Utrust with Filipe Castro (CIO) | E106

Bringing crypto payment processing to the world.

Summary:

In this 106th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host welcomes Filipe Castro, co-founder and CIO of Utrust, to talk about Utrust’s growth strategy, how blockchain payment technology competes with credit cards and other existing forms of payment, the future of payment tech, and more.

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:55: – Utrust is a platform that enables e-commerce merchants to accept various forms of cryptocurrency as payment.

  • 01:24: – Filipe met his co-founders online in 2010 in cryptocurrency and blockchain forums.

  • 03:30: – On the merchant’s side, they don’t have to worry about the accounting or conversion of cryptocurrency, because Utrust handles all of that automatically on the back end and the merchant simply receives their US Dollars or Euros or whichever currency they operate under.

  • 04:28: – For the user, you select Utrust as your payment method, which takes you to the Utrust website and allows you to select and set up your crypto wallet with a QR code.

  • 06:00: – Utrust currently has ten vendors using the platform because they had to select the optimal vendors to start the platform with in order to optimize the experience and collect the data needed to scale up effectively.

  • 07:30: – Utrust has competitors, but most of the vendors that were interested in using Utrust approached them, not the other way around, partly because it’s free to integrate.

  • 09:23: – Filipe believes Utrust is the best solution because it has the strongest community support and a seamless integration, which is crucial for a blockchain technology.

  • 10:17: – Transaction fees are competitive with regular credit cards, at only 1%.

  • 11:30: – Currency conversion happens almost instantaneously to protect both the merchant and the consumer, so the merchant gets the price they listed and the consumer isn’t overcharged due to fluctuating conversion.

  • 13:04: – Utrust is compatible with any wallet that supports scanning a QR code.

  • 14:38: – Having a diverse range of merchants on board with Utrust allows them to collect more accurate metrics to perfect the platform more quickly.

  • 19:20: – For the user, there is almost immediate settlement of payment, and for the merchant you get a notification of incoming payment and the settlement depends on the cryptocurrency protocol.

  • 22:37: – Filipe is paying attention to growing competition, but acknowledges that we are still in the building phase of this space where major players haven’t entered crypto yet.

  • 27:30: – If Filipe could change anything, it would be for all the communities in blockchain to simply get along better and coexist better.

  • 28:53: – The biggest challenge has been establishing a company culture and building a team as a startup.

  • 29:45: – Filipe is excited by the way Utrust is changing the future of payments to empower consumers and merchants.

3 Key Points

  1. Utrust gives online vendors more payment options to be more competitive.

  2. Collecting metrics from a deliberately crafted pool of users will enable you to develop and scale your business more quickly.

  3. The future of payments is a seamless digital experience.

Tweetable Quotes:

  • “We always want to protect the merchant, just to make sure that whatever the quoted price that they put in their system, they’re going to get that minus 1%, always.” –Filipe Castro

  • “We’re trying to get metrics to perfect the system. The best way to get different metrics is to integrate with different types of businesses that have different users, have different patterns of usage, sell different types of goods, have different frequencies.” –Filipe Castro

Resources Mentioned:

Full Transcript

Jason Pereira: Hello, welcome to FinTech Impact. I'm your host Jason Pereira. Before we get started today, just one piece of housekeeping for those of you who have yet to notice, I have rebranded everything I do with the various channels, podcasts, blogs, everything into one personally, brand a website, jasonpereira.ca. So please take the time to sign up for my newsletter that will inform you of any TV shows, podcast episodes, or blog postings, things that will be going up shortly. And now on today's show, today on the show, I have Filipe Castro, Co-founder and CIO of you Utrust. Utrust is an online platform that allows people to transact in Cryptocurrencies, basically looking to be the Stripe of the Crypto Sphere. And with that, here's my interview with Filipe. Welcome Filipe. 

Filipe Castro: [crosstalk 00:00:44] Hi Jason. 

