Patrick Keaney: WorldPay from FIS Crypto Business Dev Director

King Solomon of Genfinity interviews Patrick Keaney; Business Development Manager at Worldpay. Worldpay from FIS is a strategic partner for enterprise and global businesses to help navigate the global payments landscape.

Transcription

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
All righty, so we are going to get started, guys. And again, if you're joining for the first time, we do these Hedera Corner interviews in collaboration or partnership with HashPack bi-weekly. We've had some pretty amazing ones recently. I think today is right on par with that. Recently, we've interviewed Dr. Paolo Tasca, who's the head of the DLT Science Foundation, co-founder of Quant, and sits on the coin committee within Hedera. We also interviewed Sean from IBM. I think we've got Aberdeen coming up. FIS is a very interesting one to us because obviously sitting on the governing board within Hedera, but also the fact that we have Patrick Keaney, who is the director of Business Development for crypto and web3 within Worldpay from FIS. We've got Jesse up here from HashPort, and we also have Marc up here from HashPack. I always like to start with an introduction. So, Jesse or Patrick, we'll start with you. Can you maybe give an overview of yourself in traditional finance, what led you into Worldpay, and what led you into the crypto and web3 aspects within what Worldpay is facilitating as well? That'd be fantastic.

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, sure. Happy to be here. Thanks for everyone who made this happen, guys at HashPort and Infinity. My background, I studied international business and economics in undergrad and came to crypto in some indirect ways. But started my career focused on finance, but was strong in math and data. Did a couple of management tracks that combined some background I have in languages around Mandarin, Chinese, and was kind of focused on supply chain finance from the systems and math perspective. You know, it was interesting and kept me busy, but I'm not sure I liked the idea of where I could ultimately see myself. I didn't think I wanted to be a CFO at a company or something like that. Got paired with some commercial guys one time to explain how the pricing for our product at the time, which was tied to commodities, was an equation. And I realized that some of these guys didn't really understand math and basics too well. And that I actually wasn't too bad at presentation skills and sales and kind of looked at all right, how can I get into a commercial role that's complex and interesting? I know I'm probably not going to be good at selling cars or something like that, but if it involved some of my analytic background, maybe I could do this and started looking at the tech industry in San Francisco. Where could I go and got approached by a gentleman named Carl Haas who was positioning the payments industry in general at Worldpay and basically he explained to me how it all worked. It's a specialized industry, not widely understood. But it's basically about how do businesses that need to accept money from all over the world for any type of purchase do that and then on the other side, how do businesses that need to pay out money or send money do that all over the world? And I talked about crypto in one of our first conversations around Worldpay because he had already started the relationship that Worldpay had with Coinbase. This was around 2014, and at that time, it was kind of a serious problem and not necessarily a lot of ways to do Fiat to crypto on-ramps. Worldpay was one of the first exchanges with the ability to accept payments via card, which is how you purchase a digital asset. Yeah, Worldpay happens to be a very large business that services all kinds of industries and primarily is known as the payment gateway or a card acquirer for any type of service or goods or payouts for marketplaces or other use cases. But in the crypto industry, we're known as an on-ramp or off-ramp provider. I started off my role not solely focused on crypto because there really wasn't much to do. Touched a lot more of our high-risk businesses and got involved with money service businesses, some FX trading companies, and eventually had more to do when I took a new role servicing our current customer base for a crypto division, which primarily constitutes most of the major exchanges globally. What we call third-party on-ramp or off-ramps like the likes of MoonPay or Transact, and now increasingly, wallets. About a year ago, I took over our business development team for the Americas, and so anyone who would like to use additional services from Worldpay, my team helps out with facilitating that.

‍Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome, thank you so much, Patrick. And I have to give a huge shout-out to Akhredi from BCW Group. He helped make the connection to bring you into this. I know we were going back and forth for like three or four weeks trying to get in touch with each other to set up a precursory discussion about how we kind of run these. So, certainly, thank you to AJ from BCW for helping us put this together.Jesse, if you want to maybe give an introduction into yourself from HashPort, maybe a little bit of an overview of what HashPort facilitates from the interoperability and bridging aspect within the Hedera ecosystem as well, that'd be great.

Hashport - Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having us on again. So, I'm the Director of Business Development for HashPort. HashPort is an interoperability solution that connects Hedera to the broader DLT ecosystem. Currently, we are supporting 10 additional networks that HashPort connects to, so assets can move seamlessly between Hedera and those networks. We're leveraging a similar model that Hedera has in the sense of the validator swarm. We're using to secure the bridge, is comprised of world-leading organizations from within the Web 3 space. As a result, we're creating a heightened level of functional trust amongst that group and for the ecosystem to be able to move assets. Worldpay from FIS is one of our validators in the swarm, and so happy to be here today. Won't take up too much time with the intro, but would love to get into the questions.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome. And Marc from HashPack, you want to tell us a little bit about what, I think, most people probably know, but what HashPack represents within the Hedera ecosystem as well would be great.

