MoneyGram Launched a Stablecoin Card: How It Works and Why Colombia First

Anthony, welcome to the show. We're happy to have you on.

I'm, psyched to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah. I I hope hopefully, your schedule isn't too hectic in, at StableCon right now. We appreciate being able to work this out with you. Big day. How how does it feel?

Well, you know, I've been at the company for about twenty two months now, and one of the things I kinda call it since, you know, my former life as an entrepreneur is it you you we constantly want the folks that work at MoneyGram to think about themselves as refounders. And what we mean by that is to really think about all the assets we have. But, really, if you have to start this company again tomorrow at MoneyGram, what would the company look like?

And I think it's been a a long journey to get us here over the last twenty two months, but I think, you know, we've replatformed the, the our whole platform around with this concept that we wanna be the bridge that connects digital money to the real world. And, you know, today's announcement with MoneyGram card is just a continuation of that, because, you know, for your audiences just quickly, MoneyGram, just his background, is an 85 year old company, one of the largest remittance companies in the world.

We operate in 200 countries and territories, 20,000 corridors. The craziest part is we have 500,000 physical retail locations and billions of digital endpoints. But the question then becomes, what can you do with it? Traditionally, it's been a remittance, sender across border payments where someone's trying to send from one country to the next. That's a great business for us. We have 60,000,000 active customers in our network that does that. But and if you have that customer base, what else can we offer them?

Well, they when when they receive their funds, we want them to store it in a, I would say, Stablecoin or US dollar stable balance that's backed by Stablecoin. And then the other part is we want to allow them to spend right away as soon as they receive it and have some protection in terms of storage for their local currency. So all this today bridges everything together, so which is why today is a big day for us. I love it. Congratulations.

And twenty two months go ahead, Zach. Please. No. I was gonna say I was gonna say we had Luke on, your CTO, and one of the things that really stood out from this conversation was kinda his background and how he came in and evaluated the way MoneyGram was operating. And he really made this analogy. He's like, we bay you know, you may see 85 year old remittance company on the outside, but on the inside, we're moving like a start up.

And just to bring some of these products to market in the past twenty two months, you know, what was it like to come in with this mandate? And really, where do you where do you start? How do you start laying the foundation to go live with a stable point, go live with a card, and to really kind of build this next evolution of MoneyGram?

Well, I would say first you could start off by thinking about strategically what you don't throw away and what you wanna keep, because we have these core assets like we mentioned 60,000,000 customers, but we know that as a platform we wanted to be a lot more robust. So Luke and I see eye to eye since my background's in product as well. Started my career at Apple, worked in tech for many years, and then helped a lot of people go through transformations.

But, you know, I think what Luke is saying when he says we're operating like a startup is that we wanna actually leverage, I would say, the efficiency and scale of a very large organization, but do it in a way where we can execute with the speed and agility of a startup. And if can combine both worlds together, I I think you have something special. And I do think that we're just starting you know, the stuff we're building is just starting to come out, but it does feel like it's very special.

And I feel so fortunate to be able to do it in a time like today because having don't wanna date my age, but I I was there during the early days of the Internet. And this right now for us in this point in time with crypto and especially stablecoin just reminds me of the early days of the web, and I think that anything's possible.

What we do know is the future every day is gonna be brighter than today because every we got a bunch of builders that are just thinking about how to make the world better through crypto and stablecoin.

I love it. I love it. You you mentioned that you were part of some early Internet companies. You've seen multiple acquisitions. You've founded and sold companies. You've worked at some of the biggest companies in the world, Apple, Walmart, etcetera. When you came in twenty two months ago, did you come in saying, oh, I have this aggregation of lessons. Here's what I'm going to apply, or was it, no. I really needed to get the lay of the land first?

Because it seems like the like you said, huge organization, 60,000,000 customers, but you're moving fast.

Yeah. What I would say is that it's a great question, and I wanna be careful how I phrase this, which is you never wanna come in with preconceived notions of this is what worked before, and it'll work here. Because every industry, every company, every market is different, and we operate in 200 markets, as I mentioned, and 20,000 corridors.

So, what I do know, though, that stays the same no matter what you do is you need to start with a customer problem, and you need to figure out what the customer needs are, and they're different by market. And then you have to figure out, how can we solve that through products and services that we offer, and then work backwards there. I think a lot of times where people are getting things wrong is they start with the technology, and and then they're trying to find a market to to solve it for.