Jason Pereira: How are you doing? 

Filipe Castro: I'm great, thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Jason Pereira: Well, thank you for taking the time to do this. So Filipe Castro, CIO and Co- founder of Utrust, tell us about Utrust. 

Filipe Castro: So for those who may not be familiar with us, Utrust is a blockchain powered Crypto to bank payment solution. We allow E-commerce merchants start accepting multiple Cryptocurrencies from buyers while receiving in Euros, U.S. dollar or British Pounds, which are settled directly in their bank account. 

Jason Pereira: Okay. We're going to go through that entire process shortly. So tell me about the origins of Utrust, where did you get started? Why did you guys start this thing out besides the opportunity that is Blockchain? 

Filipe Castro: Well that's quite a story actually. So we are incorporated in Switzerland and in late 2017 but actually me and my Co-founders, we actually met way back in 2010. We actually met online for the first time, that was early days Bitcoin for those who might be familiar. Most of the talk was like in forums, Bitcoin talk and other similar forums. And we actually at the time they didn't know each other face to face. We know each other from allies, but only we're on the same forums. We trade all that information. We're kind of in the same community. After a lot of years, I actually went to a Blockchain meetup and I met this interesting guy who was talking about this whole blockchain thing. This is the future, this is the future of payments. This is a future for a lot of industry is going forward and there's this need in the market. I used a lot of payment solutions and actually got scammed by one. I didn't get my goods. 

Filipe Castro: We should build something better as a payment solution. There's this need in the market, let's do it. This is the right moment. We went for a beer and after that I actually discovered that we knew each other from way before. That was the person that I've been talking to all of those years in the same forum. So that's the whole concept of Utrust, that's solving existing problems and something that we actually suffer ourselves and we said there must be a better way. And then we set forward to build you Utrust, to set the company, to go to the first fundraise and to grow the team and develop the product where we are right now in the beginning of 2020. 

Jason Pereira: Excellent. Okay, so let's talk about, first of all, I always love, there must be a better way because that's almost every company gets started in this space. So let's talk first and foremost about what the experience of utilizing your App is first from the front end. So I am someone who wants to purchase something from one of your vendors and wants to use some sort of Cryptocurrency. Tell me what that looks like from both the purchaser and the vendors of viewpoint? 

Filipe Castro: Absolutely. Let's go over the merchant first. After all, we are at our core payment solutions. So looking at the merchant's perspective first, when you have your checkout, when you have all your different payment solutions right now what we provide is a complimentary Cryptocurrency payment solution at checkout time that allows you as a merchant to accept a whole new range from the buyers in your existing website. By one, to pay natively with Crypto assets, with Cryptocurrencies, but you as a merchant, you don't want him to deal with that complexity. You don't want them to get multiple chains, you don't want to deal with the accounting with the regulatory hurdles, you just want as a merchant, something that works just a different option and everything in the background plugs in automatically to your system on the backend and you just get your U.S dollars, your Euros as you were in other payments system. 

Filipe Castro: Now, from the other perspective, as a user, it's actually quite simple. At the checkout process, you go to the typical checkout, let's say you're going to buy it and Ipad, or you're going to buy an iPhone or Huawei phone, whatever you are shopping at the moment. Typical checkout process, you go enter your shipping details, your address or name everything as it was. And then on selecting payment solutions you select Utrust. Selecting Utrust will actually read direct you to a page where you can set which Cryptocurrency do you want to pay with selecting that Cryptocurrency, we'll actually pop the QR code and the page itself showing you what you have to do. Scan that QR code with your own Wallet. And with the Crypto assets you already have, it's your Wallet. You can choose any Wallet that you already have or you can use the Utrust Wallet. 

Filipe Castro: But it's very open ended and you just scan the QR code. That's kind of magic experience we're looking for. Of course you can always copy paste that address in manually, but we really want that magical experience. Just scan something and confirm and it's done. So that's how we envisioned and we wanted the experience to be like for the user and for the merchant. 

