Among the things you'll learn:
- The critical role small and mid-sized businesses play in driving global economic growth, the challenges they face, and how today's digital landscape creates immense opportunity for financial institutions and other partners to win in this space.
- How digital tools combined with innovative partnerships can help SMEs overcome barriers to growth, streamline operations, and boost resilience.
- Practical insights into how those in the payments landscape can work together to empower SMEs, unlock growth, and thrive in an increasingly digital economy.
Transcription:
Dinesh Damodharan (13:39):
Yeah, I mean I think that's the next possible growth from a technology perspective where you have stable coins and blockchain and central bank digital currencies, et cetera. You don't want to send money through a Bitcoin or crypto. Having a stable coin is definitely, I think that that's where we are heading towards and it's a really exciting space to be in.
Nick Moiseff (14:02):
I think from a Remitly perspective, we see right now a lot of the SMBs on our platform are paying with their business cards primarily around because of rewards and things like that. We do see costs coming down with the alternate payment methods, so with Fed now RTP and things like that. And it's happening more from a pattern perspective across many the other European countries with open banking. And so I think cost does drive a lot of how people pay. And then on the receive side, there are becoming more dominant mobile wallets. Like you hear of Pesa in Kenya, there's UNE Columbia, there's just basically these mobile wallets that are rising very quickly and driving adoption. And so much of what the freelancers seem to use is driven by what they can use in the merchant network. So how would they go and pay for goods and services in that country? So UPI for example in India versus a bank account. And so it's what we see on the receive side from the freelancers that are receiving funds from these SMBs is driven more from the merchant network adoption and we're seeing more of mobile wallet adoption than historically has been cash-based economies or bank accounts.
Holly Sraeel (15:10):
In terms of the growth that we're discussing, is there anything about the growth that surprised you?
Dinesh Damodharan (15:21):
I think it's expected the world gets more and more global. The expectation is that the trade routes are going to be more and more available for small businesses. It used to be privilege at some point for the large enterprises to be able to source goods with the rise in e-commerce and rise in marketplaces, et cetera. So I think it's less surprising that this is happening, but I guess the rate at which it's happening is more interesting and more surprising. And then just this different type of funding instruments that are getting introduced at a much faster scale, the regulators are trying to keep up with it.
Nick Moiseff (16:01):
Of course,
Dinesh Damodharan (16:02):
The banks are trying to keep up with it, everybody's trying to keep up with that, people's expectations have changed, et cetera. I think that for me was more surprising than just how global we are as a planet and then how we are sourcing goods across.
Nick Moiseff (16:17):
I was going to say the globalization aspect. So we'll see on our platform, like I mentioned this business in Jamaica and they're receiving funds from so many different people around the world. And so there's more of these platforms that allow access to workers globally. And it's just interesting to see the cross border money movement and how it is just become truly more of a global platform than on a quarter by quarter basis.
Molly Swartz (16:42):
And I would say even with all these new payment methods and introduction of cryptocurrency and various rails, it's still surprising to me that there is so much friction associated with international payments. If you are new to FinTech, why can't, if I'm a business in the us why can't I just pay someone in Singapore and it'll get there in five minutes? I don't know. We just moving ones and zeros in a computer. So I'm just still surprised by how many challenges there are to actually making this seamless.
Holly Sraeel (17:14):
So perfectly did Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Dinesh Damodharan (17:17):
I was just going to say that I think the different markets are different levels of maturity when it comes to identifying a business entity. You have some markets who have proper tax ID and some just a name and an address. And so it does increase anxiety and it's a lot of this one and zeros from fraud engineering background, but it is about who's that ones and zeros are going to, which is causing a lot of friction.
Nick Moiseff (17:43):
Yeah, for sure.
Holly Sraeel (17:44):
So can we talk, this is a perfect lead in, I want to talk in a little bit more detail specifically about the frictions in our panel prep call last week we talked about the various state and federal regulatory issues. We talked about data requirements, high funding costs and concerns around fraud. So can we talk about from where you sit, the frictions that you think are the biggest stumbling blocks to the expansion of this growth or the acceleration of the growth maybe is a better thing for cross-border payments for small businesses?
