The Last Unsolved Layer in Global Stablecoin Payments | Nikhil Srinivasan, Infinite

Nikhil Srinivasan Introduces Infinite and Global Payment Challenges There's a whole story as to how we got to this problem. If you try to make payments real time now, bringing a lot of that risk upfront, that window to react is much smaller. What makes Coinbase or Robin Hood of any of these crypto exchanges extremely successful is their ability to price risk. People think compliance is deterministic and static. We've noticed over the last year how much compliance requirements and controls, even across all these partners, has evolved. Go bare metal in every way possible. If you're building a fintech, you're not going to avoid the ability to go bare metal. A lot of our learnings has been really trying to think critically about the end user experience. Even though we're building a developer product, thinking about like our customers, customer first and foremost, AI will be the biggest consumer of these technologies. Same in processors may end up running the agent itself. Speaker 2 Hey, it's Drew Quick. Thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control, all from your stable coin balance. Operate at altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at Altitude dot XYZ. So excited for this something that's been really fun about doing these interviews in this format, which is new for us like this in person. You know, we've we've taken a family room and we've made it into like an interview studio, but getting to talk with you what has been now for over an hour before we push record. That's been sweet. So thanks for joining us. Speaker 1 And thanks for having me. Speaker 2 Yeah, man, a lot of what we've talked about so far has been like personal and non non work related stuff. So I'm really excited to dive into what you're building. We've been connected for like a year, but we've never we've never done something like this. And I, my Spidey senses are sort of starting to go off with you with with infinite in terms of the moment that's about to happen. And I don't know what it is, but I just I feel like there's an exciting next couple months ahead. And so even though we've been in touch for a while, I'm really excited that this conversation is happening now because there's so much there as we kick off. Why don't we start with full intro, your name, little bit about infinite and then we can start with a little bit of the problem and the core kind of ethos of what you think you're solving is a core problem, but. How Sardine's Work Led to Global Virtual Accounts Absolutely. So I'm Nikhil. We run a company called Infinite and our focus is really global businesses, helping them move money faster, cheaper and programmatically. And there's a whole story as to how we got to this problem. We have a team that has come together that's worked together before, which I think is fairly unique. Our founding team, my Co founder and I work together, a company called Sardine where I LED compliance, my Co founder LED payments and we had an opportunity to build in the stablecoin space like front and center, like building virtual accounts, kind of tackling a lot of the real challenges of productionizing stablecoin payments. Speaker 2 Sardine for like the payment nerds out there, people who are like in the industry, they will hear that and they'll be like eyebrows go up, like, oh, sorry, like sardine is obviously, you know, crushed it. But for those like define what sardine does and like why, why, maybe the vantage point of working there was so important. Speaker 1 Yeah. And Sardine. Sardine is itself a very unique company. I had met the founder of Sardine at Coinbase. And in many ways, Sardine is solving a problem that companies like Coinbase and many others kind of face. With new payment rails, the speed at which fraud and compliance attack factors can now surface themselves and the time to response is very limited. If you try to make payments real time now, bringing a lot of that risk upfront, that window to react is much smaller and so underrated. Part of what makes Coinbase or Robin Hood in any of these crypto exchanges extremely successful is their ability to price risk in, you know, around crypto, which is something that's very real time. If I'm using ACH, there's a 2 day window to settle that money. If in that period of time I'm allowed to withdraw my crypto, that's a huge problem in case I don't actually have those funds within that two day period, you could have an empty account and non sufficient funds. So that's just an example. There's every payment method as it becomes more real time, whether it's faster payments, RTP etcetera, by nature is now experiencing faster and faster kind of fraud vectors and and the time to response is much. Speaker 2 Shorter, the the damage of it not going well is bigger because the window of like if if you know, someone takes your credit card out of your physical pocket or something, like how many merchants can they actually run to to go swipe it versus like the scale of damage in a real time. Yeah, I can see how that can become so sardine. Actually. I didn't know that. Was the founder a coin baser before that? Speaker 1 Was head of risk at coin base. Speaker 2 Saw these problems. Speaker 1 Saw these problems. Was that Yelp before that? And you met telco network? Yeah, we worked together. Oops, SO. Speaker 2 For this name. Speaker 1 You know, so I think Coinbase was an experience, you know, I, I had landed my first company at Coinbase. I think we overlap maybe a bit during that time. So it's 2018 pre IPO. So the company was early in its journey to becoming the everything exchange and a big part of our team's effort was helping kind of expand the the number of assets and the type of assets on the platform, adding new block chains, adding new assets like USDC and making all of those things capable like available to the different, you know, internal business units. So really a shared kind of thesis for the crypto platform. So I think taking that experience going to like a place like Sardine that was intentionally trying to give these fraud and compliance kind of capabilities to every business that wanted to participate in faster payments. It really gave our team, you know, kind of a very unique background to go after the stablecoin, like the global B to B stablecoin problem. To make it even more exciting, my Co founder ended up working on a project at Sardine that really brought one of the first virtual account programs to the market. So in partnership with a sponsor bank and a liquidity provider, we were basically able to offer, you know, virtual account, US virtual accounts, which, you know, more specifically are these crypto native accounts, US account and routing numbers that you could assign to individuals anywhere in the world, which is a distinctly unique thing. Speaker 2 Using wallets is like using. Speaker 1 Wallets versus like an actual bank account. Speaker 2 Which is typical. The ACH routing was the traditional custody layer and all that is the unique unlock is that same kind of paradigm is being applied with maybe that those two things with an on chain account to. Speaker 1 Custom. Speaker 2 Things like stable coins is my. Speaker 1 Exactly. And this was the light bulb moment for our team. Like we saw first hand the amount of demand in the market for this unique product. And this is the reason why if you think about the US financial system, we have 300 million Americans, most of them have US account and routing numbers. There are billions of people in the world that do not have access to those same account and routing numbers, millions of businesses around the world. So the US account and routing numbers don't serve as like a unifying API for payment routing. By unifying and giving everyone access to this, you