JD Durkin: You are watching this Tuesday edition of Taking Stock, live from the trading floor. Bahar Sahajwalla joins us now. She is Chief Regulatory & Public Affairs Officer at MoneyGram. It’s great to welcome you onto the broadcast today. Thank you for taking some time.
Let me first ask you all about the new MoneyGram Card. What is it, and really, what does it mean for customers?
Bahar Sahajwalla: Excellent. Thanks so much for having me. So we’re very excited to launch the MoneyGram Card, which we just did a couple of days ago. The MoneyGram Card, as you asked, it’s a card that’s connected to a stable dollar balance, which is within the MoneyGram app.
So for years, MoneyGram has moved money across borders to help our consumers get money to their loved ones. And now we have this card where our consumers, both the senders and receivers, have a way to actually spend the money that they get.
JD Durkin: How do you think this really fits into your broader vision for transformation, what this means for the future of global payments?
Bahar Sahajwalla: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, there’s been a lot of change that’s happened at MoneyGram. We’ve spent the last couple of years really building an infrastructure that actually simplifies the way that we move money.
And so for us, this is about building something where our customers get something that is a seamless and affordable experience. So a couple of months ago, you saw, you know, we launched MGUSD, our own stablecoin. We launched our MoneyGram Balance as a way for consumers to store their money. And now we have the MoneyGram Card, which is really a logical step to giving our customers utility within the MoneyGram ecosystem and experience.
JD Durkin: Talk to me a bit more about the ways you say MoneyGram’s stablecoin-backed card approach overall is different from some things our customers, or our viewers rather, might be familiar with elsewhere.
Bahar Sahajwalla: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of crypto products out there, right? Folks are launching coins, wallets, cards. And our goal is not to attract, you know, your typical crypto user. Our goal isn’t really to have just, you know, a splashy announcement where you get to use stablecoins as a buzzword.
We are an 80-year-old company that customers have trusted to get their money to the right place for a really long time. And so this is about, how do we create utility for our specific remittance customer?
You know, in this case, the receiver picks up, you know, their cash. And our goal was our ability to actually create something where the customer can hold the cash that they get and choose to spend and access it without having to move it somewhere else first.
JD Durkin: You have to have the ability to ship a product like this to market across lots of different countries, and that means lots of different, all these other challenges, regulatory regimes. I mean, you name it, it’s something you have to take into consideration. What did that look like for you and your team?
Bahar Sahajwalla: Yeah, it’s what I would say is one of the challenging things to think about. Because when you think about MoneyGram, it is a company that operates in many different jurisdictions, 200-plus countries and territories.
And so we approach this in the same way that we would approach our other facets of the business, where you’re looking at the different legal frameworks, the different regulatory requirements, and going market by market to make sure that you’re actually meeting the requirements.
But what that requires also is a baseline product that is going to have strong KYC, strong AML frameworks, you know, a robust cybersecurity framework in order to manage the different regulations and regulatory expectations that we have to tackle.
JD Durkin: Bahar Sahajwalla of MoneyGram, congratulations on all the success. Thanks a lot for sitting down with us today.
Bahar Sahajwalla: Excellent. Thank you.
