Rain Co-Founder: The Neobank Bull Cycle Is Only Just Getting Started (Trillions Are Coming…)

Transcript

Traditional settlement is always net settlement. So like let's say you swipe your card for a coffee. There isn't one single transaction that goes from you to the coffee shop. What happens is that your issuer so like Rain for example, we would be settling with the network Visa uh net of all of our customers. >> Just like the streets of Manhattan, I'm going to keep this quick. Over 70% of our viewers [music] are not subscribers. Yes, you. Every week we interview some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in [music] the financial industry. The easiest way to support our channel is to hit the like and smash the subscribe button. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy today's show.

All righty, guys. Welcome back to Stabled Up episode number 46 with the Rain co-founder Charles Eun. Charles, great to have you in the tower, man. >> Thank you for having me. >> Yes, sir. As always, stable up is powered by our friends at FRA. Visit their fra.com to learn more about FRXUSD and more. Charles, uh, the leading stablecoin infrastructure cryptocard provider, some would say. Obviously, there's been an ex, you know, explosive growth. I'm a big fan of, uh, payment scan.xyz, a great, uh, provider of data where you can, you can see all of the growth of these individual NEO banks. So, a lot to cover on this kind of explosive growth, but maybe just uh, quick into why Rain, why start this now? What, you know, kind of give us a bit of the founding story

of the company? Yeah. Uh me and my co-founder Fuk, we met in 2021 kind of in the depths of COVID. We met on a slack channel for other founders and started working on a side project together. Not related to stable coins or crypto, but through that experience, we got really frustrated with the rails that are available to us as builders in the US. We were trying to build on top of a and wire and they were difficult to access. They were slow. They were expensive. Felt like 2021 that there had to be better options out there. Um, and then that was kind of our our first foray into stable coins was adding stable coin support to that fundraising platform we were working on. And then through that is when we got really excited and bullish about stable coins.

We we realized that the actual experience of investing in a startup and and getting an investment was way better on stable coins. Like our first angel investment happened on Christmas. >> Yeah. >> Uh when banks traditionally would have been closed and then the weekend would have followed or banks still would have been closed. So it probably would have been five plus days until we actually got the money and the investor was actually in Singapore. So it could have even been longer but extend USC we got it instantly. So that was one of our first like aha moments of like okay this is better way of moving money globally. Uh and we started to actually decide to work on rain around that time. So that was November 2021. really early on we realized that the actual bottleneck to growth and adoption of stable coins was

that spendability, the interoperability with existing rails. Like I we got the USDC that Christmas day, but what we could actually do with it was really limited unless we went and offramped through an exchange and followed all of these different steps. So we realized if we could make stable coins spendable on a Visa card, we unlock adoption and acceptance at millions of merchants globally and that instantly makes stable coins more valable. So that was the first thing that we started Rain to tackle and in 2021 there weren't really we couldn't really have started as an infrastructure provider. If we started as hey we're going to allow you to launch a stablecoin back to card we would have had zero customers that day right >> so we were actually our own customer and that we we solved for the people that

had this hair on fire problem early on and and one of those people those early adopters were cryptonnative teams. >> Yeah. So we we built for Dows, we built for cryptonnative funds, we built for protocols uh and were this B2B neoank for the what was essentially an underbanked population at the time because of regulation. A lot of them were offshore where there wasn't really this vibrant fintech ecosystem. Um so we were that the neo bank for those people and then through those like first two years of building rain is when we were able to develop all of our onchain infrastructure, our smart contracts, our licensing, our our visa membership. And then in 2024 is really when we started opening up and becoming a platform.

