JD Durkin: Our very good friend from New York, Katie Perry, CMO at Zerohash. Also author of the book Ticker Shock. Always got to plug the book.
Katie Perry: You got it. Thank you, JD. Lovely to see you in Vegas.
JD Durkin: Second year in a row.
Katie Perry: Second year in a row, and near the end, too. And as I said last year, I’ve got to get the heck out of Vegas. Yeah, it’s like I’ve got to get small doses of this town.
JD Durkin: Thank you. I do want your take. An almost $5.6 billion deal announced earlier today, Salesforce and Braze. What should we know about this? Why does it matter?
Katie Perry: A big move for Salesforce. Now, if you don’t know Braze, they do personalized marketing software. That is all going to plug into Salesforce’s Agentforce engine. Big deal. Huge result for their shareholders. I think there’s a 58% premium on the stock price from yesterday. Something else to look out for in the fintech world, as [unclear: company name], they are still publicly traded and independent, and they compete with Braze. They’re up over 10% today.
JD Durkin: Yeah. Braze up, to your point, more than 50% in today’s session on Wall Street in response to that move. How about September’s housing data? It points to a market that still, unfortunately, for far too many would-be homebuyers, remains kind of stuck. What did you see in the data? What does it tell us more broadly about what’s going on here, Katie?
Katie Perry: The housing market is about as cold as this conference hall in the Vegas Convention Center. So those mortgages are above 7%, so people with low mortgage rates are not letting go of their houses. The affordability issue continues to be a main hot-button issue. Something to watch ahead of the midterms too. So that’s going to be big in a couple of weeks. How much is that [unclear]... It continues to be hard, though, for people to get into the housing market.
JD Durkin: You are always one of the busiest people I know in the industry. That’s true back home in New York, and especially true here at Money20/20. You’ve been having amazing conversations, Intuit, Webull. Talk to me about some of the top themes that are top of mind in those conversations.
Katie Perry: I’ve been cornering people around the hall, trying to figure out what’s really going down. Some astute observations. When I talk to Webull, they’re making a lot of moves in institutional. So, you know, I know them for their retail investing app, but they now have products that are built to sell to other fintechs. Another thing that our friends at Intuit brought up was the difference between the conversations on stage and in the back rooms. A lot of those conversations in the back rooms are about the boring issues, risk. You’ve got these big enterprises adopting new software here at Money20/20.
Zerohash has actually rolled out a new product called AUTH that is designed to create an intuitive experience for people to move crypto among accounts, for users, but it needs to have the trust and controls that the big institutions need. And so that’s continuing to be the theme: the flash on the outside for users, the trust and control on the back end for institutions.
JD Durkin: I wonder what you’ve seen about the overall mood, the kind of tenor, at this year’s Money20/20 versus last year. Because there’s a lot of dealmaking being done. There’s a lot of CapEx being spent, a lot of money being moved around. And all this is happening on a backdrop, as you and I know very well, of higher-for-longer interest rates. Far too many American families feel like they can’t quite keep up.
Katie Perry: Yeah.
JD Durkin: What do you make of the kind of conversations, knowing what’s going on throughout the US?
Katie Perry: Yeah, I think you’re right. People are ready to sit down, come to the table, make deals. You’ve got the startup hub over there. You’ve got small companies. But then you’ve got Google here, Oracle here, Anthropic, Perplexity. All of these are coming together, and people are ready to come to the table. But you have to cross that bridge between making these exciting financial products that are new and buzzy, and making them palatable to the big institutions.
JD Durkin: Finally, perhaps most importantly, you know where I’m going to go. You were here in Las Vegas for what might go down as the greatest play of the NFL season, this now-iconic shovel pass from Josh Allen. You weren’t just there as a big Buffalo Bills fan. I saw you were right there on the field.
Katie Perry: I was there.
JD Durkin: Are you over what you saw yet?
Katie Perry: I’m not over it. And, you know, I always wanted to be a sideline reporter, so I’ll take this opportunity. He evaded a sack. He had to hit him with the razzle-dazzle. And then a shovel pass of sorts into the end zone for Keon Coleman. That’s Macy’s stock, if you follow that storyline with his famous Macy’s jacket he bought for $30. Honestly, JD, I can’t believe it. He passed Jim Kelly’s touchdown record. And we talk a lot about frictionless payments and frictionless transactions here. There was so much friction in that play, and he did it. And go Bills.
JD Durkin: Wow. You really made that work with the broader fintech conversation. Honestly, you know, my football Giants did not do well, but I was so happy for you that the Bills did do well here in Vegas. Thank you for chatting with us, as always.
Katie Perry: Thanks, JD. Go Bills.
JD Durkin: Talk again soon.
