How MoneyGram Is Modernizing Global Payments with Stablecoins

Host Justin Friedman sits dow with Luke Tuttle, Chief Product and Technology Officer at MoneyGram to talk about the realities of building global payments infrastructure at scale. The conversation explores how stablecoins are changing cross-border settlement, why trust and compliance remain critical in remittances, and what it takes to deliver instant cash pickup across more than 200 countries.

Luke breaks down the operational side of modern payments, from treasury management and liquidity challenges to cloud infrastructure, AI-native risk systems, KYC, AML, and local regulation. They also discuss why mainstream stablecoin adoption may come less from consumers demanding crypto products and more from institutions quietly upgrading the rails underneath global money movement.

Subscribe for more conversations on what it actually takes to bring tokenized money into the real world.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Justin Friedman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justingfriedman/

Luke Tuttle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luketuttle/

About Crossing the Chasm

Crossing the Chasm is a special series with Rain focused on what it actually takes for stablecoins to become the default for everyday payments. Instead of rehashing benefits or highlighting pilots, the series breaks down the real work behind winning on Main Street, from upgrading payment rails and navigating regulation to embedding stablecoins into products people already use. Through conversations with builders and operators, we explore how tokenized money moves from early adoption to practical, widespread use across businesses and consumers.

Transcript

Intro

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Justin Friedman 1:07

This series explores what it actually takes for stablecoins and tokenized money to move from early adoption to real-world mainstream usage by consumers, businesses, and the global payments architecture. Today, I'm joined by Luke Tuttle, Chief Product and Technology Officer at MoneyGram. An essential resource for millions upon millions of users, MoneyGram is building a bridge between traditional financial rails and digital asset infrastructure at truly global scale. Our guest, Luke Tuttle, has spent his career doing something rare in FinTech, blending deep technical chops with real commercial instinct, gleaned from decades of experience in global enterprises and retail financial services and a short stint in robotics. Luke helped bring Klarna's by now pay later products to North America and built its retail media network. Before that, Luke led transformations at Experian, eBay, and BMW financial services. He knows what it means to take a product from zero to market, and he knows what it takes to modernize legacy institutions from the inside. Today, Luke serves as Chief Producting Technology Officer at MoneyGram, where he's leading the charge to digitize one of the world's most recognized money transfer networks, connecting billions of underbank consumers to modern financial services. A warm welcome to Luke Tuttle. Hello, Luke.

Lucas Tuttle 2:33

Hi, Justin. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure being on the show today. A great uh introduction of my past and um what that's led to is this opportunity to be here at MoneyGram, as you noted in the last 15 months to do a transformation, which really is about solving new problems for our customers. And very excited here to talk about stablecoin as the technology is really interesting. But fundamentally, what we think about every day is how to provide a better service to our underbanked customers, the customers who've used us for years, to be able to send money home to their loved ones or to their friends or to fam or their family for whatever the need may be. So very excited to get into the details and thank you again for having me today.

Justin Friedman 3:20

That that's a great tee up. And I'm gonna ask you about MoneyGram's customer uh in a moment. But first, just want to review how we got to where we are today. Moneygram's roots go back nearly a century. Its predecessor was founded in 1940, and today's company traces its origins to the turn of the 21st century. Moneygram became a public company in 2004 and evolved through the dawn of the internet, barely survived the 2008 financial crisis, and rebuilt itself. In 2019, MoneyGram first dipped its toe into the waters of cryptocurrency, including a short-lived flirtation with Ripple and later the beginning of a partnership with the Stellar Blockchain, which has endured. In 2023, MoneyGram was taken private by Madison Dearborn Partners. Today the company operates in over 200 countries, including nearly half a million physical locations or agents, and a digital ecosystem connecting billions of devices. That footprint is helping MoneyGram meet the financial needs of the world's hardest-to-reach users in 2026. So, Luke, in brief, who is MoneyGram's customer?