Yeah. And enabling other people to is issue on top of the infrastructure we had developed. And from 2024 to now is has been a lot of growth and and excitement. We we now currently power over 200 programs. Uh we just announced like our Western Union partnership recently which we're really excited about and having such a storied institution work with us. It's really like a full circle moment for us. >> Yeah, definitely. And and I mean we were talking prior to the show just that it feels like uh Rain has gone through like its first kind of exponential hockey stick growth and you know that the you know as an investor would say like the easy 10X has passed. Now it's like the how do you 100x this over like the next decade and I think we'll get more into

that and kind of what you see there. But I think to to kind of set the foundation further here based on how you guys saw the opportunity right in the earlier days there, you know, this kind of neo craze or mania if you will that has kind of started to really catch fire last 18 months as you said wasn't really a thing in 2021. I mean there was the Crypto.com card. I was an avid user of that back in the day and you know no longer am but there was you know the Gemini card and then but it was really just about yeah I mean we do a lot of our payments to our uh uh from our clients to our employees to uh kind of any kind of third party in stable coins for the last six years.

We've been doing we we've basically been running this business for six years on chain and over the last couple years it's gotten to be obviously you know as things grow and scale you know you know okay that then you go and you know do banks and all these things but in the beginning it was fully on chain it was like wow we're running a business fully on chain this is awesome >> yeah like this is epic >> um and then all of a sudden this neo bankank thing came like oh you can spend it's like earn spend save yield like this kind of like this big four and then boom you know read pay explodes etherfy explodes past explodes. Um, plasma starting to grow, tria, there's there's all these names here. Maybe you can just like unpack like what the neoank bull concept is here. Like if I'm a neo bank

bull, what am I really like investing in and like what am I expressing bullishness on by being bullish rain bullish kind of like on the neo banks that it's powering? What is that like? What is that thesis actually? >> Well, what's really been exciting to see is that stable coin infrastructure has brought down the cost of launching a neo bank. Traditionally, you have to sign a partnership with a bank and it would it would be large monthly minimums. It would be very difficult to do and then you would be locked to whatever country that bank is in. So, you you'd be committed to this large upfront cost but then also not be able to expand very easily internationally. Now, with stablecoin infrastructure, we're seeing a lot of neo banks choose to go stable coin first, build on top of stable coin rails, and then day one be able to

launch in in multiple countries, expand globally, uh which we think is great for innovation. we now have this this Cabrian explosion of neo banks all with different value propositions, different areas that they're targeting, >> uh different consumers that maybe weren't profitable to target before, but now they're going after that. So for us, it's like this is opportunity to explore areas that just weren't really able to be explored before because of the limitations in the underlying infrastructure, uh the inability to scale globally efficiently. So there's now like new neo banks that just weren't possible before. So that's that's really exciting.

>> And then from the concept of the existence of the NEO bank itself, why why does the world need this product? Like why does the world need this uh kind of non-custodial uh blockchain based system for banking? Like like what is the what is the broader kind of adoption thesis here? >> I wouldn't say there's really one answer to that. Okay. I think when we first launched there was one answer was hey you have onchain assets you need to spend them now that is the base case like table stakes it's really up to our customers to ask answer that question because it is like you have to find your niche you have to find why is someone going to choose your product and that

comes it's like answering that question it's like hey why do I need this neoank >> um so if you're just answering a very blanket question then I think you're going to end up building a very generic problem that is is maybe not going to resonate with anyone strongly enough. >> Right? >> So what's exciting is that you can actually answer this for a very specific set of customers. So whether it's freelancers in Latin America or it's high netw worth individuals in Southeast Asia or it's you know remittances uh into Africa like there's just a plethora of different use cases that you can solve and build very specific applications for.

>> And that's the beautiful thing about rain is that it can power all of that. It doesn't. It's completely technology agnostic. And so, you know how generalized SAS went through this whole kind of, >> oh, like, oh crap, we're in trouble. A vibe coder can code like very specific specialized technology for plumbers in rural Indiana who whose customers are single moms at home, right? It's like, bang, I built you this in in two weeks. It's perfect for you rather than like, let's say, Salesforce CRM or something, right? Would you say that the neo bank space is going through a similar transition where okay, you know, with only so much um success can you have in a generalized fashion where it's like I

