Benevolent Disruptors
00:24:58 · Jack Zhang
[00:24:58] S1: I think organic payments and stablecoin are probably the two biggest topic in the sort of fintech world of the last couple of years. Right? So I think if you're looking at stablecoin, I think the biggest challenge is regulation and compliance, right? So, and also there's an economy scale from a liquidity and some market efficiency sort of perspective, but the biggest sort of barrier was still compliance and regulation. And it's a sort of a basket of mix of good players and bad players. And it's very hard for people and general public to differentiate the difference. And I think that's creating even extra complexity for the industry. And by thinking like a first principle, does it make sense for everything to move 20 fourseven in real time and it's very cost efficiently. That, of course, doesn't make a lot of sense. But the question is, you know, you can't really just carve out something to say, hey, that is real time. That is, you know, frictionless. You know, just talking about moving money on chain. And that is, you know, I think that is the narrative that a lot of these crypto native guys sort of created. It's almost like a bit of a de saving, you know, from a public point of view. Right? But you need to think about and also a lot there's a lot of ideologies saying, hey, the world should just move it on chain. But but guys, you know, the, you know, the world is like, still have a lot of country, you know, like, it's still cash. Right? I mean, there's we've been trying to do cashless for the last fifty years and we still haven't able to do so. Just think about when the world gonna move to on chain a 100%. I mean, of course, you can have audiology, but you also need to, as a founder or entrepreneur, you have to think about the reality of where we're sitting today. You know, there's $7,000,000,000,000 or more processing on the FX market a day and on the SWIFT network as well. So the thing about in ten years' time, can 10% of that seven or eight or even $10,000,000,000,000 a day move into on chain, right? And that'd be a pretty good situation, right? That's like trillion dollar a day. It's massive already. And even you do achieve that, you still have the vast majority, 90%, which is still fiat. And how do you kind of connecting that kind of stablecoin or the on chain world to the fiat world?
00:27:17 · Jack Zhang
How do you do instant on ramp and off ramp to really kind of delivering the value of stablecoin to the physical world, integrating with the kind of the ACH or the fast payment, the MPPs, the PayNow, the FPS around the world, right? All these OPICs or UPR, right? But none of these systems are connected yet, so that there's still a lot of fundamental issues to be solved around compliance, connectivity to the physical world. And I think there's a lot of white space to go after and Airwallex are preparing to kind of solve all these issues I was talking about. And on organic payment, I think it's more of a So one thing is obviously you need to have an uplift to the current sort of Visa, Mastercard, so the card network to kind of cater in these agents that now handling that payment information or a tokenized card or whatever that form is. But I think coming to like first principle that I feel the world needs more wallet. So I think wallet is a much secure store value facility to allow not only human to make payment, but also human to delegating agent to auctioning your wallet. And then when a certain limit gets reached, then you can get human to do remote authorization. Wallet is a much easier way to be regulated and also a lot more secure than in the tokenization itself to to kind of carry the future of Virginic payments. And you can I'm kind of putting both FIA and Stablecoin in this wallet and to allow this sort of different wallet system to community together through Stablecoin essentially become a currency of universal wallet. And that's kind of the future I imagine how, you know, organic payment is going to evolve. Essentially, you will have agents sitting on sort of a regulated wallet infrastructure, so started sort of to making payments to other agents or or issue like one time token as card or just simply sending from like one wallet to another through stablecoin, which is essentially becoming a universal currency between how different wallet and agent kind of communicate each other.
00:29:18 · Chris Corbishley, Jack Zhang
[00:29:18] S0: Mhmm. Yeah. It's interesting that wallet is still the unit of, as you say, the the store of value to enable that with with limits. [00:29:24] S1: And more importantly, there's a very mature regulatory framework around wallets, you know, the e money regulation around the world, then that the fintechs can just piggyback on. I don't fundamentally believe that you can just having agent operating payment instruments, having store value and, you know, without worrying about the deregulation, without worrying about fraud, without worrying about security. [00:29:49] S0: I agree. I think if anything, that's why we haven't seen that sudden innovation in fintech the way that we've seen it in other verticals. Does take time. Needs time. [00:29:57] S1: Yeah. Because you need to take the pause of max resistance to don't everything properly because we are operating in highly regulated environment and you could do a 100% of that crypto native way. But that's why the limitation, right? So until stablecoin, there's no real world use case of crypto. It's largely stated as a sort of speculative financial instrument and it doesn't really do much good for the world where you kind of have to thinking about how to deliver the benefit of stablecoin to the real world, which is, you know, into interacting with fiat, interacting with the current payment rails. And that's where, I think, where Airwallex is gonna be investing on to fix all these issues.