know, US account and routing capability, it really does simplify how different businesses all over the world interact. You could be a business in Nigeria, you could be a business in the UK, you could be a business in India and you could theoretically be accepting funds in U.S. dollars through AUS account and routing number. Speaker 2 It's it's kind of like in my mind, giving someone a phone number to or giving someone an iPhone in a different country, you can have like a messaging layer that's very easy. And even though you're not, it doesn't matter where physically located, even though Apple's an American company exactly, you can use the iMessage system no matter where you are. Is that a good way to think about it? Speaker 1 It's a great way to think about it. Obviously these are very US centric examples. The same concept of virtual accounts, they can be applied internationally. So take SWIFT for example. You could be an international bank if they wanted to participate and open up these wallet oriented accounts, which my personal take is this is going to be a bigger and bigger trend internationally. You can offer these same capabilities. You can open up account in someone's name and you know that capability accessibles. In this case, I gave USA virtual accounts as an example. I think that concept is not US specific, but we're very focused on making these US virtual accounts very accessible to businesses all over the world. This allows them, if they're transacting in U.S. dollars to much more easily participate in kind of commerce. So it reduces a lot of different challenges that different banks globally or regionally have interacting with each other, either through because of costs, because of the networking, through SWIFT, maybe they're not directly in a correspondence relationship or maybe because of regional differences on compliance or kind of risk. So stablecoins really kind of unify how these different participants could kind of part like work together. Understanding Fraud, Nesting, and Compliance Visibility Gaps Yeah, So you're OK. So you're at Sardine, you're you're exposed to I'd imagine it sounds like Sardine was really forward in this virtual account trend I. Speaker 1 Think we were one of the first I I don't recall how many others had a product back then. Speaker 2 It's very common now, like virtual accounts. Getting those things through some sort of like service provider is not like, you know, there, there are a lot of people in that game. Speaker 1 Absolutely. Speaker 2 But what, what, what was it about? So like seeing that at Sardine, what I guess what would be the unique Intel or edge or insight you think you took from Sardine that's kind of, you know, giving you that sense of conviction on building infinite now or what? What were some of these key things? Speaker 1 It's a great question. I think working at Sardine gives you a unique opportunity before deployed across hundreds of companies that are experiencing some of the most challenging risk problems and having to actually successfully mitigate those problems. I think when we launched our own product, we had a very unique perspective into visibility into the risks and challenges in a given space. Speaker 2 What do risks look like? Can you define? Speaker 1 I think for compliance, I mean, depends fraud is, you know, account takeovers, like if you are offering say virtual accounts to individuals, they're very susceptible to credential stuffing or account takeovers. I could have Drew's information and you get stolen KYC information. I could use that to open a virtual impersonate. You open a virtual account, move the money. You know, I think there's I could get into your account, you know, theoretically by impersonating you, I could impersonate support. And there there's a lot of fraud vectors on the individual side where you know, there's elderly abuse. You could be, you know, someone who's just taken advantage of, socially engineered. There's pig butchering kind of schemes. How? Speaker 2 Do you define that? Speaker 1 Those are much more like a social attack vector and think, you know, like a virus or a worm. But over telephone where people are calling you with with information and telling you to do things. I would say it all falls under the class of social engineering. And so if you take all these risks on the individual side, you quickly realize like you could control for a lot of those risks. You start noticing patterns, like if you wanted to have an individual program, you might control for, you know, certain demographics of the type of participants you would have in that program. Maybe you would look for certain attributes like device patterns or behavioral patterns that are very indicative of like, you know, the real identity versus a fake identity. On the compliance side, it's much more about proofing. Is this the person who they say they are? Liveness is a great way. We've seen it. Even a coin basis scale or you know, at stripe scale where you're able to kind of use not just device intelligence, but behavioral biometrics and liveness to ensure the right person is transacting. And that happens not only at onboarding, but you know, with the subcustomers as well. From our perspective, risk is so multi tenant that it's it's hard to pinpoint and say like, you know, this is the worst thing that can happen. AML risk, sanctions risk, politically exposed people structuring. So there's a lot of different types of and topologies of risk. I think what we saw as a category was there was a visibility gap. So in traditional payments, if you take SWIFT as an example, which is how a lot of our businesses that we work with are moving funds, they're moving it through a network of banks. There's also an expectation as a member of SWIFT to kind of conform to certain standards as to how they on board their constituents to the bank. So that's their on boarding policies, their compliance policies. Speaker 2 The bank, The bank layer has expectations. Speaker 1 Exactly. And you can imagine, you know, most, you know, banks expect you to KYC and go go in person and proof. And there's, there's no matter where you go in the world, there are decent expectations if it's a internationally networked bank that you're going to participate in in, in compliance shared kind of model for. Speaker 2 Compliance. This gets really important for, you know, just to set the right context. I feel like this gets really the idea of like first party versus third party payments here get like really the uniqueness of like maybe what could be more simple about first party versus third party and defining those terms. A little bit of like, am I, when I'm provisioning something like a virtual account, am I doing that for the bank or am I doing that or, or the client, or am I doing that for the client's user or the platform's person who's using that platform? And that like difference is like, it's such a unique risk difference. And, and the type of like, you know, I'm thinking about our own this, this podcast powered by altitude. Now we're using altitude for our business. Amazing. We what, you know, went through that onboarding flow. And of course the, one of the things that they're going to ask is like, are you using this account to move funds on behalf of other people? It's like, OK, that's a big what, what is that question getting at? It's kind of. Speaker 1 So that's actually, yeah, like I think that's a great segue. So when you think about the compliant compliance is also something that's such a broad term. We try to drill like be very specific about the parts of compliance that matters. So there's, you know, we we look at, you know, our compliance controls that we and policies that we expect to implement as a business that our partners, you know, kind of align with us on and we align with them on. And