# Portola in negotiations with three of the five top US consumer lenders, CEO says Neo, a Stabledash show. Sep 1, 2026. Sebastian Marshall. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/neo/episodes/how-portola-brings-credit-to-neobank-wallets-zCedkiMVbPU Portola's CEO says pooling many small neobanks into one lending channel can bring large US lenders into stablecoin wallets that have no credit today. Portola, which builds embedded credit for stablecoin wallets and neobanks, is in negotiations with three of the five top US consumer lenders, co-founder and CEO Sebastian Marshall says. The talks are meant to decide who we really wanna work with, as he puts it. ## From PIMCO to wallets Sebastian Marshall traded structured credit at PIMCO after Berkeley. He says Figure's work tokenizing loans inspired him. He describes a market that still runs on manual steps: he would put up $500,000,000 of bonds for sale by email and ask for bids within two hours. He argues that structured credit desks have no incentive to reduce friction, because more friction means a wider spread. He says moving a loan asset takes nine to ten weeks of diligence, and lenders' C-suites ask why they should be the first to tokenize. So Portola begins with wallets, which he calls the new primitive, where few connections to traditional lenders exist. ## Global apps, local credit Sebastian Marshall says wallet apps are global first but credit is local. A loan needs local enforcement, reporting to the local credit bureau, local data providers and collections run in the local language. He calls credit one of the stickiest products a wallet can add, because borrowers come back to repay. Earned wage users, he says, tend to borrow again every pay cycle. ## Speed and data He says a lending institution needs six to nine months of lift to stand something up, and few incumbents are comfortable with stablecoins. Portola can move quickly into new jurisdictions, he says, and wallet data lets it build models meaningfully better than starting from square one. Instead of a referral fee, it shares the net return on the book with partners. ## Markets and plumbing Portola expects LATAM and Asia to take off first. Sebastian Marshall describes a super cycle of dollarization there and says self-custody wallets stop banks from acting as choke points. He calls US customers well served by credit today, but he says credit inside US neobanks is inevitable as they mature. On the technical side, repayments go to a router and then through smart contract waterfalls on EVM chains, where everybody sees what's going on. He contrasts this with the opaque ABS structures he worked with. Sebastian Marshall pitches Portola as the credit layer that wallets lack, combining many small partners into one channel for large lenders. He expects a rush to the product once partners go live. ## Key takeaways 1. Sebastian Marshall says Portola is in negotiations with three of the five top US consumer lenders to decide which one it will work with. 2. Portola bundles many small wallet partners into one channel that he says is big enough for large lenders to act on, and it splits net interest revenue after losses with those partners. 3. Sebastian Marshall argues that credit has to stay local because a loan is only worth what its legal enforcement is worth, even when the wallet apps carrying it are global. ## Chapters - 0:00 Portola grew out of PIMCO structured credit and Figure - 3:01 Credit must be enforced, reported and collected locally - 4:06 Lenders won't go first on tokenization, so Portola starts with wallets - 6:36 Credit is sticky because repayment brings users back - 9:43 Neobanks all want credit, and few offer it well - 14:03 Cheap wallet infrastructure leaves credit as the missing product - 17:43 US credit integration will take time, so Portola aggregates neobanks - 22:13 Dollarization in emerging markets is driving demand for dollar loans - 26:17 Portola wants capital from treasuries, ecosystems and family offices - 30:28 Smart contract waterfalls make loan cash flows transparent - 33:11 Structured credit trading is still slow, manual and full of friction - 36:46 Printers, fax machines and reading on paper end the conversation ## Transcript **Host** (0:00) Value transfer is nothing new. Hunt, gather, trade, expand. An exchange that's older than instant. The strongest prevail and the fastest survive. The function remains as its form continues to accelerate forward. **Host** (0:45) Alright. We got Sebastian from Portola, co founder and CEO. **Sebastian Marshall** (0:50) How are you doing? Thanks for joining. I'm doing good. That that little visual graphic in between the two the two slots was unbelievable. Whoever whoever made that needs to be, you know, promoted for something. **Host** (1:02) Yeah. We we love... Personally, I love the... You're you're you're joining us here on a segment of the show called Neo. So we have, like Mhmm. You know, the main It's show within a show. Show within a show. Show within a show. This is good. We have too much fun, like, working with partners to really brand these things as their own. So shout out to Dakota. I'm sure you've come across that team in the journey. But bring us into Portola. We're we're really excited. Dive into this. We met with Terrence earlier in the show from Tech Dollar, really thinking through, like, private markets and liquidity, and we just were with Infini, Neobank. So, like, this is a perfect kind of Yeah. Yeah. Destination here. **Sebastian Marshall** (1:48) Yeah. Maybe maybe I'll back it up to sort of, you know, where where I was and, you know, where portfolio comes from if that'd be a place for us to start. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So I was I was... You know, I I left Berkeley, ended up at PIMCO, trading structured credit, and, you know, saw the work that the was doing with Figure and got really inspired by the, you know, the tokenization of loans. Right? I think I think we've all foreseen a lot of that work and thought it was, you know, somewhat inspirational. Turns out that the tokenization loans, relatively difficult concept, you know, more broadly, selling that into lenders. And so what we really ended up uncovering was that, you know, there's this huge opportunity within wallets and specifically, like, stablecoin, neobanks, even now wallet enabled apps. So take your, you know, your ripplings, your deals, your gustos, people who are... You know, MoneyGram, people adding wallets to offer credit into this scene as well. And it was well served. Right? I think people people don't necessarily think about the cost structure of wallets as compared to traditional banking. They think, you know, if I wanna offer accounts in in many different countries, like, is easy now. But it's actually just, you know, multiple orders of magnitude simpler with wallets than it was before. And so as a result, these apps are all global first. Right? And, you credit is actually very local. And I think... And it gets sort of where... How we think about the the whole problem space. **Host** (3:01) What what do you mean by that credit being local? Define define that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So **Sebastian Marshall** (3:07) so so payments, you know, it's easy to send money across borders in in some ways. Right? As opposed to trying to enforce a legal claim on a loan across borders. Think think about this for a second. So the only thing that makes a loan worth anything is the idea that that that promise is actually legally upheld. You can't abstract this away to technology. Right? There... There's no, you know, sort of technological way that you're gonna actually turn that that promise into something that, you know, that is the value of the loan. Right? So it is local. Like, it has to be locally enforceable. You have to report to the local credit bureau. You need the local data provider. You need collections efforts in the country localized in the language. Right? All that info is is is not really tech. **Host** (3:48) Yeah. So think of... When you're thinking about building Portola, bring us in a little bit before we get too deep. I I often do this, unfortunately, where we just, like, care to us. Rather than just go straight into Drew, but I'll I'll move to the next question. The center. Yeah. Back up with, like, **Host** (4:06) frame frame Portola for us as we kind of I think even framing it in that context of figure, I I couldn't help but smile when you mentioned them because I'm very inspired by my Jack has a little as well. I've I've I've... I was... I'm a professional figure. Maybe, like, help us understand why, and then why does that transition into Portola, and how does that position you within, like, bolster your thesis? **Sebastian Marshall** (4:30) Why why figure? So we could start with Zach's. Figure is is an incredible company because I think, you know, unless you've worked, you know, on a structured credit desk or on a structured credit, you know, team, I think people don't understand, like, how immobile loan assets really are. Like, to move a loan asset, right, requires, like, nine nine to ten weeks of sort of, you know, diligence over prospectus or over a set of deal docs, you know, this whole data room. They don't move like a, you know, like a JSON. Like, it's not it's not a trivial sort of asset transfer. And so I think, in some ways, that's very inspirational. Right? Because we are trying to make assets and money move at the speed that everything else in our lives moves at. How we get from there to Portola is is sort of nonlinear. So we are still, you know, gonna tokenize the loans that that we originate or our partners originate through our network. But the the reality is that we're a bit ahead of where where that needs to be. So let me just give you some insight. When we talk to the c suites of, you know, these these lenders, their attitude is basically, you know, we've we've met Mike. We sort of... We we understand, you know, what's going on with with, you know, tokenization more broadly. Why would we go first? Right? Why wouldn't we why wouldn't we just, like, wait until, you know, all the kinks have been worked out and and and and get get to the end there? But they were very interested, I think, and and still are very interested, you know, in The US, especially, we talked to partners, in doing loans at stablecoin. And so tokenization was this this thing that we could lead with more broadly. But Mhmm. The real opportunity is actually in this new... Like, every time I talk to a new fintech founder, it's like, we're building on wallets. You know, wallets are are the kind of new primitive, and there's not a lot of interconnects between, you know, the trad lenders of the world and these wallet platforms, you know, in The US, but any... Anywhere in the world. Right? So we we think about it as, you know, building out this network of of lenders that we work with and also doing, you know, some lending ourselves to to to fill this demand. Right? We've talked to, you know, dozens of neobanks. Maybe we can talk about that. **Host** (6:36) Yeah. I was actually gonna go the neobank. And, Drew, maybe this is... I think you kind of alluded to this idea with, like, payroll, wallets as core infrastructure. We were talking about deal earlier. I feel like this would be, like, a perfect place. Like, walk us through. In a perfect world, you're selling into deal tomorrow. How do you pitch the deal team embedding Portola? What's the benefit for all these people, you know, receiving their funds and using **Host** (7:00) the the deal wallet? You know, where did... Where do you fit into into this puzzle? I really like the the visual I'm about to pop up. I think this does a good job. **Sebastian Marshall** (7:10) Yeah. Yeah. It's... Our designers was was was fantastic. Okay. So on to the deal, you know, question. Credit is is one of the stickiest kind of products one can add. And I think, you know, there's this duration of of when you take out the loan versus when you repay it back. That means you're gonna be in the wall again. It's a way to monetize users that you haven't, you know, prior. And I think for a company like Deal, the EWA or the more broad category of EWA, if you guys are familiar, is is is a way to basically advance against these paychecks. I think you can argue about it or or, you know, explain it as a means of both revenue lift, you know, for our partners and retention. Right? So I I think the payroll companies, you know, they're trying to compete with the neobanks where the payroll gets sent. Right? And they're trying to capture more that value upstream. Right? How can they do that? Well, they can offer the suite of products that we're offering and selling into neobanks, but actually to