00:29:57 · Jack Zhang, Chris Corbishley
[00:29:57] S1: Yeah. Because you need to take the pause of max resistance to don't everything properly because we are operating in highly regulated environment and you could do a 100% of that crypto native way. But that's why the limitation, right? So until stablecoin, there's no real world use case of crypto. It's largely stated as a sort of speculative financial instrument and it doesn't really do much good for the world where you kind of have to thinking about how to deliver the benefit of stablecoin to the real world, which is, you know, into interacting with fiat, interacting with the current payment rails. And that's where, I think, where Airwallex is gonna be investing on to fix all these issues. [00:30:39] S0: So, yeah, basically, we always end with the same question to all of our all of our guests. And it's really touching on the kind of personal story, the personal journey, motivation behind getting through the hard times and and the good, and trying to understand, you know, what drives you. And, you know, we we frame it as like a benevolent or disruptor. You know, is it the mission of of enabling global payments in a way that's frictionless and affordable and seeing the the good you can have as a result of that technology? Or is it the the disruption potential and and the the idea of, you know, creative disruption and the technology aspect that kind of motivates you and drives you? I'm just curious.
00:31:17 · Jack Zhang
[00:31:17] S1: Yeah. So I think this is a couple fold. Right? So I think the first thing is entrepreneurship. And when we started the coffee business that we didn't have a good solution to paying coffee beans from Brazil, from Indonesia, and it's very opaque and expensive and slow, and we have to pay like 4%, 4% FX fee, right? So there's like, fundamentally, that's kind of a big problem. I think we want to solve that, so other people, other entrepreneurs that don't have to deal with this same problem. But as we sort of thinking about a larger picture, just the internet, the mobile internet, the cloud, every sort of cycle of innovation sort of fundamentally pushing the humanity forward in a way that is sort of less and less time for us adapting to technology and to change. And the definition of a global business is fundamentally different today than twenty years ago, right, as I said. And then now with sort of AI having this paradigm shift and just think about how many people are going to lose their job because a lot of the people, you know, the job category just going to disappear. And what is the answer to the society to creating more jobs to kind of shift to the future? It's got to be entrepreneurship. And because it used to take, ten, twenty, thirty, even tens of thousands of people twenty, thirty years ago to creating a business or global business. But now with the model, with all this power of AI that people can harness, that you can create a business with one or two person. And now people talk about one person unicorn, and there's a lot of solo entrepreneurs now leveraging this model and can just build agent instead of hiring human to innovate to solve a specific problem. It's just 10 times easier, a 100 times easier to start a business now, to become entrepreneur. So I think there's going to be a 100 times more entrepreneur or more businesses getting built in the next decade than the last decade. And Airwallex sort of is the infrastructure to help those entrepreneurs to access global market from day one, give them that completely AI native financial infrastructure, but also that kind of organic operating system for them to run that company autonomously.
00:33:28 · Jack Zhang
You know, whether you the company started in essence and you wanted to move to UK or Germany or Australia or Singapore or The US, you could have a bank account in a matter of seconds and you can start selling to customers there. We'll give you agent to help you to close the books, to help you to manage expenses, manage your vendor, pay your employees, managing your revenue online or offline, and reconsolidate everything at the end of the month so that you don't have to worry any of that. So that you can get a lot more done and focus on your core mission. And I think by doing this, we essentially helping the world that are moving to that AI native society, AI native workforce, and then help them to creating more jobs, which I think is a big motivation factor for me. On the sort of personal front that, you know, I think myself more like a professional athlete, you know, that you have the if you play tennis, right, you wanted to play with, you know, acras, with Cindere, with Djokovic, this sort of top elite player in the world. And if you're a basketball player, you wanted to play in the NBA. And I feel like, you know, Airwall, essentially, as an entrepreneur, I'm playing I'm an athlete in the business world. I wanted to competing with best entrepreneurs in the world, you know, the like of, you know, Patrick and John from Scribe, you know, I feel excited and motivated to compete. And then ultimately, the competition helps delivering a better outcome for entrepreneurs, for business builders, for everybody that, you know, this economy. So, and I really sort of look forward to continue to compete with the most elite entrepreneurs and ultimately creating value for the society.