And I think, you know, for myself, I've had enough scar tissues early in my career to make those same mistakes because you fall in love with the technology, but you really have to fall in love with the customer to work backwards. And if you feel like technology can help solve it, then you do that. If not, don't even touch it. So

let's I wanna transition back into the now. And I really think of this evolution. Right? You know, eighty five years. I have to imagine parents and grandparents have used this product. But now it feels like, you know, going to the card as this next evolution and getting more deeper ingrained into, you know, the digital world while also still you know, one of the big advantages, like you said, is those 500,000 physical locations.

How do you still, you know, in 2020 see 2026, see the interaction between digital dollars and physical cash?

Well, the important thing to take a step back on is not to think of this as an or thing. Do you do digital, or do you do physical? It's an and. And what I mean by that very specifically is that what we wanna do with this MoneyGram card and by the way, we have dropped all our other cards. This is our card for the future that we believe we're gonna, bank on because we believe in stablecoin that much.

What is important for us is to give them a a card that offers the customers, as soon as they receive the balance, give them access to the digital economy. So that's a very important point. The other point, though, is occasionally, they still wanna use cash. So how do they then use a card to go to a MoneyGram's, store or retail outlet and get cashed out? How do they use a physical MoneyGram card to use it like an ATM card when in the moments that they, have, a need to have cash?

And I think that, you know, in my mind, what we're doing is we're giving the customers more choices, but not limiting in scope by saying this is what you must do. I'm sure you guys saw that chef in ratatouille where, like, you can only eat one way, one thing on a menu. We don't wanna do that to our consumers. But we want we wanna do is make it so they don't need to understand the crypto space and still be able to use a coin that's protected and stable and pegged to, you know, the US dollar.

And in this case, I think that provides a lot of value.

I love it. We've got ratatouille, global cards, all of this. And just thinking about you you were talking about not falling in love with technology, really focusing on the user. When someone I know this is starting in Colombia. Maybe thinking about the interaction between, say, Colombia and The US. Someone's traditionally using a MoneyGram in the past. What would that look like, and what would this sort of new world order with the card for the future look like today?

Yeah. So a few different use cases, but I think, traditionally, there would be a a send from, let's just say, The US that you brought up, and then it goes to Colombia. They would typically get these things cashed, or they would say the receiver would say, oh, I have a you know, I I just have this receipt of cash that's coming in. I need to go into a Moneycam retail location to spend it, or you can send it to a bank account or whatever. But they don't have access to that cash on day one.

What we're talking about here, this the thing that I don't wanna make, trivialize is that we've integrated this directly into the MoneyGram experience. So the same app they use, we're not requiring them to set up a different ID or a different app that they need to download. They get the balance on day one. And then with a few taps on their phone, they have access in Columbia to a card that is accessible and be able to spend anywhere that Visa is accepted in their country.

They can spend it on ecommerce on a digital site that's outside their country. They can travel and decide to leave Colombia and travel to The Philippines, and that card would still work. And I think that that idea of opening up that freedom, but more importantly, giving them real world use cases, is super important. And it is if you think about that experience I just talked about, we're not taking something that they have today and making it worse.

We're actually streamlining it and giving them more freedom and more access to their cash quicker. And, you know, net net, it's all a positive for, I think, the customers that we're talking about while they don't have to actually understand their own crypto.

Mhmm. Why Colombia? Of all the markets in the world, of all the markets you serve, why is that the one that we start with? I'm sure we'll see a snowball effect here in the next few months of of more markets. But I'll say when I when I saw the brief, this is one of the aspects of it that surprised me, so I'm curious, you know, what what was unique about this market that this is the one that you're launching in first?

Yeah. I mean, our our ambition is not just one country. Obviously, it'd be everywhere where, you know, I mentioned earlier as long as it makes sense. Colombia had a few characteristics that really was interesting for the first use case. First, we launched a stablecoin balance there early last year, balance product. The other part of this market that makes it interesting is that they have, you know, 22 times the amount of receipts versus send outs, so they have a lot of funds flowing into the country.

And then they also have an economy that's, had some volatility on their FX, which I think, you know, if you think about a, you know, something that's pegged to a stable dollar balance, provides a lot of value to these consumers because if you cash it out today, the use case is consumer, when they receive it, they have to get cashed out, let's just say, the full amount for $300.