their, you know, holders. Right? There's a payroll company we kind of talked to right now that's working specifically on, you know, Southeast Asia payroll and stables. And and they think it's, you know, it's one of these things where you could pull them from from sending that money to another wallet as actually just doing it at the payroll company or the payroll wallet itself. Why is credit so sticky, though? Like, what what what about it? Like, is it because, like, is it because I have to go back and I have to repay my loan? Like, is that it, or is there something more? I think it's a response to a fundamental human need to draw, you know, future resources into the present. Right? If you're... You... I mean, if you take if you take the sort of broad theory of it, there's a, you know, consumption smoothing and this, you know, time preference around money. So, for example, in a EWA product, right, or in a in a payroll product, you... They know that you're gonna, you know, be receiving that paycheck at some point fixed in the future. So advancing it to you at 99% of the value today, you know, thirty days ahead of time, is, like, not that complicated of a credit decision. Granted, there are things that go into it, but the reality is that, you know, people actually just wanna pull that income forward. Now there... There's there's a complication here, this is why it gets sticky. It's because when you're supposed to get your next paycheck and you mentally sort of budget it in that you're gonna get paid, you know, at that point, you actually don't get it. Right? And then you end up, you know, doing the same thing the next month. So EWA, incredibly sticky product for for that reason. I think people basically pull the income on a schedule to to what works for them, and then they can, you know, live their life, you know, with with the normalized income. **Host** (9:43) When when you guys... You know, in the early stage here, you're thinking about bringing credit, bringing this what looks like kind of a two sided offering. You have the platform side and the lender side. You're trying to really bring this to life in certain contexts financially that really showcase what's possible. We spend... Like Zach said, we spend a lot of time on the show talking to neo banking founders specifically. And, like, even the the one that comes to mind from recent weeks was Kashy. The... I think that's the name of it, Kashy. And this is kind of like the... At least in her view, the founder of this this neobank, this specific piece of the puzzle kind of comes at like step three or four where it's like, you know, we have the the core infrastructure, wallets Yeah. And then receive is happening. Custody's happening. Now it's like you get to this point where things like credit or earning or the future value today starts to become really interesting as kind of a, like, a a phase that happens after you kind of get these core fundamentals? Are you seeing, one, that trend of, like, you're kind of getting brought into the... To these conversations in, a a phased approach? And how are you thinking about those who really need this most right now? **Sebastian Marshall** (11:05) Yeah. I think I think, you know, neobanks are exploding. Right? And and different neobanks are at different stages of launch and and maturity. Some prioritize credit on their road maps over over others. Some say, you know, we wanna, you know, get our earn integration done. But the the bottom line is that they all sort of want credit in in in some form. Right? The, you know, the sequencing question there is, you know, oh, we need to get this, you know, we need to get this integration done. Maybe we haven't launched our card. Maybe we haven't done x, y, or z. But this this sort of is a, you know, immediate demand, you know, post that. And I I also think there's a question about... You know, I don't I don't think there's anyone really com... You know, offering this product in a compelling way right now. And and the the second that sort of, you know, we start... You some of our partners start, you know, fully integrating and and getting live with the product, I think there'll be sort of a rush to to it. Right? Because the differentiation factor is is so high. **Host** (11:57) Why why is that the sort of reality happening today where there's not many alternatives? Or how do you think of the differentiation for Portola? What does that mean in your eyes? Why aren't there many alternatives? What does that mean? **Sebastian Marshall** (12:11) Yeah. Well, I think, you know, I think it takes a lot. I mean, there are companies that do embedded lending in multiple countries. Right? There aren't many of those that are necessarily very comfortable with stablecoins. So so we we do see providers sort of thinking about this about this area. Maybe they don't come from, you know, the ecosystem themselves and don't necessarily understand, you know, how how to capitalize that well on it. Even pretty savvy lenders, you know, in The US who you would imagine wanna, you know, wanna facilitate lending in platforms like Coinbase or Phantom or, you know, MetaMask, for example. Right? The lift on their end at a at a lending institution takes, you know, six to nine months. This is not like a like a quick thing that they can do. Whereas we can move, you know, rather quickly in in new jurisdictions as opposed to sort of the incumbent players. So I I think that's part of it. Like, you know, we we think about it as there are there are countries in which we will work with partners no matter what, and there are countries where we can get to market much faster doing it ourselves. And, you know, we think that, you know, collecting all the data we collect, collecting wallet data allows us to build models that are sort of meaningfully better than anybody starting from square one. Right? Because wallets are rich rich with data. There is an opportunity in... To better understand the consumer through the wallet, through the integrated products, the earned products, their card spend, all this stuff. But you have to you have to have the null hypothesis there, the existing data you would have had on that user without the app. Right? So the credit bureau, you know, the the bank account data, **Host** (13:42) you know, just alt data, social data, all this stuff. Kinda reminds me of the approach. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Go go ahead. Go ahead. No. I was gonna say, Drew, reminds me of, like, the approach that Sarah's doing where they have the... They're doing the credit versus, like, what's gonna be happening on their platform and the spend that's happening there, but also, like, you know, connecting these external sources, the other bank accounts, the other the other loans. Sebastian, I'd love to ask you more just, like, about... Like, let's zoom out macro the way that you're looking at, like, the neobank as a category. Even if we can call back to, like, you know, Mike Cagney and Figure and starting with SoFi, I feel like like SoFi is kind of this category leader that may have started as a very basic neobank and then has added... You know, has gone the round of personal loans and retirement accounts and crypto trading. And I don't know. I think I can even get my, like, auto insurance through there. So, like, how... In what ways does this neobank category need to involve? And, again, like, credit as this kinda through line for the evolution, maybe not even just for earned wage access, payday advance Mhmm. But even, like, other types of lending. **Sebastian Marshall** (14:49) Yeah. I mean, I think... Oh, this is a this is a pretty broad question. So I think on the cost structure piece, right, these wallets and stablecoin neobanks have a have a serious advantage, right, compared to the incumbent players. And so I think they're able to capitalize on that and pour more money into into distribution and CAC and doing novel things. Like, Sarah, MJ is doing some incredible things the way he thinks about sort of acquiring users. Right? This whole upside concept. There's something, you know, for for people that... Yeah. I think gen... This is sort of a Gen z. We can we can take this sort Gen z nihilisty tour about this. But I think you're able to do so much more because the cost of the infra has gone down so much. Now credit does not work this way. And I think I think that's why there's space for a pure play provider. Right? Like, we just eat, sleep, and breathe credit here, but it's the kind of thing that requires underwriting a balance sheet and all this stuff. So it's it's necessary for the evolution of these products, but these prob... Products being global first necessitates, I think... You know, may... Maybe there's a version of us that just focuses on the auto. Right? And maybe there's a version of us... I talk to people who who are thinking about doing this, but for mortgage. Right? Maybe, you know, may... Maybe there are lots of of these players that can exist in the market to enable these self custodial apps to become full banking experiences. But we're, like, we're sort of obviously not there yet. Right? The card is good. The earn is good. The stocks are good. Yeah. How how... I mean, what things do we need? Well, it seems like we're we're missing the one, which is, you know, credit. **Host** (16:17) And and credit is is is vast. Can you can you speak to the role that credit plays for this category? Like, for for the people who are in the business of building custody based services, like we call it neobanks, whatever you wanna call them, like, these platforms that are focused on being trusted to hold or manage or at least facilitate value transfer custody. Like, anyone who's in that business and who is thinking about the business of this, we have continued to hear time and time again that credit, like, Rags says this all the time. Like, credit is the... One of the most profitable opportunities **Sebastian Marshall** (16:58) in the stack Yeah. If you're in that business. Like, speak a little bit about the the role and the the kind of profit center that this is. Yeah. I think we think about it, you know, with our partners as a couple of things. Right? It's it's sort of this this constant churn we talked about. The monetization is very real. Right? And so we sort of share net interest revenue, you know, post the losses, so we call it the net sort of return on the book with our partners. Right? Enabling them to actually monetize, you know, credit and their distribution in a way that's not just like a a fee or a referral based system. Right? You can increase... Rags is right. Right? Credit is incredibly profitable. It also comes with all these costs we talk about, and I think people should not rebuild across jurisdictions for each new neobank. **Host** (17:43) Right? But they should be able to monetize it. One ask. I'm trying to figure out the best way to kind of phrase this. Perfect world. What does a neobank look like for you, Sebastian? How do we see portfolio come to life? Like, you know, and I actually... I'd especially wanna even ask, like, in The US. Like, there's all these different ones in emerging markets. Again, I... I'm really passionate about that the teams were saying, hey. Yes. Emerging markets, there's opportunities here, but, like, things aren't perfect in The US. There's... Like, use earned wage access, payday in advance. Great example. Think of a market that's, like, ripe for disruption in The US. Like, do we see this come to lot... Come to life? Is this a new player? Is this an existing player kind of going to the next era of using Portola? How... Like, bring us into, like, just that that perfect picturesque vision of of somebody using Portola. **Sebastian Marshall** (18:37) So I think I think we do also sort of as a company by by the thesis that LATAM and Asia are sort of... Are places where these things will take off first. Right? The US customer is incredibly well served. That doesn't mean that there aren't teams in The US that are doing interesting things that we sort of talk to and work with. So, you know, like, we can take the example like Brookwell. Right? They're they're doing something, you know, very interesting in terms of... In The US, The US is a bit complicated because you need you need the you need the the bank accounts. And then you you basically... Your consumer is so well served by traditional credit that the question is, like, are are you gonna have the credit extended within that application? Now you're asking me perfect case. Right? The perfect case is that, you know, the couple of neobanks that exist in The US, right, Rakwa being one of them, are able to build out, you know, pretty differentiated, you know, target channels, and and we're able to work with them to provide