HashPack Wallet - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Certainly. So, yeah, very happy to be here. So, I'm Marc. I'm the Director of Operations here at HashPack. We're the leading wallet in the Hedera system, with the vast majority of the monthly active users in the network. We're constantly looking at ways to decrease the bar in terms of getting people involved in Web 3 in a way that is not very complicated. We're constantly working on that. Just recently, we introduced the NFT marketplace inside the wallet, which once again just aims at reducing that kind of friction. But yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation and learning more about everything that you guys said at the Worldpay and FIS are working on, and also more updates from HashPort. But yeah, so very, very excited. Awesome.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
After the introductory aspect, I always like to get into recent milestones and achievements within let's say what Worldpay from FIS is facilitating, and also HashPort as well. So Patrick, if you can think of anything that stands out, maybe over the past couple of months or even more recently, I mean, I know there's pretty big news coming out with GTCR, which we'll get into after this, but just from the crypto and web3 aspect, development, onboarding, integration, innovation, whatever it may be, what are some of the most interesting things that either Worldpay or FIS proper have done recently that really pique your interest personally?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, good question. We've done a lot of things. I'll highlight two, because they're probably going to be relevant to the discussion around Hedera and some of the interesting things we're doing there. One, because it's so immediate. One thing that Worldpay has done to modify our existing products is, you know, typically what we do when we're talking about an on-ramp solution is, if somebody wanted to purchase a digital asset, somebody wants to purchase cryptocurrency, we would somehow take fiat from them, whether it was a card or bank transfer or other payment method, and give that fiat to whoever is going to provision the digital asset, and they would go ahead and do that. What we found is that there was a lot of use cases where, instead of giving those businesses or merchants, as we call them, fiat, they were interested in receiving stablecoin, primarily USDC. So one thing that we've done last year is, instead of settling our customers' fiat, we've come up with a way, through partnership with Circle and with Fireblocks, to be able to take fiat from a customer, give that to Circle, allow them to mint USDC, and then transfer it to an exchange, for example, a wallet within the Circle environment. So that's something that we piloted about a year ago, and I guess something more recently that's interesting is there's a need for a lot of anyone we work with to be able to get fiat or USDC as soon as possible. Typically, there is a delay between the time that somebody purchases a cryptocurrency and when the business ultimately gets the fiat because of the way that the modern banking system works. And so we have developed something called T+0 settlement, basically same-day settlement, not necessarily instant. Basically, what Worldpay is doing is, however somebody wants to purchase, let's say, for example, with a card, they can make that transaction, and we can settle the business same day by offering a short-term loan based on the receipt of that fiat, which may come in a day later. So I know I got into payments pretty deep, but yeah, those are things that I think we'd probably be wanting to celebrate in the near term here.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Yeah, and kind of as like a little bit of a sidebar, I mean, you guys deal with obviously a lot of different entities. If you pay attention to some of the real big hitters, either from banking or from derivatives like DTCC and stuff like that, there is kind of this pivot in the traditional sector from let's say T+2 to T+1 over the next couple of years. And you guys are stating obviously not real-time gross settlement with T+0, but T+0 being same day. Do you think that shift is just a matter of when, not if, where all of these institutions move towards T-plus and then eventually atomic settlement, real-time gross settlement type aspects? And I guess, if that's the case, how far off do you think some of the real big, like, on the back-end players, like the infrastructure players, are from actually getting to that point?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
I mean, I think there's drive from a number of different angles to be able to have something like real-time payments, whether it's in near-real-time, same-day, it just makes so much practical sense. That being said, payments is a pretty fractured environment. There are so many different methods, so many different jurisdictions. A lot of these payment methods that can drive towards real-time settlements need a collaboration of regulatory or government agencies to push it, as well as banks to be able to facilitate it. So yeah, the way we look at it is, okay, when that happens, we're going to be ready, and we're going to enable it, we're going to encourage it from an advocacy perspective. In the interim, when that's not available, we're going to figure out other ways that we can do it. Right now, the Band-Aid, so to speak, is how do we just give somebody against future receipts, so they can have their money today and not have 24 hours or 48 hours of liability? Why do they not freeze their users' access until they actually get money in the bank? Because that's just not a really user-friendly experience. I mean, some of the wallets do that, some exchanges do that, but most of them really don't want to if they can avoid it.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Jesse from HashPort, any recent milestones and achievements that you're really kind of excited about within what you guys are facilitating with kind of bridging over within the Hedera ecosystem?

