What Makes a Great Stablecoin Neobank in Emerging Markets

This is Zach from Stable Dash. We're back at the BITZO stable point conference in CD mix. It's been a great, great long day. I'm here with John from HopNow. And, John, I think you were just telling me this is your first time recording. First time recording? So, man, rip the band aid off. But like I said, we love it. StableDash live is sponsored by Agora, built for global institutions moving money at the speed of the Internet. You can learn more at agora.finance.

First time reporting, definitely, you're not somebody that's new to the space. So, we we spoke with Brent yesterday, your your cofounder, co CEO. But maybe kinda give us the t l d r of what were you doing for HopNow, and then we'll kinda start to dive into some of the the nitty gritty of, like Absolutely. Why are you even at Stablecoin conference this year? Yeah. No. It's it's exciting. I think, you know, we launched HopNow

about a year ago. We've been in stealth, growing out the business. We're really excited about the Stablecoin adoption that's sort of been happening, And, we're sort of at a scale now where we want to sort of get out, let folks know about sort of our product offering,

and continue to sort of grow out, the products we in our, in our business. Yeah. Really quick. Feel free to look here. Like, just like we're talking, you don't have to look at the camera, like, currently at all. Okay. That one will catch you, and this one will just observe us. I just do that for the pictures. Great. Okay. Got it. And so what did it feel like being in South or maybe even those few years before, you know, Lee Nichols? Correct me if I'm wrong, you're at Anchorage right before this.

I imagine you you might have seen companies coming out to market that were felt similar to HopNow. Yeah. Help help me understand, like, some of the conviction and, you know, why not just build out a company like that for the next ten, fifteen years and call it a career? Like, you know, why at this stage in your life did you feel I wanna go out and kinda I say go out on your own, but your team is stacked. You guys have been working together for a long time. So kind of on your own, but with your family, I guess. Yeah.

Totally. I think that's a big piece of it is being able to have conviction about something specific and working with a team

that has each other's backs and has similar conviction with regards to kind of the growth that's sort of happening with stable points in the in the in the expanding use cases of those stable points. As you sort of mentioned, sort of my in my career, it's kind of expanded from TracFi to kind of fintech.

So I started off my career at Goldman for many years focused on building out, the prime brokerage business, and sort of deeply getting into the weeds of capital markets and providing portfolio financing solutions for what was at that time sort of a growth area in terms of alternative investments. Mhmm. And sort of, you know, sort of operated through that period over a decade and then pivoted over to working at Stripe where I was involved in FX and stablecoins as well, kind of earlier days Yeah.

And being able to build out that product. And Hop is essentially a combination of that sort of career experience. And so we're incredibly excited about the vision for Hub over the long term, which is providing, not only, sort of Stablecoins as a product, but Stablecoins as a on ramp towards financial access and, ownership. Because we believe that that's gonna be sort of a wealth generator for companies of all sizes globally. Were

were you introduced through to Stablecoins professionally, or was this, like, the weekend side project that you're, like, it started bleeding into your professional career?

Yeah. I think, you know, stablecoin product market fit has existed largely in the institutional trading space. And so while we were running the Anchorage digital sort of trading desk, obviously, a significant amount of the trading volume was done on stablecoin rails. Yeah. And so that's where we, saw, you know, like, hey. Look. This is there's significant product market fit here.

In the traditional finance days, when you manage working capital for a prime brokerage business over a weekend, you're subject to the limitations of bank rails. And so with stablecoins, we can sit and have liquidity to be able to facilitate trading activity over the weekends because a lot of the OTC providers and exchanges are able to take stablecoins as collateral or as trading pair.

And so we really saw that as a financial infrastructure that could be applied to, you know, payments companies and real world sort of economic use cases. And so that's the focus for HubNow is really leveraging stablecoins as upgraded financial infrastructure along with everything we've learned in capital markets and FNAS to be able to provide users like remittance companies, like fintech neobanks, like PSPs, infrastructure that allows them to settle global payments faster. Yep.

Generally speaking, most of our transactions are t plus zero and oftentimes less than an hour. And, you know, sort of beyond that, also giving them access to,

institutional wholesale FX liquidity as well. And so talk to me a bit a little about where you know, you mentioned that you've kind of been in South the past year. You're obviously starting to do some some some media now, which is always fun. But talk to me about the product road map. I know we've mentioned a little bit about virtual accounts. And this is this is a term I think we've seen a lot in the space and it's kind of been thrown around, like, as a nice to have.

But why why kinda start there as kinda one of these core products or offerings?

Yeah. Totally. I think when we think about sort of financial infrastructure and financial access, I think that problem has, over the last couple of decades, largely been not a major friction area for companies that are domiciled within a g 10 country. They've been given the ability to, you know, leverage car networks and, SwiftRails and sort of other, infrastructure, that allowed them to sort of build and operate their businesses seamlessly.

You know, we are excited about being able to sort of expand that into the emerging markets. And so, we sort of think about the foundational components of, financial infrastructure and access as, access to, you know, wholesale liquidity, being able to do stablecoin on all fronts at competitive prices with that settlement. We think about, the ability to be able to collect, in dollars as well as other currencies.

