This past July,  the United States passed the GENIUS Act—the first comprehensive federal law to regulate stablecoins, bringing some clarity to a murky patchwork of oversight.

The new law requires any issuer of stablecoins—digital assets designed to be as steady as the dollar—to be federally licensed, back every coin one-to-one with high-quality reserves, and comply with the Bank Secrecy Act’s anti-money laundering rules. For the first time, only banks, credit unions, and select federally-approved firms can issue stablecoins at scale, a move that regulators hope will spark trust and broader adoption—while protecting consumers and the wider financial system.

With partnerships being announced daily and tech providers ready to assist banks in launching compliant solutions, traditional financial institutions are finding themselves at the center of the high-stakes race to modernize digital cash. We are clearly at a stablecoin inflection point. 

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan and Ashley Lannquist welcome Scott Southall, Head of BaaS, and Will Artingstall, Head of Digital Assets Payments and e-Commerce at Citi, to dig into what these changes mean for the future of banking, how U.S. institutions are mobilizing behind digital dollars, why clients are asking about new forms of money, and what’s next as stablecoins potentially go mainstream in the American financial system.

 

 

 

Yvette Bohanan: Hello, I’m Yvette Bohanan, a partner at Glenbrook and your host for this episode of Payments on Fire.

This past July, the United States passed the Genius Act, the first comprehensive federal law to regulate stablecoins, bringing some clarity to a murky patchwork of oversight. The new law requires any issuer of stablecoins to be federally licensed, back every coin one-to-one with high quality reserves, and comply with the Bank Secrecy Act’s anti-money laundering rules. For the first time, only banks, credit unions, and select federally approved firms can issue stablecoins at scale. This is a move that regulators hope will spark trust in broader adoption while protecting consumers and the wider financial system.

Banks are responding in kind. This summer, Bank of America confirmed its developing its own stablecoin while JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and others are investigating how blockchain-based dollars can streamline payments and settlements for their global clients. Citibank’s CEO, Jane Frazier, confirmed in a recent earnings call that Citi is looking at the issuance of a stablecoin with the bank’s current focus on tokenized deposits and advancing digital asset capabilities for clients. She highlighted these steps as part of Citi’s mission to modernize internal processes, open new revenue channels, and deliver seamless cross-border, always-on financial solutions, positioning the bank as a pioneering force in the next phase of digital finance.

With partnerships being announced daily and tech providers lining up to assist banks in launching compliance solutions, traditional financial institutions are finding themselves at the center of a high stakes race to modernize cash. We are clearly at a stablecoin inflection point.

In this episode, we’re digging into what these changes mean for the future of banking and how US institutions are mobilizing behind digital dollars and why clients are asking about these new forms of money and what’s next as stablecoins potentially go mainstream in the American financial system.

Joining me for this episode is someone on the Glenbrook team who definitely knows a thing or two about this topic, Ashley Lannquist. Ashley, welcome back to Payments on Fire.

Ashley Lannquist: Thanks, looking forward to the conversation, Yvette.

Yvette Bohanan: Looking forward to this conversation and I think we just can’t stop talking about this. It may surpass tokenization as a hot topic this year.

And then for this episode, we are excited to sit down with Scott Southall, Head of Banking as a Service, and Will Artingstall, Head of Digital Assets, Payments and E-commerce at Citi.

My hope is that we get to shed some light on the rise of stablecoins, digital assets, and how banks think about innovating in these new spaces. Gentlemen, welcome to Payments on Fire.

Scott Southall: Thanks for having us.

William Artingstall: Yeah, thanks. Looking forward to the conversation.

Yvette Bohanan: We have been anticipating this for some time, and I think the dates were shifting a little bit and the longer it’s gone out, the more interesting the topic has become. So, hopefully our timing is spot on with this one. We always like to start, as you both know, talking a little about your career journey and can you share a little bit about how you landed in these very dynamic and fascinating roles at the intersection of banking, payments, and tech in this moment in time.

Scott Southall: Sure. I actually started my career as a management consultant focused on strategy and technology. And I think it’s kind of the perfect career that you start off when you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up. So I did that for about 15 years, and then at one point I got recruited by one of the Australian banks to come run their transactional banking business and then ran a bunch of their consumer and business banking businesses as well.

And that kind of ended up leading to Citi about 15 years ago where I’ve done things from running countries to regional products to functions like innovation. And I think that’s all led me to banking as a service, which really is the intersection point between large businesses, small businesses, consumers, and technology. I’d love to say it’s all by design. I think some of it’s happenstance.

Yvette Bohanan: That’s fair enough, and sometimes it’s working hard and being in the right place at the right moment. Will, what is your background and storyline here?

William Artingstall: Yeah, thanks Yvette. So I’m kind of a little similar to Scott in that I didn’t start my career in banking. I’m probably less of a natural fit into banking. I always call myself the worst version of a banker, which is maybe why you end up in these innovation type of roles and these exciting places to work.

But I started my career in engineering and construction, so that was kind of where I started. I then sort of went in through the process of studying a bit of law and business and then did the only thing that seemed natural, which was to go into banking. And I’ve done just about every job that the bank has to offer.

Been with them for about 15 years. Spent the first 10 formative years of my career out in the network helping to deliver payments and transaction banking in the last mile. Scott and I actually met about a decade ago when both of us were country heads. He had the privilege of running Australia, I was running South Africa at the time. So we’ve been working together in lockstep for a long time.

And then I joined the Global Payments product organization about six years ago now, and have done a variety of roles again. And lucky enough now to be running both the digital asset payments and e-commerce services business for the payments product org.

Yvette Bohanan: Wow. Fantastic. And so, we’re sitting here, it’s towards the end of 2025. We could say this has been a bit of the year of the stablecoin. It’s waxed and waned, right, through a lot of time here over the last decade. But right now, just reflecting on the last few months, you could not read a news article or talk to someone without hearing about an announcement of someone issuing their own stablecoin.

And a lot of times we’re asking ourselves and people on this podcast, different episodes, how many stablecoins do you need and what’s going on? And I’m sure your customers, your clients, the corporates, the financial institutions out there, they’re all wondering about these topics. So what are the most common requests or questions you’re getting right now about digital assets and stablecoins from your clients?

Scott Southall: It’s a great question and first of all, I couldn’t agree more with you about, you can’t go anywhere in the payments world right now without this being a key topic of conversation in terms of stablecoins. Interestingly though, for a lot of our clients, the question they’re asking is, Why would I use them? What problems do they solve?