built this thing, it's for anybody. Uh there's not a geographical kind of opinionated thesis, there's not a net worth opinionated thesis, there's not a spender thesis, a traveler. like there's like there's kind of like little subsets that I'm sure each of your customers uh are you know competing on but also have realized that there's like uh more of like a moat and a blue ocean if they kind of focus on on one is this neoang space going through kind of a similar generalizable SAS to specific SAS kind of thing that AI has has has brought or kind of how would you explain the >> yeah I think that's part of it every every technological trend goes to this unbundling and and rebundling phase and I think right now in the stable coin space we're seeing this unbundling in parts of it and then bundling at other

parts of it. I think in the infrastructure side you're seeing a bundling okay >> of infrastructure providers now offering more of this like full solution and then on the neoank side you're seeing an unbundling where you're maybe taking uh what would have been like a super app that's catering to everyone and then just focusing on actually I'm just going to take this one piece that this company does okay and then I'm going to do it really well and I'm going to be known for like this one thing. >> Yeah. Um, so yeah, we're we're kind of seeing like that unbundling of the stable coin neo bankank space where people are going more laser thin, going deeper into it. And that was really when when we were starting rain and and kind of deciding to become more of a platform. That was one of our core

thesis was that we couldn't we had the opportunity of just going direct going B TOC and becoming a neo bank for consumers. >> But when we looked at the landscape, we realized that there is really no way that we could be best at all these things. There's no way. We're not on the ground in Mexico. We're not on the ground in Nigeria. We don't know the remittance market well enough. We don't know the freelancer market well enough. There's all these spaces that we're not the best to build the product for that. We felt like we were the best at building the infrastructure and then allowing our customers to do what they're best at. Yeah.

>> Which is solving for the the problems that they're closest to. >> Yeah. And I think to understand a bit as to why RAIN even needs to exist or why neo banks needs to exist, it would be helpful to understand the way that uh transactions even work. >> And you guys put out a really good article. I think it was uh it was a team member, I forget his name. >> Yeah, Conor Conc wrote a great post. >> Great post. And it basically is like the anatomy of a stable coin swap or swipe. >> Swipe. Yeah. >> Um and so maybe you can just like explain to us how card payments work. I know it's not the sexiest topic. and then how stable coin card swipes work.

Uh I think that would be helpful. >> Yeah, I think there's a few different ways like you mentioned the the Gemini card and the um some of the other exchange cards which I think were are important um pieces of this whole space. But when we started building rain in 2021, it was really important to us to not just solve the maybe superficial problem of making crypto spendable, but also there were so many advantages that we felt that we would be able to have if we could actually build everything from the ground up on chain. >> So, not just being able to make a tokenized asset spendable, but actually the benefits of settlement on chain uh balances being on chain like all the time. Like that's really what we try to

build is on the ground from the ground up stable coin native infrastructure. So for us the way rain does it which is not necessarily the way every stable coin infrastructure provider every cryptocard does it but the balance when you authorize a transaction we're actually checking like onchain balances to make sure there's enough spending power that the user has. Usually in a traditional um fiat card that would be like bank account or there would be some sort of underwriting happening, right? >> Um in our case like the underwriting is happening against like assets that are mostly onchain and then we would do the authorization decision. Clearing is essentially the same. That's like more of a merchant to network side and right now Visa does enable merchant settlement

but that's not something that rain touches or that a lot of consumers would know or care about. Um and then settlement. So traditional settlement is always net settlement. So like let's say you swipe your card for a coffee, there isn't one single transaction that goes from you to the coffee shop. What happens is that your issuer so like Rain for example, we would be settling with the network Visa uh net of all of our customers. So that's includes refunds that our customers have that that includes all of the authorizations that were made and are clearing. That's all like one transaction that we'll be doing daily for Visa and then on the other side the merchant has like one transaction where they're getting settled net uh with the card network against all the transactions.

