We are here at Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam for the final day of the conference, and I have the pleasure of being joined by Tim Moncrieff, Managing Director of Visa Payments and Currency Cloud.
Tim, thank you for joining us.
Anastasia, it's wonderful to be here.
So tell us a little bit about your team because I know that you lead a lot of the strategic decisions here and um.
We don't see the back end, like I like to see my money leave from me to the person I'm paying and vice versa.
Tell us about um what problems you're focused on solving at the back end of of that experience.
Well, thanks Anastasia and and it's wonderful to be at Money 2020 today and er this week it's such a dynamic and vibrant group of fintechs and banks and and networks and other players in this market.
Um, so my team does really focus on, on what I refer to as the back ends of finance, and the way I look at this is that I think we've had probably the last two decades where the industry as a whole has really focused on the front-end customer experiences, whether that's tapping your card at a point of sale or, or the in-app experiences that we've seen that have really enhanced what we.
Um, experience as consumers.
What's changed more recently is that those expectations of that seamless, real-time, immediate experience has started to play across into institutional corporate payments.
And that started to put some pressure on the backend rails.
So there's settlement infrastructures and there's back-end systems.
And so my team spends a lot of time focused on how we can plug in and enhance and operate on a multi-rail, multi-connected service at the back end and how we can start to increase the volume that those pipes at the back of the network can maintain.
So, I look after a part of our product called Visa Direct.
Yeah.
Um, which focuses on money movement globally, and I focus on those, those capabilities.
I think that's very interesting because as you say, we've all been looking at the, you know, fintech as a service, the patching on top of things, making it easier from the consumer perspective, but actually it can only go so far with those pipes, um, if they're not fully digitalized.
Um, we've had a cross border payments, uh, revolution that we're going through.
I think at the moment, historically this has been quite opaque, um, quite tricky.
Um, what role is Visa playing in revolutionizing the cross border payments?
So within Visa Direct, we are trying to support multi-form factor and multi-rail connectivity for cross border payments.
So we, we support the full life cycle, so a full stack of capabilities from receiving money, converting that, holding that, and then sending that across a range of currencies and long tail payouts around the world.
And we're focused on that across, as I said, multi form factors, so the ability to send money or receive money on a card, an account, a wallet, and more recently, stablecoin wallets as well.
And then across multiple rails.
So across RTP rails, across SWIFT, across local local routes and ACH and also through directly into uh beneficiary banks.
I can't move.
Um, across this conference without hearing about stablecoins, you know, and, and I'm, I'm on the one hand, you know, it's, it's repetitive, on the other hand, delighted because we've been talking about this for such a long time.
The crypto crypto world, stablecoins have been so fundamental and now we're seeing it move into the rest of the financial world.
What role do you see stablecoins playing in, in money movement?
So stablecoins are a generational shift, I think, in some of the underlying formats of how value is recorded.
And what's most exciting about them is the regulatory clarity that we're starting to get, whether that's with the Genius and Clarity Act in the US, MICA in Europe, or the emerging regulatory frameworks in, in the UK.
And that's starting to allow stablecoins to bring their use cases from perhaps a number of edge cases that were less attractive for some of the banks into use cases that could really be applied into mainstream payment experiences and commerce and other and other use cases.
We, we're really enthusiastic about the opportunity with stablecoins.
Within Visa Direct specifically, we're, we're working on two pilots.
So the first is to allow our customers to be able to send money to Visa as part of their pre-funding experience in a stablecoin format, which allows them to start to fund us over weekends or outside of normal bank operating hours, and we can then honor that downstream payment out to a beneficiary much more quickly.
The other opportunity is payouts to um stablecoin wallets.
And so where we look at it, there are around a billion people in the world who don't have access to a bank account.
And so from a financial inclusion perspective, the ability to receive money in a stablecoin could be a really big unlock for them.
And it really forces that perspective to be global because, you know, the, the, the bank, bank affordability across the world varies so much according to, to where you are.
Absolutely.
Um, tell us a little bit about Currency Cloud.
Um, what has that changed for how customers are, are moving money?
Yeah, so Currency Cloud, we, we acquired the Currency Club in, in 2021 and it's been a fantastic acquisition.
Um, when we went on the journey on Visa Direct, we really started with the ability to push money to a card.
Um, we then invested in and, and acquired a company called Earthports which we now call Visa Payments Limited, that allowed us to send money to accounts around the world, so it had long tail reach.
Currency clouds really allowed us to go much deeper into the ability to to receive money or what we call collections, have a more sophisticated foreign exchange capability to be able to hold that money and to be able to provide that through a series of APIs to our customers.
So for us it completed.
A large portion of our proposition in Visa Direct that allowed us to go deeper into collections, holding funds, the foreign exchange capability, as well as of course bringing a really dynamic and forward thinking fintech community into the uh visa business.
And there was a, a session happening yesterday, um, where they were debating whether or not there really is innovation in payments or we're just repackaging what already exists, you know, end of the day, it's, it's a ledger somehow and the money or the value is going to move.
Um, uh, you know, what's your view?
Is it, what is the, the framing.
The movement of money look like for you and why does that matter?
I mean, I think we are, I, I think unequivocally we're seeing enormous innovation.
The, the reality of money movements is that it is actually really hard.
It looks easy because we've got some great businesses and fintechs and banks who have managed to present it to their customers in a way that is quite seamless.
But underneath, it's very difficult.
You've got the regulatory and compliance obligations which are so important to keep us safe.
You've got the monetary frameworks within domestic markets and the sovereignty angles, and of course you've got all the complexity around settlement and foreign exchange and the cut-off times and the reconciliation and messaging standards.
When we look at money movement, we try and package all of that together and then we try to embed our services into financial institutions.
So we don't sell directly to customers, but we provide our services to banks to try and abstract a little bit of that complexity away.
And present a full stack money movement experience.
Unlocking so much value, which as you said at the beginning, it's the back end question, but it does constrict us and actually the, the opportunity just grows from there.
Exactly.
And look, there's so much to look forward to, I think, and I'm really excited to see more from, from Visa payments and currency clout and we will see you back here next year, I hope.
Well, Anastasia, thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