Hashport - Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
Yeah, I mean, I think the future is all about connectivity. So, in that vein, since the beginning of the year, we've added six new networks to the platform that we're supporting. Both recently, we just announced the integrations of Moonbeam and Aurora. We'll probably have several more in the short term that we'll be announcing. There's a few more EVMs and Roll-Ups that we would like to connect with. I mean, there's quite a few things that we're building all the time, just iterating on the offering that we're providing to the community. There's fully searchable transaction history now chronologically on the platform if you go to the metrics page, which our Tech Team just knocked out of the park with, and shout out to them. So, we just keep trying to innovate. Obviously, a lot of other items on the wish list that we're working towards, and so, as things progress, we hope to have many more exciting announcements for the community.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
And Marc, real quick, if you want to touch base on the integration with, I know it's a rebrand but it was sentient, right? The marketplace and the NFT marketplace that is now accessible directly through the HashPort wallet. I mean, it's been really amazing to see the journey of HashPort that really cares about the UX/UI, the user experience from the user standpoint. Maybe just briefly, if you want to talk about maybe that relationship developing and why you guys decided to go live with it and what that represents for HashPort wallet users.

HashPack Wallet - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Yeah, of course. We've been working with Sentient for a number of months, and all the other marketplaces, and then over the past, let's say, a month, month and a half or so, Sam from Sentient came to us and said, "Hey, what do you think about this?" And then we started looking into it, and we're like, "Well, this would be a very good place where people can, you know, when they download their wallets, they can easily access the NFT scene in the ecosystem." So we launched it just a couple of days ago. It's been getting a lot of traction, seeing some of the data in terms of the sales and some of the feedback from the community has been awesome, just because, again, it really makes it that much simpler for them, and it's just going to be continuously, you know, we're going to be continuously iterating to make that process a lot better and a lot smoother, and really just beefing up even more in terms of the user experience so it's even more seamless. Yeah, I mean, there are many more things coming, but that's just the brief overview.

‍Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Thanks Marc. And Patrick, more recently, I'm sure you knew this was going to be a question I asked, FIS selling a majority of stake of Worldpay to GTCR. I believe from what I was thinking, it was like 55%. Maybe touch base, has that been confirmed? What does that do for Worldpay, and Worldpay obviously being kind of a subsidiary of FIS? What does that do to any of the business aspects you guys are currently facilitating? Does that change your role as the director for business development within crypto and web3? Maybe just some of your thoughts around that acquisition from GTCR of a pretty large portion of the equity of Worldpay.‍

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, good question. So it's been announced, and yeah, I was confirmed via email, I guess, as well, but it seems like that's what's going forward. To back it up, Worldpay operates as a standalone business inside of FIS already. We do have some shared services, but essentially it's just one of three business units inside FIS. They acquired us in 2019, and there was an announcement in January of this year that some of our investors and our board had decided that we'd actually be better off to be spun off alone than to operate underneath FIS. So they announced that to the market that Worldpay was going to become a standalone company, but be publicly traded again. That being said, we knew that offers may come in, but market conditions may have made that difficult. M&A activity is down, and it was hard to know how much to pay for these types of businesses because you don't really have any comparable acquisitions. Eventually, this private equity firm, GTCR, came in. I was aware of them. They're pretty big and have a good track record. I'm excited about the spin-off mainly because Worldpay and FIS kind of have different capital allocation needs. In terms of growth, we often buy other companies for new product launches, and we were very different in terms of that structure. So what I would see is, hopefully, more room for new product releases through acquisition or build. The private equity firm has already announced that, in terms of their press release, they're going to set aside one and a half billion dollars for us to make acquisitions. I know we've been thinking about all types of things we'd like to do, but I'm excited for it. There's a lot of obligations when you're a publicly traded company, from a regulatory perspective or risk perspective, and while I don't really know what we're going to do, I presume that we're going to be able to take a little bit more risk. Encouragingly, for me specifically, I've been told that there's really no change to our structure. Crypto was split out into its own division at Worldpay. It's been prioritized even in a bear market, and I know we've kind of doubled down on some of the capex spend that we've allocated for the business. I don't really see that changing. Yeah, I'm excited about it.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome, and I mean, we all know, at least from within the Hedera community, obviously Fidelity Information Services sitting on the governing board within Hedera. FIS also having, I mean, it's kind of topical obviously with the XRP news today, there's been Ripple integrations years ago, I think I want to say five, six years ago, something like that. How in the know or in conversations is Worldpay, being a standalone aspect? We know there are connections with HashPort. I mean, do you know of any proof-of-concepts that are going on behind the scenes? I know there are probably NDAs and stuff like that in place, but is there real utilization of the technology going on with FIS? Is it kind of just testing to figure out what works for clients? Because a lot of it's user experience. Maybe just touch base on your thoughts around FIS sitting on the board of Hedera.