>> So it's like this batch settlement process that happens traditionally that happens using the traditional rails that are available to you in whatever market you're in. So as a if you're in the US you you have like Fed Wire, you have a um you might have access to some other rails as well. Those traditionally only run during banking hours, so Monday through Friday. >> Uh, and then you would have to post collateral with the networks to cover weekend settlement or long holiday risk. Y >> because you're not settling on a Saturday, you're not settling on Sunday, you're not settling on Christmas. >> Um, and the but Visa cards are being authorized 24/7. So come Monday morning, Visa doesn't want to take the risk that the issuer on their network isn't able to actually meet the settlement

obligations that happen. So they will have most issuers post collateral to cover those days when they're not settling. Uh in 2021, Visa introduced stable coin settlements. So you actually settle with the network in USDC. And then we were one of the first to do 365 settlement. So being able to settle in USDC every day of the week. So whether it's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, whether it's Christmas Day, Martin Luther King Day, we're settling every day. So that actually allows us to collapse some of the collateral requirements. Y >> that an issuer typically would have to pose. So lower cost of capital. Um our borrowing needs are a lot lower. So that means we can run programs more efficiently.

>> Hopefully those savings can be passed down in to the end customers because the actual costs of running a program are now a lot less. >> Yeah. Yeah. A and so very specific uh kind of uh point on the refund side. That was a big push back to using crypto for payments was once you send it, it's gone. >> Yeah. Um, and I assume you guys are working, you know, very diligently on this. And then if it's not out already, it will be, you know, very soon a feature because when these guys go and say like, "Oh, I'm a I'm XYZ powered by Rain credit card." Like, it's my stable coin credit card.

>> But when I think credit card, I'm like, I can go take my MX to the club and spend five grand. And if I don't have it in my bank, I I can still spend the five grand. >> But it's not a credit card in the same sense. um you know in the same sense that I can you know get a refund or spend that money if it's not there because you're saying you guys are running the onchain validation or verification instantaneously what am I missing there and what's the status of kind of like >> so there's different we support a variety of different types of of credit miles some of it is collateralized so you'll have uh crypto and like a smart contract or somewhere where it's collateralizing your your your credit card or securitizing your your card so that exists in the fiat world where

there's like a securized credit card usually that's for like subprime borrowers where they can actually maybe their credit limit is too or their credit score is too low and the bank isn't willing to underwrite them without securitizing some sort of collateral. So there's like onchain equivalents of that in smart contracts. We do have some programs that are not collateralized. So they're actually are doing some sort of underwriting and they're authorizing a transaction uh without some sort of collateralization happening. Yeah. So we support both models. Like really what we're focused on is the infrastructure and you can develop different types of programs based on that infrastructure >> and refunds are available cards.

>> Yeah, refunds are available. It's >> we think that a lot of people like to talk about just stable coin to stable coin account to account wallet to wallet payments >> but there's a lot of value that a network like Visa provides in a transaction having this like trusted intermediary in between the transaction. If you're if you're uh transacting with an unknown party, like you're just walking into a store, you have no idea who this business is, you haven't underwritten this business, you haven't done any KYB on this business, you can take a Visa card, swipe it, have a a transaction authorized, and you trust that you're going to be able to get the good that you just paid for. And if not, you can file dispute for that.

>> Yeah. >> If you're sending this random merchant online or in store, uh USDC, like you said, it's gone, right? And if you didn't get the good that you were promised, you have very little recourse on getting that USDC back. >> So we think that even in a world where stable coin settlement on both sides, from issuer to the network and from the network to the merchant is happening instantly in in stable coin rails, there's value for a network like Visa to provide in that transaction, >> right? 100% there is. Yeah. And I mean, we had Josh Moss, their stable coin strategy lead here. Uh I spoke a lot about the work that they're doing and they're just really really pushing into it hard. obviously that open USD announcement that they were a part of.