that's, you know, a mix of these, you know, mostly AML sanctions, Pep kind of procedures and reporting around that. Like if we identify risks, how do we kind of like report on that? There's also compliance around the flow of funds, which is, is the way that the banks are exposing payment capabilities to the businesses. Is it done in a way that like is nested or not nested? And I can explain what that means. If I'm I'm doing first party payments, I'm moving money between customer A and customer B or customer A and customer A. If I'm a platform as a customer, then I'm likely moving money between customer B and customer C as customer A of the bank. And so there's a lack of visibility into what exactly is happening or why that transaction is moving between those two entities. There's a higher expectation of compliance controls, mitigations and and how it's even modeled because if you have the visibility, there's nothing wrong with third party payments. And I can give you an example, which is sponsor banking, right. In the traditional sponsor banking model with like FB OS, you don't quite necessarily have visibility with your fintechs. So there could be a lot of things happening with the fintech program that you're coordinating with the fintech to really understand as a bank if all the controls are being met. But it is harder than if there was a technology layer that actually facilitated coordination between the bank and and the fintech. Speaker 2 Oversimplifying this a little bit, right, Like the FBO model for the benefit of model is a bank or the licensed provider to provide these sort of virtual account type functions is giving that giving that ability to a fintech company who's then essentially taking that ability and saying, I'm going to now give this ability to all of my users. So you're, you're essentially you're giving me permission to offer these services to my, my users, finance businesses, people. And like, there's so much there and the extra layer of like, OK, I just provisioned like a million of these accounts and now they're transacting with each other and the bank is back here or whoever's like holding the bag or the, the, the compliance burden and saying what's actually happening with all of these like, and, and. Speaker 1 And a good example is like your bank, a fintech is built on top of your bank and another fintech is built on top of that Fintech. Yes. Now you're thinking about recursively how many of these fintechs are are, you know, kind of nested under each other in terms of and the risk as well? Speaker 2 That's the word nest that when you. Speaker 1 Use nesting. It's like, and, and it's nesting is when there's like a single account and there's multiple sub accounts under them. And so you have a concentration of like customer risk, portfolio risk. And so that's typically how banks have like opened up accounts. They'll open up a master account and the fintech can go open sub accounts on behalf of their customers. Now I do think a lot of that can be solved if we actually opened a master account for every customer, right? There's no reason we couldn't do that and it's likely more operational lift for the banks, but it's also a technology problem that banks can solve. So that's like an exciting way to think about solving some of this visibility and the compliance controls that the bank would need to have where they can directly own every relationship, so. Speaker 2 Instead of thinking about this Fintech going back to the example as like some sort of there's like some sort of wall in the way you kind of just like bring that layer of compliance to the end and you treat that end client almost with the same rigor as you would the Fintech is that kind of the. Speaker 1 Model. I think that's the model. I think it also it's more of a relationship. You extend the relationship, you're opening these master accounts on behalf of every entity. And so when the entities are interacting with each other, you have clear visibility which entity is interacting with which other entity. This matters in the first party and 3rd party use case, as you asked. It's very important to understand in 3rd party use case who's moving the money to who and why. So if you're moving, you're the platform and I'm moving money to a friend and you're processing that on my behalf between me and my friend, that relationship is something that would be much more distinct and clear who you know, who those entities are, what they're doing, what that activity looks like. Speaker 2 What is the downside of not doing this well or not doing this at all? If I think a lot about the kind of era that we're in where we're kind of in this Wild West on chain payments world where like a conversation that's coming to my mind actually recently was with Rodri from Crossmint and he was talking a lot about like he had some very clear and convicting takes around. How out of bounds a lot of builders are right now and and you know, go back and listen to that episode with him. That was a really interesting one. And and how you know there is there is about to be a very clear slap on the wrist for a lot of teams and a lot of companies and a lot of people who have been doing business in ways that are non non compliant. If you look at like the standard that the there's so many laws that have been passed and like big secrecy acts and like all of these things that apply to fintech Web 2 that are completely like almost like web three builders aren't really taken seriously. He at least believes that like we're about to enter this era where like compliance is going to become a massive, massive part of a lot of the priority. Do you kind of resonate? Do you? Speaker 1 Resonate. I resonate. I think our whole thesis is that, you know, we're taking the simple problem of global B to B payments and saying stable coins can be the technology solution, but in order for it to integrate with all the existing flow of funds, there's trillions of dollars moving internationally. You're going to have to solve that last mile of compliance and even closing the loop with, you know, to answer your question about, you know, do I do I kind of agree with the sentiment or what do I think could happen in the space or what do I think is necessary? I do think that stable coin processors are in many ways fintechs. They're no different than any other fintechs. So the challenges we've seen in the last couple of years with concentration of risk and portfolio risk within fintechs that emerge in the banking sector is a risk that, you know, stable coins also present to banks, right? And so I think the compliance will really dictate how the the affordances that the companies make or the controls that they implement will really dictate how quickly we can grow this total pie and integrate with the existing flow. Infinite's AI-Assisted Approach to Progressive Compliance It is important for us to to always think about the portfolio risk and and this is a very new technology. One of the key insights we had at Sardine and Sardine Still is very convicted in this thesis is that with new payment rails there are visibility gaps that emerge. And so you can think about the visibility gap of cross-border payments where maybe you are originating A stablecoin transfer Fiat to Fiat. It's a stablecoin sandwich. So you know, there's a dollar coming in the US, there's local currency coming out internationally in between stablecoins are used to route this traffic through stablecoin providers that are willing to on ramp and off ramp internationally. And if you take that concept and, and you really ask yourself like, OK, how at least today, where does the visibility gap? Why it's on the international side, We have incredible technologies for visibility into American accounts. So if you're originating AUS dollar payment from the US, you have Plaid, right? You