And there’s a pretty uneven distribution of knowledge right now for a lot of the clients. Potentially some of the more e-commerce driven clients or tech driven clients having a better view. Maybe some of the traditional manufacturing clients having less of a view.

But we do run a survey every year where we talk to our clients about what are the key topics on their mind. And for the last couple years, issues like speed, cost, efficiency, and transparency have really been at the top of the list. And this is much of what stablecoins are purported to address.

And so this journey of, Citi’s been on for a while now saying, how do you become 24/7 and always on? So things like the faster payments journey, things for us like creating a 24/7 clearing network are all kind of angling down in the same direction of how do you create, our 95 country network, 300 clearing streams, how do you really start to try to solve those problems? And I guess we look at it, we’re a network of networks and digital assets is an opportunity for this to be another tool that’s solving those problems for our clients around speed, around cost efficiency, around transparency.

And I think with the changes and the greater regulatory clarity, whether it’s Genius Act, et cetera, we’re actually getting just a lot more inquiry. So I think this is like the summer that stablecoins went mainstream, if you know what I mean. So it’s traditional companies talking about it now as opposed to maybe those on the leading edge. So we’ve had a lot more inquiries lately and a lot of it’s in that exploratory phase.

William Artingstall: Scott and I have been fairly big proponents of this view that use cases are a phenomenal way to kind of crystallize the mind when you’re thinking about what payments are used for or what sort of specific payment types are used for.

And we’ve been on a journey for the last two years, I think, trying to think about product development and product deployment from far more of a use case oriented perspective, just because our take is you tend to build more of what your customers want and you tend to build them in a more integrated fashion.

Where if you think about the two sort of feet we have with Scott and banking as a service, and myself and e-commerce, that’s really what a lot of those clients are after, right? They’re talking about bringing financial services and embedding them into a core activity that they do. So that, in our mind at least, has always been the leading edge for us. So when we think about customers and we think about the way customers would tend to engage with us, we like to lead with use cases.

And I think just sort of taking one step back, there was a very interesting paper released earlier this year, which spoke about what stablecoins are being used for. And if you looked at the spectrum across the board of what stablecoins are being used for, like 94% of it was either as like a transitory type of currency or some form of holding currency, with only around 6% of the transactions actually being used for payments.

What was quite nice about the 6% was very evenly split, right? 2% was P2P, 2% was C2B, and 2% was B2B. That means different things depending on which of those use cases you look at. So if you look at P2P, that flow was around 0.4 of a trillion dollars, which is a fairly big number from a P2P perspective. It was about the same number for C2B, and it’s obviously then less relevant, or I wouldn’t say less relevant, but has a smaller sort of market share in C2B. And then in B2B, it’s really small, right? B2B runs into the hundreds of trillions which means that a 0.4 trillion number is fairly small. So those use cases are still emerging, but it’s evident that there’s a lot of usage within, I think, the P2P space.

If you take that use case view that we’ve had within Citi, the points I think we would make is, we looked at things like Citi Token Services as very foundational to having a foot into this token and blockchain oriented world that solved the direct client need. Going back to Scott’s point on this near real time 24/7 use case, we saw that as very acute within treasury based use cases. And that is why solutions like Citi Token Services were so important to us as foundational steps because they really addressed core client needs and actually had utility the clients were after.

Yvette Bohanan: That’s an interesting point because it makes a tremendous amount of sense, starting with your customer and what do they need. It just sort of underscores that no matter how advanced the tech is getting, the basics are still there, right? You can’t just build it and they will come. You have to understand what the problem space is, where the frictions are, and solve.

How deep did you have to go into your infrastructure to build something like Citi Token Service? The reason I ask this is, I caught a small clip recently of the CEO of BlackRock speaking to an audience, and the comment that he made was something to the effect, and I’m paraphrasing, but something to the effect of, We’re talking about stablecoins, but we’re not talking enough about how the whole engine, the infrastructure is becoming just transformed here with blockchain capability technology, distributed ledger capability technology, tokenized assets, right, tokenized deposits.

And how elaborate did you have to get in order to deliver something to the client that’s meaningful and useful, and, to some degree, simple compared to all the backend that had to be done?

Scott Southall: It’s actually a great question because, you’re principally going from a world where things like core product processors, around things like demand deposit accounts or payment processors, these have existed for a long time.

Yes, maybe the type of technology has changed, but moving to distributed ledger technology and starting to go to a point of saying, Okay, now I’ve got to learn about on-chain, in many ways it’s not only setting up that on-chain infrastructure, it’s also then a question of saying, how do you connect that to your existing legacy infrastructure?

Because your clients not only need to be able to use it, but they need to be able to instruct payments in it down channels they already have through their ERPs or their TMS systems, so treasury management systems, ERPs, et cetera. It’s got to fit in terms of how they run their business. But then the backend of the on-chain technology has to fundamentally connect to how do you do statements, how do you run your data lake, how do you do all the things that enable you to both meet client needs, regulatory needs, and otherwise?

So it’s a pretty significant replumbing, not changing out old technology, but adding the new technology and integrating it in a way that’s actually going to be effective for the bank and for the customers.

William Artingstall: Yeah. I think, Scott makes a great point. I think, philosophically, payments have been moving into like the 24/7, 365 near real time environment for a little while. So I think from a core philosophy standpoint, you’ve not really needed to change too much in terms of actually addressing what clients are after. But Scott’s absolutely right, the real challenge comes when you’re thinking about how do you integrate this new piece of technology into your existing infrastructure.

Now, one thing I think the teams did really, really well when they looked at Citi Token Services in particular, was there was a realization that clients potentially weren’t ready for some of the complexity or some of the additional features that come with tokenization. So things like programmability or needing to have direct access to the tokens themselves may not necessarily have been a need upfront. And what essentially they did was they abstracted that complexity by not exposing it to customers. So you get all the benefits of tokens, the transfer of them, the driving of them, but you use traditional methods to actually initiate the transaction APIs, the Citi Direct online platform.

And the whole idea behind that was get the benefits you want from the tokens, that 24/7 access, the near real time movement, but don’t have the additional sort of complexity. I think treasuries have probably still got some way to go before they’re really ready to start talking about things like programmability of money and being able to automate all of those processes.