>> Um, so just kind of getting to Rain the company, not to be confused with the RAIN token that is on the coin market cap right now. >> Oh yeah, I don't even know what that token is. >> I'm sure you guys get asked that a ton. It's it's confusing. Um, you know, you guys are having this explosive growth. Uh, the transaction quantity on Rain Cards is exploding. the amount of neo banks launching is also it's it's almost like those people are have realized that this is a good business model if they have a unique value proposition to a unique set of customers as that grows rain is just the kind of a benefactor of that growth you guys have had this massive explosion of of transactions I mean I think [snorts] I think the like the leading card providers are doing

hundred million dollars a month of of volume and then like 80 80 60 40. So cumulatively you're looking at like a quarter billion or more a month right now through rain. Um which is which is in which is pretty intense, right? I mean if you look at that chart from 20 in early 2025 it was less than maybe 20 million. >> I think in 2024 we were if we did a million in a month we were like very excited, >> right? Yeah. Exactly. And so we talked so that's that first 10x. Congrats to all the investors who you know entered that saw this early. Great. But the next like 10x for 100x from here is like now you're talking a quarter a billion a month to like you know you know you know tens of billions a month and then you

start to get to like the big the big T, right? And so >> like what does that look like? Is it agents? Is it more neo banks? Is it regulation? Like what does Rain's decade long like trajectory look like? Give us like like the bull case and and maybe the conservative case as well if you can. >> Yeah, the growth so far has been exciting. you know, looking at payment scan, it's awesome to see the the inflection, but really I don't like to pay too much attention to that because if you zoom out, stable coin cards are still such a small like speck of the actual volume. Visa is doing trillions of dollars a day and we're doing like a tiny tiny fraction of that. So growth is exciting, but when we talk about the TAM of what we're building, we really think

about like all of money movement. We feel like there's very few use cases where stable coins wouldn't improve. um whether because it's faster, because it's cheaper, because it's global, because it's more transparent. There's so many benefits to moving money through stable coin rails. We think that the TAM of this space is actually like all of money. Yeah. >> Um which is a ginormous TAM. And uh right now we're focused on this this space and also we like to talk about just where we are in the technological adoption curve, right? We're we're still in this crossing the chasm moment where there's early adopters that have really found success with using stable coins and now we're trying to get into the mainstream and that's really where the next 10 100x of adoption is going to come from. It's going to come from the

Western Unions of the world launching stable coin products. It's going to come from more and more of these traditional businesses moving over to stable coin rails. I think in the US a lot of our fintech apps probably feel pretty great like we don't really see the need to use stable coins or dot stable coins >> but I think it's the underlying plumbing that is really what needs an upgrade in the US. It's how do we actually upgrade the way that settlement happens that doesn't rely on preunding accounts all over to make it seem like it's instant and magic but actually doing that uh lowering the cost >> like the end user should actually not even know that experience has changed.

It should be like your app just upgraded from this cloud provider to this other cloud provider and you didn't notice a difference, but maybe it's a little bit faster. Maybe it's they can uh offer you the service for a little bit cheaper. That is I think the dream is that the actual experiences don't really change. They're just maybe available to more people. They're available in more countries. They're available for a cheaper price. Uh the experience is faster. Like all of these benefits, but the actual experiences don't necessarily have to look very different. >> Yeah. A and so that's the big swing for RAIN is this reinvigoration of the settlement process of spending at large to get to that kind of bigger >> and the bigger space is just you know we're we're trying to increase stable

coin adoption globally. >> Yeah. >> Um and if we can just take a small piece of that like that's that's great. Uh I think that that's going to be right now we have experiences that we're mostly powering our card base. We're going to be experimenting with a lot of different experiences that are not necessarily card based. Yeah, >> we're also really excited about aentic payments. We have >> both stable coins and AI like two very disruptive technologies at the same time, which is very rare that you're in this like platform shift of money movement and also um artificial intelligence. And >> I'm you don't really know what agentic experiences are going to look like in the future, but I am really certain that agents are going to spend more and more on our behalf. Uh and then those agents are probably going to prefer stable coin

rails. Yeah. if it's an option. I think a lot of times it's not going to be an option because of merchant acceptance, but you're seeing things like X42. Yeah. Where agents now can pay for APIs like using stable coin rails and that's like a no-brainer to me. So, what are those new experiences that can be unlocked using with with AI agents? That's like completely green field, which is very exciting. >> Yeah. [snorts] Is this your first time? Is this your f are you a first-time founder? >> No, this is I guess technically like a third third startup. I did my first startup in high school. >> Okay. I was building this uh college admission statistic website. So we were like crowdsourcing all this data from our friends in high school and then posting it on this like online site that we built where younger classmen can look

and figure out what they needed to do. That was the first startup. Uh then uh after college I graduated from Stanford. Um did a startup uh on like the contractor management space. >> Okay. >> So we were it was in this like gig economy time. So we were selling to uh ride share services like food delivery startups anyone that had to manage thousands of contractors and onboarding them every week globally. We built software to help automate that at scale. >> And then we got acquired by in it. Um and I was part of the self-employed team at INT for over four and a half years.