Who Uses MoneyGram And Why

Lucas Tuttle 4:27

So, MoneyGram's customer is a person who has a need to send money to a friend, a loved one, somebody in need. That's in another country predominantly. We do offer transfer services within the United States as well. So there are certainly cases where somebody could be in Alabama. Maybe they have a loved one who is driving a truck and has some kind of problem. They need money, they need cash immediately. They're in another state. And that person can send money to be picked up at a Walmart in cash in minutes. So the variety of use cases is extremely wide. But I'd say most of our customers are folks that have immigrated to another country. They're making money in that country, and they still are supporting a loved one elsewhere. So for example, um, some of our top quarters are folks that are living in the United States, sending to somebody in Mexico, to the Philippines, to Jamaica. As you noted, nearly 200 countries and territories that we support. So we have a ubiquitous service. So the the great thing about MoneyGram is the person who has a need to send money, when they come into our app or web or they go to a physical location to send it, we can accept however they wish to pay, whether that's in cash, their debit card, their credit card, a bank transfer. And then we're able to send that to where their loved one is elsewhere in the world. Many of these customers are of ours, but there's a variety of segments. So you could have somebody that uh is a significant income earner that came to the US and they have a family that they support back home in India as an example. You also have workers uh in many cases that are uh, I'd say lower on the socioeconomic range in terms of the money that they make, but they're still supporting somebody else. So like the Mideast is one of the fastest growing quarters for money remittance because you could have many folks from, say, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Africa that are working in countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and those individuals need to get money home. So it's very broad-based, very wide in terms of the countries. But in general, there are kind of send and receive countries. So there's countries where people are immigrating to to earn money, and then they're sending that money back home, friends, family for a variety of purposes. But uh, we see a large amount of our customers uh return. 80 to 90 percent of our customers are repeat. So they have a frequent need. So you can imagine they're getting their paycheck, and now they're thinking about how do I support those folks in another country.

Justin Friedman 7:04

So, Luke, I know you've only been at MoneyGram since 2025, but can you tell me, has that customer profile changed at all over the last decade, let's say?

Lucas Tuttle 7:15

I'd say the big change is around the countries that people have immigrated to. I think the customer that we serve is largely the same in terms of segmentation, kind of those high-income earners that have immigrated, they're sending money back home, or the, I'd say, more transient worker that's moved to another country to earn a living, they might be lower on that socioeconomic, maybe underbank scale that are sending money home. But what's really changed is where people are immigrating from and to. And also things such as the uh challenges in the world, whether it's wars or people being displaced for other kinds of reasons, those also drive a significant amount of the money movement traffic. So that's the kind of thing we need to stay on top of because where people are at and where they're sending has changed a lot over the 10 years. But I think the reasons people send money is largely the same.

Justin Friedman 8:07

Okay, so let's talk about you and the philosophy that you bring to this work. You've led product and technology across companies like Klarna, Experian, eBay. How does that shape how you approach building here at MoneyGram?

Lucas Tuttle 8:22

So with the because I'm chief product and technology officer. So when I came to MoneyGram, I came as the chief technology officer. And in my initial days, my focus always is about how do we serve the customer. But I was very focused on how do we improve our infrastructure, our development processes, uh, overall to be able to speed the ability for us to deliver new features and functions and do that more reliably to our customers. Um, about six months into my role here at MightyGram, I also took on the product role as well, which to me is a real treat because everything starts with the customer, right? Um, in terms of solving those problems. So now I have an even greater focus and attention on the needs of our customers and have an ability to think about the priorization of those features that we do for our customers. So everything starts with a customer, a customer segment, a customer problem, and then thinking about how we can continue to reinforce our trust. Because MoneyGram, fundamentally, if if you say what is Moneygram about, the very first thing is trust. Like giving money to somebody else, which is someone giving us money to send to somebody, is a very intimate affair. You're wondering where your money is. You don't want to wonder where your money is. So MoneyGram brings trust. So a lot of what I think about is just how to continue that.

