Ep 291- Arche Capital Managing Partner Vanessa Grellet

**John** (0:00)
Hey, it's the FinTech Newscast. My name is John, and with me, as always, and we're always lucky to have Steve with us. Welcome to the podcast.

**Steve** (0:09)
Very lucky. Happy to be here, John. How's it going?

**John** (0:11)
You like that smooth intro this time? It's only 300 times, but still messing it up.

**Steve** (0:17)
Nailed it.

**John** (0:19)
Yeah, yeah. And we are very lucky, actually, to have someone that knows a lot more about Web3, crypto, blockchain, than we ever will.
Vanessa Grellet, the co-founder and managing partner at Arche Capital. Welcome to the podcast.

**Vanessa Grellet** (0:38)
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

**John** (0:41)
Yeah, yeah. Great to have you. In the news this week, actually today in the Wall Street Journal, an interesting article about a payment method I haven't heard of before, but you probably will hear of coming up called Paze. P-A-Z-E.
I'm meant to take on the Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal world. As you can imagine, those cost a little bit. They have to give some money to, the banks are giving away some money to Apple Pay. In this article, they mentioned they pay Apple 0.15 percent of the purchase price, which works out to $750 million last year across all of their purchases in 2025 And that's just one of the wallets. So the banks are eager, using the same consortium they've used for Zelle, the early warning services, to create this new competitor called Paze. What do you think, Steve? Would you use Paze?
Are you solidly in the Google Pay camp?

**Steve** (1:49)
I mostly use Google Pay right now because I have an Android, but it's interesting because I actually worked on an early warning engagement recently. And I think the issue that the consortiums like these have is that there's just way too many cooks in the kitchen. So you have basically all the big banks. We have the Wells Fargo's, and JP Morgan's of the world cooking up a solution. And what I find is that for something like payments, UX and UI and also a well-defined strategy can actually be super important, but it gets diluted if you again have all these banks in this space. So sort of how we saw that although my caveat here is that as we saw how Zelle really took a long time to gain traction and to be a competitor to Cash App and Venmo, there's actually a potential that Paze could eventually become similarly popular, especially as it seeks to displace or replace some of the transactions that are now being done by Google Pay and Apple Pay. But I think that it's an interesting play. I don't know that I feel bad about the fact that whenever I use Google Pay or Apple Pay, banks have to pay Apple and Google for the benefit of my business. Exactly. Will somebody please think of the banks? If they find a way, yeah, exactly, poor Jamie Dimon. But if they find a way to make it more useful and more economically convenient, maybe I'll go over to Paze. But as of now, I just don't see the value prop. Yeah, I just don't see the prop.

**John** (3:14)
You're not the target audience.

**Steve** (3:16)
No, it's folks under 40

**John** (3:20)
No, it's people over 44, especially women, are the target. So, and get this, they've used, guess why? They've used Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union to be their spokespeople in their ads.

**Steve** (3:39)
Because they're women over 44?

**John** (3:41)
Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union.

**Steve** (3:45)
Oh, Banks and Union, no way.

**John** (3:47)
Yes, Banks and Credit Union. And they're the target demographic, women over 40

**Steve** (3:55)
That is a stroke of genius.

**John** (3:56)
Because the tech savvy or tech friendly people, they know they're going to be kind of committed already to Google or Apple, or they love their Venmo and all that. So they're going to go after people who are unaffiliated first.

**Steve** (4:11)
Unaffiliated? Look at that.

**John** (4:12)
So it's interesting you be skeptical because, yeah, you're not targeted.

**Steve** (4:18)
It's not for me.

**John** (4:19)
Anything you've invested in similar to this in this world, Vanessa?

**Vanessa Grellet** (4:23)
Yeah, I think FinTech and payments, if you add on the crypto layer is a super exciting space with the advent of stable coins. So we've invested in a similar solution that is called Limited and is basically backed by stable coins and partners with banks all around the world.

**John** (4:48)
It's called Limited?

**Vanessa Grellet** (4:50)
Limited.

**John** (4:51)
Limited, okay.

**Vanessa Grellet** (4:52)
And basically, it focuses a lot now on emerging markets. So maybe a different target audience than Paze, but will also be coming to the US. And basically, allows you to have bank accounts all over the world, transfer in any currency at the speed of light.