Molly Swartz (18:19):
Sure. I will speak a little bit on the regulatory side. For non-banks that are looking to get into money movement, I think one of the biggest barriers is money transmission laws in the US and similar types of licensing frameworks in foreign jurisdictions. So I don't know how familiar everyone in the audience is with money transmission laws, but in general where you as a business are receiving money from one party for transmission to another party, you are engaged in money transmission, absent and applicable exemption money transmission is regulated at the federal level and the state level and requires licenses at the state level. Usually embarking on that kind of project is a multi-year journey that costs several millions of dollars and then there's lots of ongoing compliance that is needed to maintain and renew those licenses on an ongoing basis. So there's a big moat around money transmission in this country and there are probably, I don't know, you might know better than I, maybe 200 companies in the US that hold money transmission licenses so that they can actually receive money from one business for transmission to a supplier.
(19:31):
We see a lot of activity in the FinTech space with companies that don't hold those licenses trying to figure out solutions where they can partner with a license entity or with a bank who has similar regulatory permissions for money movement or they can figure out some creative way to avoid being in the funds flow. But that's a big challenge and one that lots of folks are trying to solve for, particularly if you're a startup company and you're looking to get into international payments, you are probably partnering with a Remitly or with a bank in order to make that happen.
Nick Moiseff (20:09):
Yeah, I think for us on the SMB side, just building on what Molly was saying a little bit is one of the biggest challenges for the SMBs is to get through the KYB process.
(20:21):
And when we started it was working with our legal and compliance team to understand the laws and the rules and regulations and then how do you build a policy that is both customer centric and reduces friction but also meets requirements. And so there's the KYB piece and for us, we started with the normal C2C identity providers like Lexis and Nexus and things like that. But what we were trying to do is electronically verify identity for these businesses and we weren't able to do that effectively. And then we had to find other providers. We started working with a company called Mid Desk, which allowed us to electronically verify information about the people behind the companies and essentially pass KYB for these businesses more fluidly. And then beyond that, we've seen a number of these small medium sized businesses be more targets for scams. And so beyond just the KYB, it's really coming up with risk ratings for these businesses and identifying bad actors, but being able to balance the precision and recall from a model perspective along with KYB has been some of the most, we think it's supposed to differentiator, but also a challenge and opportunity.
Molly Swartz (21:28):
And sorry, just to go back, I mean one sort of interesting thing is that for banks providing payment services, they actually have a higher standard of a ML than a money transmitter. So banks would typically consider this to be forming an account with a customer which would require a formal customer identification program, whereas money transmitters actually are required to implement a risk-based AML program. So that typically gives you much more flexibility in terms of information you're collecting from a sender and how you're going to verify it.
Nick Moiseff (22:02):
Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up too because the banking partner that we choose may have a different risk posture, and so that help dictates ours as well. So it's very much a partnership
Dinesh Damodharan (22:12):
Just end of the day we do all this to make sure that we are following the right regulations, we are not sending funds with AML loss and sanction screening, et cetera. So it creates all this friction because you are trying to give a good experience in a very regulated environment, and generally they're to each other. You don't get them both, but you got to balance that out in a way that you protect the customer and you protect the regulation in the right manner. And I think they all stem from these needs of making sure that you're sending to the right person, both as a banker, as a provider, you are obligated because you're moving money on behalf of this SME. So the SMEs worry is what if I lose the money to the ether versus the bank is what if that ether is a bad person?
(23:07):
So balancing that out I think is critical. So that's the reason why KBS are harder, because different markets when you're trying to do cross-border, domestic is probably easier because you have similar standards that you could match with, but when it comes across border like Kenya or Pakistan, et cetera, you need to have enough confidence to say that you're not violating any of the regulation. So the providers of those countries, et cetera, should match up with the standards that you're trying to manage here as well. And then of course, trying to track the funds through the transit, that's another huge friction point because you want to be able to anticipate when the funds reach the receiver and also receive the right person or not. But that's where a lot of the innovations are happening. So most of the innovation happening on the identity side, on the realtime settlement with access to realtime status, et cetera. So yeah.
