Advent International Operating Partner Kahina Van Dyke Talks Stablecoins

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Romaine Bostick** (0:07)
Romaine Bostick sat down with Kahina Van Dyke, the operating partner at Advent International, in a wide-ranging conversation on everything from stable coins, fintech consolidation, as well as the rise of AI. Take a listen.

**Kahina Van Dyke** (0:20)
When I joined the Citibank Internet team, I was the seventh employee. There was no fintech name, but we did believe that the Internet was coming, and that was going to have an impact on the digital world of money.
It was an unproven theory, but you put a bunch of 20-year-olds together, and we spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and we launched things like online statements, and people went, what are you talking about? Why would I take a statement that wasn't delivered by the US mail? And so a lot of things that we did back then were envisioning the future that is now just normal for people, or tap and go. The first tap and go that we did was actually a sticker on the phone, because the phones couldn't handle an actual tap. So we were just being really creative back then, envisioning this world, and to see it actually happen is, it's beautiful to see how it has enhanced access for so many more people to participate in banking. You used to have to go to a bank, by the way. You had to, banking hours, right? There were nine to three, and they weren't in all the neighborhoods. And so, both in the US and globally, we now have a new relationship with moving money around the world instantaneously, so I'm really proud of that work.

**Romaine Bostick** (1:31)
Well, what's the role of stable coins in that, particularly with regards to moving around money? I was sort of thinking about, obviously, the Genius Act, which passed almost a year ago from where we stand, and I know there's the Clarity Act working its way right now through Congress, but now you're sort of setting up the regulatory guardrails, legislative guardrails here. Does that benefit sort of the traditional banks in that space, or is that going to favor more kind of the newcomers, sort of the real sort of fintech forward type of companies?

**Kahina Van Dyke** (1:59)
So I'm a big believer in stable coins. I've been a believer for the last decade. I always thought crypto and blockchain were all upside opportunity. It was the safest way. It was the most secure and the opportunity. So we have how many currencies in the world and how many currencies, like the Peruvian soul, who knows about the Peruvian soul? But there's folks in Peru who needs to conduct commerce, right? And so the idea of a stable coin has always, for me, been a safe way to instantaneously go in and out of multiple currencies. And you know, the FX traders are probably not happy to hear this, but I do think it democratizes the idea of commerce, international commerce, moving across borders with safety and security instantaneously.

**Romaine Bostick** (2:43)
Do you think the central banks, though, are going to stand by? And I mean, not necessarily allow it to happen, but not necessarily try to compete on their own with their own version?

**Kahina Van Dyke** (2:51)
They absolutely should. I've been talking to regulators for a long time about the fact that we should have the central banks have an opportunity to take the leadership position. Things are happening with outside of the central banking system. I'm a big believer. I grew up in banking. I'm a big believer that we need the participation of the regulators. We need the participation of the legislation to make it safer and to make more people feel comfortable with it. But this is the world. We're in a digital world already. And so having digital commerce, stable coins is absolutely crucial to digital commerce.

**Romaine Bostick** (3:22)
When do we start to get the more, I guess, transactional volume? I was taking a look. I mean, in terms of the actual total sort of raw volume that you're seeing out there, it's in the trillions, 30 plus trillion dollars with the stable coins. But when I was looking specifically at the numbers for what was actual payment activity, that was still around 400 billion dollars. So that's a huge gap.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:41)
That's a huge gap.

**Romaine Bostick** (3:42)
So money is moving, but when do we start to see it moving more on the transactional side?

**Kahina Van Dyke** (3:46)
I think adoption curves, as you know, if you've been following this world of financial services and digital payments for a long time, and it always starts slowly. You're talking about people's money, you're talking about their security, you're talking about their ability to buy a house, to send their kids to school. These are really important things and they shouldn't move too fast, quite frankly. But I think the infrastructure does have to exist first. The early adopters are showing us what's possible. And now I do feel that we're at this cusp where people are really saying, I get it, I understand it, I want to participate in it. Not everybody knows how to do it safely, but most of the major, either wealth managers. Five years ago, you couldn't go to Fidelity and buy crypto, you can today. And I think that's where we're going with stable coins as well with international commerce.