Got it. >> Before leaving and then starting Rain. And is the vision for Rain to potentially be acquired in the future? Uh is there a like like what is your kind of longer term thought here? Obviously folks are going to be uh you know and I'm also curious like how you guys make money and etc. But kind of how are you thinking about the more longer term trajectory? >> We want to build a generational business um aspirationally and we want to IPO become a public company. >> Hell yeah. uh don't want to get acquired. Like that's that's not something that we're we're actively looking for or interested in. Like we really want to build a sustainable business that can continue growing and compounding for decades ahead.

>> And what are some of the if you can share like what are the like what what has been the growth of the of the revenue side and you know how h like what's the margins of the business like what are the business lines? >> Yeah, main sources of revenue are interchange is a big source of revenue for us. So that's the the fee essentially that merchants pay for accepting cards to the card networks. Uh as issuer we get a large percentage of that that fee. Uh we also charge SAS fees to our our customers for running the the infrastructure. Uh and then there's usage fees that we charge as well. So that could be for issuing cards for KYC. A lot of these are costs that we bear for operating like a compliance program or or dealing with like shipping, dealing with disputes. So fees

at scale as a program goes. So those are our three main lines of revenue. Um growth I think in the last we've gone from low singledigit millions to hundreds of millions in the last uh like 18 months. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> So I mean another year or two or something and this IPO is going to be ready to go. I mean if not >> uh yeah we'll see. I mean there's a lot of work to do ahead. Uh we're just trying to build the best business possible and and then hopefully everything else falls into place. >> And what's the relationship like with your other founder? How did you guys I mean you you guys met in the Slack and kind of saw this problem. What's the what's the kind of dynamic between you two?

>> Yeah, it's it's been interesting because we didn't know each other before just meeting on Slack. >> Yeah. >> We had this organic like founder dating experience while working on this. No way. Well, like we worked on this side project together which like low commitment uh just for fun for like eight months. But that was really great because we got to learn about each other's strengths and weaknesses. got to see if we enjoyed working together uh without a lot of the pressure that comes with putting like a a co-founder label on it or >> raising money uh and then having to like make things work. Um, and then when we found an idea that we had really strong conviction on that we wanted to actually go all in at, we had this experience of, okay, this is actually a partner that I

think would fit for this because I I think people talk a lot about product market fit, but founder market fit or founder product fit are just as important. >> So making sure that you and your co-founder are the right people to be building the startup. It might be a good idea. It might be something worth doing, but are you the right people to do it? Is this the right co-founder to do it with? >> Yeah, >> I think that's just as important of a question to ask. Uh, and then we felt we asked ourselves that question, we felt like even though we had no experience launching cards and we felt that we were the right people to do this based on other experiences we had and I think we complement each other really well. Like I'm I'm the CTO. I mostly drive product engineering design. He does like all the

other parts of the business which for a financial services business is a lot, right? It's dealing with compliance. It's dealing with legal. It's dealing with implementation, marketing, >> um, finance. There's so many aspects of the business that are >> really important to to handle. And if you get wrong, then the business is just not going to work. And if you get it right, then the business can actually like really start humming. >> Yeah. What are some of the qualities of your co-founder that you uh appreciate the most and what are some of the things that are are are the hardest to kind of work through?

>> He's, I would say, very creative individual. like he just can any problem I think he will just find like a creative solution to it. Yeah. Uh so it's it's great working with him >> because I I can just like think okay there's like this is so difficult like I don't know how we're going to like you know get this like when we were first trying to figure out how to launch rain. We didn't know anything about cards like we didn't even know who we should talk to. we just talked to anyone that would that would give us a meeting and then it was really his like creativity that came up with a plan of like how we were going to do what we wanted to do at the time.

