Why launch your own stablecoin? Why not just use t- you know, Circle's USDC, Tether's USDT? Doesn't having your own stablecoin, um, and using somebody else's or a, a variation of it, does it not achieve the same purpose in terms of cheaper costs, uh, 24/7, global? What does having your own stablecoin enable you to do?

That's a great question.

So let's just take a step back.

So we actually have been working with Circle for a long time, and we continue.

We'll work with Circle 'cause we use, uh, uh, we use your coin USDC for a lot of our products including how we settle with Treasury and we use other types of, uh, of, uh, uh, coins according that way.

The, our, our announcement at MGUSD may be the thing that's different about this versus what everyone else has done is that we actually launched it for own network, for our own benefit.

We didn't launch it specifically for institutions or trading.

Mm.

So what kind of changed internally for you guys that made you decide to go down this route?

Some of the things as we learned about applications is that it's very difficult to think about a stable point as just the asset.

And when you're done, all of a sudden you're going to get a bunch of people using it, especially outside of trading.

What we actually, when we took a step back, I think we had two big insights.

One is that the network is the computer, which what we mean by that is that when you think about the internet, a lot of the logic, the intelligence has moved up to the cloud.

And when people are trying to deliver services to the consumer, the applications have also moved up to the cloud.

But when you think about issuance, of currency and how we send money today, they're all kind of running through maybe unintelligent rails.

The technology is not

So in terms of cryptocurrency and the relationship there with MoneyGram, how is that looking?

So MoneyGram has been really embracing digital assets for the last five years.

And I would say the original start was in, I think that they did play a part in Bitcoin, but that was a while back.

Now, what we've really embraced and we went head deep into it is as we've been rebuilding our whole platform, we're actually building it on top of what I would call stablecoin rails.

So our whole business, from how we think about the back end of how we run treasury, of how we do fx trading how we pay our partners to how we want to get paid to how we actually conduct and help orchestrate a payment to a consumer to enable those payments will all be over time uh uh powered by stablecoin um and uh right now we use usdc uh you know there's always obviously we're always looking at where the space is evolving uh the exciting thing though is we've really started embracing and leaning into stablecoin in a big way and right now um this year we're right now on track to do over a billion dollars of uh float that's just passing through our back-end treasury Our goal would be, since we have 50 million customers and we have an important time on an annual basis, about $200 billion of float, is to move all that onto stables and to run it all digitally over time.

And the reason is that there are real... big problems that digital assets and currency specifically solve for us may it be settlement time in terms of getting paid quicker not having to do any pre-funding or forecasting as well as it's just much more cost effective and so for us what we see is that we can settle over the weekends even when the banks are closed which ultimately all leads to the fact that we can offer a lower cost to our customers as a result of running it more efficiently.

And so how do you view these projects as competitors or do you view them more as, you know, they can help build up MoneyGram and take that and help make MoneyGram better in this industry?

It's funny you ask that.