Ep 288- EnFi CEO Joshua Summers and CTO Scott Weller

**John** (0:00)
Hey, it's the FinTech Newscast. My name is John, and with me, luckily enough, as always, Steve, welcome to the podcast.

**Steve** (0:07)
Still here, still around. Good to see you again.

**John** (0:10)
You're doing okay? You're surviving the summer?

**Steve** (0:12)
I am barely surviving. Yeah, it's funny, I work with teams in Europe, and the first thing that they say when they get on a call is, I'm burning up here.

**John** (0:21)
At least it's a drop.

**Steve** (0:21)
I'm burning up here.

**John** (0:23)
Yeah. Or as my friend used to say, it's not the heat, it's the stupidity.
You never know. All right. And we are very lucky, actually this week to have two C-suite level guests with us from EnFi, the CEO and co-founder, Joshua Summers. Welcome to the podcast.

**Joshua Summers** (0:44)
Thank you for having me.

**John** (0:46)
Yeah, thank you. And Scott Weller, the co-founder and CTO of EnFi.

**Scott Weller** (0:52)
Happy to be here.

**John** (0:54)
Yeah. All right. Well, you know, the news story for this week, as if he doesn't get enough attention, is Elon Musk's release on, and it is FinTech related, of X Money.
Premium and Premium Plus subscribers of X Money can now do more transactions. The test has expanded. So you can, I guess, pay for your cyber cab on the way to your rocket trip to the moon pretty soon here.
But this is putting together a lot of features that I think everybody wants. Instant payments, high-yield savings, cash back, peer-to-peer, FDIC insurance, and surprisingly, not cryptocurrency related at all, running all through the normal payment rails. Are you surprised, Steve, that it wouldn't be some doji, a Bitcoin or it seems like this is how he makes it succeed?

**Steve** (1:53)
Yeah, it's interesting because it seems like it's not quite as a meme forward as you would expect from a product from Elon and X here. So the idea here is, again, they're launching a thing called X-Money, and it seems like it's running on the infrastructure from Cross-Driver Bank as well. I don't really see what market it would play in, but I think the API is pretty attractive. It's actually 6%, which is higher than the Fed fund. I think it's about between 4% and 4.5%, so you could actually get some some substantial return on this. But I'm not sure who this is built for.
Is it a way for them to increase engagement via payments and having payments in the app, or is it just one step towards the everything app that Elon has been working on for the past five or six years or so? So again, I'm not sure what this is for, but at least it's an interesting play in the FinTech space.

**John** (2:41)
Yeah, it does seem focused on X users. So yeah, like you were saying, the everything app. So a lot of the features and things we're talking about are for X users. So you can peer-to-peer on the deceased body of Twitter through X to another x.com handle. Yeah, it's kind of like building up on what he's already got, which he has a history of doing with the Rockets lead to Starlink, and the Starlink leads to data centers in the sky, and building on top more and more. So he certainly isn't shy about taking risks on these sort of things.

**Steve** (3:24)
No, no. Also, I think the user base, the MAUs, the Monthly Active Users on the X, have actually been declining so much, slowly but steadily. And I think that launching some sort of P2P payment app can also help stem the tide of losing users. But I am concerned about, I guess, but I would be concerned with, again, the fact that they're promoting a 6% APY while they're basically, their rate is presumably at 4% or so. It seems like a money losing thing. But I guess if they can attribute this as a way to require customers, it could be their smart play.

**John** (4:01)
It's all part of the package.

**Steve** (4:02)
We'll see how it plays out.

**John** (4:03)
We'll pick it up on advertising.

**Steve** (4:05)
Yeah.
From X money to X credit cards. That's my prediction here. You'll get your X mortgage soon.

**John** (4:12)
I'm sure. Any worry that a Musk venture will jump into your industry, Joshua or Scott?

**Joshua Summers** (4:20)
Well, first, I'm not surprised he's doing this. Elon's an infrastructure guy. So first, going after solar and going after EVs to control energy.
Going after communication protocols, launching satellites, controlling X, and now ultimately going after payments. I think the next thing we'll see is X water and controlling sustenance itself.