And we think about sort of being able to provide you with the infrastructure to be able to do third party payments out to your beneficiaries. And so that that that's sort of the financial access part of our, you know, fast stable point infrastructure that we wanna provide our users. And then sort of beyond that, after that sort of part of the product roadmap to ship, then we sort of grow that business. We wanna embed ownership into that product offering. And so, that basically means, hey.

You know, business these businesses want to be able to manage their corporate treasury.

One of the ways to manage their corporate treasury is to take their idle cash and be able to sweep in a yield bearing product based on kind of your risk appetite that that the amount of yield that you get across the various products that we offer can go from, you know, really safe kind of money market fund equivalent risk profile and yield to something a little bit, you know, higher yielding, a little bit further out on the risk curve.

And then beyond that, we also wanna provide our users with the ability to access, broad based equity indices, through tokenized products in The US as well as outside The US to be able to allow those users to, again, generate sort of wealth creation.

And so would that definitely be in the more consumer realm that you're thinking? Are these, you know, institutional business oriented products? I was even just talking to Chuck. I don't if you've met him before. And we were thinking, like he asked me the question of what does my perfect financial app look like? And it kinda stumped me because in one hand, I kind of, like, you I'm used to slash like the fragment fragmentation.

Like, I go here for banking, and I go here for trading, and I go, you know, here for crypto, and then I go here for I don't know what else I could go do. And that's where I think we're seeing this trend, especially with tokenization, where neo banks are integrating trading, trading apps are integrating stablecoin cards.

And I guess from me from your perspective, how do you think people right now, you know, want to use essentially these products that are built on top of virtual accounts to to generate wealth or to manage their finances?

Yeah. I think we're seeing one of the so outside of the institutional trading side where we've definitely saw product market fit over the last couple of years and a lot of the stable coin transactional volume growth has been on the back of that. Yeah.

You layer on top of that sort of the next stage of growth of the additional cohort, and that's really been kind of these emerging markets fintech neobank apps that have allowed, you know, users of those apps to be able to, you know, sort of have a store of value by being able to convert their local currencies into stablecoins, and then be able to pick a card, spend it across, you know, 200 different countries That's been backed by the stablecoin backed by their stablecoin balance.

So ability to sort of have a store value in a currency that's less volatile and be able to spend globally on the back of it. So that's been definitely one area of adoption and increasing use case. Yeah. And we'd love to sort of see that. We've talked to many of the folks at the event that sort of power that. I think the part that we are seeing kind of early stages of traction around, but not really seeing it sort of necessarily inflect and take off is, again, ownership of risk assets globally.

And so, I think, you know, for the first time, not only can you sort of have a US dollar stablecoin balance that allows you to avoid FX volatility, but you're able to actually earn a return that's greater than inflation by putting it into, say, broad based equities as a way to sort of build your wealth. So if you're not you're not spending the funds that you earn, you're able to, like, invest it, over the long term Yeah. And sort of grow those those funds.

I kinda wanna go back to what we're talking about with virtual accounts. Kind of piggybacking on the trend of we've seen this term thrown out a lot. What do you think makes a really good virtual accounts product? Like, what you know, even when you're thinking about, hey. How we're designing this product? How are you going for it? Like, what really matters to people that need virtual accounts?

Yeah. Absolutely. I think a big a big part of it is, you know, risk based underwriting of the user. Mhmm. So, you know, being able to, come up with a fit for purpose onboarding that is aware of the their business model, what their fund flows are. Mhmm. And so I think, you know, we, having grown up in sort of the capital markets and payments space with the the cofounders and myself, we sort of understand sort of how to calibrate around the onboarding process.

So that's sort of one side of the of the friction that kind of exists today that we're looking to solve. And then the and then the second piece is, again, I think the product has to just work. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of, providers out there where there is friction with regards to, you know, payments getting delayed and things of that nature.

And so incredibly important for us to work with, the appropriate bank partners and have the right sort of integrations to be able to facilitate a lot of the payment needs that they have to be able to run their businesses in a way that's highly reliable.

Yeah. And so I think that's sort of gonna be our kind of two focus areas, you know, for Lodge and Ava. And and so would you say these people that are getting virtual accounts, is it could they go just get a bank account, or is this really right now, their only option?

I think they can go yeah. I mean, there's plenty of options available. I think the question is, does the financial partner understand their business? And are they able to build the right types of products and solutions for their business quickly? Yeah. And so I think we we think of ourselves as very much solution oriented sort of product offering.

And so, I think, like, again, the kind of initial ICP that will be focused on are kind of fintech neo banks, And and that we're gonna be focusing on sort of building out the infrastructures

infrastructure that they need. What gets you excited about fintech neobanks? I think about this a lot. You know, we've seen just the massive rise of them. You know, we'll have a separate segment that we do on the show cover. NEO, which will will be a part of this kind of series. We've seen some of them look similar. Some of them look very, very different. If you were to sit down with somebody that is saying, hey, I'm building a, you know, a fintech NEO bank, What makes a really good fintech neobank right now?

