Pamela Draper & Paul Twigg on AI, Stablecoins, APIs, Modern Banking & Payment Rails (Part 1)

Wow, yeah, that sounds great, right? So, okay, so, you know, you're like shake and bake, both of you guys working together, figuring stuff out, right? That's awesome.

So, let's see.

So, I mean, how about a little bit deeper now on the digital commerce group? Like, what's going on there? And you're more...

Well, from a connection into the United States, you're more in the West Coast side, right? I'd assume.

But I don't know if you go down to like that Silicon Valley area.

How does, you know, Digital Commerce Group and you probably have multiple business units going on there, too.

How does that all fit together in in kind of the ecosystem in Canada? But then also, does it connect it a lot or a little bit into the United States also?

Yeah, so we have a Schedule 1 banking license in Canada.

So that's the same license as a BMO or an RBC, which you may be familiar with.

But we use it very differently.

So we use it purely to facilitate online payments.

So what we've done at Digital Commerce Group across our companies is we provide a suite of payments APIs and related technology to allow our corporate clients to to move money online faster, more efficiently and more securely.

So practically what this means is we provide electronic connectivity to all the major Canadian banking payments rails, and we allow companies to issue Visa and MasterCard cards, as well as process card transactions.

Our operations are pretty much 100% in Canada with that connectivity built into the Canadian rails.

We don't have the US rails built out at this time, but like I said, we do have the credit card piece built out.

So there are elements of that can move money cross borders, but right now the business is almost 100% focused on Canada.

Now, are you getting into any kind of stable coin or anything like that yet or not yet?

Paul and I have talked about that.

The regulation in Canada, as well as it is in the US, is evolving on the stablecoin piece.

So we haven't done anything yet, but certainly monitoring where that's going and looking for probably more regulatory clarity with respect to stablecoins before we would do something in-house.

I don't know, Paul, if you have any thoughts.

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there? Yeah, it's something that we're looking at.

I think one of the advantages that we'll get as a stable coin becomes, no pun intended, a stable part of the economy, is being able to work with a single type of currency anywhere in the world.

So now, anytime we go to any country and want to spend local currency, we're always dealing with FX.