Modernizing A Legacy Company Fast

Justin Friedman 9:48

How do you modernize an 85-year-old company without breaking what made it that trusted institution in the first place?

Lucas Tuttle 9:56

So we have a great base. So um carefully, but we also don't have a lot of time because of how fast the world's changing. So this um conversations about stablecoin. We've been working in stablecoin for years. So, as you mentioned, uh relationships going back to Ripple in its early days, but then the stellar long-standing relationship, we extended that relationship. Um, it is an imperative for our business to really kind of think about the innovators' dilemma. How do we disrupt ourselves to use new technologies to deliver new products and services efficiently with that same trust? Um, so carefully, but we must do it at a high pace. And that's been a mix of the existing staff that we had, very experienced in money transfer, but we've also brought in folks with new views from uh Strite, Meta, Root Insurance, Klarna. So we've brought in additional viewpoints of people who've done similar type of rapid product growth and transformation so that we have the experience to not make mistakes as we're rapidly iterating the infrastructure and continuing to deliver a high trust and value service.

Justin Friedman 11:11

You actually just said something that really piqued my interest. I think that for an 85-year-old company, it's often hard to recruit professionals who have worked in some of the most exciting names in tech, younger, perhaps perceived as more nimble companies that are innovating at the bleeding edge. How have you managed to attract talent like that? And what what are you convincing them to come aboard and help you build?

Lucas Tuttle 11:40

So the first is the purpose. It's very easy, in my view, to recruit someone with the purpose of the company, which is to provide this trusted valuable service that is a meaningful GDP driver in many parts of the world. So it's truly changing people's lives with the ability to send money back home, serve this purpose of supporting how people live. So that that's like the first piece. Like it's yeah, it's a very nice elevator pitch for the purpose of the company. But when it comes to technology, when I came in, we had very reliable Rails, but things like our app were initially developed back in 207, 2018. Our website was even older. So it's somewhat a gift to have an infrastructure that had been built at such a period in time to be able to then say, now we can reimagine it with the newest technologies. AI has sped this in many ways, but in the last year, we've completely rebuilt and implemented an AI native risk platform. We've completely uh rebuilt and implemented a Gen AI chat that significantly improved our CSAT scores. We are rebuilding our app with React. So we have the newest technology there, and we took the opportunity to upgrade many other parts of our infrastructure. So we we have the newest technologies, but we also are demonstrating success at implementing those rapidly. Um, and the folks that we're bringing in, they are folks that want a challenge. So in our interview process, I literally tell people this is not going to be easy. It's gonna be extremely difficult on every dimension of people because we're transforming from uh, I'd say more of a data center process uh IT mindset to a product-led, agile, rapid development mindset. Technology, we have everything from a mainframe to the newest Gen AI technology. Those different components need to be uh stitched together, but we also want to rapidly integrate and implement new technologies. Um, and then just the process. So we had processes that to me were still meant for physical data center architectures. We're now in the cloud. That's not just a physical move, it's a complete shift in how you can distribute accountability to individuals. And that's kind of the last piece is the way we set the organization up is uh very independent domains where people that lead them are highly accountable, which means they get to take the decision. So there's like a real sell of if you come here, you own payment processing, you own the payout network, you own uh money transfer flow. So we've reorganized so that individuals, much more flat organization, but individuals have real ownership of a piece of the technology. And I think that resonates with uh the people that want to transform and change and solve problems.

Justin Friedman 14:43

It sounds like the real combination of mission forward and empowering people to just go build uh that sort of entrepreneurial mindset, which is rare, hard to find in an 85-year-old company. So kudos to that. This series is called Crossing the Chasm. From your perspective, what is the chasm in global money movement that needs to be bridged today?

