I'm here with Anthony Suhu, Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram.
So excited you're here.
Thanks for inviting me.
Well, you know, let's just talk first about the fact that you just took over this job 13 months ago.
I'd love to hear a little bit about your vision and, you know, where you go from here.
Yeah, so the beauty of joining the company at this point in time is I feel so fortunate.
Because, uh, I joined a little over 13 months ago now.
And the beauty of what we're doing is we're really re-founding the company.
For people that might not know about MoneyGram, the company's been around for 80 years, but the more interesting thing is it operates in over 200 countries and territories across 20,000 corridors.
And the bigger part is that we have physical representation of Nearly 500,000 retail locations.
To give you a sense of what that means.
It's actually bigger, our physical locations, more than McDonald's, Starbucks, and Subway combined.
And so when you get, think about that reach and add 5 billion digital endpoints, we can affect a lot.
What we've done is leveraging these assets.
We've rethought what the company can become.
And one of the things about where the world's going, especially right.
Now with the digitalization of currency, the idea and emergence of AI as well as embedded finances, they're all converging all together.
And I think what that means for consumers is that MoneyGram can deliver better outcomes for them by having them save time, effort, money when they're thinking about the, the matter of money, either send receipts, store, or maybe in the future, if they want to save.
Yeah, so speaking of innovation, you guys certainly have had a history of that.
And speaking of digital assets, you guys have some, some developments.
I'd love to hear more about MoneyGram ramps and also the new stablecoinpowered app that you've got.
Mhm.
So, I'll separate those two.
Yeah, and I would say that um when we look at the world, we know that we are really experts at being able to send a very complex transaction across the border.
And on that, we do it really well, but what we believe is that's with stablecoin, it allows us to offer a different experience to our consumer.
So besides sending the money, which we've served in terms of sender, on the receiver side, we're offering them now a digital wallet that they can store, and especially in, in economies where there's a lot of fluctuation in the currency, they actually can keep it in USDC.
And only, and it's pegged to the US dollar so that uh when they are ready to spend, then that's at that point they convert into cash.
Um, so it allows them to actually have much more stored value than if you typically receive the money and you don't need to spend it for a few days.
And so I think that you can kind of imagine as we do that, we're now launching 7 LATA countries and we're going to launch it and our hope is to blanket around the world.
The second part is that when we think about where innovation is going, we know we won't always have the best ideas.
So we built an open network platform to allow developers to build and access our global network that I've mentioned earlier in terms of connecting the globe, so people can build, and we've seen developers build payroll apps on top.
They've built things for gaming, they've built things for gifting all within the MoneyGram platform and the, the The great thing is they all know their customers better than we do, and they're developing these really individual, very focused vertical solutions.
And we're excited about where that's going.
We just launched ramps, uh, really back in May, and we've already started seeing a lot of traction.
Oh, that's really cool.
And also, you, the staplecoin-powered app, that was launched in Colombia, correct?
And you've also expanded.
Yeah, and our goal is to uh actually expand across the globe over the next uh year.
So, we focus on Laptam really because it's a strong receivers uh market, and also there's a lot of currency uh volatility there, which affords us to be able to provide a really clear value proposition for the consumer.
Well, you know what they say, if you want to go fast, you go alone.
If you want to go far, you go together.
So it seems like partnerships would be key for you, and I wonder what your approach is to those, you know, fintech partnerships across the Middle East since we're here at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
So I think our approach to, uh, partnerships is the same as kind of how we approach business or how we approach building products, which is we always start with who are the Customer is and what problem are we actually trying to solve.
And then at that moment in time, we start thinking where are the assets we have and where are the assets our partners have, and how we can combine it to make the service better for our customers.
And so, that's gonna be really the key thing.
So there are some areas, for instance, where we operate, where a partner will know their market a lot better than we do, and they basically want to use our. because uh our network touches around the world.
As I mentioned, we have one of the largest global payments network in the world.
And so we want to allow more use cases on it because in some respects, when we partner, we see ourselves much more like a platform than we do like a tow booth, if that makes sense.
You need that entrepreneur background is showing through with solving that pain point being your focus.
Still early, but yes, we hope so.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Excited to be here.