If they only need a $100 or they don't need much of it at all and they wanna spend it over time, if they keep their balance inside this stablecoin balance, they only are translating back to locator currency on the card when they are actually spending it. All of those reasons in terms of, you know, high volatility with their FX, a market that's big on remittances in terms of coming in, as well as we've already had a balanced product there, all made it feel like it made a lot of sense to start there.

Because, you know, and as as more we learn, I think, you you know, hopefully, ambition is to expand in many more places than just Colombia.

When we think about I wanna do a little get maybe a little spotlight on the partners here. When look at the stack, we see RAIN as the key key card structure that's kind of, you know, known surprise in our end. We see Crossman and then we see Stellar.

What's it maybe been like working with these with these teams, and if maybe any reasons why, you know, I I think Seller's maybe one that I would ask, you know, what stands out with the Seller network, and then maybe some of the work you're doing within those those ecosystems.

Yeah. I mean, Seller's been a strong partner of ours for, even before I got here. I think, you know, this partnership is specifically around our consumer wallet that we've been building. And in terms of this consumer wallet that's really currently powered by, by Stellar when we signed up with them, we knew that there would be many other use cases that we would use them for, and this just happened to be one of them. We use m zero for, you know, our smart contracts. We use Stripe really to help us with issuance.

And then, obviously, in terms of coordination of all that, we use Fireblocks. And then the the new player that we're adding into this infrastructure around crypto on top is, RAIN. Reason we chose RAIN is because they had the same philosophies we did about, you know, what we wanted to see in terms of a seamless experience that we can abstract away for the consumer, And they were you know, saw us eye to eye in terms of having as big ambitions as we do to wanna expand in many other places.

And, you know, based on that as well as our comfort level of working as a team, we consider them to be a very strong partner and excited to launch us with them.

That's great to see. Anthony, you

you were saying you could you've come in, lots of big things happening. I'm curious when you think about the future, like, what do you really want your legacy to be at MoneyGram in terms of it feels like this storied company is revolutionizing and evolving very quickly. And I love that you said it feels like I'm back at the beginning of the Internet because we feel that. That's what gets us excited about modern money and all that's changing, and it's so global. It's so fast.

There's so many inefficiencies, and there's so many problems to solve, and some of the best builders in the world are jumping in, including yourself. What do you really hope to accomplish when you think about your legacy at MoneyGram?

Well, I don't really think about it from legacy terms, but what I would say is what I do think about is, the idea of will MoneyGram be a more important company maybe to the world than it is today? And what I would say is that when I came here, we had a very strong remittance company that focused upon doing some one thing really well.

As we think about, you know, where the world's going, what I would hope is that as we offer these type of services that our consumers will think about MoneyGram in a much broader sense where we're actually helping them not just send, receive, but helping them also manage and spend their balances and and with their money.

And I think if we can do that and we can provide financial access to especially on the digital side to people that previously would not have it, I think the world's gonna be in a better place because we're talking about financial inclusion for about one and a half billion people that might not might currently be held back in terms of financial inclusion.

And I think that we're gonna give a lot of folks that might not have thought about using MoneyGram in the past a different idea about, you know, what MoneyGram is and how it might fit into their financial lives. And if that is the case, I think I'll be certainly a lot really happy. Our investors will be, and hopefully our customers will be as well. I think so. It sounds sounds about right.

So you're at StableCon. Are you speaking today, or did you speak yesterday?

No. I just, I just flew into town, late last night, had some meetings, and then this morning was our big announcement.

Yeah. And so you guys are actually like, we're I'm an hour or two fresh right after the, announcement, so excited to be here. An hour two fresh. Awesome. Yeah. I guess that's that's, like, the biggest thing, though. You know, it's it feels like we've had these moments where, you know, we're going towards this regulatory state, and it really feels like like what next? We obviously know that more more markets, but like where where do you focus?

Like what problems now are you shifting your sights to and saying, hey, these are the next problems we have we have to solve and we want to start tackling. We see a lot of times like the last mile problem, local payouts, and definitely this this, there seems to be this tension right now, at least on the consumer side on, hey, we want access to US dollars, but our life is still operating in local currencies. How do you how do you kind of address that tension?