Jason Pereira: So for lack of a better term, you're almost trying to be the Stripe of Crypto online transactions. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Yes. 

Jason Pereira: Nailed it. Perfect. Okay, so first off there must've been a number of challenges, both technical and human in dealing with this. So let's talk about the human aspects of this. So you have a number of companies you're dealing with. How many clients do you currently have as vendors right now? 

Filipe Castro: So right now we have 10 vendors that are using Utrust solution live. That's because we had to pre-select. We actually had thousands of merchants joining in on the Utrust ecosystem because it was a long time since the inception developing the product until actually going live. So we had a lot of pre- registered merchants, but we had select and filter down the first ones to enroll. Those are based on metrics such as processing volume, the type of customer they already use, the vertical. And we selected those 10 and Oh, by the way, we are adding more every month because we want to optimize our product. After all, we only launched nearly six months ago. And for us a priority right now is not so much as to scale big on the next one month or two. But to get the necessary metrics to be able to scale big in three to six months. 

Filipe Castro: So it's taking those early metrics to actually optimize the experience and grow even faster. So that's our core focus with our first merchants. We could have 50,000 merchants if we wanted, but the way to do it right is actually to do it slowly and then scale up really fast. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, it was something like payments, the last thing you want is to break. This is something like electricity or water. It better be there when you want it. Otherwise people are just going to lose faith very quickly. 

Filipe Castro: Exactly. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. So clearly you had that much interest. That's interesting. So before you launched this product, how did you go about getting that much interest from different vendors? 

Filipe Castro: Well that's a quite an interesting one because most of the vendors, most of the merchants, wanted to try the platform and it's still unwilling too to try it out. They come to us because there's this niche, there's this need in the market for a solution [inaudible 00:07:50]. Because there's, let's be frank, we do have competitors. Okay. We are not the only game in town in terms of solution, but we believe that we are the best at what we do. And we have a lot of merchants, a lot of driving interest in this specific sub-segment of payments. Not because it has a big overall volume compared to other current payment method, but because of all the buzz and everything that this technology will bring to the merchant themselves. No chargeback, less fraud, the costs and less fraud and no chargebacks alone are in the billions getting more margin per article if the users pay with Cryptocurrency, that's actually a big point for merchants. 

Filipe Castro: So there's a lot of driving interests from the merchants themselves. To use a solution such as this. Plus it's free to integrate. So there is no monthly subscription costs. There's very little in terms of the barrier to the technology adoption. So it's something that you as a business, as a merchant can integrate basically free and get additional revenue. 

Jason Pereira: So essentially, what you're saying is that the inefficiencies of the current payment system as we know, chargebacks, fraud and all this sort of stuff is leading to people saying, "Hey, okay. We recognize the fact that we don't have to deal with this nonsense on the blockchain because of the sheer dynamics of trust in it." And that's driving their interest. Now you made an interesting statement about you're the best at it and I'm going to ask you to justify that. What makes you the best at processing these types of transactions for these types of vendors? 

Filipe Castro: Well, I would say that in terms of interface, in terms of perceived brand, in terms of community support, in terms of the whole ecosystem. Being seamless, not only from one part but to everyone, from the user to the merchants. I think we are pretty much unbeatable at that tightness in the ecosystem. At the brand power and at the community support, which is very crucial for a Blockchain powered solution like this. 

Jason Pereira: Good. So basically, experience is pretty straight forward. People are basically going online wanting to purchase this more or less seamless experience. Kind of like what they're used to except without using a credit card. Vendors are basically happy because they're not dealing with all the stuff that goes along with traditional Credit card vending or trip processing. What kind of fees are they paying on this in terms of transactions? How do you compare in terms of costs versus a Credit card vendor? 

