sending money cross border. Never mind. That's our our mission is really to be able to connect the world and allow the movement of money to be much more efficient and much more clear, much more secure. So, we have built a network. We believe the network is valuable what we built, but in addition, we also think that we can contribute more ways than just for our consumers as and it's really important

for us to build a network where we're very open to work with various different partners because the more partners we open up to, the more use cases it opens us up for. Kraken is a good example as you we talked about earlier. I think that what we saw with Tempo, which obviously was incubated and I think they work with Stripe very closely. Stripe is a strong partner of ours and we took it seriously in terms of understanding that they were built as you mentioned purpose-built for payments with Stripe and that was a company that we're already doing a lot of business with and plan to do more. It just made a lot of sense for us to contribute and be part of that infrastructure, that network so

that we first can learn from it, but in addition, we can contribute back to that community. And then I think over time as you're become a validator, it just gets us closer to the infrastructure side and we see that you can't be a great global payments company if you don't understand and are not part of the infrastructure. So, I think both those are the big drivers around it. And I think that why we want to contribute to it. You know, there's a little bit more of a community, being part of a community more than anything else. And also, we're being part of the infrastructure will be very important.

>> Right. So, it's like sort of like building your other verticals like in in addition to reimagining or what is it? Refunding your traditional core stack. And that makes sense. And going back to to to the other interesting point around product development. So, now everybody has dollar account, dollar denominated account through MDUSD. I have great cash in, cash out through hundreds of thousands of points. Um, do I get also get a card to to spend my MDUSD on in retail? How is that coming soon?

>> Well, we don't want to we don't want to speculate on products that we have not announced yet. But what I will say is that our goal would be to uh provide the billions of people around the world that have limited financial services access the ability to access and democratize the services that they can that they can have. I think that, you know, thinking about this as a platform and think about this as a network on top of a platform, you can kind of imagine that we want to provide services as long as it makes sense for the consumer. And we would be excited in terms of doing so. Stablecoin is one of those areas that I think gives us a lot of optionality in terms of what we can do.

>> Right. That makes sense. Okay, so no no announcements there yet. But I I get the point around, you know, this is an opportunity to access, you know, American markets and offer financial services that you would otherwise not be able to without, you know, getting fully involved with the local ecosystem. >> Yeah, and these are our customers to begin with. We just want to provide them We want to build deeper relationships with them. >> Right. That makes sense. Um, I think one last topic that has also fueled the narrative has been regulation, of course. And, you know, we we already spoke about bridge. It's a, you know, genius act regulated issuer for for the stablecoin. How do you see the discussion around yield, for example, for holders of a stablecoins? And how

does that play out? How do you think it will play out? >> Well, I think that first, that seems to be a hot topic. I think that, you know, the way we need to look at rewards is what makes sense and what's within the law. And we are working very closely with our regulators to make sure that we, you know, we follow the law in that. And that's why we started and rolled out first in the US because it allows us, there's much more, I would say, between the genius act and, you know, the clarity act kind of going through right now. We just have a little bit more framework and guidance and guardrails about how we can operate, which will allow us to operate faster. But our goal would be to work with all the of our regulators and governments around the

world to see, you know, how they view it. I think that there will be certain flavors of what we can do and what we can't do around the world. I think in some areas, I think that, you know, rewards are going to be one area that's will be a big selling point in others, maybe not. But what we do believe is that we'll we'll be able to successfully navigate all of these structures and frameworks because we've been doing it for 200 countries, 20,000 quarters across our 500,000 retail locations and billions of endpoints around the world for 80-plus years and we'll continue doing that. I think that there it remains to be seen, but I think that, you know, local governments or each government jurisdiction will want their customers to probably earn and and have

as much savings in their pockets as possible. So, we're we're hopeful that, you know, we'll have more clarity in terms of what we can do and what we can't do. >> Yeah, and it feels like we're moving in in the right direction we with clarity gravity, genius act, and mica, and so on. But, there's still some, you know, like indications in the other directions. So, recently, for instance, you have Brazil that introduced this ban on stablecoin settlement for, you know, like EFX businesses. Without commenting it specifically, I don't want to get you in trouble in any jurisdiction, but how do you see, you know, it globally playing out, particularly in those, you know, like destination jurisdictions

where, you know, like regulators might be concerned that this kind of initiatives sort of like erodes, you know, like local currency controls, capital controls, and essentially brings out the dollarization of the economy. >> Yeah, I think that on that one it's a really tough question to answer because I think this stuff is so early right now. Honestly, you know, you know, I think a lot of us have been talking about this for quite some time. I mean, buddy, we've been working on stablecoin for over 5 years, but I think the regulators in in countries now over the last year are just kind of catching up.

