Ep. 131 - The Internal Pitch Problem: Convincing the Board on Stablecoins, with Cyclops

Grant Evans (0:05)

Welcome to The Payments Shed Podcast, live from Fintech Meetup Europe here in sunny Lisbon. It is the inaugural European event. And this afternoon, we are joined by Willy Bardiot, Director of Product at Cyclops. Willy, thank you for joining us on the show. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in the wonderful world of payments and Fintech?

Willy Bardiot (0:23)

Yeah, thank you, Grant. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

I actually started my career in banking and finance industry, and I pivoted into entrepreneurship. I was a co-founder for four years of an NFT platform. We had a good ride, but the market crash killed the idea. So yeah, it was a good experience overall. And then after that, I joined Shift 4 as a main product manager on the new crypto team and build crypto payments for Shift 4 during a little bit more than three years.

Facing a lot of challenges, stitching a lot of providers, and managing the different priority of a big payment company that is publicly traded. So I've gone through a lot of challenges first and see how to build a successfully stablecoin product for a payment company. And now with Cyclops, that's what we are replicating, but helping other payment company launching stablecoin products and enriching their offering.

Grant Evans (1:41)

Well, that experience makes you the ideal subject matter expert for our conversation today, which is all around winning the internal stablecoin pitch.

Namely, you know, you're a director of product at Cyclops, you're helping payment companies actually ship stablecoin products, but also you've been on the other side, right, you're working within an acquirer, which is really interesting. Why do you therefore feel like so many boards currently struggle to prioritize stablecoin products internally? Is it still a challenge that we're seeing in the market?

Willy Bardiot (2:09)

Yeah, we are seeing a lot of boards that actually want to prioritize it, but then the leadership under them struggling to see how to execute this prioritization.

Since Stripe acquired Bridge and Privy, MasterCard acquired BVNK, and the new regulation coming into place with a genius act in the US, Micah in Europe, Stablecoin is really seeing us as one of the rails of future, and boards don't want to be fallen behind, so they want to do something with stablecoins. But most of the time, the team don't know what exactly they want to do, what will be their ROI, and they want to check a checkbox and say, yeah, we've done something with stablecoins. And usually it comes first with an announcement, but then it's much harder to actually execute on the right product behind.

Grant Evans (3:02)

So what do you feel the boards of these payment companies need to actually hear to change their mindset around prioritization for stuff like stablecoins?

Willy Bardiot (3:12)

Think it's finding the right use case based on the benefits of stablecoin, what it can offer compared to a normal payment trail.

Fund available 24-7, money moving cross-border, instant settlement. There are a lot of good use case, and most of the time, the one board or leadership sees the obvious one, which is pay with crypto, crypto acceptance, but it's not necessarily the one bringing the most ROI to the company.

Grant Evans (3:52)

And have you heard any interesting conversations in the room today where a new challenge has presented itself, obviously without naming any brands, but are you feeling that you're at these events and you have another conversation like, oh, there's another use case there that we could maybe identify.

Willy Bardiot (4:06)

Yeah, we are seeing a lot of more and more use case linking stablecoin with fiat rail and local fiat rail and how to move money from one country to another using stablecoin as a rail to go cross border, but then you still have to exchange to the local fiat in the country and there's a lot of challenges around this and how to manage regulation in each country, who will be unboded. Yeah, there is a lot to tackle on this subject.

Grant Evans (4:42)

That leads into that kind of notion of you've got the challenge, you've identified what the market is saying.

The partner of Cyclops in this case is engaged, they want to crack on and prioritize that project. Who are the stakeholders you're generally dealing with day to day then from an implementation point of view? Who are the individuals then defining these projects, working with Cyclops and bringing your product to life?

Willy Bardiot (5:05)

Yeah, the product team definitely need to be involved, but the compliance need to also be involved from the start. They are like a key stakeholder and usually the product team underestimate how much compliance can be a blocker if they are not on board from the start because the crypto regulation is very different from the fiat regulation and there is much more to figure out with crypto, especially around the flow fund, who touch crypto on behalf of Foo, and if the payment company is under the regulation or not. This depend on jurisdiction and some of the regulation are changing. So it's a challenge for the compliance team to know exactly how it works.