If you think about the vast majority of players in the space today, in fact, actually where the most automated payments happen in areas like e-commerce, what’s actually tended to happen is they’ve extracted, they’ve actually extracted those two activities away from each other and had an application layer for payments that is completely distinct and separate from the treasury layer and then they integrate the two from a reconciliation and statementing perspective.

But they think about them as kind of potentially two completely separate disciplines, in sort of what the organization itself is trying to deliver. And I don’t think it’s dissimilar here. It’s really new technology that you’re trying to make sure you’re fully integrating and making seamless with your existing infrastructure.

Ashley Lannquist: The use of blockchain technology, it’s a distributed ledger. How has the use of distributed ledger technology specifically helping achieve these goals of rapid transactions 24/7, liquidity, helping with cash management. That’s my first question.

And the second is with Citi Token Services and the other approaches that you’re describing right now, are we talking about stablecoins or tokenized deposits or both and any of the above?

William Artingstall: I think, Ashley, it’s a great, it’s a great question. From our perspective, I’ll start with your second question in one word and then I’ll kind of come back to the beginning and we can build on from there.

So I think if you think about Citi’s network and its network of network place, interoperability has really always been our game, right? That’s what we’ve always been very, very good at. It’s been 95 countries, 140 different currencies. We’re able to sort of really make payments where our clients are wanting to make payments and give them access to a really big global network. That has been really the foundation to the success of the strategy of the bank. And so that philosophy, I think, still holds true.

Coming back to the former question, which is how we looked at tokenization and blockchain as mechanisms for improving how we move money. If you think about this, you used to, to some degree to compartmentalize how branches used to move money around between each other. And I think one of the obvious benefits that blockchain and 24/7 really gave us was the ability to move money between branches is significantly easier and you also have the opportunity to pull liquidity and make your liquidity effectively a little bit more efficient.

And that’s really what the Citi Token Services platform allowed us to do, when thinking about money movement for some of our corporates who are wanting to move money around between those branches, right. You can actually effectively move that money 24/7. So that’s kind of like the first one.

What I would say is we didn’t really look at trying to solve that problem in isolation with just blockchain technology. We also looked at it with, as an example, the 24/7 clearing platform that we have, which is dollar related. And if you come back to the sort of message I’d mentioned, that philosophy I’d started with, which is interoperability, one of the things we announced at Sibos was the connection of those two platforms.

So actually one of the things we’ve been looking at doing is connecting Citi Token Services and 24/7 clearing. Because the benefits you get are pretty exponential then, right? So if you think about it, if you’re a corporate client of Citi who’s looking to move money 24/7 around on Citi Token Services, but your end beneficiary is a bank that’s sitting on 24/7 clearing, historically those types of money movements were quite challenged because you were resolving for that 24/7 and that liquidity into branch movement in slightly different ways.

Connecting those two platforms brings those use cases into a single payment flow. So we are enabling the ability to move money between Citi Token Services and the 24/7 clearing platform that give you kind of the benefits of both. But again, I think what you’re trying to really do at the core of this is solve for some of those legacy inefficiencies that existed around liquidity movement and money movement between branches.

Scott Southall: I think your point is absolutely right. Tokenized deposits, in many ways, started about movements within bank own four walls. I think connecting it and giving it the outlay through a network of almost 300 banks then creates an exponential benefit in terms of the tokenized deposit.

I do think that interoperability is going to keep going from there. I mean, obviously a lot of the talk we get into is, the challenges with stablecoins at times is that they’ve got to be pre-funded. There are things where you’re not earning yield as a result, or you’re not getting to take advantage of lines of credit.

So, ultimately, how all of these things come together and you see more interoperability, not just between tokenized deposits and 24/7 clearing, but potentially things like tokenized deposits and stablecoins, I think are things that are going to be important in terms of saying how do you use tools appropriately to both maximize benefits, but also to solve specific problems, right, in terms of how they’re deployed.

So, Will, I think you’re spot on that, in some senses, the learnings we’ve had have started with tokenized deposits, but I think they’re extensible.

William Artingstall: And maybe just to sort of round that thought out, Ashley, just to close out on that question you’d asked around tokenized deposits and stablecoin. I think we’re seeing, at this stage, more use cases specifically in the corporate world for tokenized deposits, but I think there’s also extension into, and there’s obviously a huge amount of interest in looking at stablecoins from a payments and collection perspective.

And if you look at the announcement we’d made just recently with Coinbase, that’s a prime example of exactly how we see that interoperability coming to the fore, right? The first part of that is really around enabling their business and allowing their customers to pay out in the fiat rails. That reduces friction and makes a little bit more of a seamless on- and off- ramping type of process that allows access to Citi’s network.

The second part of that, which is a little more exploratory in nature, is how we could then potentially leverage what they’ve built, the infrastructure they’ve developed, in order to create solutions and capabilities for our own customers. And obviously that all again comes back to that interoperability play, where you really want to be delivering what the customers are asking for. And we think that’s kind of really a combination of both.

Yvette Bohanan: That makes sense. A lot of times when we’re talking to people about this, we do a lot of workshops, we talk with our clients, and there’s sort of this underlying question. And we get this a lot. It’s sort of like, Well, if you can do the 24/7 clearing with, you are smiling, I see you smiling because you know where I’m going with this, with the legacy systems, right?

People have been doing fast payments, they’ve been doing the instant payment rails. We’ve had cross-border proof of concept between RTP and ECB around just connecting two fast payment systems together. You have the instant availability, you eliminate reconciliation completely, theoretically.

But when you look at this, what’s the distributed ledger to technology actually giving you that you couldn’t achieve in a, say, instant payment, fast payment environment, realtime payments sort of capability stack and system, and the interoperability that you could kind of affect with more traditional non distributed, I’m using this in air quotes because everything’s sort of distributed in its own way, but the distributed ledger blockchain kind of world, right?

What’s the benefit of the tech? And now you’re kind of saying, we have these sort of compatibility tech stacks behind the scenes, and then we’re trying to create the interoperability between the entities. Are we adding too much complexity? Are we removing complexity? Unpack that a little bit of like how you made that decision. Because it’s a huge investment in people and time and resources and capital for you guys to do this, right? So why would a global bank want this?

Scott Southall: Fair question. I guess first of all, we’re operating on a premise that while on-chain technology and digital assets, whether it’s tokenized deposits or stablecoins, they’re going to exist, right? There are specific use cases, and we’ve talked about whether it’s programmability, the instant nature.