Holly Sraeel (24:04):
We talked earlier about the thin line between consumers and solo operators and the difficulty in terms of regulating the cross-border transactions for small businesses. Can we talk a little bit about that because you guys are active in policing that, looking at that, advising on that and working to facilitate transactions for those solopreneurs?
Dinesh Damodharan (24:35):
Yeah, I'm sorry. So solo, so as Nick said, that's a huge spectrum. When we see SMB, it starts with a person on a garage trying to sell something all the way to the high end of mid-market would hit around 250 million in revenue. So it's a huge spectrum. And then as a solopreneur, you're sort of having your personal identity along with your business identity, and that's where it gets quite interesting and challenging to understand what are you represented as, are you the person or are you the business entity? And where is the KYC and KYB loss for that? But we do have those businesses, we want to make sure that they are serviced and they're provided, et cetera. And so there is a change or the way we do KYB is a little different for these type of businesses, A larger business with a bigger revenue, easier to validate versus as I said, a personal garage trying to say that I have a shop that I'm setting up on Shopify, I'm selling something, right? I'm trying to buy goods from China, for example. So we need to be able to validate that and make sure that we are not breaking any regulatory loss in the process.
Nick Moiseff (25:48):
I think for us on the Remitly side, I mean we're still relatively early in this journey, and so we've been kind of taking it from a first product principles approach and what are the core segments that we're focused on. So we don't really want to serve these larger businesses that maybe MasterCard can better serve. So we really focused on the solopreneur segments specifically or where we can better understand the people that are behind the businesses. So it's not like a business owns another business that creates complexity there. And so that's really what we've been focused on because it more closely aligns with our C two C business as well as just basically understanding the needs of those types of businesses. And going back to what Dinesh said around just instant money movement, lower cost, and really meeting their needs beyond anything beyond that maybe is not in our wheelhouse. It's better served by a pioneer or other providers in the market,
Holly Sraeel (26:39):
But it's a significant size.
Nick Moiseff (26:41):
Oh, it's massive. Yeah.
Holly Sraeel (26:42):
It's massive. And as you look around the globe, there will be more participants over the next five to 10 years.
Dinesh Damodharan (26:51):
I don't think that I love the fact that the segment, but at least when we look at it, we look at it holistically as the SME segment because we don't want to marginalize any segments with the services. So at least the MasterCard products like crossword service, et cetera, we tend to sell the spectrum, but the UBO, the ultimate business owner becomes the most challenging to arrive at, and that's where we have partners that we work with to make sure that we can arrive at that with a high degree of confidence to make sure that we are doing the right things
Molly Swartz (27:20):
Right. Yeah, Holly, I think you said it right. There's a thin line there between Molly sitting in her garage acting as a business and Molly just sitting in her garage and consumer payments and commercial payments are regulated differently. And typically the key difference is the purpose of the payment. So is this payment being made for business purposes or is this payment being made for personal family or household purposes? When we're working with commercial payments companies, a lot of what we're doing is making sure in your contract with your customer, you are making clear that you are only supporting payments for commercial purposes. You Molly in your garage rep and warrant that you are in fact operating as a sole proprietor or otherwise for business purposes. And even then we had a client recently who was a commercial payment provider who had that type of language in there, their user agreement, and they got sued by a sender of payments alleging violations of Reg E, which would only protect a consumer. And because it was Molly sitting in her basement or in her garage, Molly alleged that she was entitled to those protections. So those types of where you see that blurring of the line between consumer and business, that's where I think you see people try to claim consumer protections. You probably have to take extra steps on the KYB front. It's an area where there's still a little bit of gray.