have Amex, you have Stripe financial connections, you have all these capabilities in addition to, you know, the sardine device intelligence and transaction monitoring things like so cure that can do KYCKYB really well internationally. So you have ways of doing this proofing. But then when you get to the international leg, there's so much variance in open banking standards and bank linking standards and even the compliance requirements in the local market. And compliance is kind of interesting. I think it's going to be the theme for the net for a while. In stable coins. I think a good analog for stablecoins is PayPal Mass Pay, where the technology solves moving money between different entities internationally. It's a Ledger, so to speak, but you're responsible to bring your own compliance. Speaker 2 I think PayPal PayPal quickly realized that they were in the compliance business pretty. Speaker 1 Fast. Yeah, And I think there's a famous story of, I forget if it's Macs or someone else, like their bathrooms apparently had screens with graph analysis that would surface fraud rings, AML rings, etcetera. So you could visually see the structuring and you could highlight risks and you can give that feedback to the team. They were innovating on how quickly they could even identify and target because the business opportunity here is massive. If you're a company today that takes compliance seriously, that takes fraud prevention seriously, and wants to take on this challenge of moving money faster using stablecoins or any other real time payment rail, you're positioning yourself to actually build one of the most interesting and exciting data sets. Because ultimately that's the network effect is the ability to identify and predict where the risk in the network lies and mitigate that. In order to compete with like a network like Visa, you really have to be able to build a network on top of an open protocol. And so that's where Infinite sits. We, the technology is highly available. We work with a lot of different providers under the hood that help us deliver stable coin rails, whether it's on ramping or off ramping, getting U.S. dollars into stable coins, getting stable coins back into local currency or U.S. dollars. Speaker 2 Yeah. So you're spending a lot of the time in that kind of in that Open Banking International kind of endpoint. Speaker 1 Well, we're thinking about though, I mean, we're starting with the the idea that there's a network effect between all these different providers and the unifying network effect is the stable coin. The fact that most of these providers accept USDC and USDT allows us to stitch together what would otherwise require a ton of capital locked up at a ton of banks internationally in a correspondence network. Rather, we actually have all of these processors and the local markets, as well as originally here in the US that allow us to enable this. Now, Infinite's unique model is to partner with, you know, this finite group of ecosystem partners, and we're closely with them on our compliance controls. So we want to go above and beyond with our partners in really defining how we collaborate on compliance. One of our key insights is, you know, compliance is not purely a technology problem. There's a degree of actual operationalizing of the compliance program, coordination and collaboration, and that's really, you know, a huge part of our focus. Speaker 2 So, so you guys are, you know, you're an American give kind of the the bullet points of like based here in America. You've where you at in the fundraising journey right now. Speaker 1 Yeah. So we're, yeah, we went through YC. So we're a new company. We're about a year old. We started last year, January of last year 2025. We my Co founder and I had left Sardine. Our first hire was our Chief compliance officer at Sardine who had then gone to so care. And we our, our vision really from the beginning has been how do we solve the what we call enablement problem in the stablecoin space. So there are a lot of orchestrators and we use and partner with many of these. Speaker 2 Orchestrators. How do you define orchestrator? Speaker 1 I think orchestration is, you know, I would take for example what Stripe is doing or Bridge is doing what BB and K is doing. A lot of these are providers that have licenses to move money in their local jurisdiction in and out of stable coins. And what we've done is built a network of these providers that allows us to move money to 40 plus countries between 40 plus countries, right pay insurance and payouts. What we found in the process is that each one of these providers is implementing their own compliance control in a very unique way. And so if you think about Stripe, one of their key insights early on was solving for identity and compliance. The Stripe identity experience has always been phenomenal. Even Link feels like it's a you know, it knows who you are, and that's how it's able to give you a better. Speaker 2 You like, hate how good it is. It's so good. Speaker 1 It's the best Stripe components were always and Stripe elements were always a differentiator. If you think about companies that have created what I would consider enablement is something like where Stripe operates, where they're providing a lot of those building blocks and Legos for you to go and deliver it best in class and user experience. But that often require abstracting away a lot of the underlying hard tech necessary to deliver that end user experience. And so in that process, we quickly realized that owning compliance, we've built our own compliance, you know, links for collection. So think you know, we can go and send a link out to any customer. We can control what data attributes we're collecting. And this allows us to be very dynamic depending on the flow of funds and the use case as to what we're collecting upfront. The dynamism here is really, really important. I think a lot of people think compliance is deterministic and static. But even as an industry, we've noticed over the last year how much the compliance requirements and controls even across all these partners has evolved and often in the direction of collecting more information. Sometimes maybe less, but very rarely. Speaker 2 Yeah. We were talking earlier today with Charles from Rain about the nuances of things like KYC for the amounts of certain payments. Hey, this payment is $2.00 for this special shot versus $2000 for, you know, some NFT or digital good or, you know, luxury. Speaker 1 Risk, it's, it's, it's very, I think something I didn't appreciate you, you take a very probabilistic and portfolio risk approach when you think about financial services and how do you control for risk, Your goal is to stop most of the risk. It's credo optimally you wanna get 80% of the risk. You'll always find someone or something that's innovating beyond your controls. But the challenge is keeping up with that, right? Those risks are always evolving. I think for us what we realized is if you're approaching compliance, you know, in a very accessible way that can reduce a lot of the friction. It's the Stripe Link experience being able to say we can onboard a customer in the US and they can onboard international subcustomers and we can actually go and collect exactly what we need for both the onramp and the off ramp makes that super seamless that. Speaker 2 And you can sort of message layer that information to. Speaker 1 Exactly. And as as the compliance requirements evolve, we can just progressively ping and ask for, here's a request For more information. It can be in app, it can be texted, it can be emailed fully white label. But it's a big part of the experience. I think right now, at least the status quo that what we experience is often there are so many different providers involved that there's almost a, a, a bit, a