Filipe Castro: It's actually quite competitive and effective for merchants. We're talking about 1% so that means we only get charged 1% versus the traditional payers that can be as high as 24%. If you account for FX, so Foreign Exchange converting one currency to another. For example, if someone is paying in U.S dollars and where we sell are in the Eurozone receiving Euros, then it can be even higher to six 6.5%. So it can add up to a lot. If you are merchants selling high value goods then to the more. So it's a very attractive proposition. 

Jason Pereira: Interesting. Yeah, again, I quoted Stripe earlier and their base price is 2.75% you're doing this at one. So let's talk about what happens in the background with the currency. So you're taking, at the end of the day, someone's buying this would say Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever it is and with ether and then they're turning around. Yeah, the vendors turning around and receiving currency at a set rate so they know what they're selling for the price is listed in as $50. Then that's converted over and the person who's buying knows what they're going to be giving up in Crypto. What's happening on the back end for you to manage that kind of risk exposure? Because essentially, are you instantaneously trading Crypto for hard currency or what are you doing? 

Filipe Castro: Yes, it's pretty much close to instantaneous. So we always want to protect the merchants just to make sure that whatever the quoted price, as you say that they put in hard currency in their system, they're going to get that minus 1%, always guaranteed. And you as the user obviously, we want to protect you as well. We want to make sure that pay the right amount, it's fast and it's as seamless as possible. What we do is we try to convert just in time as soon as we can to manage that risk to arbitrage that risk. So that's, we take part of the risk, we protect our merchant counterparts. In essence, we try to convert as soon as possible to guarantee that set rate. 

Jason Pereira: Interesting. So are you guys basically an exchange or are you partnered with an exchange house who's facilitating this? 

Filipe Castro: Yes. So we are not an exchange ourselves but we partner with exchange or liquidity providers to provide this kind of instant feedback to the users. As you know, price varies and different exchanges and we actually use that to provide that optimal rates to the user. And that's actually one of the key elements of this, because there's no universal set price of any Cryptocurrency. There's small arbitrage differences and we can actually take that into account and provide something that it's more stable on a very short timeframe to make sure both parties are satisfied. 

Jason Pereira: Interesting. And I also see that you've done various integrations with different Wallets. You want to speak about how that works. 

Filipe Castro: Actually we support any Wallet that is capable of scanning a QR code at checkout time. And even if you want to use your paper Wallet, actually we have a manual option at the checkout process instead of QR code, they can just copy the address and the amount. So even if you want to use- 

Jason Pereira: I'm curious, how many people manually type that in? 

Filipe Castro: Well, I'm not sure. I don't have the statistics right here. I could get them, but it's not a lot. Most people now they just prefer to scan the QR code. It's more practical and most Wallet support the scanning feature. So it just makes more sense. 

Jason Pereira: Absolutely. So let's talk about the different types of vendors you basically already partnered with the first time. I mean you're not, some of these are... It looks like you have a mix of reasonably sized two very large vendors. I mean the ones that caught my eye. Just happens to be my grandfather's favorite soccer team. So Benfica, Portuguese... So what can I say? So the second I saw that I was like, "Oh, okay. I should talk to this guy." If nothing other than to... So tell me about the different vendors that you chose. It seems like you have a diversity of industry as well as I'm guessing a diversity of scale. What was the thinking behind that? Was it just trying to onset amongst the many industries as you could in the first go? 

Filipe Castro: You're actually right. There's a lot of diversity that's tied into the reason I mentioned before. The first mention is that we wanted to onboard for Utrust. We're trying to get metrics to perfect the system, to have mass deployment and massive goals. And the best way to get different accurate metrics is actually to integrate with different types of businesses that have different users, different patterns of usage, sell different types of goods, have different frequencies. So having this diversity actually help us to get more accurate metric for next stage of growth. Benfica is actually our first merchant. They have a huge community of fans and it was a pleasure to actually have them as our first merchant. And now you can go to their online store, buy season tickets, season passes, merchandise, jerseys with Cryptocurrency. Another one for example, Phone House, they sell phones and electronics across Europe, so it's a different segment. Of course it's not in the same league as Benfica. It's a different segment selling electronics, but it's a completely different pattern in terms of users, in terms of preferences and checkout. It gives us a totally different set of metrics. 