The Float Problem Stablecoins Can Fix

Lucas Tuttle 15:09

So from a consumer perspective, there's not much of a chasm. So I can go down the street to Walmart today with some money and have it sent to Bangladesh in minutes. So the family member I would have, friend that's in Bangladesh, they have a wallet, literally sees the money there in minutes. So instant money movement is a thing. And in the majority of our corridors, we can move money instantly to minutes. The difficulty about that is it requires between one and two billion dollars to be outstanding every day in our network to be able to fund that wallet. So you can imagine that cash goes into the retailer if it's at the fizzle location. Well, we don't get that money from that merchant until the next day, but the customer expects it immediately. So that means we already moved money, we did the currency conversion, we took the costs on that to be prepared for that money to be in that wallet. So there's a tremendous cost to that to run a network that has that amount of float. So folks that are starting businesses today, wallets that exist that are using stablecoin, they can think about the network differently in a way that doesn't require that float. Um, there's really hard problems using stablecoin to solve this because of you still need to off-ramp to fiat in cases where not stablecoin end-to-end. But it is an imperative to our business to become more efficient, whether it's treasury or B2B trading, um, and to do that with stablecoin. And we believe that we can dramatically lower the flow to the business and still give the customer an instant service uh 24 by seven.

Justin Friedman 16:56

So when you think about the tech stack and what you need to do to evolve over the coming years, where will you be five years from now? What will be fundamentally different?

Lucas Tuttle 17:07

I think the the biggest piece is that we will be uh particularly with our B2B trading partners, so that's the merchants who are in our merchant network collecting money. It's our own MoneyGram Online where we're uh being settled to by our payment processors, that those funds flows to us will move to be a much greater proportion being in stablecoin. And then on the pre-funding side, um we will be funding seven days a week, many times a day, much more in concert to the the flow of the money. Because today we have to predict what are the transfers into a particular country going to be over the next two days, and if it's a whole day, it could be three or four days. So we've got an FX trading that we need to ahead. We've got money that's parked, not earning for us. Um, so my expectation is that that kind of money movement that is much more kind of store and forward, like you're you're forecasting, you're trading, you're storing it somewhere, that that will be much more continuous. So it's more of a continuous operation than this uh stepwise function. It requires an ecosystem, though. So we've now got the rails. So we announced we're working with fire blocks. Um, we plumb the fire blocks directly into our cash management system, our ERP. So our partners can pay us either fiat or with stables, automatically updates your invoice. It's getting marked at paid. So that was key. Same on our pre-funding flows. Now we're doing the hard work of getting everybody else to come along on this exercise, but somebody has to lead. Somebody has to say this is the way to go.

Justin Friedman 18:57

Well, so you're you're starting with more physical retail locations than McDonald's, Starbucks, and Subway combined. And also access to over 5 billion wallets, cards, bank accounts. So what is that combined scale enable that purely digital players cannot replicate when they're starting today?

Network Scale Cash Out And Kraken

Lucas Tuttle 19:20

So it's very difficult building any kind of network, two-sided, particularly at scale. Um MoneyGram's done that over the 85 years. So you could try to kind of rent the network, so to speak. Um, but that's costly. That takes time. Our advantage is that we support so many countries and locations already. So, particularly when you think about marketing a service, when someone comes to us, we support every quarter. The um the ability to cash out in particular, we just announced a partnership with Kraken this week, where they're looking to add utility to their service. So that's an example of not only are we building our first party network, we are also serving other companies who do want to provide additional services and utility to customers with their wallet. So with Kraken, what they were interested in is adding more utility to their wallet. And what they recognized is many of their customers do still prefer cash. It is a preferred form of payment. So we're able to extend what they can do with that service. So I expect cash to continue to be a preferred form of payment for some time. If you go to Germany, it's very often you go to the cafe and it says no card to this day. So every time I land in Germany, I'm like, oh, I gotta go get cash out.

Justin Friedman 20:45

You know, Luke, that uh that's actually true in New York City and in a lot of places. Corner stores that um either don't accept cards or strongly prefer cash and charge you a markup if you swipe your card.