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Sure, yeah. FIS and Worldpay are members of a number of trade organizations. We do that for a lot of different reasons. You know, we are really focused on thought leadership and keeping our eye on what's going on in emerging markets, crypto specifically. So I think this started around 2018-2019 in terms of us joining the Board of Governors. I don't know all the details of how Hedera operates, but my understanding is that that's kind of more like an oversight board. Hedera has its own actual board of directors. We are working a proof of concept, fairly interesting, and it relates to the product that I was describing earlier around the ability to settle USDC to exchanges, wallets, or other crypto web3 businesses that would like to receive USDC as opposed to fiat. So I kind of guess the macro problem there was, all right, there's no real proof of reserve for stablecoins in general. Like, you know, solving the problem of what is backing up this stablecoin. So yeah, Circle does audits periodically. They test, and you have a pretty good insight into what their stablecoins are backed up in terms of reserves. But you know, if we're saying for a WorldPay customer, for example, they may want to say, for their own audit purposes or for their own reporting and reconciliation, is this something just like WorldPay and Circle cooking up and saying, "Here's your stablecoin," or do we really take that money that we got from them or from their customer, move that into a Circle account USDC, so, what we're doing is working with Hedera and the wider group to basically do a proof of concept for Proof of Reserves and put that on the Hedera network. Now, what that really means is it's pretty easy to demonstrate when you generate a USDC coin, but what we had to figure out is how do we prove that those payment files from the series of banks, from Worldpay, from the payment method themselves, actually move into Circle and ultimately get minted. We use what's called an oracle. I believe we chose Hashport Pro Axiom as our Oracle choice, and that essentially is just a way of automating the payment files and saying that, indeed, it is one for one, this amount of Fiat and this amount of USDC. Not sure if I revealed things that I shouldn't have. I kind of freelance to go talk about it.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
So, is that from Jesse's standpoint, is that like leveraging Hedera's consensus service and then maybe portions of the file service that we don't see a lot, we haven't seen a lot of uptick in that yet? Or maybe Jesse, if you could maybe touch on what that might represent.

Hashport - Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
Yeah, so the Axiom Oracle service is going to basically harness HashPort's existing validator swarm. All of the validators that we currently have for HashPort for the bridge as a separate standalone service are basically going to act as oracles. And as a result, we're going to be able to leverage HCS and enable sort of proof of reserve for the specific use case that Patrick's been speaking to, as well as several other enterprise use cases that we're looking to build out currently.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome. Patrick, I know you guys have been talking quite a bit about the stablecoin aspects. You know, there's probably a lot of demand from your clients to leverage stablecoins. I guess the question that I have is, is that kind of in part the stability but also, in part, just slowly dipping their toes into the water aspect of digital assets, crypto? Just to make sure that they have a seat at the table for when we have some sort of regulatory clarity, whatever it may be. Or maybe, can you touch base a little bit on how you see this market evolving and developing over time for what your clients may or may not want to use in the future?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
I think most of the interest for stablecoin settlement has come from crypto web3 businesses, and I think there are just operational efficiencies, cost efficiencies. They're already taking fiat and turning it into USDC or another stablecoin, USDT. And you know, I think Circle wants to promote the provision of USDC, so they're out there working with fintech companies, payment service providers like WorldPay, and they're also promoting it as well. But yeah, that seems to be the real driver now. Now, we are seeing some kind of non-cryptonative businesses express interest as well, and I think it's for the same reasons – it's operational efficiencies, it's cost efficiencies, it's concerns around, you know, will I be banked in this country or this jurisdiction? What's a way to limit that risk?

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Still good? Yeah, okay, cool. On top of the WorldPay and HashPort aspects, how you guys find synergy and what you're doing, you know, and working together. I also always find it interesting and I don't know if it's kind of the same story, like we know that there are multiple governing board members within Hedera, and we also know that FIS and Eftpos have a relationship. For the audience down there that if you're not aware, Eftpos is also a governing board member within Hedera. There was a proof of concept for micropayments that went on, I want to say maybe 2020 timeframe. And then Aftpos joined the governing board. Eftpos is essentially the ACH system of all of Australia, New Zealand. I do think that the Eftpos relationship within Hedera proper is kind of the Australian aspect within the ACH system. But is it a similar story? Does FIS and WorldPay, do you guys collaborate with any other governing board members and understand that you have that corresponding relationship with Aftpos as well? Or are there conversations there about how to leverage the technology, and is that kind of an easy aspect to talk about being that both sit on the governing board? If you could talk about collaboration across different companies, whether they be governing board members or not, and how everybody's trying to come together to harness the power of web3 and crypto, that'd be great.

