Ivan Soto-Wright on MoonPay’s global payment processing expansion

0:02i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have ivan soto wright the ceo and co-founder of moonpay ivan welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today thanks ashton except to be here i'm excited for you to be here and to talk about moon pay your team is really growing a lot

0:23recently and i'm excited to learn a little bit more and i would love to start with an overview and the focus and the vision of moon pay and then we can dive into the details sure so in really simple terms uh we are here to make uh crypto accessible to a billion people by 2030. moonpay you can kind of think of it as that passport to the crypto economy we connect your

0:45identity we connect payments and crypto asset delivery in one seamless solution we connect to everything in the legacy financial system so primarily a lot of people use moonpay with their debit and credit card but our ambition is to cover every single payment method across every single geography and doing that with the very best conversion and customer experience

1:06possible wow and that's very ambitious and but i think now is the time to be doing this because uh it's it's well needed and there's a lot of advantages to it um and maybe you can talk about the there have been you know people that have been working on payment processors trying to integrate crypto into e-commerce and just into payments in general for a few years

1:30um but right now seems the best time as ever to be growing in this space can you talk about what makes moonpay unique and you have a competitive advantage or something that makes it different from from other digital transaction platforms yeah so this is an important distinction to make so obviously there's crypto for commerce where you know once you have your

1:49cryptocurrency you can send it to anyone over the blockchain peer-to-peer really what moonpay is doing is it's helping customers get their first cryptocurrency so most people interact with moonpay if they're inside of a major cryptocurrency wallet uh we work with companies like bitcoin.com and trustwallet and zengo uh arjun's wallet all of these wallets essentially

2:11are the kind of the first kind of touch point when people want to buy uh their first cryptocurrency and acquire it so they can then send it or use it uh across a wide variety of applications in the crypto economy um so really moonpay is that kind of trusted interface uh for that customer to get their crypto quickly and really i think the the kind of light bulb in my head went

2:31off in terms of you know if you think about it most people aren't used to buying cryptocurrency or buying buying anything really on an exchange you know exchanges you know part you know the bar charts and the candlestick charts i'd say there's definitely a an audience that's sophisticated and that's really geared and tailored towards but i would say vast majority of people just

2:50want to have simple uh easy exposure and getting their first crypto and we try to make that process as simple as possible so i think in terms of the way that we think of ourselves in the market obviously convenience and ease of use is absolutely critical and then followed by that conversion right you know one of the biggest challenges where we found when we first entered the

3:11market is you know really trying to build an experience where you know when you're trying to use your dominant credit card it gets accepted and so we have a whole system of logic and smart routing that we do in order to try to boost that conversion rate and make sure that you get your crypto on your first try definitely and i appreciate that and throughout north america at some time

3:33there was issues with credit cards trying to purchase uh cryptocurrency and i find that's has been an issue in the past and you mentioned that your ambitious goal of having all payment types globally across the world and i think that's that's great and i'm curious to know you know is your team decentralized are you guys based somewhere and is the platform already

3:54available globally or did you start primarily servicing you know the area around your team and then you're growing out from there so taking us back to the mission you know we want to bring a billion new people into the space you know ultimately the rationale is once we're in the crypto economy we have tons of efficiencies you know i think in the long term we're

4:11not there quite yet i would say i describe it as we're kind of in the dial-up phase eventually we get to fiber optic and you're going to be able to use your crypto for payments transaction costs i think of the long term are going to tend towards zero and there's all these amazing applications that you can take advantage of once you're in crypto and so to kind of get to that ambition

4:29of a billion people um we thought okay what is the fastest way to get there and you know the way you're going to do that is you need to connect the legacy financial system and for us we started with debit and credit cards primarily visa and mastercard debit and credit cards because they were already available worldwide and so we knew that if we could support

4:47debit and credit cards first we'd be able to operate uh in a number of different countries and so we're now in about 160 countries that support wound pay today and now we're starting to fill out uh more and more local payment methods so obviously in stockholm 3's demand credit card penetration is a isn't as high and so local bank transfers or e-transfers or other payment systems are

5:07going to be more popular and so for us it's extremely data driven just looking at country by country uh what are the payment methods that we need to support so we've done it in europe and uk we have you know local bank transfers it's pretty popular uh we also take advantage of something called open banking where you kind of log in with your bank account which is great because

5:25ultimately if you're paying your bank account the fees are much cheaper than using your debit and credit card uh very soon we'll launch into united states as well and more geographies towards the end of the year definitely good to know and yeah it's great to have those low fees especially if you're making multiple transactions and there's people that are starting to