Again, there’s multiple ways to solve for instant nature, but some of the ideas are around 24/7 and programmable and instant. There’s some use cases that start to lend themselves specifically to this kind of technology, and yes, some of them may be, How do I make those kind of large scale payments 24/7 on the weekend when the US market is closed, or when it’s a public holiday.

It may not be every payment that needs to go down that set of rails, but there are very specific problems that can be addressed with this technology and it’s ability to operate in a fashion which is very different from, let’s call it the legacy kind of batch base world that many of the payment processors have come from.

So, we look at that, we look at the kind of transparency and the interconnectedness, and you start saying, well, again, we are going to see multiple kind of rails and multiple types of technology exist. We’ve got different client needs and actually how you build products or solutions that address those needs and leverage the technology, it’s never going to be one size fits all for us.

So providing that optionality for our clients who say, Hey, I’m a gaming company and I’ve got a segment of my gamers who want to pay me in stablecoins, because they’re digital natives and that’s how they roll. Or you know, somebody who’s saying, I’ve got app developers and I need to be able to pay them because that’s the way they want to receive it and they may be in an FX volatile market and they want to proxy for a US dollar.

We’re building technology to solve problems. I think it’s not necessarily about, if you can do it in the right way, you’re not introducing more complexity. You’re just in introducing more capability in the stack that can address a broader set of client needs. And that really does anchor for us, almost everything is going back to those client needs and those use cases as Will called out. Being able to build for solutions that then address that effectively.

Now, I do think in general, as Will pointed out, we’ve all been on a modernization journey already where a lot of those platforms have moved from, let’s call it five by eight, in terms of five days a week, eight hours a day, to being much more 24/7. A lot of our platforms are already ready running four nines because, in essence, use cases around e-commerce or use cases around fintechs have demanded that, business doesn’t stop. But I think this adds another set of capability, not necessarily complexity, but capability that allows us to solve real world kind of client problems.

William Artingstall: I really like this question because I think it points at the hearts of like, how do you strategically build the future of a payments business when you kind of don’t know really directionally what is going to be the next big thing, right? And frankly speaking, like we talk about a dominant form of payment as something that’s got market share, like between 10 and 15. That’s not really that big when you think about it, right? That’s not a very, very massively dominant form of payment. It’s kind of still fairly small when you think about the overarching lens of it.

So I think the first thing I would say is, philosophically, if you think people want choice, and I still believe that if you had to put a hundred people in a room and ask them about their preferences for money movement and money management, you’re probably going to get like 80 to 90 different answers, which is fairly evident of how we tend to think as people. And by the way, it also is very evident of how important payments are and how personal payments are, right. We speak about things like we’re doing our job when no one can see payments, but the reality is everybody makes a payment almost every day, even if they don’t know that that’s something that they’re doing.

And so, what I think is kind of interesting is actually, what I’m a little excited about is we’ve gotten to a technological point where the technology is allowing us to cater for the complexity that exists in payments. And I think that’s a very, very interesting, crossroads to be at. If you think about blockchain and you think about the similarities, 24/7, near instant, the ability for people to make payments, I think if you look at it from that perspective, you’re not probably going to see massive amounts of difference between the traditional rails and the new rails.

But I think where it gets interesting is on things like the fact that it’s fully transparent, right? Transparency is a big play on blockchain. The fact that a public blockchain is fully visible, every participant can see every transaction, that is a very, very interesting set of use cases that may make things interesting in the future.

The second area is programmability of money, right? It may be a little early for large scale corporations to be thinking about what programmability of money might mean, but if you think about integrating that into something like the working capital cycle of a company and automating payment flow when you’ve got very long supply chains, there could be some really fascinating things that come out of that in the B2B space.

So in my mind, when I think about it, there’s a lot of potential here, and I think the real question is how that’s going to get teased out over the coming years. But I think what’s most exciting about this is honestly the fact that the technology is allowing us to cater for the complexity.

Maybe in the future, a dominant form of payment looks more like 5% of total flow. But the real question, I guess, for an organization the size of Citi, is if you’re going to take bets on something, the real question is, do you think it has the potential to become a sizable form of payment? And if you do, you need to take some of those bets if you’re going to be relevant to your clients in the future.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. I really appreciate those thoughts because it starts to kind of get at the heart of how you are thinking about this space in your role as a global financial institution. And what you said about catering to the complexities of payments, I think this notion that a payment, you have a sender and a receiver, you have initiation funding and completion, but it’s that simple and it’s not that simple. And so trying to sort of craft things to make people’s lives better or to make businesses more efficient with their cash flow is really important.

When you look at it though, and you kind of zoom out and go at it from a different angle, we’ve also been in this space where every week somebody’s coming out with their own stablecoin, right. PayPal with, I think Paxos has one, JPMorgan, Amazon, I could go on for a long time. Is that necessary? How are you talking with your clients about this sort of, and it’s not every client, but like, do I need a stablecoin or can I use somebody else’s stablecoin, or how’s this all going to kind of play out at that level of what should I be pre-funding, what should I be using, what should I be exchanging? How do you read the tea leaves on that one right now?

Scott Southall: That’s actually a great question and it’s certainly a question a lot of our clients are asking as well, right, to understand. There’s a lot of, let’s say, conversation in the marketplace. And that’s a conversation that’s not just the treasurer, it’s the board. It’s people asking, what does this mean?

And I think, my answer, does everyone need to issue one? No, not everyone needs to issue one. There’s not going to be a thousand different stablecoins running around. There’s undoubtedly going to be rationalization over time. And there are differences though, as to why you might want to use one depending on what kind of business that you’re operating in.

And I think for a lot of our clients, it’s starting to cut through and understand what does that look like and what does it feel like, and therefore what role should this have, or what meaning should this take to me and my business? Whether that be just issuing one or simply using once they’re out there and available. For banks, if I were to start with banks, a lot of banks are probably starting with the idea of, what about tokenized deposits? Because that keeps the funds on my balance sheet, can I offer more utility to my client?

There’s a very strong conversation happening with a lot of banks around tokenized deposits where you might hear from marketplaces that are saying, I’ve got a very, very large ecosystem. How do I create almost a virtuous kind of loop where I can keep things within my walls? Perhaps I can avoid merchant service fees, maybe I can figure out how to incent my marketplace sellers to work with me more closely, et cetera, are there things I can offer in terms of services or otherwise a discounts? But can I create a more closed loop system?