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, I mean, at a high level, definitely, that's a forum to be able to collaborate on these issues. I know that interesting discussions like that happen outside of the specific committees and the obligations of the chairs and the board members. Things like that, companies like Eftpos or organizations like Eftpos, we already have a relationship with, right? Like, we are already connected to our payment gateway. Obviously, what they were doing around micropayments was interesting to us. We collaborate when we have similar initiatives, which we do with a lot of the members of the Board of Governors. I don't have anything specific in terms of use cases there. We're not working directly with Eftpos on their POC, but you know, we'd love to see what they're up to, and we already have a commercial partnership with them.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome. And I know that to give the audience down there again, Patrick is Director of Business Development within Worldpay from FIS for crypto and web3. If you guys are just joining right now, I kind of do want to get, being that you're working within the Americas at this point in time, one of the things, at least in North America or the United States, in particular, is the fact that we always talk about regulation versus innovation. Is the United States going to be able to remain competitive? And I will bring it up briefly because it's obviously a gigantic announcement that just came out today, but I guess I'll just read through Stuart Alderoty's post, who's Chief Legal at Ripple, so that you, because you mentioned Patrick that you kind of briefly saw it. But I guess I'll give a quick rundown. XRP not a security as a matter of law. Sales on exchanges are not securities. Sales by executives are not securities. Other XRP distributions to developers, to charities, to employees are not securities. The only thing that the court found constitutes an investment contract are past direct XRP sales to institutional clients. Looks like there's going to be further court proceedings only on those institutional sales per the court's order. And kind of wrapping that all up, I know that's a lot to kind of digest because everybody across the entire space has been watching this court case unfold for the past few years. What are your thoughts around at least some sort of clarity with one asset like, and understanding that now that that's set in and as precedent, that probably represents a massive, at least a little bit of maybe the skies going from gray to blue with what could potentially come about in the United States? And do you see clients from Worldpay or FIS? Do you guys have to be especially careful when operating out of the United States proper for how you potentially leverage crypto because of all the uncertainty that's occurred thus far?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Well, yeah, I mean, if the implications here are that the other cryptocurrencies outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum are indeed not securities, that sounds great to me. But yeah, as I said, I was in some meetings earlier, I saw and I scanned through a series of text groups, one of which had some of our lawyers on there that gave some of their feedback, which I'm sure they wouldn't be happy for me to share. But yeah, I mean, the regulatory environment in the United States is really tough. Some of our customers are being sued by the SEC, right? So yeah, it's tough, and we'd rather that not be the case for reasons of our – we'd like to grow the relationship with our customers, but like, you know, I think it's bad for the industry in general, I think it's bad for the broader US economy if we don't allow for the United States to be a place where crypto innovation, web3 innovation continues. And you know, one of the other challenges really a little bit more de facto regulatory action relating to banks – it's just particularly difficult for crypto web3 businesses to get corporate retail banking services, and that's deeply concerning for me and something that we navigate in a very limited practical sense because we just need to remit funds to our customers' bank accounts, but if they don't have one, we can't really work with them. And so we do a lot in terms of our partner networks, and you know, people come to us constantly with our latest list of recommendations of how they can get banked and I wish that wasn't the case. I hope there's a lot more clarity with some of the court action going forward that limits some of the risk policies you see across the U.S. banking sector.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
One of the things that you said earlier on, Patrick, that I found kind of interesting was you mentioned that Worldpay, and I'm assuming FIS as well, is kind of a byproduct. Like, Worldpay has kept a priority on innovating within the crypto landscape even throughout the bear market. So, I wanted to kind of ask you about the Enterprise growth and adoption. We talk about market cycles, obviously, but from the institutional purview, from what Worldpay is doing with payments, settlements, card issuance, has there been a slowdown with adopting and trying to figure out how to leverage the technology, or has it been – and I guess have you seen that across the board, like, is it still going on, or are people still trying to innovate throughout even the cycle? You mentioned a priority for Worldpay proper, but maybe if you know because I'm sure you guys deal with multiple entities as well, if you could give your thoughts around the adoption of where we were at, maybe the last bear market versus where we're at now and how you maybe expect that to continue down the pike.

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, so obviously, there's a slowdown in the market, and there's a slowdown in development. I'm under the view that, you know, I guess what Andreessen Horowitz puts this out pretty quick, you know, pretty eloquently in some of their marketing reporting – this, what is it, the state of crypto in 2023 – but like, you know, this space operates in boom-bust cycles, and price is a leading indicator of innovation. So, sure, we're seeing, you know, some businesses struggle, some limited innovation at the same time. From some of the stuff that we do in the glory days, you know, of market highs, it was easy to get money into the exchanges, and they had to scrutinize a little bit less how efficient, how costly getting fiat into crypto needed to be, whereas now, prices are down, they need to be a lot more focused on efficiency, it costs, so there are pros and cons of these boom-bust cycles, and it is unfortunate to see, you know, businesses go down or people get laid off. But yeah, we're committed to the long term. You know, we see this industry continuing to grow, and so, you know, we haven't stopped our investment as we've entered a bear market over the last year or so.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Thank you so much. And I know you mentioned, so, different integrations within blockchain and DLT. You had mentioned obviously collaborations and a proof of concept within Hedera as well, which was really interesting. Other networks and use cases. I mean, let me try to phrase this in the right way because you mentioned kind of integrating within Fireblocks, and Fireblocks has tons and tons and tons of networks that you can reach out and touch base into. How many, I guess the question I would have is, how many different ecosystems, DLT ecosystems, or you guys kind of working with right now in a way that you can say it? And then, how do these integrations with things like Fireblocks, how do you see them going down the pike? Is it going to be more of, like, your customers are going to be able to choose which assets they want to leverage within Worldpay's platforms? Or maybe just give your thoughts on that kind of overarching, I guess, topic.