Well, in in my mind, there's not gonna be there's always gonna be this tension, and our goal is to continue building out and modernizing our network so that we can be the bridge or to connect digital money into the real world. I would say that, you know, I bring us back to maybe 2007 when the iPhone was launched. I think that at the time, I think Jobs, Steve, as well as Apple didn't even conceive the idea of having an App Store.

They just thought we made a phone that, you know, initially allowed you to go on the web and allows you to make some phone calls, and maybe, you know, be able to access and watch some videos here and there. But everything was preloaded on that phone. Nothing else. We're kinda currently in that moment. You know, this idea of having a card, but we're building a card on top of something that's programmable now.

That's kinda why it was important for us to have MGUSD, because currency for the longest time when you think about fiat was not programmable. And this is when you think about digital currency, they are programmable with smart contracts, and there's a lot of stuff you can build on top. What can that become? I think, I would say we have some ideas. We're not gonna share them all here just because we are still working through a lot of it.

But what I would say is that we believe the future is gonna be very bright, and we're excited about where the world's going. But, definitely, there will be a future where there's gonna be always fiat, but digital will play a very, very important role in the real world. And what we want MoneyGram to be is to be that bridge to connect the two worlds together.

Yeah. I I know there must be a lot of potential ideas, a lot of you you don't have to share all the alpha here. I know it probably has to be worked out on some leadership meetings, etcetera. But how do you decide when there's all these potential innovations? How do you kind of work through it with the team? How do you get the right ideas surfaced and say, hey. Here's what we're really gonna go after. Here's how we're gonna sequence it. What's that gonna look like?

Because, obviously, with as big of a sort of market share and user base you as you have and with as many use cases of this technology can have, what is prioritization and kind of road mapping and choosing what innovations to chase look like?

Well, it kinda starts with us understanding what the problem is that we need to solve. And then secondarily, do we believe that, you know, there's something here when you build it that you is uniquely something that MoneyGram can win at? And then and will and then third is, will it benefit the consumer or our customer base? Or will it bring a new customer base that will benefit from this?

I think all those are in consideration, in our priority order, but if we can't do anything that creates some level of differentiation, we're not gonna do it. I know there's other companies that might launch something that looks great on a press release, might fact in fact, looks exactly like what we just launched, but they require you to download a separate app. It's a hide side hobby. And but what we think needs to happen is anything we build has to fit in with the core.

And how do we make this when we're making these bets or or making these product bets that we make it and give it the best shot of being successful? And the only way we know how to do that is not treat it like a hobby, but treat it as core to our business.

Anthony, I wanna kinda dig back. Maybe this gets a little more, like, entrepreneurial journey, your journey as a leader. When you you I I love the way you're framing it. It sounds like that the programmable aspect of stablecoins is is really what caught your early attention. But when when did this get onto you? When did this technology infrastructure, when did it start getting onto your radar, like, a leader, as a business professional?

What was your experience like, and what were some of those kind of moments that if you were to maybe, you know, speak to a colleague or a friend you haven't talked to in ten years and say, hey. This is what I'm working on, and this is why I'm working on it. Where should they start?

Maybe I'll tell you two funny stories, actually. So when I've done a a few, transformations in my day. As I mentioned, I've I've actually helped lead a transformation of an enterprise software company, you know, led me CBS into streaming after they bought my company, and then I helped Walmart with their digital transformation. I've never seen a transformation where, when you're talking about going digital, the economics get way better. I I don't mean a little bit. I mean a lot.

And the reason is handling cash and sending cash around in this business is obviously expensive. That's why there's costs associated with with between, you know, armored cars to the cash handling, accounting money. But in this business, when you're excel when you're thinking about transformation, the question is not how much you have to slow down because you're gonna be losing margin. Best case is ecommerce.

When you have to ship a box to someone, you have to pay more versus customer coming into your store and picking it themselves. So when you do that, you're constantly thinking about how fast I wanna grow or how much I wanna slow it down by and make the economics all work. In the digital space for in payments or financial services, when you go digital, it only gets faster. And so there's an inherent benefit to that.

And in addition, one thing I mentioned about the fact that sending money if you ever tried to send money to a friend and you need to send cash, it's actually takes a long time, very expensive. You know, digital currency is completely portable, which means that it's great for running your back office and running it because it's just a ledger transaction.