Nick Moiseff (28:47):
And then for us on the receive side too, so we work with say the five largest banks in India, they need to also understand that it's a business transaction collectional information as well. So there's both the sandre and the received.
Holly Sraeel (28:59):
So can we talk about some use cases that demonstrate the significant emerging payment opportunities for cross border and small businesses? Nick, you talked about earlier, Remitly is testing lines of credit offerings for small and mid-sized businesses in developing markets. Can you share a little bit on that?
Nick Moiseff (29:20):
Yeah, I can start to a little bit, I'll circle back. So again, I'll focus on Pakistan for a second, but we are starting with start with this concept of a store of value or a global store of value that allows these customers in Pakistan to open up account with Remitly that allows them to have multicurrency account access. And whether you do that via fiat or whether you do that via stablecoin, there's a whole gray area from a licensing perspective what you can and can't do right now. And so we're working through that. But once you have a store of value concept, if you look at the Pakistan, basically the environment right now, there is basically a thin credit file. You don't have a lot of information about those freelancers, and so it's hard for them to get loans. And so we are essentially starting to build credit underwriting models with information that we get for cross-border transactions to those freelancers and basically come up with our own modeling around how can you start to offer loans or other financial services to them. And then on top of that, with the store of value product, you can start to create interest bearing accounts
(30:24):
Either by staking or through fiat means as well. But there's a whole ecosystem of financial services in some of these developing markets that are emerging that when you look at some of the changes within the landscape from an international perspective that we're able to address
Holly Sraeel (30:42):
Dinesh, you talked about MasterCard having a suite of products under MasterCard move solutions that are focused on all the challenges that we've been discussing. You want to share a little bit on some of the detail there.
Dinesh Damodharan (30:57):
So going back to all the challenges that we talked about in terms of KYB, real-time statuses, being able to say real-time settlement, when it can be done, et cetera. I think these are all true pain points and the suite of services, which is the MasterCard cross border service addresses all of them. It gives a set of APIs, it gives a set of services that a partner or FinTech or ecosystem enabler can use to put a really good end-to-end experiences. On top of that, we have a partner in Nordics, I believe Gyro, who actually have built their crossword solution on top of these APIs, on top of these services for their customers. And we are constantly innovating and trying to make sure that we could reduce those frictions. Going back to your earlier question about how do we improve access to capital and how do we make it as real time as possible? And at MasterCard, we have a lot of data and we could actually use that to our advantage if you want to ever get into supply chain financing. If some FinTech wants to get into that, we could provide the right services at some point, but we are constantly innovating on all these friction points and trying to make sure that we give a good suite of services to increase confidence for both the SMEs and the providers or the banks, et cetera, to play in this space.
Holly Sraeel (32:23):
If we look down the road three to five years, is there a specific innovation or series of innovations in cross-border payments for small businesses that banks and small businesses and FinTech should be considering or are working on that is not publicly known yet? Any takers?
Dinesh Damodharan (32:47):
No, I think that, so of course the advancement technology of stable coins, et cetera, it's not mainstream yet. There's a lot of innovation happening, but look, as an SME, they don't really need to understand what happens under the hood because they have a fiat currency, they want to send money across the ocean to another country, and it could be done through various rails and various networks. It could be on a car network, non-car network, et cetera. The goal is to make it as seamless as possible and there are innovations happening on blockchains, et cetera to reduce the cost of that money movement, reducing the volatility, the effects rates, et cetera, wrap, but with a matter of time they start becoming mainstream and we want to make sure that we are innovating across all those areas as well.
Molly Swartz (33:47):
Sure. I was just going to say, any solution where value is held in one place and doesn't actually move while the sort of right to that value can exchange hands. So you see that with stable coins as an example because the underlying value is held by an issuer and we're just sort of exchanging some electronic right to that value. We are seeing some other versions of that without getting too legally technical. There is a new article of the Uniform Commercial code related to controllable payment intangibles, which sort of contemplates the idea of almost like a check tied to a store of value that you can then continually negotiate. So people are passing these electronic check or drafts between each other without actually moving the underlying value. So to me at least that solves some of the problems around transaction costs as well as the need for instant payments.