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, so within Worldpay, not too many more direct connections to networks that I can speak specifically about. But in terms of our product releases, we're going to continue to focus on stablecoins just because of the demand and practical use cases that we see. So the next one we'll do is, alright, we want to pay out in stablecoins, right? That one has different efficiency use cases, but it's more about, you know, okay, somebody wants to receive USDC and not a more volatile currency like a contractor or something like that. Yeah, I think that's kind of all I would say around the Worldpay side of things in terms of direct connection with networks. But yeah, we do have a strong relationship with Fireblocks. There could be things that we do around wallets as a service. There could be a number of things we could do if we acquire a business, and I'm excited to kind of see where that goes. Obviously, we're in a moment of change in terms of our product roadmap due to this acquisition that was announced last week. And so maybe a lot of the things we're planning have to be revalidated and looked at on the parent company or current parent company side of things. They're also doing some interesting things around the CBDC lab that they have with FIS. So, you know, I don't know all the specifics of that group because it does sit in another part of the business, but as I understand it, they are working in collaboration with a number of banks globally, working on specific proof of concepts around CBDC with specific governments around the world, mainly around some of the infrastructure components of how those would be deployed.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
And I want to ask Jesse from Hashgraph a similar question. You mentioned, I think you mentioned 10 ecosystem integrations right now that can bridge back and forth between Hedera and their ecosystems. How many more, I guess, I am not going to ask you to disclose any alpha or anything, Jesse, but how many more are you guys looking at right now, like in the near term? And then what does that look like over time, let's say moving out of 2023?

Hashport - Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
Yeah, great question. I mean, further additions could be anywhere up to two, three by the year's end, probably. No promises there, but that's sort of what we're looking at. As well, you know, it really depends on, again, over time. I think, you know, on a long enough time trajectory, you're looking at integrating everywhere that there's value or that the market would like to go in the direction of and have a connection to, right? I mean, what is happening right now in Web3 is no different than what has happened in Web2 over the last 40 plus years, I guess you could say, in terms of really working out the fabric of the internet. And it's no different. It's just we need to go through the painstaking process of developing standards and relays that will allow us to seamlessly communicate with all of these decentralized networks. Now, obviously, you know, just like Web2 and traditional businesses, there's going to be a lot that likely don't survive for the long term. But I mean, ultimately, we're going to end up with a landscape and infrastructure that looks very similar to the integrations that have been made in Web2, only now there's going to be, you know, payments and trust that has been layered over top of all of that. So I just think it's a process much the same way that we're seeing play out right now with this recent court ruling with XRP. I think it just takes time for everything to be looked at in the proper lens. Obviously, you know, there's a lot of things that could have gone better in that situation, but I really do feel like over time, as things are assessed for what they actually are, Web3 is too valuable not to do things properly at the end of the day, and I think that's what we're starting to see play out here.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome, thank you so much, Jesse. I wanted to touch briefly on this as well, Patrick. So Worldpay and FIS put out this Global Payments Report 2023 that came out in May of this year. I always find these analyses very interesting, especially when we talk about one of the statistics in here, which is really eye-opening, and it's surrounding e-commerce. E-commerce transaction value. So I'm going to read just a quick blurb from the FIS Global Payments Report. "Further, our analysis finds that crypto was used for the equivalent of $11.6 billion at e-commerce merchants in 2022, which represents 0.19% of global e-commerce transaction value." I mean, that's a drop in the bucket, it sounds to me when I read some of these statistics, and not even putting my tinfoil hat on, just understanding as we continue to digitize and leverage the technology. I mean, I would love to hear your thoughts around that figure, $11.6 billion used in e-commerce, utilizing crypto, which is only 0.19%, is that a total drop in the bucket from your standpoint, or where do you see that potentially going, or just like your broad thoughts around some of the ways that crypto can be leveraged? And I'm sure a lot of the statistics are the same. How would you envision that kind of changing as adoption occurs within using the tech?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, well, thanks for mentioning that. That is like one of our most heavily downloaded marketing materials. It does have some interesting information. For anybody that hasn't downloaded, go check it out. Just type in Global Payments Report. And you can find it. But it kind of shows you how fractured the landscape is in terms of how people buy things all over the world, which, you know, as an American, we just think everything works with Apple Pay or your card or whatever. But you leave the US and it doesn't quite work like that. In terms of crypto as a payment method, one thing we're trying to do is figure out better ways to track how people actually buy with crypto. It is true that it's a small number, but it's grown quite a bit. When you hear 0.19%, it seems quite small, but the growth trajectory of people using crypto to buy over the last five years is pretty substantial. There are a lot of reasons why people don't use crypto to buy goods and services, though, mainly around the volatility of the asset. You don't know what your value will be today versus tomorrow for any particular good or service. And then there are more practical things like you would have to connect a wallet to do that. But people still choose to purchase using cryptocurrencies, mainly around luxury goods. I know Gucci, for whatever reason, turned on the ability to buy with Bitcoin and a series of other currencies and saw a massive uptick in their purchases. But it really is things that are high-ticket items, luxury goods, things like boats and cars. And it's probably no surprise to anyone on this call that when prices are high and return to some of the heydays a couple of years back, things like that are more common. I definitely see that number going up over time, and not necessarily only in correlation to market prices. I think there's room for stablecoins to get involved in that. And I didn't mention this, but pay by crypto is another feature that Worldpay is going to be launching as well. We've already found some partners to help facilitate that, but again, that's likely not going to go into the types of companies I'm focused on. I'm just focused on generally helping turn fiat into crypto with mostly exchanges, wallets, neobanks, and DeFi protocols. Whereas these things are likely to be used by Worldpay's customers, the likes of which would include Gucci and other high fashion brands, and potentially some real estate and hospitality industry providers.

