Hey @BillHarris__ 😊👋
1/ Firstly, congrats on the amazing accomplishments! CEO of PayPal AND Intuit, I am sure that I've got a huge amount of things I can learn from you and hope that I can lead our teams to find success that you've helped others find. Genuine crusher!
But...
1/ Firstly, congrats on the amazing accomplishments! CEO of PayPal AND Intuit, I am sure that I've got a huge amount of things I can learn from you and hope that I can lead our teams to find success that you've helped others find. Genuine crusher!
But...
2/ I caught your interview yesterday on @CNBCFastMoney and it was really interesting to watch. Bitcoin not having value and the current networks needing to be faster to solve the same problem is really surface level stuff. My name is Michael and I'm the CEO at Wyre. 😊
3/ Among other use cases... Our partners use Wyre to build remittance applications. They send us local currency, and we pay out fiat same day (6 hour delivery, average can be ~90 minutes give or take). They never see or hear about Bitcoin, but it's the engine room underneath
4/ everything. They give us USD and then they fire over requests through the API about the disbursement (e.g. a payroll company with 500 people getting paid into Euro SEPA bank accounts). This service is offered by PayPal and others. Our pricing starts as Mid-Market-Rate + 0.75%
5/ and tiered lower for volume etc... So we're pricing at 0.75%, with MMR, and same day delivery. Nothing incredibly new here. However, the irony is that outside of compliance (We've now got someone that was at PayPal/Xoom btw!) not one of our team has any experience in
6/ payments or international remittance. What we do have though is an incredibly large interest in Bitcoin.
Using the Bitcoin infrastructure, our payment flow looks like this... USD buys BTC --> transfers to Euro BTC Exchange partner --> Converts BTC to EUR --> Paid to our bank
Using the Bitcoin infrastructure, our payment flow looks like this... USD buys BTC --> transfers to Euro BTC Exchange partner --> Converts BTC to EUR --> Paid to our bank
7/ --> We disburse using our partner. That whole process takes ~1 hour, depending on the partner etc... But what is now apparent to you is that we don't have any working capital (well we do, but it's 90% that of a traditional cross-border payments company). Because we have an
8/ infra built on an extremely deep liquidity pool (Bitcoin) it means that the double conversions (USD to BTC, then BTC to EUR) that create this synthetic USD/EUR rate is still a profitable exercise, even though our fees are half of the closest competitor AND we're executing
9/ two conversions. The key thing with cross-border payments is working capital. Working capital is the band-aid for businesses to hold floats in the foreign geography because SWIFT or the provider is actually unable to transfer the value in real time. So to make the UX
10/ more competitive in the incumbents space, they hold reserves in the foreign geography because otherwise the flight time (using traditional payment rails) means customers would be waiting longer than the overly demanding modern customer is used to (instant/now/cheap/kthxbye)
11/ A huge barrier to entry for startups in the cross-border space is that they're not doing any volume, so the rates they get aren't that sexy until they get to scale and can negotiate with the FX provider. So they use other services that have proven volume to the bank and now
12/ resell that awesome rate (with a moderate and fair markup) to them. Which is great! But they've still got working capital overheads. A team that is doing USD to MXN might have raised $5M in VC financing, and if they're doing $3M per day in payments to Mexico then they want
13/ their $3M equivalent in float on the otherside. Now if I came along and told them I am a giant company outsourcing some dev work Europe and I do (example for examples sake) $10M per day... They're thrilled to get my business, but to have any similar SLA's they would now
14/ need to figure out where they get the float from in order to service this customer. Float and treasury management is obviously always going to be part of it... But imagine substituting out the above example, and running that over Bitcoin? Getting a $10M wire into their
15/ bank each day, then they take that and convert it over the day into Bitcoin, and transfer it to their exchange partner in the EU and liquidate/payout to bank. Right now, if you did that in blocks of $2M, you would get hit with ~0.5% in fees/slippage.
16/ Think of how drastic that becomes in terms of lowering the barrier to entry for teams globally to get started much faster? Or for businesses that have supply chain cycles (Solid video explainer I'll add below, highly recommend. Haha, it's me in the video, but it's helpful🙌).
17/ Nobody really talks about this enough and mostly because a lot of people don't really get a chance to experience this value prop. Our customers never had to see or learn about bitcoin because we buried it into the techstack, and just gave them a clean UI. Granted we still
Seems the rest didn't publish, but here fyi ☺️ 