all these users credit in in many different forms. So we we don't think about it just as sort of personal loans being the place we'll stop or EWA. Right? We think about it as, okay, partners in auto, partners in mortgage. Right? Who who can join our network to provide all of these types of products within, you know, these US neobags? I think the appetite is is is there, but the opportunity is not apparent. The appetite might be there on the demand side. The opportunity is not yet apparent to the lenders who need to do the uplift to get sort of out of the network. Right? I think we're gonna need to see more maturation of US neobanks before we get there. Right? But in some ways, think it's actually inevitable. **Host** (20:14) Go to that side. I don't think we've talked about that at all. So we've talked about wallets. We've talked about the the consumers. Bring us to the side of the lenders. Saw on your website, you're like, hey. Lenders signed up. You mentioned, like, how do you get them on board? What is the bet... What are the benefits for for lenders? You know, I think about, like... I imagine... Please correct me if I'm wrong. All these other mortgage companies that have watched Figure from the sidelines, could... You know, are are you approaching them saying, hey. Move like Figure does? You know? Or or what what is the angle there? **Sebastian Marshall** (20:49) I think we think about it as a as a roll up of a bunch of smaller wallet... Like, any... Okay. So take the the OnePay, you know, the recent OnePay deal where they added embedded lending. You know, for a for a marquee lender or sort of any large lender to do any deal or structure like that, they're going to need a sort of a a marquee partner on the other side. What we do in The US, right, is we build the relationships across all of the of the neobags, and we take those in aggregate, right, to lenders. And we say, look. There's this channel here. Right? Any individual partner probably could not get you to do anything. But together, all of these partners are large enough and an interesting enough channel for you to to move on it. Right? And that's where we found the most success, especially with the consumer unsecured lenders. So we're... You know, we... We've talked to... You know, we've been... We're sort of deep in deep in con... Sorry. Not con... Negotiation sort of conversation with three out of the five top US consumer lenders right now just to decide who we who we really wanna work with and who, you know, fits the product spec that we need, you know, in The US. Right? But that that... That's the that's the pitch. It's like Yeah. Look. There's a channel. Each individual individual player on their own, not as compelling. Roll them up. There's something here you can plug in. Right? It's a it's a simple integration. **Host** (22:13) What what... You mentioned the two markets, LATAM, and then what was the other one? **Sebastian Marshall** (22:17) What? Asia? For Asia? For lending. Yeah. Asia's a bit complicated. Yeah. Yeah. What what is specifically **Host** (22:24) unique about those markets that highlights the value of what you guys are building? **Sebastian Marshall** (22:30) Yeah. So I think there's just a lack of... Well, okay. So dollar access is is sort of the big thing. Right? Dollarization is is a... We're sort of in a super cycle of dollarization like we haven't seen, you know, maybe since the nineties with Argentinian, you know, dollarization. You know, that didn't end so well. But the reality is that self custody wallets remove the ability for the bank to essentially create a choke point around the the flow of money. Right? And what that actually enables is a is sort of a liberalization and a liberation around the means of sort of, you know, the means of transferring value in those countries. And so what we see and what we talk to in consumers in in LatAm and and some some in Asia, Asia is a bit more complicated, but in LatAm is is... You know, people wanna save dollars. They wanna buy assets in dollars. They wanna denominate their whole life in dollars. Right? I talked to, you know, a lot a lot of Brazilians who say, like, you know, I want a dollar like loan. I I don't I don't wanna deal with, you know, my local entities here. I I want a dollar loan. I don't even care if it's, you know, cross border or what what it is. So I think what we're basically seeing more broadly... It may be... You know, it'd be... It'd interesting to get your... You guys' take on this. But what what we're actually seeing is that dollarization is gonna sweep through, you know, a bunch of regions in a way that isn't stoppable. Right? We talked to someone at the World Bank recently or maybe the IMF. I I honestly can't remember. I know that there's there's a rivalry there. It's bitter, but I can't remember right now. And and then they're very concerned about stablecoins for this exact for this exact reason we're talking about. I think, you know, they think about it as, you know, the the previous, you know, monetary controls that used to exist are no longer as sort of implementable. So there's an arms race. Right? And the question is, like, do you stand on the side of wallets and, you know, the liberation of people to not be, you know, financially repressed by their by their government? Or are you like, you know, oh, we need, like, the monetary stability of the country and and to keep the, you know, the sort of capital account and the FX, like, more control? And I think that these are, you know, it's it's not yet clear which of these two sides will win, but I personally stand much more on the side of, you know, people being able to save in whatever asset they want rather than being forced to exist in their own banking system. **Host** (24:46) I'll say that this is a very relevant topic right now. We started... We did last week. We did our first... There's a MoveMe series presented by MoveMe. Friendly debates. We did this first one around agentic payments, but the next topic we're talking about is dollarization and is the role of US dollar stablecoins versus local stablecoins. And Mhmm. You know, we had Ferdinand from Augustus come on and very, very blatantly say that the dollar is the world's best product. And we've had other people on, like, Tarab or even, like, Dave from Etherfuse who are like, yeah. Look. The dollar is a great product, but it is on top of, you