‍Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
We've talked about stablecoins quite a bit, and I know looking at the statistics that come out of Hashgraph pretty consistently, the USD numbers far and beyond exceed a lot of the other assets that are coming over within and being leveraged within the Hedera ecosystem. So one of the questions that I always try to think in my own head is, why not just bridge an asset like USDC over into Hedera and then leverage the speed, efficiency, and cost aspects within Hedera as a whole and do it in batches rather than consistently on Ethereum where we all know that the gas fees tend to be higher, things like that? What's Worldpay's thoughts around that? Do you guys look at not only speed, efficiency, and cost, which I'm sure you do, but also even the ESG aspects, like sustainability within the networks you guys are trying to work with or leverage?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
In terms of the way Worldpay looks at it, it's more based on what our customers want and the most practical use cases we can provide. We're fairly agnostic in terms of any type of payment method or the way we look at crypto. We're here to facilitate that, whatever it is. But yeah, broadly, we do have corporate goals. Right now, under FISG, ESG is part of that. I don't know how far we look into our exposure to crypto in terms of its ESG impact, but I believe strongly that all those considerations are going to matter in terms of driving mass adoption. On the retail side, people want to not feel like they're negatively contributing to the environment. Social impact is also a reason why some of this innovation gets done. People want there's an ideological component to all of crypto and web 3, some of it which is on opposite sides with some of those ideological viewpoints. Yeah, and then good governance, right? It's going to be critical as well so we make good decisions and avoid fraudulent behaviour, that sort of thing. That's part of the drive of working with a company like Hedera, right? Because governance is such a big aspect of their business.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
You touched base briefly on this as well with real estate aspects and understanding what Worldpay facilitates from a card issuance standpoint. So I kind of want to ask about a little bit about maybe your thoughts. I don't know how much Worldpay is looking into this right now, I'm sure you guys are to an extent, but maybe even some of your thoughts around the convergence of technology. When we talk about, I think we've seen a shift especially over the past 12 to 18 months where it's not just crypto and DLT. We're starting to tie in things like artificial intelligence, and we're starting to tie in things like digital identity and zero-knowledge proofs and all those different aspects. Being that you guys do the card issuance aspects and you're dealing with crypto and all these things, is it important from Worldpay's purview to stay on top of what's going on with digital identity? And maybe even from your personal standpoint, how do you envision these things potentially tying together in the future?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, I'm sure there are so many different use cases because it seems too open-ended and vast in terms of how far-reaching things like AI and digital identity and biometric stuff could reach. I mean, I'd be speculating a little bit, but yes, it's true that we hire a lot of technologists, smart people, whose sole job is really just focusing on forward-looking trends and how they could impact our business and how we could deploy them into product offerings. From a digital identity perspective, one of the things that we care about and offer products in is around fraud solutions. So there's definitely going to be a component of that that may help us limit fraud. That's something that's being looked at in terms of innovation on risk-scoring tools that we offer in the market. So you know, we could see something there in terms of products in the future. Obviously, AI is one that probably has more eyeballs on it because it has taken the storm in terms of buzz and media coverage. A lot of VC dollars flowing into it. I live in the San Francisco Bay area, so I can't avoid any conversations around AI daily; they need to be had. Maybe some implications, right? I've heard a lot of interesting ideas around AI agents becoming standalone businesses, whether that's traditional payment methods or involving cryptocurrencies where you may be able to see more use cases with AI's utilizing digital assets. I don't know, you probably have to guide me on specific paths of where we want to speculate, but I find it all pretty interesting, and we're definitely focused on that as a business for sure here.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
And I think one more question, and then we'll kind of get into forward-looking statements and try to wrap it down, and I know how busy everybody is up here on the panel and certainly appreciate your time as well, Patrick, Jesse, and Marc. From the front-facing aspects of a company like Worldpay and FIS, as the payments landscape broadens and the technology gets utilized, what are your thoughts around the traditional media aspects for you guys to reach out and talk to the mass public, the mass populous out there about what you're doing with crypto? A lot of these media firms in crypto or in traditional landscapes right now are just going through the same cycle of doing the media aspects without necessarily knowing how to reach out and touch the community. Is that gonna be something that Worldpay and maybe even FIS try to get more involved with, like front-facing within the community, the wider Web 3 community or the wider mass populace, over time? And how do you maybe envision that coming down the pike?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
No, it's something that I advocate for internally. I would like for us to be more involved in the community. I would hope, and I'd be willing to bet that us becoming a private institution and not a publicly traded one would allow for more of that, and I'll just probably leave it at that. But you know, as a division inside Worldpay, there's definitely a strong desire for our crypto web3 division to be more active and to communicate more and to talk about more retail-focused issues, practical use cases that we're working on. When you're a giant corporation, though, it sometimes can be more difficult to get all the internal approvals needed to get to actual media outlets. So yeah, I hope to see more of that in the future.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome! I kind of do want to get forward-looking statements here and allow for all the panelists up here, which we certainly have a lot of gratitude towards, coming on within their extremely busy day. Marc, if you want to maybe give us a couple of minutes, like what are you most excited about in the near future from Hashgraph's purview or within the wider space, whatever it may be? And I want to allow all the panelists to give you know a couple of minutes to kind of close us out here.