Lucas Tuttle 20:59

So people prefer it. It's so having that utilities is is is a big deal. And you know, payments is local. So I always caution listeners to any uh show like this to make sure that they recognize their payment preference has absolutely nothing to do with the payment preference of somebody in rural Columbia. Like, is cards accepted? Do people like to use cars? Do they trust a card? Um there's many local payment schemes. So our network contemplates that, but cash in general is still a common method that does have preference, at least within certain segments of almost every country.

Justin Friedman 21:43

So MoneyGram has been building in the crypto space for some years now and partnering with some of the key institutions and networks that power crypto. So that said, what has been the hardest part of moving from experimentation? Into production.

From Crypto Pilots To Compliance

Lucas Tuttle 22:02

So over the few years, so as you know that again, we worked with Ripple and Stellar for years. It's been quite a journey along many lines. So you have the technological learning. So it's a very different mindset to engineer on blockchain. But then the compliance and risk aspect. So what I found interesting getting into this is that every country is different. And until the Genius Act, there was a lot of skepticism around stable coins in their place and a lot of confusion, I would say, between what's different stable coin and a Bitcoin. So stable coins are a currency. It's great for exchanging of value between two trading partners. I'm sure there's there's many discussions on what is Bitcoin. To me, it's much more of an asset class. It has an appreciation, it has a value that can appreciate. Not such a good currency because it's volatile. But that's not well understood. So people still to this day ask me, like, why are you into crypto? I'm like, well, we're into a subset of crypto stable coins. So part of it is just the organizational transformation around what is this and what's the value. Um, we've been fortunate to be doing this so for long, so for so long that our compliance group is now well versed in it. Our technology just are well versed in it. So that learning, it takes time. We've done that, and now we're in the ability to leverage that. And then we've also brought in folks that had uh you know particular skills in treasury trading. We've got very important partners with CrossMint, uh, Fireblocks. Um, so we've added additional partners just in the last 12 months to enable us to scale more quickly, serve more use cases than where we started.

Justin Friedman 23:55

When you think about stablecoin adoption in the future, is it going to come through consumer demand or is it institutions integrating stable coins as part of their stack and the consumer may not even notice the difference? Or some combination.

Invisible Stablecoins Consumer Balances

Lucas Tuttle 24:14

Yeah, that's common, but more of the last. So when it comes to the consumer side of it, what stablecoin and blockchain together enable us to do is to provide a balance to every consumer that has the MoneyGram app, as long as the country's regulation supporters. So there are countries that have blanket crypto bands. But what we've started to do, and we've just released a release Columbia last year, we we just released or launched in El Salvador, is the ability for a consumer to hold a balance in MoneyGram. So just like Venmo has a balance, MoneyGram, it just has a balance. Every user will have a balance as we roll this out. And what that user is interested in is US dollars. So how it's held, if it's USDC or another stable coin, what we've seen in the research that we've done is the consumer uh isn't so interested or aware of how the money is stored. They're interested in the the currency or the uh that is a USD denominated value. That's the customer demand. And of course, there'll be other currencies that they might want to store in their wallet, but then our infrastructure is the same globally. And the beauty about that is we can deliver it at a cost that serves anybody. So you don't have to have a checking account, a minimum balance, uh, traditional things that you need to have a low or no cost account. We can provide the service at a low cost with blockchain infrastructure everywhere. And also just do it with our in our own regulatory viewpoint. So traditionally, in like the US, if you wanted to offer a debit card to a customer, you'd need to work with a sponsor bank. That sponsor bank has their own risk controls, their compliance view. They're gonna review all of your onboarding. That's a lot of work and expense to manage. Doing that on the blockchain infrastructure for ourselves globally dramatically speeds how we can do the work and the cost to do it, which means we can provide a better service to more consumers globally. So I don't think consumers are gonna ask us for stablecoin. They're gonna enjoy the balance. And then on the B2B side, I think that's where the efficiencies of trading so we can start to lower the cost of the network. Some of that we can give back to the customers as well as we uh change the cost basis of the business by lowering the float needed.