Whereas issuers in their own right are looking at the liquidity and the yield they’re driving for revenue. But also, I think monetizing the network, if you’re an issuer, has become a huge thing, right? And there is a significant proliferation of layer ones and other things that are going on right now as people look to say, how do I also understand what the adoption is going to mean to different businesses and where the monetization opportunities are?

And I guess it all comes down to your perspective to say where do those benefits sit? And probably what that focus is going to be. I think minimally, though, we’re going to find a lot of people saying, how do I ensure that my customers have the optionality to pay in the way that they’re going to, they’re going to want to pay?

And ultimately, that often is the initial tipping point for when adoption occurs in different segments. And then also strategically, does this add value to other people in my ecosystem? Whether it’s suppliers, marketplace sellers, et cetera. So I think it’s a little bit individualized, but certainly the story plays out differently depending on what sector you’re in.

Ashley Lannquist: Would you mind please defining tokenized deposits for the audience who might not know since it’s not used quite as familiarly as stablecoins? And also you mentioned closed loop with the use of tokenized deposits. And I know Citi has been a pioneer in general of tokenized deposits, but you’ve been part of regulated settlement network, which I believe was experimenting around a private blockchain to settle on an interbank level tokenized deposits, and maybe some other types of digital assets.

So I tend to think of them as open loop, but this is a debate that we’re having internally at the firm as well. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yvette Bohanan: Just for the record, Scott, you put two people from Glenbrook in a room and you come out with like six answers in our opinions.

Scott Southall: I think that just demonstrates agility of thinking, so that’s fine. It should be. But tokenized deposits really are no more, if you think about right now, a liability on a bank’s balance sheet. If somebody has a deposit at the bank, it’s represented as a liability. It’s record kept in our books and records as such.

A tokenized deposit is simply a tokenized version of that. It shows up on a bank’s balance sheet in exactly the same fashion as a liability. And therefore for clients, the big difference is when you get into things like accounting treatments for corporate, they may get very conservative in terms of the types of things they want to hold because does it show up as a cash or cash equivalent? And a tokenized deposit does, it shows up as cash.

It comes through in their statement, or can come through in their statement, in their core account in the same fashion. It works with their systems in a way where it causes no change in the way they absorb or ingest information from their bank. And again, in terms of how they report, it also can be consistent. So when we look at a tokenized deposit, it’s just a tokenized representation of that same liability that sits on a bank’s balance sheet.

William Artingstall: Just jumping back, I actually would like to address one thing that Yvette had said, and then come back to this question on closed loop and the use cases that Ashley had mentioned there.

So Yvette, you’d sort of made the statement, it’s like almost every week we’re getting an announcement on somebody doing something in stablecoins or in token land. One thing I would say is that I think we as an industry run the real risk of getting announcement fatigue while all of that is going on. And the risk with that is you miss something huge because everybody’s making so much noise in this space.

What it really calls on is us to be really vigilant about what we’re seeing and really ask the question on whether we think it’s serving some new utility or not. Because I think the announcement fatigue is a real thing. You really don’t want to be missing something that actually is quite sizable or quite game changing for the industry if it comes to that.

So Ashley to your question on closed loop, and I think why we sort of think about closed loop use cases in particular is, if you think about closed loops today, one thing that blockchains and potentially stablecoins address quite well is not unlike what we’ve done with tokenized deposits. They can create efficiencies within systems because you don’t end up with having value having to leave the ecosystem and then come back into the ecosystem and you can kind of optimize for that type of flow.

There are a few things that are still sort of fairly big considerations when it comes to these closed loop networks. Some of them are, for example, to what Scott had mentioned around the pre-funded nature of these things, the reality then that means is you have to tie up quite a lot of capital in order for some of these closed loop ecosystems to have, or create enough value for there to be some benefit.

But that’s really where I think when you look at some of the large scale corporate use cases today, they’ve been a little bit platform oriented or a little bit closed loop ecosystem oriented where because of the way in which the money moves and the way in which the users are interacting with that platform, there are quite a lot of benefits about having some form of closed loop solution to drive efficiency in those interactions. So that’s the one statement I would make.

The second I would make to really sort of bring something like that home is if you think about things like social media interactions, those are increasingly live. And one problem that payments, I guess, have been challenged to solve for has been things like micropayments.

And there’s an opportunity here where if you think about a closed loop blockchain that’s being used by a social media platform, you could make payments that are fractions of a cent that cost almost nothing to move around on that ecosystem. And you’re not worried about moving money out into an ecosystem where there’s other participants or other activities that can generate or create cost.

So I think there are a couple use cases like that, where stablecoin really does look like quite an interesting potential solution. The real big question for those types of use cases is going to be whether a closed loop database is a better answer than a blockchain. And I think we don’t really know the answer to that just yet. I think it’s going to be interesting to see as the technology is applied in live environments.

Scott Southall: I think a lot of it depends on how big the ecosystem is and how much utility it generates ultimately as to whether or not that is going to make sense. But, we’ve seen this historically where that kind of prefunded nature and other things are okay and we’ve seen it in different wallets and otherwise where they say, If I’m getting utility that works, I’m happy to leave the funds there.

And in that sense, all the points Will’s making then about saying, if I can then keep that flowing effectively and efficiently in a large ecosystem where it suddenly strips out cost, it becomes very compelling to why somebody might want to issue in that space.

Ashley Lannquist: I was reflecting that there’s a bit of an in-between a closed and open, I think, in the way that we’re discussing, and this is maybe where I haven’t been able to nail it down for myself yet. But open loop, we tend to think of one payment provider. But I guess if you have a permissioned blockchain with a couple payment providers, like a regulated settlement network or others, I think you may refer to that as closed loop, but I’m not, the customer can send to other payment providers as well, but it’s not as open as a public ecosystem or the ability to send to anyone.

William Artingstall: Yeah, I think the reality is there’s a little bit of nuance here. I think we would see anything that’s outside of a captive audience as essentially more open. So if you think about something like Project Agora, which is like the extension of the RSN and RLN network being run by the Bank of International Settlements. I mean, that’s got the potential for seven central bank participants, north of 40 private market participants. Yes, it’s permissioned, but it’s a little bit more open loop in nature. It can solve for more open loop type of settlement requirements.