And all those give me hope that that, along with programmability, is gonna allow us to build new services and products that we can't even conceive of today that we would want. You know, it seemed crazy before that you wouldn't wanna watch a video on a phone, but but when it started happening, you're like, you can't live without it. And I think that we're gonna have some moments over the next three to four years of stuff we're gonna launch that people are gonna feel like I can't live without that. Mhmm.

And maybe one of the things that does motivate me is you meant you know, you know a little bit about what I've done in the past and companies I've worked for, but MoneyGram was the first company that my parents were super excited about that I worked because they had used the service. They didn't buy you know, they didn't use Apple. They barely used Yahoo, and they watched TV shows on CBS. But when I told them I worked at MoneyGram, you should have seen how much they were beaming.

And, you know, to be able to do something that your parents are proud of, I think, is one of those biggest gratifications in life.

That's pretty amazing. Yeah. It's funny. I know that, you know, you only live life forward, right, and then you understand it backwards. But it is interesting to see the integrations of the various stops of your career. I mean, I was I was looking at this integration, you you know, pulling up. It's like, here's your iPhone integration. We've been talking about the iPhone. We've been talking about Apple. Obviously, Walmart and MoneyGram have a very close relationship.

But it's almost looking backwards, you can say, oh, there's a very natural evolution of where you are now. But I'm sure at the time, you're just making the decision next best step. But, hey, your parents are extra proud now.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, when you talk about Walmart as an example, I didn't really know when they when I was thinking about joining MoneyGram what I know about payments.

But one of the things I learned when I came in really quickly is the optimization payment routes and how you optimize a payment is very similar to optimizing a supply chain, which is what I was doing at Walmart for a period of time, especially during COVID, trying to figure out how you move products from point a to point b in as least amount of hops as possible in the lowest cost. Well, very much the way I just described it to you is exactly what you would do when you're trying to optimize a payment spend spend.

So you would know, you go through the least amount of corresponding banks. You try to find the most direct route at the lowest cost. They're all interrelated, but you said in life, it's funny how it works because you just you can't anticipate what you're gonna be doing in the future.

Man, that's well said. You know, it's actually we just had a pretty deep AI supply chain conversation at the top of this. And, again, it was not really something that's on our radar. We've heard the stablecoin use cases for supply chain, and, again, you sort draw on the parallels, and it's, it's it's quite astonishing. Yep. What Anthony, I just wanna I just wanna give you the mic. Like, what would you leave people with?

Like, if you had to say somebody that maybe is, you know, especially that's been in this kind of more crypto native, digital asset native sphere, and we think that, you know, institutions move slow. What what do you think that most people misunderstand about MoneyGram that they might misunderstand about maybe your mission? And, what do you hope to just, like, prove like, you want to just kind of prove people wrong. You know?

Well, I try not to worry about that as much as I try to focus on what we want to do get right. But what I will say when I look at the space, a lot of times people get wrapped up, and they really fall in love with the technology, which is great. We all love technology, we're all technologists at heart. But you really wanna figure out what be really crystal clear with ourselves. What are the problems that need the world wants us to solve in this space for digital assets, digital currencies, crypto?

And if you can really be really tight about that and understand in a very clear way that and then being intentional about what are these things that digital assets and digital currency can solve better than what how people are doing it today, I think we're all gonna be better off. And really not getting so caught up in the technology in terms of selling it that way, but really using technology as an enabler where we abstract it from a consumer, I think we're gonna drive more people to this world.

And it's really, if you think about it, it's how Apple really got a lot more people using their phones as well as how they got more people using their computers because they really abstracted the complexity from the consumer. And I think that that's one of those things that we can all do a better job, myself included. And when we can do that, I think the only thing that will happen is we'll bring in more and more people that will be zealots and evangelists for this movement.

Yeah. Abs absolutely. Makes me think of Mike Drop. I know. Mic drop. Jobs wanting to ship computers without instruction manuals. It's like when you you've mentioned multiple times the integration ease of this. The app is already with people, making technology easy to use, focusing on the user, focusing in on the problems. And I think if you continue to do that, we'll keep seeing amazing moves from MoneyGram. We're excited to continue watching the journey.

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. On it. Enjoy stable con. Enjoy Washington, DC. It's great talking to you, Anthony. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.

See you later. Little little rainy moneygram on the way out. Little moneygram right out. Love it. Love it. See you next time. Alright. Bye.