bit of friction in the network effect that Sablecoins offer. You're searching at different providers, but you're also inherently going through different onboarding experiences. That fragmentation does present a challenge when you compare it with the status quo. RTP, you know, kind of, you know, sponsor. Speaker 2 Banking that into like make this as dumb simple as you can for me with either an existing customer use case or a, you know, like a mental model customer use case that you think about when you think about like the before and after of this. I love the idea of, you know, being able to sit on the collection and pay outside of, of both sides because I'm imagining like if I'm, if I'm doing the sandwich, if I'm sending and receiving in one flow, I'm just like, Hey, I want to send money, but I'm starting it here. Yeah, I'm ending it here. And these two things are completely different. Like the starting piece of bread on this side is not talking to the piece of bread on that side. But you guys are like, hey, we can just collect. It sounds like we can collect information here. And because we're, you know, the cheese or the Bologna in the middle, we'll just give that information over to this piece of bread. And we we're not going to like force the same thing to happen twice. Speaker 1 Is that kind of Yeah. And I think that's, I think that's the right idea. And I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that compliance is just as much, you know, a technical problem as it is program management. So a lot of this is like expectation setting with the partners. Everyone is trying to solve for the same problem, which is risk and risk mitigation. And really every organization has a unique approach to compliance. They have their own controls. Our unique approach is recognizing each organization partners unique compliance approach, what their requirements are, using technology then to make that very adaptable. O the classic example is many of our customers would try to orchestrate multiple Sablecoin orchestrators or you know, kind of build an end to end solution on top of that. Yes. What they would often find though is that they were either KYC ING customers through different portals, through different user experiences, maybe the request for information or you know, sometimes there are follow up questions that are asked when you're setting up some of these accounts. Those questions might often repeat themselves. So something that maybe one side exactly how you described it, maybe you know, the initial onboarding that question was answered, why would that the next entity or partner need to ask the same exact question? And so being really smart about the visibility there and really building towards that is something that we're, we're very unique in. The second-half of this is really what you also identified, which is there's an entirely different life cycle for our customers and then their end customers, right? Which is we serve merchant developers. Our merchant developers are often doing third party payments, moving money between different people. Sometimes they're doing first party payments right and. Speaker 2 Find Merchant Developers. Speaker 1 Merchant developer I would say is like, you know, any customer of a fintech payments platform. So you are a business and you're trying to expose financial services to your customers. I consider that a merchant developer. OK. And in that case, we're, we're offering to these developers that want to offer financial services to their customers, the ability to have these Lego blocks, not only for onboarding, but also for actually processing the payments. So that's like links that would include invoices. And so we can actually get the source of funds attestation as part of the life cycle. That makes it a lot easier when you're a bank and you're reviewing a payment and you're trying to understand like what exactly the payment is for. We're able to use AI to analyze a lot of those documents and understand if those those attributes actually add up and make sense. Like an example is our AI agent is able to look up, you know, typical pricing information, wholesale pricing rates and make sure that we're like, you know, the invoices quoting the items correctly. I think similarly we, we are able to use the AI to really process a lot more rich media than a typical compliance operation would. So if you're uploading documents that are, you know, requests for information. Speaker 2 What would the what would a typical like when we were I'm going back to this example because it's recent, but we we onboarded to altitude and we were like we're. Speaker 1 Big fans of altitude. Speaker 2 They were like, hey, you know, what business are you in? Can you like send us? I think for me, we sent like a media sponsor contract to them. They because they required that to say like. Speaker 1 And that was via e-mail, right? Speaker 2 I think so and. Speaker 1 So that's one of the first things we solved by the way, because we started signing up for all these different Sable coin services and it was interesting because our customers were getting these RFI's. It was. Speaker 2 Not the most like modern feeling thing in the. Speaker 1 World like getting an e-mail asking for a passport, sometimes cap tables, you know, all kinds of information that I've never. Speaker 2 Coin based institutional onboarding. It was like, hey, can you like e-mail me a picture? Speaker 1 Of it felt the same. Speaker 2 Way passport. It's like what? Like it would, really. Speaker 1 And so, yeah, exactly, I think it's the the whole category of very, very manual operations around these, these compliance processes is something we noticed immediately when we entered the space. It felt very distinct, this stablecoin space, because I don't remember, you know, sending any of my compliance information via e-mail. Speaker 2 But but also what's preventing me? Like it was a real contract, I sent them a real one. I can vouch for that. But like, what's preventing me from like just going and spinning up a fake one? Speaker 1 Well, it's manually reviewed. It is manually reviewed. So that's, I mean, part of the process is, is, is, is whatever you're submitting is going through a very manual human review and that is not going to change overnight. I think it'll take a long time to remove the human from the compliance. Speaker 2 Process. OK, so that's still the case. Speaker 1 That's still the case. There are humans reviewing all these things. There is some degree of automation, right? I think if it's if the if these systems think the data matches very accurately, there's not going to be a review. It's up to the business though, if it doesn't really meet certain confidence scores to actually go in and staff that process effectively and efficiently. Now, what we noticed though is that our end users were struggling because they're not. It's like our customers, end users actually. So our merchant developers, their onboarding users, those users know nothing about our underlying providers. They don't really know why they're getting this e-mail from an arbitrary link. It's not very branded. It doesn't really feel like part of the app. Speaker 2 Sometimes they can say names of companies that are not you and they're. Speaker 1 Exactly. Speaker 2 Who is this company? Speaker 1 And so there's so much confusion that stemmed from that. But we're in NYC. We, we made it a mission to actually solve that problem. So whether it's the initial onboarding or we collect all this data, it gave us the opportunity to replay that data instead of it being stuck on each of these links. Because often actually you can't get the data out of the link as a developer. Speaker 2 So like like a persona or something? Speaker 1 Is It really depends on how they're configured. Often, you know, and everyone's