Nick Moiseff (34:44):
Yeah, I mean that's a great example. I think so much is dictated by regulations and interpretation of those regulations. I think the other thing I'd add is that I think is happening more globally is just the proliferation of these instant payment schemes that in theory could start to connect internationally, which makes instant money movement more possible. I don't how real that is across all the different continents, but I think when those become more ubiquitous or more prevalent from a domestic payments perspective, there is an opportunity to leverage those and create some connectivity across them. So that will reduce costs, that will increase transparency and ultimately create a better customer experience.
Holly Sraeel (35:26):
I have a question on the regulatory front. Over the next two to three, four years, whatever's left in the Trump administration, how are you feeling about the regulatory environment overall in terms of the acceleration of your business opportunities and the ability to serve the small business market through cross border payments? I mean, we all know that this is a terribly important market, and I think at times the media has a tendency to lean in on the narrative that deregulation is going to occur at a rapid rate or whatever. So I would love to hear from you on what you see or feel about the regulatory environment over the next several years.
Molly Swartz (36:12):
That's a big question.
Holly Sraeel (36:15):
Good or bad? Good for the market. Bad for the market. I mean, it's a little crystal ball gazing, right?
Molly Swartz (36:23):
I think deregulation is probably in the short term good for the market.
Holly Sraeel (36:28):
You heard her, that's on record.
Molly Swartz (36:29):
In the long term. In the long term, I'm not so sure that's the case. Certainty is good for the market, that's really what's good. So if deregulation means in the next two years we can skirt AML laws, we can skirt money transmission laws, although we can't, I'll get back to that.
Holly Sraeel (36:43):
Yeah, please.
Molly Swartz (36:45):
Maybe that's a good thing for SMB international payments. But I guess what's interesting about money transmission laws in this context is that they are mostly enforced by the states. Again, FinSEN at US Treasury has some enforcement powers, but state licenses are enforced by the states, and at least in the money transmission context, the division in terms of how states interpret and enforce their laws does not fall on sort of the blue red divide that we see in other places so frequently. So states that tend to be quite aggressive include California and New York, probably not surprising there, but also Texas and Florida. And so I think when we think about money transmission, it's not so clear that a Trump administration really affects the way that states are enforcing those money transmission laws.
Nick Moiseff (37:38):
That's been our approach as well. That's what we've thought about. I think what's top of mind for us is potential legislation that is taxing remittances and how that might change newer behavior. But I think from a regulatory perspective, we're kind of still in a wait and see. I think the hype cycle around stable coins and things like that is something that is coming top of mind for us, but we're still trying to understand the value from a consumer perspective before we really go deep on that.
Dinesh Damodharan (38:10):
Regulations keep changing. It's never constant. They are therefore reasons to protect the right people, et cetera. And we want to make sure that we follow those right regulations. We are making sure that whatever we do is based upon the right sets of laws and regulation. So it's inevitable it's going to happen. It's just we need to make sure that we work around that and provide the services that are following them as needed.
Holly Sraeel (38:45):
Final question. Given the appeal of the small business market and the opportunities with cross-border payments, do you see any M&A activity picking up?
Molly Swartz (39:00):
We are seeing M&A activity picking up. I don't know that it's necessarily been in the SMB international payment space, but there has definitely been more of deal activity E since the start of the year than we've seen in 2024. I think that is likely to just in general, I think there will be a lot of activity in the FinTech market, particularly once a number of these IPOs that are sort of rumored to be coming out in the next quarter or two that are FinTech companies, IPOing. Once those go out, if those are successful, I think you will see many more and you will see more deal activity. You'll see more launching of new products, new financings of early stage companies. It'll be a real boon for the industry.
Nick Moiseff (39:47):
Yeah, I think from our perspective, we're seeing maybe two categories. So one is there's entities holding licenses that are mobile for cross-border money movement, correct?