Where what we’ve been talking about, which is like a social media platform providing services to their users, that’s a little bit more closed loop, right? You’re really only going to be using the settlement for one or two different types of use cases that are specific to that type of environment. So when we sort of think about the interplay between closed loop and open loop, that’s maybe a little bit more of how we’re thinking about it.

What I would sort of come back to again though is I think obviously from our perspective, the interoperability play is, again, going to be where this gets really interesting because the flow can’t exist in a closed loop forever. There’s going to come a time when the social media influencer wants to get paid out, and that may happen in fiat rail, that may happen in stablecoin that may happen in cryptocurrency.

And that optionality is kind of one of the biggest sort of requirements that’s likely to happen if we look at what’s happened in the past. Clients today, when they come to Citi looking for a payment service, they’re not usually looking for us to just do checks, or they’re not looking for us just to do ACH. They’re also looking for instant payments. They’re also looking for alternative payment methods. They’re looking to us as a payment services provider, who can offer them multiple different settlement rails in order for their sort of needs and requirements within the business that they’re operating.

Yvette Bohanan: Absolutely. And I don’t see that changing too much. They may not ask for checks in the future, but-

William Artingstall: Yeah, they’re very persistent as a form of payment, that’s for sure.

Yvette Bohanan: I know, they’re stubbornly persistent. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? So one of the questions that’s coming to mind as we’re talking about this, and what you’re bringing up, Ashley, is really interesting to me. I think one of the other data points we could look at is the correspondent banking in certain countries over the years has sort of dwindled for a lot of reasons, high cost for compliance and that. And we’ve always had sort of this issue around cross border trade and global finance and things like that around exotic currencies, currencies that people don’t use very often, but when you need them, you need them.

And do you see this new sort of capability helping with the correspondent banking issues, the exotic currency issues? Does this allow countries maybe that have been having issues getting into the game of global finance, does it help their businesses in those countries get into things now? It’s not just efficiency, but it’s actually entry. Is there a capability base being built up here that’ll help that?

William Artingstall: I feel like we need to sit down and have like a three hour debate on this question alone. There’s a lot to unpack in that question, Yvette, and I’ll tell you how I sort of think a little bit about this game. I think when you think about the way this was originally sort of brought about in the 2008 white paper, the logic was that you can do away with intermediaries entirely, right? The whole logic was, let’s decentralize finance, let’s give everybody the ability to control their own wallet, move money around and move things as in how they deem fit.

But the funny part is, I think it potentially redefined the role of an intermediary, but it didn’t eliminate it. I think that’s something that’s really important to sort of think about within this ecosystem, right? Almost every service provider who gives a user simplified access to a blockchain is acting as an intermediary on behalf of that individual that’s getting paid, right? And if you think about the blockchain world in particular, they’ve also created new versions of their own complexity, which is, as an example, if I need to make a payment and the beneficiary is on Base, but my wallet is held on Ethereum, I need an intermediary to help me get the money onto Base in order to get that transaction settled.

So to some degree, even though you may see some changes in how the correspondent banking world works, the correspondent banking world was set up to try and deal with some of the fact that if you’re a dollar oriented individual trying to make a payment in a foreign country, the bank that you worked with didn’t have a license to operate in the foreign country and needed somebody else to help them make that settlement happen. There’s kind of a little bit of the same thing occurring within the blockchain world, in that more and new versions of intermediaries are emerging that are having to reduce some of the frictions that are coming in from this network.

One version of the truth could be the fact that I have a specific cryptocurrency or a specific stablecoin, but my beneficiary wants something else. I need to go to an exchange in order for that type of conversion to happen. And if they’re on a different chain, I may need another intermediary in order for that transaction to settle on another step further down. So the way I look at this is that I think there’s potential for it to redefine how the intermediary operates, but I don’t think it necessarily does away with intermediaries or aggregators.

Because the average individual, the average person on the street, doesn’t really want to be exposed to the complexity of a blockchain. They want somebody else to abstract that complexity, right? It’s exactly what we spoke about in what we’ve tried to do within our own payment strategy. So at least my opening thought on this is, does it change the role of an intermediary? Potentially, yes. But I think you still, to some degree, will need intermediaries for some time until the average individual can really get that complexity really reduce. So I think that’s one sort of lens I would take.

The second is, if you think about one of the things that correspondent banks do fairly well is they introduce liquidity into the system, right? So they’re able to support the settlement of payment flow because they hold liquidity. They’re massive deposit takers. They generate assets, they have the ability to pre-fund transactions on behalf of clients as they’re trying to settle and make payments. And they’re also there to help potentially create or find access to markets. If you start to get into some of these emerging markets where you’re looking to try and get a hold of foreign currency in the local markets, a lot of these markets are not very, very deep. And I don’t know necessarily that, a blockchain or a new token deposit eliminates that entirely if the problem is fundamentally economic.

If it’s that you’ve got a massive import export deficit, and you’re struggling to get foreign currency as a country, as these things scale, I think you’ll start to see the same types of problems emerge, and you will need liquidity providers in order to be able to support the completion of a transaction. So, long answer, but I think in my mind, at least when I’m thinking this through, like I think it has the potential to really change the role of an intermediary, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily ready yet to eliminate them.

Scott Southall: I think you’re right, but I think part of this nuance is moving things on-chain becomes potentially more frictionless, so to speak. Maybe fewer hops, maybe fewer intermediaries, but that last leg out where if I need to move from what is predominantly US dollar world to my local currency, a lot of those same challenges are going to exist as it relates to liquidity or potentially even cost, right?

Because as you start to look through this and play through it, it’s initially, how do I maybe convert from fiat into the currency? How do I pay for the gas fees if I have to convert out, and there’s still an FX on the backend? There are still issues to deal with, whether it’s liquidity, whether it’s cost. And for some of these markets as well, it may work if I’m somebody who wants to hold a stablecoin because it gives me a proxy for a dollar and if I’m not going to use it locally or if I’m not as worried about that.

But a lot of these economies, also things like currency control or in some cases prohibition also are going to create some of the challenges, especially in some of the same markets where you might say the requirement exists.

Ashley Lannquist: I agree. In a way, I think it’s not only keeping the same level of complexity or friction, but I think it can add a friction on the cash in and cash out. And I agree with what you also just said about, okay, in a foreign country, you could get access by proxy to the dollar through a USD stablecoin, but it’s a different question whether you can actually cash out and get the dollar. That money might not be there available.

Scott Southall: Spot on.