5:44not use credit cards because of those fees and i think they're once they see how easy the crypto is uh then they're just going to be using that full time so i'm really excited for that that kind of adoption yeah and also to go back to your question in terms of our team yeah we're globally distributed so uh we have people in about 25 different countries in the cities uh around the

6:02world and you know i think we were we were kind of forced to be that way you know we have customers obviously in all these different countries and so having uh people that are able to speak the language for some of those different geographies when we're dealing with customer support tickets but also just kind of understanding uh the diversity of experience that you

6:19need to appeal to this kind of wide kind of mainstream audience so we really pride ourselves on our diversity uh in terms of our talent and i think you know we're uniquely enabled today um you know we were we were actually globally distributed remote before obviously the pandemic but i think the pandemic has really opened up everyone's uh world into kind of remote working but

6:38um you know i think it's uh you know i think it's the future of work you know people can be uh more efficient with their time um they can have autonomy um you know more with their personal life um which i think is you know really important um you know there's a lot of time wasted i think commuting uh not good for the environment and so yeah we really pride ourselves on

6:56trying to push the boundary of building a company that can operate successfully uh remotely 25 countries wow very cool ivan and you spoke about uh connecting into the uk now starting to move into you know places where it's not just visa and mastercard and getting with local banks and getting e-transfers especially in underdeveloped uh and under-banked countries where

7:18crypto may have the most benefit and i'm curious because you're doing fiat on an off-ramps and it's not just crypto there's also regulatory compliance dealing with money can you talk about any of the hurdles you've had to jump through or you know the compliance factor of getting into all these different jurisdictions and having to deal with different laws in different geographies

7:41yeah 100 i mean global regulatory compliance in our dna from day one uh we knew we wanted to be a business that's going to operate over the long term and so we would find regulated partners for every single jurisdiction in which we operate we make sure we have legal opinions for every region that we operate but now as the company has really started to scale

8:00we start to acquire our own uh regulatory stack so part of it is obviously you want to get to market quickly so partners can help you enable that at certain geographies we've taken advantage of those partnerships but now kind of given the size and scalable business um you know i'd say this year a big focus of ours is you know bringing that entire regulatory umbrella

8:18uh in-house so you know i think it's it's obviously interesting there's different nuances for different uh parts of the world around how they treat cryptocurrencies uh certain countries bannon certain countries um are proactive and you know have kind of safe and and uh you know smart regulation really you know i think a lot of it is around uh how to combat uh money laundering

8:41uh and these components and it's important to have a you know safe and smart aml program um but you know there's a balance you don't want to hurt your user experience but you also want to make sure that you're in compliance with the rules and the rules are really there um you know governments are putting those in place to try to make it safer uh for people to interact in this

8:58environment and i think you know crypto got a bad rep uh to start um you know i think a lot of people uh acquitted it with the silk road and the illicit transactions that have happened there but i actually think uh cryptocurrency and the data kind of supports this is far safer right um you know essentially in terms of uh you know bad illicit activity um you know we're

9:18talking under one percent uh which is less than you know the existing fiat sources of money so i think we're coming a long way uh to moving people uh to get more comfortable with cryptocurrency that's not scary and you know it's something that you can use and there's actually real utility and value for using cryptocurrency definitely and well said ivan i think

9:37not enough people reiterate that the amount of fraudulent activity and money laundering is under one percent and there's a lot of uh perfectly legal and perfectly valid transactions going through and i'm curious just to further extend on that because you know it it's not zero percent there is the chance of that kind of stuff happening um and also just fraudulent transactions

9:59chargebacks times where transactions need to be reversed and on the fiat side that's easy but on the crypto side not so much is that something that moon pay has had to deal with and how does your company deal with that if any sort of thing like that happens uh with transactions yeah so it's obviously one of the most the biggest challenges when you're kind

10:18of interacting you know with fiat and crypto because with fiat as you mentioned it can be reversible in the form of a chargeback or you can call your bank and say hey i didn't make this transaction uh whereas with cryptocurrency it's kind of delivery's final so we're typically on the receiving end of this a lot where a customer might make a transaction uh we will

10:36deliver the crypto uh and at that point once we deliver the crypto it's final so we're actually taking on uh that viability and risk and one of the things that we do is uh we're b2b companies so we're offering this retail infrastructure to wallets to exchanges and other applications and one of the big headaches that we take away is guaranteeing that risk of chargeback so