Holly Sraeel (39:56):
Yep. Correct.
Nick Moiseff (39:57):
And then the other is more banking as a service. So basically if you have a license and then you have the technical capabilities to enable cross-border money movement, I think what we're seeing is more opportunities in those spaces. And so there might be consolidation. And I think the other thing that's top of mind for us is just I think the barriers to entry are somewhat lowering with gen AI and with some of these, basically renting the license is kind of the way we think about it. And so with less capital and with basically these third party providers and essentially writing on their licenses, I think you could see more entrance into the market to address more niche customer needs. And so that's another way or something that we talk about.
Dinesh Damodharan (40:41):
So there are adjacent services that are very promising that you want to probably look at from an M&A perspective, from a cost perspective, I guess we got to wait for the regulation all, et cetera, to settle down to see more activity on that front. There are definitely consolidation, et cetera. And of course, so we see a lot of innovation happening. The innovation cost has reduced drastically because of technology being in the forefront of that. And that's creating a lot more of these interesting use cases that you always thought was really, really hard to get after because you had the technology limitations they're being, they're slowly going away and you would start seeing adjacent use cases that you might want to also capitalize on top of. I think that's where you'll start seeing a lot of that happen. But yeah, once some of those regulations all settle down, we'll see a lot more of that happening. Okay.
Holly Sraeel (41:38):
So any questions from the audience for our stellar panel? Yeah, please. Down front.
Audience Member River (41:45):
Hi, River from We Share Space. Yeah, hi from payin, which are a space on the consumer side. And we have tremendous collaboration with MasterCard on the SMB and consumer side as well, and all the mtls, that is a nightmare for me, but we have, what can we do together in the next, let's say 12, 18 months? I believe in co-creation collaboration. The space is huge to sell it, Holly, it's huge. The amount, the time is amazing. What could we do together? What can we solve together? I welcome your thinking already. It could be to make it at the end of the day, I want the SMB is to pay and be paid faster, simpler, cheaper. Now, any ideas that we can collaborate not only before apps, but everybody,
Nick Moiseff (42:57):
Sorry.
Dinesh Damodharan (42:58):
Yeah, mean, so this is where the MasterCard products are an enabler, right? More than anything else. The whole point of collaboration, partnerships, all the stuff that you talked about are critical, right? And those are some of the friction points we spoke about as well over the course of last 30 minutes. How do we understand who the payer is, who the payer is, and how can we make money transfer as real time as possible and make it multi rail, make it give choice, give selection, and hopefully increase access to capital for these businesses. So we have a product right under the MasterCard move solution that is exactly working on those areas. And we are more than happy to collaborate if needed or Sure.
Nick Moiseff (43:45):
Yeah. I think just to add to what Dinesh said, I think it's kind of like what are the core competencies and what are each organization's strengths and where there might be overlap. So an example would be from a Remitly perspective, most of our flows are going from us to certain markets. And then is there the inverse of that and be able to offset from an FX trading perspective. And so when we break down the business and you look at the core competencies, I think there's opportunities to basically offer capabilities that another organization doesn't have. And I think a lot of that comes down to licenses as well. And there's a lot of opportunity for partnership there as well. Happy to talk more offline in more detail. Yeah.
Holly Sraeel (44:27):
Any more questions there? Few. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, sorry. I can't see. Can you put the mic closer? Sure.
Audience Member 2 (44:44):
Listening to your presentation. Very good. By the way, it looks like it's a lot easier to be in this market by not being a bank, being something else. And on top of a license to transfer money, of course you have stable coins that has a lot more value outside the US than in the us. So how do you see this industry evolving? At the end of the day, you want to provide capital, you want to provide all the services that banks provide, but you are not, in order to be in this space, you better not be a bank. So how do you explain?