William Artingstall: Ashley, your point on complexity is true. The other thing to think about is it’s still not a perfect science globally when you think about payments regulation. You’re now seeing stablecoin regulation coming in, and those regulations are still fairly new and don’t have the benefit that the payments regulations have had, which is decades of alignment and improvement that has brought those regulations closer together.

So there is going to be a little bit of complexity to navigate on the fact that you have new regulation that hasn’t had the opportunity to harmonize across the globe yet, right? You’re going to see differences in different markets, different locations, and that may be easier to navigate as a consumer, but I think it’s going to be fairly difficult to navigate as a large scale global corporate who’s having to operate as a merchant in every single one of these markets.

Ashley Lannquist: Stablecoin is ultimately a type of cryptocurrency, and I think that the expectations by some stakeholders and industry and cryptocurrency users around regulations for consumer protection, for instance, maybe AMLCFT, are different than what we’re used to in the traditional payments world.

There are no clear consumer protections guidelines, for instance, within the US Genius Act. They don’t have the Reg E consumer protections that we have for electronic transfers here in the United States yet. And while we could develop it them in the future, I think the expectations from the industry could be a little bit different.

I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but it’s the cryptocurrency world versus traditional payments.

Yvette Bohanan: How are you guys, I’m really curious, that’s a great point, Ashley. Like how, do you have a North star here around when a client comes to you and starts talking with you, how do you think about that from the consumer perspective with them and talk through that? Because that is a glaring difference, honestly, at the moment. I mean, it may get adjusted here at some point.

Scott Southall: Well, I might start, because it’s an evolution, right? If you play back 12 months, before, let’s say, the rescinding of 1179, a lot of the banks, it was very difficult because you required a non-objection. Genius Act is very helpful in starting to lay out a framework.

But I think Will said this well, the rest of the payments world, this evolution’s been going on for a long time. I think back to even starting a faster payment scheme and helping originate that in Australia, and I think we started that in 2012. And that’s still evolving to get to the point where you’re happy with the outcomes from all the different angles, whether we think about how it manages fraud, et cetera.

As we are looking at this, clarity, it’s going to be forthcoming. It’s probably one step in many in terms of understanding, for a bank, what are the prudential obligations that actually exist for consumers? How do you build in many of the same protections that might exist on things like card rails where a lot of these kinds of things where you’re dealing with maybe more let’s call it anonymized transactions, that you have protections in place.

So I think there is an evolution and it’s difficult because there are a lot of participants in this who would like to snap their fingers and say, No, we’re done. Let’s run. There’s a number of risks all of our clients have to think through, whether it’s cyber risk, reputational risk or otherwise.

And a lot of things we’re talking about are also now barrier instruments, right? If you don’t have the right security in place, what are the implications? And you may not have all the same kind of controls that we’ve built around, let’s say, traditional fiat rails in place. So I think these are all real questions that, the reality is, as much as we might want them to be addressed quickly, are going to require time before they fully play out.

And I think some of these things will also impact the speed of adoption, especially by different segments. So, in terms of what, let’s call it, mainstream B2B payments or perhaps, things like consumer payouts, there’s an uneven distribution. One of the surveys I read not that long ago was saying, less than 20% of, Americans have experience with crypto.

So not everybody’s rushing headlong despite the noise. And I think this will play out over time as those protections come in and they evolve. Maybe that’s when people put down the checkbook. But I’ll tell you, my mother still has one of those leather bound books and I don’t think she’s going to be rushing.

So again, different segments in terms of how this plays out, but I think we still got a long way to go before this gets full stream adoption. And even so, as Will pointed out, a dominant kind of adoption doesn’t mean that it’s going to be all payments. It may still mean, is it 10 or 15%? Has it become a real player in terms of payment rails? That is yet to come and still defining what success looks like, I think, is important because it’s not that fiat rails are going to go away.

William Artingstall: What I would add to Scott’s point is Citi has spent over 200 years building up a reputation of being a trusted advisor to clients. And when I think about that kind of logic, I think a lot of that comes from making very new and complex conversations and topics relatable.

So in my mind, when I think a little bit about the risk side of this, to Scott’s point, there’s so many topics there that are going to be common, right? Fin crime is going to be common consideration that they need to think through, compliance with local laws and regulation. In many cases, the participants that you’re now working with are maybe not necessarily operating in the country that you’re operating in as a large scale corporate.

Citi tends to be on the ground with many of our clients today. So we have skin in the game when it comes to trying to make sure that we’re doing things in a compliant way and we understand some of the local country nuances because of the fact that you’ve got those teams on the ground.

So I think what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to kind of go back to grassroots basics and walk them through a lot of what they see today. Think about how do you cater for things. Like, just take a simple one. If you’re a treasurer today and you’re thinking about using blockchain for a B2B payment, if you don’t have a provider who’s good, how do you do make a checker, right? Like make a check is a very simple process in treasury land, but it’s something that a lot of them do to keep their payments secure, and to make sure that their payments are being completed effectively.

How do you do that? Does the new vendor who’s providing you access to the chain, are they trustworthy? Do you, are you comfortable that the service they’re providing is something that you can do that you, you can kind of work with them on to solve for that problem? I agree with Scott entirely on that front.

The second thing I would add, which I think is a little bit of an interesting one that needs to play out a little bit more is, we’ve seen this actually even in e-commerce today. If you think about payments today happening in e-commerce, a lot of them are still highly dominated by cards, right? Very, very highly dominated by cards.

And some of that comes back to what both yourself, Yvette, and Ashley have said, which is that there’s a lot of inbuilt consumer protection. If I make a payment with a card and there’s fraud, I can dispute the transaction. There’s an entire well-crafted, dispute based process that allows me to claw the funding back, challenge the transaction, and put some of that liability and that risk back onto the merchant.

And if you look at things like instant payments, which has been touted for a long time as a mechanism to help settle transactions in e-commerce land away from cards, I think one of the reasons adoption has maybe not been as fast as people would’ve liked is some of these inbuilt consumer protection tools aren’t there, and the payment is final.

If you think about a payment in stablecoin land today, if I use it for an e-commerce use case as a consumer, that payment is final. The mechanisms aren’t yet there or in place to give me some form of consumer protection, that gives me that benefit. The other thing is if you’re here in the US I also get 40 to 50 days interest free on the card. I also get 5% cash back and love those points. But the point is you’ve got a lot of these consumer benefits and consumer protection oriented things that have been wound around a payment form, a form of payment, that ease and give consumers more certainty when they’re trying to transact online.