asking different data, so you might not even want to pull it out because you might not be getting, you know, exactly mapped data like one org might ask for some information, another org ask for something else for the same customer. And so there's a big part of this is controls mapping and really coordinating between these organizations to define what success looks like, what is like the best kind of controls for, for compliance. The second I would say aspect to this is how the RFI's are handled. The RFI's are requests for information. There are these follow up questions that often get emailed or sent and they're very specific to your company and your use case. And really, due diligence is the best way to describe RFI's and they happen at the beginning of the customer relationship. Speaker 2 Crucial point in the yeah. Speaker 1 And so from our perspective, we not only made that something that can be white labeled and part of the app experience, but it's also extremely progressive and dynamic. So we believe that it's almost better to constantly be like stepping up these requests for information and really closing the loop on some of these compliance questions in a single profile. Speaker 2 Instead of like, hey, here's another step, here's another step. Speaker 1 And the audit trail is, is important, but the context being unified and centralized is also very important. So yeah, that's a long winded way of describing basically one way that we're approaching tackling some of these compliance problems. Partnering with Local Stablecoin Winners for Global Reach As a payments company, we're fundamentally a global B2B payments provider. We go up against the D locals, the transfer wises, we're helping people move money internationally. The use cases are are very much looking for how do you get access to these USD accounts and exposure to U.S. dollars and then at the right time, how do you also get access to local currency liquidity and the industry calls it stablecoin sandwich. But we've found that often there's very specific routes that people are looking for. The sandwiches look pretty similar. So we're very focused on finding some of the the most exciting repeatable kind of patterns and quarters and routes and solving the compliance for those routes. It's really hard to, I would find it hard to believe a company has solved compliance to an equivalent degree in every market overnight. This is a problem that you have to think about strategically in terms of coverage, in terms of. The depth and breadth. Speaker 2 What is the OK, so, so I'm, I'm kind of looking at this at a global scale. We've met with a ton of these teams throughout the journey. And I'm, you know, just thinking on the top of my head, you have what seems to be like very obvious, interesting businesses in the local Stablepoint landscape. You have the trace finances in Brazil, you have the Mateos and Latam, the conduits and, you know, APEC and yellow cards like you. You have all these different like regional powerhouses. Is it like a good mental framework to say like these might be some of the partners that you would want to work with? Speaker 1 Absolutely. That's a great way to think about it. We see ourselves as allies to most of these stablecoin processors today. Speaker 2 Betzos in Mexico like. Speaker 1 Exactly. We we, we see the fact that there's so much local compliance required, there's so much depth to establishing a successful compliance program locally. Speaker 2 Which they're focused on probably already. Speaker 1 That we see the network effect of stablecoins actually allowing winners in every market to coordinate with each other. It's efficient market hypothesis. We have a couple of providers in each major market and they're all able to provide us with different capabilities to different. Speaker 2 They also need each other as well. And so like, like, you know, Bitso and Mexico really needs to, you know, they need to focus on Mexico and what, you know, what are the laws of the land there and users. And Mexico is very different. Yeah. Speaker 1 I think you're hinting at something that we've noticed. There's a lot of bidirectionality. The network effect is really strong in this space. I think you'll notice a lot of customers are also partners with each other. It's a lot of cross selling. I do think the market structure is such that it's emerging. I think a lot of the partnerships exist because they're able to find market efficiencies in certain corridors that are that are sought after in that market. And we're almost seeing as like all of these different routes and local regions bootstrap the local currency liquidity against U.S. dollar stable coins almost like naturally like through market like efficient market forces, which I think is the most exciting thing. It's forced us to, you know, really think differently about how we build our platform. We're very generalized to the to support any of these different providers. It's a lot similar to what we were doing at Coinbase to generalize the platform to support different block chains, maybe with even different accounting models, say like the account based ledgers versus UTXO. Speaker 2 I don't know, this might be a bad way to say it, but it's kind of like an interoperability layer for compliance across a lot of these types of different local players. Like if I'm, if I'm mentally thinking about this, like let's just say that I'm based in Brazil, I'm a importer exporter there. I'm I'm going to likely use maybe I use trace finance or, or a platform that's like very local to that part of the world. And you know, there's going to be really great benefits because I'm I'm going direct to them. But then there's like a ton of need for me to have a global by nature business, but I'm on board there. Is it a good, is it a the right way to think about it? We're like infinite could be a really great they're behind trace to connect to all these other things. And then maybe thinking about it opposite, like maybe I don't start there. Maybe I can go to infinite 1st. And also the backward backwards compatibility is also there too. Are you thinking of infinite in like that bi directional way or are you more focused on being that kind of direct relationship layer first? Speaker 1 I think it's bi directional because what we've found is stitching together these various providers has enabled us to unlock a lot of unique capabilities or fun flows that otherwise wouldn't be possible. So the network effect in my opinion really lies and being able to coordinate all the exciting partners and companies that are really solving for the depth of liquidity and local currency against these U.S. dollar stable coins. Now I do imagine that's going to the market structure will quickly evolve, but right now it does seem like that's the most exciting thing. It's it's really just seeing how many, how much flow is moving towards the stable coin. At some point it was some leg being denominated in stable coins. Yeah, as part of the B to B flow. Speaker 2 OK. So talk, talk a little bit about when you think about 2026, we're we're still early in the year, you guys are about a year in. It seems like a crucial time. What can you share around? Yeah. Like what, what are some of these, you know, public bullet points that you can share that are like whether that be clients volumes, like what are the things that like you're able to disclose? Speaker 1 We're still we're still pretty, we're still pretty stealth, I'll say. I'll share that we're our product is fair is much more mature and we're one year in. So we have AV one that we're very excited to share with the world. That product is being used by you know 10s of customers. We have hundreds of customers that are actively, you know, onboarding and and trying the product. And this new version I think is a culmination of