This feels actually like maybe how people talked about Gen AI back in 2022, honestly. And then it wasn't, you know, maybe early 2022 before ChatGPT 3 came out. But, I would say that this stuff will sort itself out and we're confident however way the governments want us to work, and we're providing our input where we can. We're going to operate with the Milan frameworks that they're we're given, and we'll make sure that what we want to do is based on that framework that we're given in the clarity. We will try to maximize the value we we can provide to every customer around the world, and they will probably be different, just like any other services that we offer are

different depending on the country that we operate. >> Do you think local currency stablecoins are part of that cuz, you know, everybody's trying to make them work, and it's also a good way to avoid, you know, traditional bank effects rails. Uh do you see that as part of the how the ecosystem will shape out and you see yourself sort of like operating liquidity against local, you know, like stablecoin pairs? >> I think that what will happen is there could be instances where you go stable and stable in the same in the same stablecoin. There will be instances where it's one stablecoin A of USD going to another stablecoin that might be denominated in a different currency. And that's no different than right now how we operate where we're constantly trading between, I don't know, 100 or so of different types of

currencies where we trade US dollars to something else. It's not going to be any different except I think that mechanism in terms of doing that is going to be much more efficient. I think version will hopefully be a lot more efficient as well. You know, we the way we think about this, maybe I would say if we take a step back, stablecoin by itself is really no different than any other currency. You got to eventually create it and convert it back to something the consumer can spend with. And that's going to depend on the period in time what we're talking about. But I'm hopeful that when we do these translations, we're going to be ready today and we'll be ready in the future when things evolve because all of it what we're talking about is just a trading and conversion of different

currency pairs and that's a sweet spot for us cuz we've been doing it forever. >> Fascinating. And it's it's it's sad that we are running out of time for today, but before we we wrap up, I I wanted to give you a chance of you already alluded to sort of like that chat GPT moment of for an industry. What are you excited about? What's what's what's on your like mind thinking about, you know, like 2 years from today or or 6 months depending on how aggressive you are. What what do you want to look back and see happening?

>> Well, I would say that I don't think in the history of my career in tech have I ever seen a new platform shift happening at the same time, kind of converging all at the same time, happening together. You know, I remember the PC era, I remember when the internet took off, I remember when mobile was taking off. It was always one platform. What we're talking about now is the the maybe the convergence or the mature evolution of blockchain with AI and really a genetic commerce all happening at the same time. And it's what I would say is when I look at it, it's a great time to refound a company and think through transformation because the possibilities are so much broader and the impact for consumers is so much more impactful. So, I could see

as we're going through this, that our services will only get better as result because of AI and blockchain and they will only be much more cost effective for the consumer and we're going to be able to provide more functionality. The tough thing is when you have all this, is how to get distribution and guess what, we already have distribution across the world. So, we're going to lean into that, we're going to lean into the fact that we have of trust with consumers because of the fact that we've operated in these markets with them for decades and our MoneyGram brand stands for trust and I think that that's something that's going to be even more important as new services come on board and we're excited about what we can do.

I would say that it's still very early days and we're just getting started, but maybe the right word to to say here is stay tuned because I do think that you know, people will think about MoneyGram much more broader sense because of our ambitions long term about we can actually help people around the world with financial inclusion and access. >> That's fantastic. Okay, I'll add myself to that invitation to stay tuned and I really want to thank you for again for chatting with us today. Exciting times and best of lucks with the launch of MD USD and hopeful to stay in touch for conversations around Agentech coming coming soon. So, all right well thank you so much Anthony great having you

today. >> Thank you it's been a lot of fun great being here.