>> Um which felt like a very large task. So I think just his creativity um his like he's kind of fearless, right? He's you kind of need that that fearless person in the co home. Uh, I think I'm a good counter to him in that I'm like the >> the sanity check sometimes and like some of his he has a lot of crazy ideas and I veto like a lot of them or like maybe we shouldn't do that. But this one is actually like really good and let's like I think when we both agree on an idea it's usually like a very good idea. Um, >> so he's able to like come up with like a lot of crazy stuff and then I'm able to like filter to like okay here's like the things that I feel like >> we should actually do and then

>> that has been a good combination partnership. You know, I'm curious, you know, how your workflows and your productivity and your the way you've thought about building the company, especially on the product side, has changed post AI, post cloud code, post cowwork, codeex, etc. You know, just give us kind of a sense into how your, you know, entire viewpoint on building a company has changed. uh whether it be the standards you set for your team with using these tools or your own workflows just like from the viewpoint of you know getting acquired by into it back in the day for a company that sounded like it'd be a lot easier had you had some coding tools versus now building you know the go-to infra for crypto cards. What has

changed in your outlook and your and your personal uh you know flows? >> A lot. Yeah. I I always think that we're lucky to be building the business at the time we're building it and to scale it at the time we're scaling. In the beginning of last year, we were just 17 people on the team. >> Sure. >> So most of our growth has come with the assumption that there are these agents uh and these artificial intelligence that would be able to do a lot of work that traditionally as a as a fintech you'd have to hire a lot of people to do. So we can think of compliance, we can think of support, we can think of implementation from an AI first perspective like how do we actually redesign these traditional workflows from this assumption that you have an agent that can do a lot. Uh so

that's been great to be able to to build under that assumption. also thinking about what are our competitive advantages as a business. Like my last startup, I think if I would not start that business today because I think everyone would have just built that internally >> uh because it would be a lot easier to to do it uh and have it fully customized to the way that your flow works for us. We're building an a startup that I think is very difficult to vibe code. Like you can't really vibe code rain over a weekend. >> Yeah. just because of all of the compliance, the licensing, legal, the relationship that you'd have to build, all those stuff just takes time and experience. Um, so it's it's it's also like redefined where we think we should be investing in the business, investing

in things that are unique to what we're doing um and that can't be replicated and then being okay outsourcing everything else. So buying off the shelf things that are not really uh advantages to the business. Um and then trying to still maintain the team as like relatively lean. >> Yeah. >> Right. Not trying to overhire and then having to do a round of layoffs because we realized >> a lot of these roles can be automated. >> Yeah. >> Um so every person we hire is a very intentional hire. >> Yeah. >> With the assumption that we can provide them tools that will give them a lot more leverage.

>> Yeah. Well, Charles, man, congratulations on the success. I know this is uh from your perspective still the beginning from the outside perspective clearly uh one of the breakout kind of consumer applications of the space throughout this bear. I mean it's been amazing just to see the pure growth uh give you something to be excited about and it's you know there's a there's a really unique position for you guys where the world's waking up to kind of this concept of neo bankanks and you guys are in a great spot of just being able to be the the provider. Um, and you know, like the beautiful thing is as these different types of leaders and founders come on with various skill sets and various ideas of what they want to do, it's just this continuous product feedback to you from your own customers.

you know, one person may need like a license in the Bahamas and need a special FX, you know, you know, rate there and a specific bank and, you know, another person uh may need a specific cash back and like there's just consistent feedback across the whole spectrum. kind of builds out a more uh you know sturdy product for for you guys that you can eventually kind of say to anyone, hey like we can definitely do whatever it is that you need because I mean look at all you know what we've done and so I know that you guys are are getting there and steadfast on the way to the IPO. So look forward to seeing that as well and thanks for thanks for uh joining us here man.

>> Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. That pleasure man.