our experiences from Coinbase, from Sardine, from. So cure it really for us, it's, it's been like the vertically integrated experience and stablecoin that we've been looking for as developers. And we're starting to notice that it does solve a very real user experience pain point. Yeah. Speaker 2 What, what is different about? So I'm, I want to ask you about this V2 or whatever, whatever you're going to call it, but what is different about infinite today than what you expected? Like what have you learned in the last 12 months that has shaped what the product maybe this V2 is the best versus what you expected? Speaker 1 One of our YC partners, Tom, was started Monzo and gave us really great advice when we started the company. Go bare metal in every way possible. If you're building a fintech, you're not going to avoid the ability to go bare metal. I think what we've been uniquely able to do is take a vertically integrated approach and find they'll, you know, kind of bare metal sources are low level sources for compliance data or fraud prevention data, you know, bank sponsored banking relationships to really stitch together something that we think looks and feels better in a pretty competitive market. So a lot of our learnings has been really trying to think critically about the end user experience, even though we're building a developer product. And that's that's really our whole thesis around enablement. It's thinking about like our customers, customer 1st and forecast foremost. And it's given us a very different perspective on how this product should look, feel and and the quality of service too. I think if you interview a lot of customers in the stablecoin space, I think one thing they'll call out is there's inconsistencies because there's so much fragmentation. And so our hope is you can benefit from the network effect that does sometimes feel like fragmentation. Speaker 2 Fragmentation in what sense? Like identity wise. Speaker 1 I think in every sense, you're working with a lot of different partners and you're trying to coordinate a lot of different technologies and you're introducing a lot of room for a variance in quality of service. That could be Slas, that could be how long it takes to settle payments. It could be, you know, the onboarding process, like, yeah, there's just so many different things. And it's, yeah, that's probably a topic that you can interview all the founders on this podcast about. But each of us have horror stories about, like, the plumbing requires a lot. And that's why we're very grateful to be built on the shoulders and the foundation that the industry is kind of like built over the last couple years and didn't quite exist 10 years ago, but it does exist today, yeah. Repeat Founder Insights and Agentic Commerce's Payment Future So you sold you, you've exited a company before you sold the company to Coinbase, which is like, you know, an amazing slam dunk to be able to say that. What as a repeat founder, do you feel like you have like the approach with this? What what is different due to being a repeat founder that you think is like uniquely advantageous to Infinite? That maybe if, if this was like the first, if Infinite was like the first startup you had right out the gate, if this was the first one, what are you doing differently? Because this is not the first rodeo, do you think? Speaker 1 I think you'll appreciate this. It's something that Brian was a big fan of teaching us at at Coinbase, which is Coinbase has. Speaker 2 Produced a ton of founders out of that place. Speaker 1 I think that was intentional. When I was there, there were 50 founders, crazy, you know, ex founders getting together for dinners and whatnot. I think one thing though that we all took away was that what makes Coinbase such a an indie company in my opinion is the fact that they've survived every crypto wave and cycle. Crypto is cyclical in nature. And I think the perspective I bring after working at Coinbase is, you know, I think when I joined Bitcoin was trading at like $3000 and people are extremely concerned about the post 20s I've crashed. I think you learn a lot about what you can build in a bear market. I think you learn about being very long term, right? I think that's a unique approach we take, and we have a ton of conviction that these problems do take intentionality, time, and conviction to solve. I think it's very hard to go into this space without that sheer conviction that this is definitely a future model of reality that needs to exist. I think many of us on our team would fully banquet stablecoins if we had all the capabilities figured out and there was parity with the status. Speaker 2 Quo yeah I think that definitely deserves to be celebrated about the Coinbase culture I've never heard it said that way but that almost like desensitization to price action. Most of my tenure at Coinbase was through the post 2021 crash and FTX and like all of that stuff was like an extremely volatile moment. But like they, because you, you have to in the stock even now, like when I was there with publicly traded company, the stock price has gone all over the place. Any public traded company maybe has that a little bit, but imagine like Coinbase is publicly traded and the markets are like so embedded in like that company and the momentum of it all, you are forced to detach from all of it. You can't wake up. And it's actually genuinely believe that like, you know, obviously people check the stock every now and then and like it's important whatever. And like more institutions are going to be knocking on the door if bitcoins crushing it. But there's genuinely a sense of like we are here because we believe. And it has nothing to do with like how much bitcoins trading and to be around people like that who are like not actually paying in that much attention to the, the news or the prices. And there's something about that that like it creates defensibility and survival and. Speaker 1 And I think it's necessary. I think the other, the other thing I would, I would say that's different as a, you know, repeat founder is you. You definitely appreciate when the market, the timing, the market. I think at Coinbase we learned a lot about trying the idea at the right time. We attempted a lot of ideas again and again and when we nailed the timing, you know, we crushed it. And so I think that perseverance required to kind of consistently chip away at the problem while also taking into account like, you know, there has to be that market pull, Yeah, in order for it to be a success. You know everything from like you know we. I don't know if you remember the bundles experiment where? Speaker 2 Bundles. Speaker 1 Yeah. Or we had like, you know, a product at Coin Base where you could almost by like little groups or indexes of of assets really. Yeah, there's a lot of cool products that we tried, but I think the timing of it matters. And I think you could try those products again at a different time. They're still worse. Coinbase Wallet went through many iterations, Toshi. I remember our team, half of our team was building the Coinbase Wallet from Toshi migration. Speaker 2 Coinbase Commerce, This has some interesting seasons of life. Speaker 1 It's time it gets better and better and better and I and you just see how much of the market penetration that you're able to compound over time. So that's something I really appreciate. Yeah. The thing that keeps me up at night is we are experiencing absolute disruption right now with AII think, you know, as a company that's going vertically integrated in a payment, a very regulated industry. It does give me confidence that, you know, that is a Moat in a period where like AI is disrupting a lot of the, you know, foundational drivers of of fundamental value. But I think at the same time, you have to think about it from