Filipe Castro: Again, alternative airlines, which was actually a one of our latest ones. That's travel buying tickets, airfares online. Again, totally different metrics, totally different types user. It's very, very diverse and that's for a reason to basically get good data points so we can scale even faster. 

Jason Pereira: Excellent. So any good Crypto play, you basically raised money, the traditional Crypto way, which was through an ICO. Tell me about that process. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah. Well, we started with an ICO because at the time it was closely aligned with what you're building in terms of Blockchain technology. As you know, we have our own token, UTK which also plays a role in the ecosystem. In our payment gateway, the user can pay with multiple Cryptocurrencies, including UTK with specific benefits. But at the time with the fundraise, we decided that this was intrinsically a project driven by a need. A need of the community, a need the users, because we were part of that community. We were those users that we're seeing a problem that needed a solution in the industry. And at the time an ICO, seems like one of the best ways to kickstart this project forward. 

Filipe Castro: Was it difficult? Yes, I would say it was extremely difficult. We did manage to raise successfully, but it was a difficult process as it is in any fundraise, traditional what not. We managed to fundraise within Switzerland. We were one of the first actually to get regulated ICOs or as closely as it could be at the time because there were no issued guidelines when we actually did. The guidelines were only issued in the later months, but I'm proud to say that we're one of the most compliance out there doing it full KYC for every single participant and working our best to be proactively compliance with everything that was required at the time. And I would say that's a fantastic ecosystem, still is and I think it was the right choice to do it. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. Well, your timing was right. I'm looking at your chart, it looks like you were doing it during the ICO craze so that probably helped you a little bit too. You can't turn someone, people aren't willing to believe at that point. 

Filipe Castro: Well, I would say yes, but I don't know, we've seen in unfortunately a lot of projects that also raised during the ICO craze, based in Switzerland, based in other geographies that didn't succeed unfortunately, and I think it showcases this, this market is not that different, ICO market. It's not that different from a traditional fundraise in venture capital. Most startups end up in failure. That's expected actually and I don't think this ecosystem is that much different. It's natural that many projects will end up in failure, but you have to persevere and you need to try it. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, and I don't think many people took that into account when they basically thought about there was a really a gold rush, land grab from a lot of people's standpoints and again these are highly speculative plays just like any other startup. But many of them, it's interesting, I saw a study from a professor who studied the ICO pricing, ICO pricing and ICOs in general and you found something like the Libra was the average rate of return on an ICO was positive. However the average ICO was bankrupt. Yeah. So like more than... Like I said, something greater than 77% probability that the ICO was not going to survive a 18 month period. However, the ones that did were orders of magnitude more successful than anything else which made up for it. Which is typical venture capital type returns type stuff, right? So it's all fine and good for us to talk about stuff like that, but the average consumer is just not ready for that kind of deviation and risk. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah. There's a correlation between risk and reward and that's, as you said rightly so. It's part of the associated risk. 

Jason Pereira: Exactly. So let's go back to the product for a couple of minutes here. A couple of follow up questions. So first question is, what are the settlement times look like from the second I hit buy and I've approved the transaction? How long does it take to process everything? 

Filipe Castro: For the user itself or for the merchant? 

Jason Pereira: Well, for both. Let's talk about both steps. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah. So for the user, you actually get an immediate feedback that your payment depending on the Wallet that you're using. Again, this is very dependent on the protocol as well.On the merchant, what do you see in your merchant dashboard, you will see incoming payment not yet confirmed. Again, this is depending on the specific protocol or the speed of that protocol. If it's Bitcoin high congestion, it might be longer. If it's something a bit faster, it will be faster, but it's always dependent on the protocol itself. As a merchant, of course, you can see if it's pending or not, but looking from the merchant's perspective, it doesn't really matter if it takes a few minutes or a few hours because we're talking about the shipment of a product. It's not time sensitive for the merchants so they can afford to just wait a bit more for the confirmation. It's not something that is business critical for them. And that is why we- 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, and you guarantee the rate anyway, so you've de-risked them altogether. 