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Justin Friedman 27:06

Great. So MoneyGram has made a flurry of recent announcements. You mentioned the Kraken integration, very exciting stuff there. I'd like to learn a little bit more about what you're doing on the retail side. So I understand that MoneyGram is working with Stripe to modernize what it offers to retailers around the world. Tell us a little bit about that.

Retail Payments Upgrade With Stripe

Lucas Tuttle 27:29

Sure. So MoneyGram has always accepted cash. That's been the main use case of you have cash, you walk into an agent location, they have MoneyGram, you say, I'd like to send money to another country, and you give them uh the cash. Um in the last decade, the number of customers walking into a retail location who want to use their debit card has increased dramatically, both in Europe and the US. Um so we were not offering a debit service globally, and where we were, it was uh it had a fair degree of friction in the way it was being provided. So it wasn't well adopted. So what Stripe gave us was the ability to implement a variety of ways to accept debit with terminals, a tap-to-pay solution. We have also something called pay by link, so that we can broadly serve our customers at every agent location. And then based on the volume at the store, we can have the right solution for that agent in their customer base, whether it's a dedicated terminal, something we call Pay by Link, which a customer can pay for their transfer using Apple Pay or Google Pay on their phone. So the Stripe solution, what's very nice about it is it works globally. Uh their API is consistent independent of the way that we we deploy that payment method. So the settlement in the background is the same, irrespective of the consumer experience. So that brought a lot of building us the ability to rapidly scale this in a short number of months has been very helpful to have a global partner like them who's already at large scale. Where in my past, I believe you would have had to have many PSP uh arrangements in many countries to do that. And Stripe's global footprint made our integration, the commercial contracting, the diligence process just much easier with one provider for that service.

Justin Friedman 29:36

It it sounds like it's actually as maybe as big of a deal for Stripe as it is for MoneyGram. Stripe obviously started as a company powering e-commerce, and their early customers were entirely on the internet, and then now having this opportunity to touch physical point of sale is an interesting direction.

Lucas Tuttle 29:58

Absolutely. And you know, as somebody that remembers when Stripe launched years ago and their initial pitch was we make it easier for developers, um, they've scaled quite a bit for a company that really focused on ease of integration. And that's what still holds true today. So even ordering the terminals, it's very straightforward. And they get shipped directly to uh our agent locations where my original thought was, well, we're gonna need to find another provider to warehouse the terminals, ship the terminals. So they thought through an end-to-end experience for us, uh that was quite attractive in being able to have one commercial arrangement, and it makes the end-to-end solution very nice. But yeah, it all goes back to, I think, their original manifesto, which was kind of make it easy for the developer, and then the rest will follow, has really continued to hold true.

Justin Friedman 31:01

All right. So let's think a little bit more about the consumer experience. If we zoom in on a single user sending money cross-border today, what still feels unnecessarily slow or confusing or unpredictable? And how are you going to solve for that?

Lucas Tuttle 31:22

So there are quarters where you're reliant on a traditional banking network. So depending on the time of the day that your money might arrive in that or that might be sent, when it shows up in the receiver's bank account could vary. And that's just confusing because customers today they expect their TV to be on demand. They expect it to be instant. I think we all expect nearly everything we do to be instant, that as soon as you press enter, that you can see the result of it. Um, so you do have uh banking rails, and this is a continuous evolution of the network. And there's not many places where this is true. Most of our network has moved to be instant or in minutes. But this is something we continue to work on to have it be instant or within minutes everywhere.

Justin Friedman 32:19

And Luke, for let me ask you this for consumers who haven't yet found traditional incumbent money movement platforms that can reliably meet their needs to move money across borders, they have often turned to crypto wallets. And you know, that requires a certain level of enthusiasm for the technology to figure out how to fund a crypto wallet, how to send to your recipient who receives in crypto, and then off-ramp into local fiat. So my question is at what point does the user, can the user stop thinking about whether money is crypto, fiat, or stablecoin, and just assume that it's going to move instantly wherever they need or want it to go?