the perspective of AI probably will be the biggest consumer of these technologies irrespective of if they're regulated or not. So. Speaker 2 What does compliance look like compared to you know, we are going to probably continue to talk more and more about all of these ideas of a theme for the show is like ideas on the frontier. What is on the frontier and Agenta commerce is just going to with stable coins natively is going to become such a key theme of the show, I'm realizing. And compliance as we've talked about agents are extensions of people and there still needs to be high regard for compliance maybe even more of a regard in some ways guardrail wise over agents doing commerce. What what is the difference and maybe approach are the things that you're up at night thinking about when you compare a human based commerce experience that maybe is is more common in the last 10 years of fintech versus the next 10 years of agenta commerce? Like what is what is the compliance? It's how are you thinking about those two things differently? What are the maybe unique challenges that an agentic commerce world brings that you're excited to go solve? Like this is kind of the problem that will I think make a company like infinite win or not, you know this. How do you think about that? Speaker 1 It's a great question. I think we, we think about in a lot of different ways in the sense that I think any company that's becoming AI native is almost taking an AI first approach to, to solving the problem. So the one of the first things we've done, and we did this from day one is design our compliance review process around agents. So we've always had native integrations with all the top models that are actually looking and reviewing and, you know, also persists in memory our decisions on every onboarding or transaction monitoring case. Even though we rely often on other partners that make the final decision, we're still actively building our own competency around visibility of compliance data, our opinion on it and like how we can truly inform our AI to like help us streamline that process. The reason I bring this up, even though you asked about agentic commerce is what keeps me up at night is actually machine to machine transactions. So I actually think like like third party. Yeah, Yeah, I actually, I'm not, I'm not worried about like I, I don't think, I think we're going to 10X like the market for digital commerce for sure through ChatGPT and Claude. I think at the same time, the much bigger opportunities actually imagine an agent shopping with another agent and where, where does that agent live Even I think there's an argument and assumption that the foundation model providers would own all these agents. Speaker 2 What do you mean when you say live? Speaker 1 Like this agent has to like, you know, run somewhere and that environment has to constrain this agent's capabilities in some way. I think today we define a lot of like, you know, constraints around, OK, we can give the agent a wallet and we can have based keys and we can give it like limits. I think there's another world where the agent is almost just given its wallet and an environment with a lot of constraints upfront. I think like those two things, it wouldn't be crazy to me if if some of the biggest payment processors are hosting agents and like really a lot of the regulatory value, a lot of the the compounded commerce value comes from like deep integrations with like the payment stack. It's just something that keeps me up at night if if truly most payment will be between multiple agents, that I do think PS PS have a very important role in enabling agents to actually go to market and deliver value. And the alternative is also true. I think the foundation model companies may become payment companies in the process. Speaker 2 What do you mean Foundation model companies? Speaker 1 I think the commerce element of of like an anthropic or an opening eye is so important. Speaker 2 You think they will kind of be? Speaker 1 Involved. Yeah. I think there's a, there's a natural kind of market structure kind of forming where. Speaker 2 Any thoughts on X money? I've been kind of looking at what they're. Speaker 1 Doing I think Elon is a great leading indicator for how you know the macro or the market structure is evolving. And I think the fact that he has X AI and X money in the same world and you're solving a lot of problems, whether it's like the data training problem, like scale, you can tap into millions of people and give them capture their attention and help them train the AI, right? You can make that feel like you're part of the user experience. Just no reason why you clicking like isn't part of their AI training process. And so these RL environments that they're creating, you introduce money into the RL environment now becomes real. You're introducing a very, very real incentive both for the human that's coordinating those agents as well As for the agents themselves. Speaker 2 Yeah. And the human which is already identified, already onboarded already like put through some sort of like KYC process, which is so great. Speaker 1 But maybe that's where I started thinking about when you say the identity problem, I think everyone's talking about like, OK, cool. Like how do we get this like identity on chain or how do we get like something to the agent standard on identity or something to that effect? I do think you can solve a lot of these problems by thinking about basic roles and you know, kind of our back within enterprise. And that's where it excites me that payment processors may end up running the agent itself because why wouldn't you have like, you know, an agent scaffolding that just gives it a wallet, gives it virtual account, gives it cards like. Speaker 2 Yeah, because I don't know, I am interfacing with that, you know, I'm interfacing, I'm already there. I'm already, you know, talking with Anthropic or whatever. Like they're, they're going to be the ones in the position to issue the rain card or issue that like. Speaker 1 And I think someone I don't know who mentioned it today are are on Twitter, but Visa's going into this with the commerce, AI commerce kind of specific product that they have there's. Speaker 2 So many things to follow. It's such a wild like right? This week is like a wild week. Speaker 1 So excited for very stable conference. I think there's a ton of other events happening this week. Speaker 2 OK. So as as we close here, thank you so much for taking the time and energy. I know it's been a long day. Speaker 1 Thank you for having me. Speaker 2 Yeah, this has been a black. I don't know how long we've been rolling. It could be like 40 minutes or like 2 hours. I'm kind of at that thing where like time doesn't exist. What does something that I'm kind of thinking through, Anytime you're selling something or delivering a product, you want to hear pain. You want to know what pain sounds like what what is does the pain, What does pain sound like for infinite, and who is typically feeling that pain at the organizations you're selling to? Speaker 1 If you're listening to this and you're a fintech or a payment processor and you're struggling with your global payouts and FX, come talk to us. I think what we've found is. Dealing with the traditional solutions requires a ton of manual operations and if done right, a solution like Infinite not only streamlines the economics, the efficiency on cost and and speed, but it's also an internal process improvement. I think we can really cut down the programmatic element of stablecoin payments to something I think our customers have told us has been a huge, you know, boost. It's just like Fury, humans involved, you know, able to process more transactions with less people. Speaker 2 The kill. Thank for this. Yeah, we'll do this again. Man, so fun.