"You Now Have Two Customers: The Human and Their Agent"

**Raja Rajamannar** (0:00)
You need to rethink the entire stack. The criteria of selling to a machine are quite different than the criteria of selling to a human being.
But at the same time, I have to get into, so I'm now attacking two segments, the person and the person's agent. Both of the requirements are different, and both those requirements are critical from a sale to go through.

**Sam Ewen** (0:30)
Hi, it's Sam Ewen. Welcome to CoinDesk Spotlight. I am very excited to be sitting down with Raja Rajamannar.
Raja, you're a legendary marketer in the world of both brands and financial technology and all the things that you've done before. We've spoken a number of times, and after you and I spoke with Mayur Gupta in Miami at Consensus, I thought it'd be great for us to have a little bit more of a substantive conversation. So welcome to the show, and where do we find you right now?

**Raja Rajamannar** (0:57)
I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's a great place to be in, in summers.

**Sam Ewen** (1:04)
I did not know that. I was there for one day for a meeting, but I have my sister-

**Raja Rajamannar** (1:09)
You should come back.

**Sam Ewen** (1:10)
I should come back. My sister-in-law's family is in Cleveland, so I know there's a rivalry or something there.

**Raja Rajamannar** (1:16)
No, but it's all Ohio, so we are good.

**Sam Ewen** (1:18)
Right. It's all Ohio.
Raja, I feel like I was thinking about you and our conversation, and I wanted to think about questions and your perspective on things that I think would be really interesting to our audience.
I'm not going to do a lot of your background and career. I think that'll come through the questions themselves, but I think about how you really steered the Mastercard brand to be just truly one of the most important in all of mainstream brands, but also certainly in the world of financial technology. I started to think about it through the lens, and it's going to be provocative from the beginning of saying, we're here at CoinDesk, we cover crypto and now crypto and it's over overlay with AI and payments and technology, but it has a branding problem for sure. I think that's one of the big challenges we face is, how do you get the normal consumer to think, this is not all illicit activity, this is not all being hacked and scams, this is not all meme coins and some of the stuff that's happened in the last year with that. As opposed to thinking, hey, we are really exploring how to reformat the financial rails for the digital age, for the internet age. How would you approach the brand of crypto's problem?

**Raja Rajamannar** (2:51)
See, I think you have got in the crypto world, two problems to solve.
If you ask the man or the woman on the street and talk to them about crypto, it's one very fuzzy world and they have no clue of what's there on the other side.
On the other hand, because the category itself is not understood, any brand in that category means nothing to them. So it's a two-step problem that you have to solve.
But I think that's the biggest opportunity. If the category is already known and there are established brands, like financial services, financial technologies, financial services, financial services, and so on, then you can find a new category altogether. If you are a new brand which is coming in, you are competing against the behemoths. It's a humongous challenge. And you are trying to find out a differentiation vis-a-vis the other brands.
But in the case of a new category altogether, you have an opportunity to define the category as to how the consumers should perceive it and associate yourself uniquely with that category in the hearts and minds of people in a very powerful way.
And I think this is the first thing. So if I'm the brand manager at any of the crypto companies, my first thing will be to put crypto in a simple, easy to understand, plain English manner to tell them what crypto is. And by the way, we, brand XYZ, is the best in this category. So it's a two-step thing that you have to do. But as I would say that, it starts with a category education. Because right now, I can tell you this, like I go to any of my friends. They're all well-educated. They're all executives in many companies. But you ask any one of them, do you know anything about cryptos? They heard about Bitcoin. And then they say, yeah, Bitcoin is probably for various illicit, illegal kind of things. And you want to beat the system. You want to beat the taxing. You want to have illegal trafficking of whatever drugs or people or whatever. That's where you use crypto. That's a misperception that people have. And you need to change that. But the good thing is in that it's only a small subset of people who have any opinion, if at all. So the vast number of people have zero opinion about it. So I would say, take certain use cases which are really powerful and compelling. Like, for example, if I'm in a country where the inflation happens, it's on a daily basis. And there are a bunch of countries like that. So you earn your salary or your paycheck this particular, say Monday, you got it. By Friday, the paycheck is much less worth than it was on Monday. So if you position it saying that this is a method by which you reserve the value of the good effort that you have put and the legitimate returns you got, you're protecting it. So this is a kind of a product which holds its value. And you know what? Coinbase is the best one for doing that, or whatever else it is there. So that's how it'll come through, right? Or the second one, like I'm in the United States. Some of my family members are still back in the US., back in India. So I keep sending some money to them from time to time. Somebody's birthday, somebody got married, somebody had a child. What do I just send a small gift to them? Normally, it is in the form of, say, small amounts, $100, $50, $1,000, whatever it is. Now, the money that is actually reaching them compared to what I send is very small, and there is a time lag. And if I actually opt in for instant transfers and all, the margins of the middlemen are even higher. So how cool will it be if you were to educate? For example, if I'm sending money to my cousin, you educate both of us, you know what? What you send is what he gets.