Making Cross-Border Transfers Feel Instant

Lucas Tuttle 33:05

So that is happening already. And I say one of the challenges though in crypto native wallets, though, is there is still the need for anti-money laundering type uh regulations to be uh followed. So one of the things that MoneyGram does quite well is have a uh network or a global compliance function where we are actively monitoring the money that's transferred to ensure that it's uh done safely, it's done within the regulations of the countries that we operate, that it fits within the monetary policy of the countries we operate. So, in many cases, you can't just send money from one wallet to another. You still need to have KYC involved, you need to know who's involved in the transaction, you need a way to off-ramp that reliably. And then back to kind of one of the original tenants, you need to have trust in the service. So MoneyGram has the trust. We're continuing to increase the ways that you can send and receive. So as I talked about having that balance for every MoneyGram customer, when you're sending money to earn the MoneyGram, that will be a uh just a blockchain movement. So those will be 100% uh instant in those cases. And then as we think about adding additional utility like connected cards, off-ramping to cash, off-ramping to local bank accounts, then that receiver is much more in control of the movement. One of the most amazing things that I learned as I got into money transfer that traditionally money transfer was really just about the sender. That the receiver would get a reference number and it said, you need to go pick this up. Um, clearly there's interaction between the sender and receiver to exchange some information before the send. But the receiver wasn't really a customer of MoneyGram. So now where we can address this question is being the best example of the first party network. So in our first party network, we can be the best example of instant money movement at a lower cost globally. But we also support a partners like Kraken. So we can provide them the best way to off-ramp for their customers when they can transfer the network, and we can provide some of the additional controls on the edge, right? As the receiver's getting it, we're now in the money movement. We can help them in how the compliance is uh is uh implemented at that point. So that's kind of how we see it in that this is already happening, can be instant. We've already enabled it to some of these countries, Colombia and El Salvador, but we'll continue to do that uh country by country here uh in the coming months and years.

Justin Friedman 36:05

That that can that convergence, that convergence is exciting to me because it provides optionality to the funder of the transaction. Are you bringing cash to a counter, or are you funding from fiat in a bank account or a crypto wallet or stable coins and providing that same optionality to the receiver who may want, again, to pick up cash at a kiosk, or they may want a deposit in a local bank account, or they may want to keep it on-chain in their digital wallet. So that's a tricky challenge because of the compliance issues that you mentioned. Financial crime is still a very real issue and perhaps growing, and there's a lot of skepticism about how do we solve this in kind of a multi-channel environment. So, what are your thoughts on best practices to do that?

Lucas Tuttle 37:10

So kind of bottoms up, one of the things we're doing is continuing to evolve our risk and compliance infrastructure. So we are we announced a partnership with Osler. We're very deep into bringing this completely live so that we have additional capability to automate um within the right controls with our regulators, uh, clearly, and the people that are operating these functions, but that we can at scale more ably manage the evolving, you know, the current compliance environment, but one that's evolving. And to me, like compliance rules monetary policy, it's not going to get lessened with blockchain. In fact, there's more signals, there's more things that you can look at, there's more things to consider in digital move money movement that we need to be able to be able to adapt to and include in our rules. So that's kind of like the infrastructure piece. On the consumer side, now, as you said, I expect most people will still get paid in fiat for quite some time. So if you just think of like the steps, I get paid on a monthly basis and I want to transfer money to India. Do I want to transfer from my bank account to my crypto wallet to then somewhere else? Or do I just want a seamless transfer of I'd like to draw directly from my bank account and then send to my loved one who is using a MoneyGram wallet, or they're using a stablecoin wallet from another provider in Africa, or they're using a fiat-based wallet in the Philippines. So the sender shouldn't actually need to worry about how the monetary value is stored. It should be as seamless for them as possible. Um, but we will be thinking about capabilities to fund the transfer from stablecoin or other cryptocurrencies as well. So if that is your preference, uh as a debit card could be your preference, in-person cash could be your preference, uh, back to the payments as local. We should be able to serve and accept uh alternative payment methods, cash, crypto being a new form of alternative payment method. So it's as seamless and convenient for the sender as possible when they're doing that transaction.