Molly Swartz (45:30):
I mean, I think there are a lot of ways to skin this cat, and I don't know that there's a better solution. You're right that obviously banks can lend as well as move money, but banks can't necessarily provide those services to foreign persons or they might not want to provide those services to foreign persons. In contrast not being a bank, now you have to deal with 49 states in the district of Columbia coming into your offices and checking out what you're doing once a year, twice a year, or once every other year. And maybe you need to go out and get licenses in foreign jurisdictions to serve customers in those spots. This is all sort of regulatory overlay that anyone has to deal with when they're moving money or when they're lending money. So I don't know that I would necessarily agree that the way to do this is to not be a bank. I think people try to attack this problem in different ways.
Nick Moiseff (46:27):
Yeah, I've been at Remitly for 10 years, so pretty close to when we started. And I think for the 10 years that I've been there, we've had this debate of what is the end game? Do we want to be a bank? And it comes up almost every year. And we're actually debating that right now is what's the end game here? I'd say just one of the pros of not being a bank is you have a lot more, like you said, it seems easier, you have a lot more flexibility. I think the con is you're reliant on banks to help dictate your program. And so you have less flexibility and you have a dependency essentially. And so it kind of depends on the overall strategy. Where do you really want to focus? What are your core, again, going back to core competencies and what are you trying to serve?
(47:12):
I think it goes back to my earlier comment of the barrier to entry in the market, maybe lower, but to truly go deep and provide all these financial services that we're talking about, you need to have just a deeper investment essentially, which may look like a bank or it may look like a different version of that. I think stable coin and the licensing around that kind of has a gray area, so you may be able to do more without some of the licenses. And as historically we've talked about from a fiat perspective, but it remains to be seen if that will be true years from now.
Molly Swartz (47:41):
And that's such a good point. Money transmitters have to hold money at a bank in the us so they're necessarily dependent on banks, which I dunno, maybe people didn't know, but
Dinesh Damodharan (47:52):
Most common denominator is a bank.
Holly Sraeel (47:54):
Exactly. Okay, one final question. Anybody right there, sir?
Audience Member 3 (48:03):
Hey, great panel. Thank you so much. Quickly, on the point of unlocking more financial services for these small businesses, you touched upon lending or loans for these businesses, and you talked about supply chain financing internationally. How do you see this play out in the next whatever, a couple of years or so? Because there is a real need for access to capital for small businesses, not just in the us. I mean, it's a huge problem in the US but internationally, and there's just so much you can do from a factoring perspective, supply chain financing. So yeah, how do you see rapidly in MasterCard playing a role in that?
Dinesh Damodharan (48:39):
So from a MasterCard perspective, we don't provide any line of credit, et cetera. What we have is data that can help with enabling a provider or a bank or a lender to be able to say that I have enough confidence to external line of credit. And then I see a lot of innovation space. I look at India where they have the whole AR on blockchain and they're trying to give loans on your receivables, and they're doing that uniquely because it's in a blockchain. It was pretty interesting innovation. So of course new technology like blockchain is going to create that level of uniqueness, lesser fraud, et cetera. But at least right now what I see from MasterCard is we provide services to banks, to all the lenders, neo banks, fintechs, et cetera, arming them with enough information to make those decisions easier for them. Right?
Nick Moiseff (49:41):
Yeah. I think for us, and Dinesh mentioned it, a lot of it relies on the data that we're able to leverage. I think we have a little bit of hubris if we think that we can go into certain markets and solve local problems, and we're really focused on the United States. So I think we're really talking about being intentional about which markets we focus on, and then also what allows us to differentiate ourselves. And it really does rely on the data, and I think there's some primitives that we can use and patterns that we can pattern match. But it also comes down to what are one or two markets that we think we can differentiate. And a lot of it depends on what is the macroeconomic conditions that would allow us to win compared to other local providers.
Holly Sraeel (50:26):
Before we adjourn, I'd like to invite everyone to join us for the reception in Golden Gate A and my extreme gratitude to Remitly Nick Moiseff MasterCard's, Dinesh Damodharan and Paul Hastings, Molly Schwartz. Please join me in thanking our panelists.