Now, I’m not saying that stablecoin won’t get there. I’m absolutely sure we’ll end up in short order with some coin that earns benefits and gives you some protection and all, and the likes, but I think there’s still some time to get there. And the roles are still being crafted in terms of how people are engaging with those coins.

So there’s a lot to unpack in that. But I think one of the risks becomes if you’re an online corporate or an online provider is, yes, you start to provide those types of access because you have consumers that want to pay you in stablecoin what happens when there’s disputes, what happens when there’s challenges? How do you manage that client experience? There’s several new sort of risks to consider just even thinking about operationalizing the settlement and using stablecoin and the likes. And those things can have knock on effects onto consumers as well.

Scott Southall: It’s not just the consumers and the adoption. If you’re a corporate, and I had this conversation just this past week with a bunch of very traditional corporates who have said, the idea of being able to pay out a stablecoin, I’ve got to change both, kind of my core ERP system in terms of being able to hold this category on the balance sheet. I’ve got to change my interface to the bank. I may have to change something in my treasury system. There may be additional reporting implications that I’ve got to change out of my data warehouse.

And they said, Until I see the utility, don’t come to me and ask me because I look at this as a cost, and until the utility outweighs the cost, I’m not that interested. And if people aren’t pounding down my door to say, I either need to pay you this way, or I must be paid that way, there’s a hesitance.

And so I think there’s kind of things to play out, Will, as you’ve rightly called out and we’ve said on the consumer side, but I think we’ve also got to see that play out on the corporate side. And again, those things like, where will this sit on my balance sheet? Will this be a cash or cash equivalent, so my quick ratio is where I want it to be, or is this going to be treated a different way? How’s my auditor going to feel about this? Those are all still really prevalent questions that are driving the adoption, I would say on the corporate side as well.

Yvette Bohanan: Yeah, no, those, that’s a great point. That is an excellent point. And I think there’s so much unfolding at this at every level. Do you have time for one more question? We just had one more thought.

Ashley Lannquist: Yeah. Deposits. You don’t have fewer bank deposits on the Citibank balance sheet sitting as liabilities because you have the existing deposits and they get frozen or reserved. And then the tokenized deposit is issued in parallel and used. But with stablecoins, if we do talk about them being used more for payments, that does imply less money being held in bank deposits.

And we could crowd out bank deposits, commercial banks from Citi to smaller commercial banks could have fewer bank deposits. So I thought you were in an interesting position to just provide your perspective on how, as an institution, you weigh that along with the exploratory opportunities with stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

William Artingstall: Sort of thinking out loud about this one, I think there’s a couple things in my mind again, as you think through this whole thing. I think the first is, if you think about most of the issuers today, if the reserves are kind of held the way they’re being looked at, which is effectively as cash, most of them are holding them with banks.

So, today, I think, at least in the current model, and the way it’s currently sort of shaping up, you’ve got several participants that are really looking to banks to still hold the reserves behind them, right? So the risk of losing significant deposits, at least upfront, is sort of fairly measured.

Now, there are some rate changes I think that potentially do place a little bit more risk on that. Things, for example, like these entities looking at starting, for example, their own bank charters, potentially becoming banks themselves. You do have this potential for some of the deposits to move into a slightly different ecosystem to kind of what you have today. And I think debates that are going on at the moment now as an example, for example, with ingenious where interest can’t be paid on stablecoins. Those types of things probably limit the form of holding those types of currencies or holding stablecoin as an alternative.

And I think the last one, I would say, is a fairly sort of interesting one is you are also going to see the tokenization of other asset classes, right? Which may bring deposits back into the sort of the bank world. So if you think about things like the potential for money market funds, if you think about some of the investment opportunities that banks bring to clients in terms of term deposits and the likes, as additional assets are tokenized and additional assets are added, what becomes the end mechanism by which corporates decide to hold their currency is kind of still, I think, very much up in the air.

So I think there’s a lot to sort of unpack in that space. And I’m not sure necessarily that anybody knows the answer just yet as to whether there’s going to be complete disintermediation or not.

Ashley Lannquist: I guess when the stablecoin issuers then go and choose to hold their reserves in bank deposits, which as you mentioned, they can do, I guess they don’t count as retail deposits on the bank side anymore, that are that kind of safe, sticky, money that can then be used easily for bank lending.

Rather they come back as unsecured wholesale deposits, which could be a bit flightier and require more liquidity coverage. So, a thought, but points taken.

Scott Southall: And Ashley, you’re right, there is a difference in treatment in LCR though, it’s probably more of a fractional treatment. So I think that’s part of it. I do think depending on the level of adoption, even at a payment level, though, it may not be indicative of what clients actually choose to hold in terms of that.

So, when I deal with a lot of my corporate clients right now, even if they’re talking about the idea of accepting or paying out most of what they want to hold and what they want to touch is still fiat. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I think Will’s point on the reserves is a good one.

And also, as long as we’re looking at the yield construct, I think that there may be a difference in terms of payment volumes versus what sits on balance sheet in terms of how that’s reflected as well. But it’s hard to have the full crystal ball on this, but I think even if it’s a 10 to 15%, at least based on the kind of predilection that most of our clients have towards yield, my suspicion is that a lot of that will transition kind of seamlessly and interoperably potentially right back to either a tokenized deposit or fiat land in order to kind of maximize the returns as well.

So it may be something that is, again, we’ll see how it plays out, but my suspicion is that it may not necessarily have a material impact, at least the way things are construed today.

Yvette Bohanan: That’s fascinating. Okay. So thank you so much for your time today. Scott, Will, Ashley, yeah. This has been so cool. I hoped that we could shed some light on what’s going on with the rise of stablecoins, how to think about digital assets, tokenized deposits, and how banks in particular, financial institutions are thinking about this.

Your bird’s eye perspective on this labyrinth of kind of trying to guide us through all of these facets of what’s going on has been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Really appreciate it.

Scott Southall: You are welcome. Thank you so much, Yvette. Thank you, Ashley.

Yvette Bohanan: And for all of those listening, thanks for spending time again on an episode of Payments on Fire with us, and good luck in keeping up with all of these things. Don’t get fatigued by all of the announcements. Try to separate that news from the noise and, look for the big, big changes out there.

Thanks everyone, and until next time, keep up the good work. Bye for now.