know, other countries' mind right now. It's like, we need con... We need we need liquidity in our in our own currency. Like, we don't... Like, we want... It's... I don't know if it's that they don't want their citizens to have, you know, the economic freedoms. But on the other hand, they're like, we need cut... We need our debt being bought and being custodied. Yeah. So that conversation will be will be coming soon. And I'd say... I don't know, Drew. Where where where do you land land on the spectrum right now? I will say this. On the side of neobanks, when we think of, like, the two products that every neobank seems to be talking about, it's credit and it's FX. So at the end of the day, I think the answer right now is people need both. Like you said, they should be able to custody the money they want. And... But if they need their local currency or need another currency, it shouldn't come at some exorbitant cost. And Yeah. That's a big problem, I think, right now with the neobanks is the cost for even the local currencies just doesn't make sense. **Host** (26:17) Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough it's a tough problem. It's been it's been fun to... I I got a chance to meet Hunter in Mexico City on your team. We... I think we met at, a... Oh my gosh. Where were we? I think it was a ramp event. And I've been I've been enjoying his tour around New York. Yeah. Last week, he's got some... He's got... You know, he's in Brass Factory doing his rounds, Monad office, got some time with MJ from Sero, Dan from Modern Treasury. So would... I guess my my question here is, like, when you think about the rights... Like, if we could if we could... You know, what is it? Tuesday? We have Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to open an... Open three doors for Hunter? Like, what what would be the best offices or partners or strategic relationships? Like, if he, you know, today posts these pictures, like, what would be the best three days he could have in your mind in terms of, like, relationships, people that you would love to get in touch with? Because I think for for us, we're always trying to think through for Portola, companies who are younger and, like, building, what would those strategic unlocks be or or, you know, step functions that could could really accelerate things? Like, who are you trying to meet with most right now? **Sebastian Marshall** (27:42) Yeah. So let me let me take that Brian Armstrong. Into Brian Armstrong. Always. Always. I wanna I wanna talk to Lex. You know? No. I'll take it into two... One, Hunter's gonna be on a plane, you know, very shortly to Buenos Aires. So, unfortunately, Hunter will not be able to take meetings in New York, but we'll be meeting some some interesting, know, companies companies in... You know, for Crescimento. I think on our end, we think about, you know, who... Who's a big unlock for us. So, you know, we're always trying to talk to more on trained capital sources, you know, treasuries, you know, you know, ecosystem companies that sort of need to invest their balance sheet and would like to buy, you know, tokenized assets. Family offices also sit in that lane. You know, those are very interesting companies. On neobanks, I think we actually have, you know, I would say not that many more that that I think we need to we need to meet. So I don't think... I think there's actually huge unlocks. Always Mhmm. Always interested in talking to people who have experienced lending in in I I... You know, these these these... This this this... I would've come with more structured asks, but these are generally the the broader the broader things that we think about. **Host** (28:55) So the ecosystem one. So this is like, you know, Monet. Let's just say... Just for example, since that was just on the timeline. So foundations like them or, like, people in that position, they... They're sitting on a lot of that asset most likely, and they want to maximize returns and maximize you... Like, you can't... Like, so you're kind of sitting in the in the position where you could go to a monad, for example, and help that foundation really put those assets to work because there are markets for them, and you can go and, like, kind of build... Is... Define that a little bit. I'm kind of, like, 80% there. I'll I'll explain. **Sebastian Marshall** (29:35) So for example, right, these ecosystems or these l ones have every incentive to get assets onto the platform that are doing interesting new productive economic things. Right? We're literally tokenizing real real world assets, but not a a private credit fund. You know? And you're putting it on on chain. We're, like, putting loans onto your blockchain. Right? So you have an incentive of both, you know, maybe from your treasury perspective to actually finance some of that paper, to sit in a warehouse, you know, as the senior and sort of finance some of the paper and maybe earn some... Just spread on that. But there's also the secondary, you know, flywheel of, okay. Actually, something interesting is happening on your l one because you're, you know, hosting these native, you know, loans and this loan registry. It doesn't exist on really anything other than, like, Provenance at this point. Provenance blockchain? Or what do mean by that? Is this Yeah. That's a great... I was... That's... I think that's actually a great thing to... Again, one of the least talked about **Host** (30:28) l one's ecosystems in this whole conversation. And Yeah. What is... What's going on there? Refreshing. With Provenance? Yeah. Yeah. Give us the breakdown of, like, Provenance, and then, like, how would you use that as an example to compare it against maybe other other l ones in in the... In that role there. **Sebastian Marshall** (30:44) Oh, man. How long do you have? So so Provenance is You're you're our last one today. So unless you have a hard time who has, like, a New York Bit license. Is this the same one, Provenance? I'm I'm sure they have... They've probably got every license. They have an alternative trading system. They have a, you know, a face certificate, stablecoin. They have a broker dealer. Like, they got they got everything. Pro... Provenance was basically built because, you know, it was, like... I think it was, like, starting, like, 2018 or 2019. And and they wanted to basically build a custom blockchain that could handle the overhead