10:54we beat that risk completely you know a lot of that comes down to using smart data smart analytics to make better decisions around the customers that you bring on to the platform to make sure that they're using the platform in the right way um but you know i think it's it's just something obviously you're going to have that attention where you're dealing with

11:13this final final system but i think in the long term you know really you know the beautiful thing about cryptocurrency uh is it's taking a lot of the pain and cost of reconciliation which is what is really expensive for kind of the legacy financial system to deal with today so i think the fact that cryptocurrency is final brings with it a lot of benefits

11:31uh obviously um you know there are some exceptional cases where um you know there are scams and and these type of things you know where someone might ask someone to you know enter a bunch of information which they then try to input onto our platform we do a lot of things to prevent that type of stuff we have 3d liveness checks uh we do you know as much as possible to

11:51make it a safe experience for the customer if a customer tries to buy a large amount we'll put up warnings to help them prevent them from you know falling victim to a scam but they do happen and in those cases we try to work with the customer uh to resolve that uh with the local authorities if it's uh if it's a crime that's been committed that's really good to know

12:08uh ivan and i'm curious moving forward your team is already growing and you know you're moving into all these new jurisdictions can you give a glimpse into the next six months throughout the summer of 2021 what are some of the milestones that you're looking to hit and and grow the platform yeah so i mean this is a this is a huge year for us um you know we've seen a

12:28tremendous amount of growth and obviously interest in in crypto um you know we've had an incredible event with uh i think the watershed moment for the industry with coinbase recently going public uh so there's just a much more i think there's much more awareness around crypto but not just crypto also nfts i think that's also been really fascinating to see because people start

12:46to understand you know these different applications within the crypto economy and i consider nfts to be one of those buckets um you know i would say our focus will continue to be making sure that we build the very best uh experience for our customers and partners um you know making sure that we build the very best uh conversion focused solution when you're trying to go from

13:05you know these legacy payment methods into the crypto economy um i'd say the other kind of big focus and pushes for the business is we're starting to look at other enterprise use cases so you have you know traditional fintechs that are saying hey we'd like to offer crypto exposure to our customers they have a million plus customer bases that uh their customers could be interested

13:23in interacting with crypto so you know to offer that as a service and easy rails that they can plug into our apis and we see that as a big area of growth uh also the other area that we've recently announced is we've built a solution specifically tailored towards nfts uh we think the nft marketplace is going to be really big uh we're still really early days

13:42obviously we're in a i think in any kind of new technology cycle you have an excitement and sometimes they might even classified as a maniac cycle and right now obviously there's a ton of demand limited supply of some of these nfts and so i think that's you know obviously creating some interesting uh dynamics uh for that market but um obviously i think there's going to be a

14:02need for a robust payment solution for nfts uh to pay in and also pay out um you know especially you know creators that are monetizing these nfts and want to get paid um you know making sure that they can do that in a compliance way making sure that we can offer a seamless payout experience where they can redeem their their nft into uh dollars or a stablecoin and

14:23doing that within uh regulatory compliance i think is going to be super important so that's another area that we've really doubled down on and we've been working with some of the some of the most amazing platforms we power companies like openc we're working with dapper so really exciting stuff that's going on there so a lot of it is obviously driven by our

14:42partners and their needs but also you know from from our side we just have this ambition to really cover all these payment methods and doing it well so we'll continue to focus on that definitely and i'm glad that you mentioned that with nfts it's great to be able to power those marketplaces and yeah it is continuing to grow and it is reaching the mainstream and i

15:00think it's getting more awareness about crypto to people that you know weren't interested in in the financial aspect of it now it's opening up to collectibles and digital artwork and all these other faucets which is which is really exciting so i'm glad that moon pay is getting involved in that as well and if there are viewers or businesses enterprises uh

15:20developers anybody who's interested in learning more about moon pay what's the best way for them to get involved in the community and to learn more yeah so obviously you can go to head to moonpay.com uh that's our main website uh you know we're active on twitter and other social medias as well but uh you can reach out to us via info.com you can reach out to

15:40me at iso right um pretty responsive in terms of dms um but uh yeah we we really welcome anyone that's trying to look at uh offering uh you know mainstream rails to their customers and bringing more customers into crypto really excited to work with a wide range of projects you know it's been super exciting from our from our side because you know some of these projects

16:00that we started with were tiny or just kind of getting started and had tremendous growth uh over the last year and that's been really exciting to see and help enable that very exciting and i will leave those links in the description box below ivan thank you so much for the time uh to talk about moon pay and let's follow up in the near future awesome thanks ashton

16:29you