I think it's understanding their users and what their needs are. So we've seen lots of different angles around this. We've seen ones that sort of are focused on global gig workers. Yeah. We've seen ones and those typically have, like, a remittance

Yeah. Product offering that Well, think it's starting to see it a little bit even more granular. There's the gig workers, and now it's like if you're a gig worker in the media industry, and if you're a gig worker, you know, and you're working, maybe it's a geo. So it's definitely they're seeing I'm seeing more and more of this, like, the differentiation sometimes is just who the ICP we deeply care about is. Correct. Correct. So I think you'll see more specialization.

I think initially, the early versions of these applications were more

broad. Yeah. Dollar access. Exactly.

Exactly. That was the functional product. And now I think you're seeing more and more apps emerge that are solving for, like, very specific verticals. And those are the ones that we get super excited about because and I think it all goes to the theme of, like, a significant number of people in the world are still sort of underbanked

Yeah.

For a variety of reasons. Some of it is driven by, again, the work that they do. So if we think about one of those specific verticals that we've spent some time on is like the seafarer industry. Right? Say say that again? The seafarer industry, if you work on like Oh, interesting. Yeah. The shipping industry. And so they they have a need for, you know, having a reliable wallet to receive their wages. They have a need to get a card so that they can sort of spend it throughout their travels.

They have a need to do remittance to, you know, pay their friends and relatives. And so I think that's kind of an interesting area where, you know, we've seen, you know, an an adjustable market and new companies starting to emerge to sort of solve those specific pain points. And we're excited about sort of hoping to enable a lot of that.

We didn't really talk about this this, but I'm I'm just curious what you would say. You know, we've seen deal recently come out. Know, first, they they come out and they say, hey. You can do payroll now in stablecoins to your w two workers and anybody on their EOR product. And then I think they followed it a week later, they they quietly launched a stable coin in the payment app with a card that you can just go spend.

What's your thoughts on, you know, I think I've even seen one of your one of your core focuses is is payroll companies payroll companies starting to become like neo banks? You think it's a logical step, or do you think, no. Just be a payroll company, pay to wherever, and yeah. What's your thought on kind of that that convergence?

I think it's super interesting. I think it's super interesting, and it gives them the ability to sort of monetize the other side Mhmm. Which is, you know, the again, a lot of the reason a lot of the friction that these payroll companies like Adeel solve for is to help companies that want to have a global workforce be able to sort of employ that global workforce using them as an employer of record. And they're basically solving for the local complexity.

Well, oftentimes, the workers that are sort of within those jurisdictions, they also need sort of embedded financial services themselves. And so you're seeing an emergence of startups sort of solve that pain point. But I think employer of record companies are also really well well positioned to to solve for for for those as well, because they naturally are not being user. I know. I'm starting to wonder too. I'm like, are we gonna one day see, like, neobanks,

you know, going into the payroll? The term payroll has gotten thrown around a lot amongst, like, neobanks. It's like, no. You you do contractor payments, which is kinda like payroll, EOR and and even PEOs, like, that's a whole another beast when that we need to tackle. So maybe that's a conversation for another day. I guess as as we wrap up here, just when you kind of like reflect, is this your first time being at this conference or even more focused on conferences outside of your previous roles? Correct. Yeah.

We've always kind of

operated

Yeah. You're like, hey, I'm not the sales guy. Just limited sales and marketing. Yeah. I guess what what's your experience been like so far at the conference, and and how has it been getting out to meet builders face to face? It's been incredible. Yeah. It's been incredible.

We've gotten to meet, like, incredible builders that are focused on solving very specific customer pain points. Yeah. And the energy has been great. I think, you know, we've walked away with tons of really, really great ideas and, you know, customers as well as partnership opportunities. So I think these events are great. It's been awesome

hanging out with you guys as well. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for this. Introducing us to a lot of these things. Yeah. I know. I mean, big shout out to Bitso. We're grateful that this is the second year they've had us out. It's so fun to get out. And like I said, it's really a concentrated room here. I think money 2020, some of these other ones are are great. But at the end of the day, you know, we kinda like that there's just a little bit of tribalism. Like, hey. We're saving coins. We're we're modern money.

Every once in a while, let's let's get the focus and and, you know, get us all into one room. But we'll let you know which other ones we have on the radar because I think that's our big focus at StableDash Kind of thinking through the next year is, okay. Well, where do now it's across the chasm. What's the other side? You know? I I just think through the people even we've watched a wider in this interview that are like, what are they talking about? You know?

They and, like, maybe this is their first stablecoin conference. So going into the that crowd would be good. So but Absolutely. John, congrats again. Thank you. Gonna be exciting year ahead. Look out in the future. We'll be doing a segment focused with HopNow, more on the the focus of FX, probably going into the non USD stablecoin topics, but to really get into some of the nitty gritty of the happenings there. So we appreciate you as partners.

But we'll be back shortly with some more interviews from stablecoin conference, and CDMX powered by Bisso Business. See you soon.