and the the custom modules underneath that they needed for basically... The the core way to think about it is that when you have a loan, you need to basically pledge that loan to someone else to receive financing for that loan. Right? And they wanted to build that natively into the into the blockchain as being able to, like, mark a particular asset. Right? Now there... There's a lot of, like, structural things about provenance that make it, you know, more more efficient than other blockchains. I'm I'm not here to, like, shill provenance. Right? Like, you know, I I I love, you know, I love Figure. I don't know of... You know, I I I don't know if provenance is is the thing, but, you know, they basically custom built this blockchain for themselves. And so it's not super interoperable with other blockchains. Like, they have, you know, they have the the prime token and Hashtra, and they're and they're trying to get liquidity from other blockchains. But, you know, that that seems to be the thing that is sort of more of the focus now. When we think about what we can do with, you know, existing l ones, it's more about building that architecture where you can, you know, have a... Basically, what is a lean registry? Right? It's like who... When the when the borrower pays, you know, the... Pays us or pays the smart contract router for whoever owns this loan, where are those proceeds then distributed? Right? And how can we how can we do that in a way that's, like, compliant and legal, but also allows extensibility? So what I mean by that... Right. The the whole reason I left PIMCO broadly was because the ABS structures we had were incredibly sort of opaque. Right? You would receive loan money. It would flow through this waterfall. It it would come out the other side. Right? It wasn't super clear what was going on inside of it. With this... With blockchain smart contracts, the the liens get repaid to a to a router. The router distributes to smart contract. The smart contract waterfall distributes. Right? Every every... You know, everybody sort of sees what's going on. And so that's the system that we sort of built on on EVM chains that we were working on, call it, like, you know, eight eight or nine months ago, that that we're gonna actually end up using for the loans that we we generate. So it's a it's a horizontal layer, essentially. It's not our own blockchain or anything. What was, like, the biggest learning from PIMCO **Host** (33:21) while while there that you've brought into this experience? It seems like you just highly regard the... That institution. **Sebastian Marshall** (33:28) Yeah. I mean, it's a... They're really sharp people. Like, they're really sharp guys. Probably the thing that I sort of take... Took away from it most is that there are people out there whose job it is to understand every movement in the yield curve at every point on the curve and and think about that in relation to all other rates. Like, you know, when you think about when you think about I'll make it more clear. You think about the yield curve and you think about rates as something that exists almost just as a... Like like, we think about an an FX an FX, you know, price or something. If we think about it as, you know, whatever, the 10 the ten year's up 20 bps. Right? But, like, when you're in an institution that manages, you know, that much money, you realize that the movement within the yield curve or the movement within, you know, the prices of assets is actually reflective of, you know, big institutions that are are taking positional bets. Right? And enough of those positional bets. I think, basically, there's a discreteness within the market structure that people can't appreciate unless they've, like, you know, bought or sold more than, like, a billion dollars of bonds in a day. And, like, they don't understand that discreteness. I think the other thing is just how low tech low tech, you know, trading fixed income really is. Like, I would sell half a yard of bonds over essentially what was like Craigslist on Bloomberg, iBeachFat, and send out like an email called a Buick. And, like, you know, it it would be like, oh, I got, like, $500,000,000 of bonds for sale. Like, send me your bids in two hours. And, like, you'd have to chase down JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and be like, hey, guys. I need my bids. Like, you're thirty minutes late to my auction. So, like, the the market's so... It's... At least for ABS, it was it was it was pretty slow. Pretty slow moving. **Host** (35:11) Wild. Is there... Maybe that's like a research thing. Like, even, like, 2026, like, is that in the past, or is that, like... Is that still the reality? That it's just... And it's like, how much of that is, like, do people just completely not even, like, think about again? Because on the surface, it feels like we're in the technological era, and we're in the age of AI. And **Sebastian Marshall** (35:32) No. No. It's it's it's it's like, you know, there are improvements like Tradeweb and stuff for corporate bonds. But for, like, structured products or or anything that's a little more hairy than, like, agency mortgages or IG corporates, You're you're trading, you know, over the counter with dealers at banks, and, you know, they're quoting you a price. And you may or may not like like the price. You get on the phone. You call. You argue. Right? Maybe they maybe they, you know, give you a better price because you're PIMCO. And and and, like, that... That's the structure. Like, it's not... It's, like... I would I would honestly I would honestly describe my morning routine of searching through lists of bonds that we could buy in the secondary market in the morning as as trolling through, like, auction lots or, like, Craigslist. Like, you look through the list. You, like, maybe you run the bond, you know, you see if it's any good, but it was not... But I think the people in the market like it that way. Like, I actually think that the more inner... The, you know, the more friction, the higher the spread. Structured credit desks have no incentive to reduce that. And so that... That's why I figured you're so transformative in some ways. Right? Because you're basically collapsing that intermediary role between, you know, loan pool asset buyers and sellers. **Host** (36:46) I I have one more really important question before we close. What are you using the printer behind you for? **Sebastian Marshall** (36:58) That's crazy. I actually don't... I don't use the printer. Hunter uses the printer, and and then he comes he comes around behind me, and it sort of... Yeah. It's an it's an encroachment. This printer is actually, like, you know, cause of cause of many a disagreement in the in the office. So I don't use the printer, actually. Is is he printing out, like, long form? I... I've I've thought to myself, like, if I had a printer, what would I actually use it for? Like, maybe printing out these long reports that I don't wanna spend thirty minutes reading. Like, what what would the I... Yeah. Yeah. I got something. I had a comment on that. Think that's I I think that's what he does. I think he prints out, like, you know, he'll he'll, like, find a Bank of International Settlements paper, and he'll print it out, and he'll, like, you know, go through it with a highlighter. Mark it out. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of... Our brains are so slopped, you know, because of AI and Claude. The only way to actually learn or think about anything anymore is to get, like, you know, pen and paper and, like, maybe actually work through it. There was a guy giving his testimony, and he does research on, like, child development, and there was a there was a correlation between when technology was introduced into schools **Host** (37:59) and actually the IQ, you know, of the generations. And Gen Z was the first generation, I think, in the last hundred years that was actually dumber than their parents. And, again, so you're seeing as more technology, as more screens are introduced, the actual, like, knowledge retention is dropping. I think about that in my own life. I think about that with my kids, and I'm like, there is a certain amount of time where, like, I can't read anything else on the screen, especially when it comes to all these reports. It's not that I don't want to read them. They're actually... Literally feels like my brain... Like, it's just not sticking. So, Drew, maybe this is a venture we go through together. We'll both We should just acquire **Host** (38:33) a a print... A failing printer company, ship them to all of... A thousand of our most popular or loyal listeners, and then we can just do the newsletter version of, like, faxing them every Tuesday, Thursday what they need to know. Like, here's the run of show. You get... You you know the printer, the paper starts coming out. It's You're the network once you once you get the once you get the machine. Again Wouldn't that be such a more exciting experience instead of getting an an inbox ping? It's like you just hear the paper behind you start coming out. You're like, oh, stop it. That's lie. Like, we talk about credit being sticky. Like, **Host** (39:08) if you want to talk about, like, media consumption being sticky, if if if somebody is willing to bring a device into their house and or into their space and to actually breed a physical version of whatever you're publishing, like, that seems like peak pinnacle. Like, that's where you wanna be when it comes to comes to mind share. **Sebastian Marshall** (39:27) But Yeah. Yeah. The facts... I think this is a this is a good note. The facts is **Host** (39:32) a lost a lost a lost thing that we should we should bring back. Because the idea that you just send a contract, you know, don't have to deal with the email. I think I like the fax. I think we That would be sweet. Well, you you could close the deal, hop on a call, be like, I'm faxing it to you. I see the paper come out. I'm like, you gonna sign that? Sebastian, sign the paper. I'm watching. Exactly. That'd great. Exactly. That'd be great. We need to go back to the We we we we just found out that our engineer actually in **Host** (39:55) 2007 designed and built a real time fax over IP solution. And this is public knowledge. This is... He sent us a screenshot through his LinkedIn. Drew, Andre never stops us surprising us. Dude, this guy this guy. What Don't you do real time pass over the internship? **Sebastian Marshall** (40:13) What do you guys have this guy doing? I think he's, you know reason we don't use Zoom or Google Meet is everything you see right now. This is all in house. I was very impressed. I'm, like, very impressed by this setup, to be to be quite honest with you. This... I was expecting a Zoom link. This is this is definitely better than that. **Host** (40:34) It's, like, going better than Zoom. **Host** (40:37) Well, Sebastian, we'll we'll end with some confetti. Thank you for the time. It's great learning from you. We we will have some exciting, like, research related segments. This is specifically where where we'll work with the company to go, like, really deep in a certain topic. I think credit and lending is definitely one that we will be going deeper into. So we'd love to have you back and kind of be a contributor to that. The pursuit of knowledge in that part of the conversation is how I would describe it. So thanks for your time, and more question for you actually, Sebastian, before you drop. **Host** (41:10) Go for it. Who should we bring on next that you know? Who should you bring on next that I know? **Sebastian Marshall** (41:17) That's that's a tough question. I don't know who you've... I don't know every single person you ever brought up. No. No. Like I said, maybe think think on it, and if you... We're open to a short list. And... **Host** (41:26) But, yeah, we'd love to know. That's how that's how we grow the pie. We have had... We actually have a post that we're probably gonna do this week. We crossed about 250 people we've interviewed this year since starting the show. But the the the TAM is a lot larger than people think, and we're... I think we're especially keen to to talk with people that are on the up and up. Like, who who should we interview that you don't see on the circuit that is, like, a great conversation? **Sebastian Marshall** (41:53) I will I will I will I I will return with good names. I think I... It'll take one look... I'll, like, take one look at my schedule. I'll be like, okay. This is, you know, this this is the person you guys wanna talk to next. So let let me let me come back to you on that one. Awesome. All good. Great to meet you, Sebastian. We'll see you around. Wonderful wonderful to wonderful to meet you both. Happy to be here.