Justin Friedman 39:28

Is there any form of value that will become a part of your ecosystem that nobody's talking about yet? I mean, there's all these new fan gold instruments like you know, digital gold, right? So is there something that we're not even thinking about today that you're thinking about?

Tokenized Assets Simple UX And Closing

Lucas Tuttle 39:45

Absolutely. That's a great uh great point. Um, Stellar, they have a partnership with Franklin Templeton as an example where with through their Benji, you can get access to uh a mutual fund type, money market fund type product. We see many of these showing up in other countries as well. And they're quite interesting uh in being built on stable coins where they're using some of the yield from the stable coins to offset some of the FX. So these products are able to both provide some uh benefit when it comes to the FX values, but also is a way that a user money RAM could potentially store money in a local currency if they choose. So back to the customer preference. Like, does everyone want to store it in USD? Probably not. I think many will. There's going to be value to that. But then if they're using our app on a more local basis, they may want to store money in local currency in and out. And stablecoin just increases the range of options that are available to be able to do that. Again, I need to always consider this from a regulatory perspective, safeguarding there's uh considerations in how we present and offer some of these funds. But it makes it so much more efficient to think about. And there's so much innovation going on in this area that does result in products that have benefit to a customer. And particularly for this underbanked customer who's not able to get a bank account today, the way that these different types of financial instruments are being tokenized lets us efficiently, or at least it makes it able to contemplate that we could efficiently provide that to the customer. The the key is is can it be done in a clear, simple, direct way that's solving a real problem with the customer? Because I think at the ultimate end of the day, they might want USD and Columbia pesos. How that's stored, maybe they're not so interested, as long as it's trusted and it's secure. That's still something that we're uh working through and thinking about how you kind of that to me is a bit of the chasm, is how to continue to provide things that are very simple and straightforward, even when the back-end piece is very innovative and new.

Justin Friedman 42:09

A lot of our listeners are enthusiasts who uh tinker with crypto and stable coins and tokenized assets, and they're um interested in investing in tokenized securities. And these are exciting technological developments and financial developments, but you have to think about how to create a user experience that just works for the majority. So that I think is the chasm that I see. How do you take these new technologies and just make them work for regular people who have pretty simple financial needs?

Lucas Tuttle 42:46

That's exactly right. I believe there's there's a lot of apps that do a great job serving the crypto native user. We do not plan to compete directly with a crypto native customer's wallet. Um play today is in a habit loop that's still predominantly around money transfer, that money movement, but then adding utility on top of that. So I'm receiving money every month. I need a place to safely store that. I'd like to be able to spend from it. I'd like to think about saving. Maybe I'd like to think about getting credit based on top of that. Um those features don't need someone to understand what a meme coin is. They don't need to understand a passphrase. They don't need to understand that there's multiple multitudes of blockchains out there. Um, so our aim is to provide a cons a consumer product that solves a problem, which is uh a need for financial services to be banked, to be able to participate in our banking network and get the the values from that. And my belief is none of that, everything I just said there does not require somebody to understand the plumbing or the technology that enables that. And in fact, I think that's an advantage not to um unless that person has an interest in understanding it more deeply. But I think most people they just want to know my money's safe. Maybe I'm earning some incentives on that. And then I know that I can spend it and access it at will, um, is what they're looking for.

Justin Friedman 44:31

Luke Tuttle, thank you so much for joining us today on Crossing the Chasm. Our conversations here highlight what it takes to bring stable coins and modern money rails into real-world regulated global scale systems and how companies like MoneyGram are playing a foundational role in that transition. Listeners, we hope you'll subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And please join us as we continue exploring how stable coins and tokenized value move from early adoption to mainstream deployment. Luke Tuttle, thanks again. Listeners, until next time.