HashPack Wallet - Marc Ugas - Director of Operations
Yeah, certainly. So really, some of the things that we're most focused on now is how do we become a catalyst for even more adoption? So we have a lot of things working that we're working on in the background to bring in a lot more people and also to enhance the user experience for new people coming to crypto. The other thing is one thing that we've been working together on, and it's still very important to us, is really trying to bridge all the different communities from different ecosystems together and getting to the common realization that we're on this together. In the end of the day, the case for XRP, for example, is a win-win for everyone in the web3/crypto ecosystem. So that's the main thing that we're really focusing on as we move forward. And yeah, I guess stay tuned; we have a lot more things coming. Really enjoyed the conversation and getting to hear some of the insights from Worldpay and FIS.

‍Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Jesse from Hashport, what are you looking forward to coming down the pike, whether it be the network, the ecosystem, or what you guys are doing within Hashport as well?

Hashport - Jesse Whiteside - Director of Business Development
Yeah, I mean, just continuing our mandate of making it as easy as possible for users, apps, or platforms and services to be able to interact with and connect with the Hedera network. I'm just looking forward to, there's a lot of building that always goes on whenever we're in the midst of a wavering market back and forth like this. Whenever things seem the bleakest, it always ends up being that we ultimately get some resolution as to the direction of things, and it always typically is trending up. I think there's a lot of work being done behind the scenes by a lot of talented people and platforms. Those that are building haven't gone anywhere, and they just continue to build, just like we are. So, I feel like, over time, over a long enough time period (and I don't know exactly when that'll be), but over the coming years, I think the space is going to begin to be accepted for the value that it can actually offer to, by and large, pretty much every sector there is in the world. Ultimately, I think ledgers are going to consume pretty much every industry there is. There's not going to be very much value that isn't tokenized or put somewhere where you can immutably track it and verify that data, as opposed to just taking someone's word for it. I think, when that day comes, it's going to be a whole new world, and really, everyone in this space right now, and all the builders here, hats off to you because that's what everyone's here for – to create a better future for everyone.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
Awesome, thank you so much, Jesse and Marc. Keep killing it. I know how hard you guys work. I've talked to you before, Jesse, and I talked to Marc almost every day of my life. Patrick, any forward-looking statements from you would be fantastic. What are you most excited about, looking forward to within the near future, from Worldpay or even from the wider web3 space, from a tech standpoint, adoption, campaign?

Worldpay - Patrick Keaney - Director of Business Development
Yeah, from the Worldpay perspective, I look forward to continuing our mission of solving for how do we get Fiat into crypto or crypto back out into Fiat, based on users' demand. Where we're going to be focused in the future is on the global aspect of Worldpay. We are a global company with entities and offices all over the world. Emerging markets are some of the places where it's still hardest to buy digital assets, so that's where a lot of my focus is, particularly Latin America since that's my remit. But other parts of the business are focused on Africa and parts of Asia. So that's what I'm most excited about, and that's what I'm going to be spending a lot of time on in the year ahead. In terms of the wider industry, I am excited to see the outcome of some of those regulatory actions, at least in the United States, with some of the SEC lawsuits. I'm interested to read more, a little bit of the analysis on what happened today with Ripple, to get a little more detail there. Yeah, I hope to get some clarity here, at least from a U.S perspective, on how businesses can operate.

Genfinity - King Solomon - Founder & CEO
I wanted to give a huge shout-out again to Accredi, AJ from BCW, for helping us to get Patrick Keaney on today. Patrick is Global Business Development for Crypto and Web3 at Worldpay from FIS. And Jesse from Hashport and Marc from Hashpack, just thank you to all the panelists that were up here today. Hopefully, for the community down there, we provided some value and education within this space. It was really great to be able to talk to you for the first time in a spaces, Patrick, and hopefully, we get to do it again in the future. Thank you so much to everybody up here for allocating a little bit of time out of their massively busy days. Really appreciate it, guys. Thank you all. Thanks, guys. Bye.