Filipe Castro: Exactly. So that's why we focus a lot on online merchants, not the point of sale scenario, where they will need that instant feedback for the user and the merchants. We think that solution will come in the future, but it's not yet from a based Blockchain point of view, we're not there yet. Or the use case is not as mature. But in online that we provide for the merchant. For the user, again, depending on your Wallet, on your Wallet, at the moment you pay, you the scan that QR code and you come from, depending on the Wallet use, you will see that you have sent your payment and you will receive a confirmation by email. And that, "Okay, were processing your payments and if something goes wrong in the next few minutes, we'll get in touch." This is with most Wallets, If it's for the Utrust Wallets, we have- 

Jason Pereira: You control the currency there, so that should be a lot faster. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah. It's instant. So in any protocol that we support the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, others, you got that instance, feedback and feelings. So both for the user and the merchant. 

Jason Pereira: Excellent. So tell me what kind of processing volume are you guys seeing at this point? I'm sure you guys are trying to ratchet this up slowly so you don't break anything along the way. What's been kind of the peak and the average in terms of add currency processed. 

Filipe Castro: Well, since the last six months we haven't overwhelming number of merchant and users trying out the platform. Unfortunately cannot quote anything in terms of TPV. We usually reserve that for, new partnerships or something that can cause of an NDA, then we can absolutely the goals- 

Jason Pereira: You can't blame me for trying. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah, sorry about that. But I can say that absolutely we are experiencing tremendous growth, so it's not a matter of growing it slowly, but trying to optimize the first batch of merchants to have an even greater experience and roll faster nets. So we're just not trying to actively put a break into things, but we want to really focus on the experience and make sure that the next batch of merchants, the next ones to onboard will be quicker, faster, and basically more seamless. 

Jason Pereira: Excellent. So are you worried at all about traditional payment processors getting into this space? Frankly, the fact that you're charging 1% in a lot of ways creates an innovator's dilemma for them, right? They're used to bigger, fatter margins. They're more used to fraud and all of a sudden stuff too that they got to pay out on. But for I think Stripe or anyone else charging 2.75% turning around and offering a payment alternative that is almost a third of that cost is something that's going to make them stop and think. So do you feel like you need to watch out or you're concerned about those types of players getting to this space? Or do you think that just your positioning already, both in terms of pricing and this being an evolving market gives you some protection? 

Filipe Castro: Well, we always looking at new entrants and competitors, that is for sure as a startup we still consider ourselves to startup, We cannot afford to drop our guard on that regard. As [crosstalk 00:23:27]. Yeah, of course. For established players, most of them haven't entered the space for a reason. They have a great business model. They have a business model that works, that have scale, so there's really, at this point they are little incentive to change that. Again, what we are seeing right now is kind of the foundations of a new system and we're still in the buildup phase in many cases of those pipelines with this new system. You see it with projects such as Libra. 

Filipe Castro: You see governments now talking about digital currency, about issuing their own digital currencies and that is disruptive. As in highly, highly disruptive because those initiatives which are option-based or, they are trying to take away the number of intermediaries in that financial system. Of course slowly but that's where they're aiming for and that is very highly disruptive. Obviously, I think big companies, the leading players, are interested. They are actively looking at this space and they are actively looking at the right moment to participate with your own initiatives, maybe partner with other players, with startups. I think it will happen, it's just a matter of when and not if at the end of the day what ends up happening in most established companies. 

Filipe Castro: Look at Google for example, when a new startup develops a kickass product, they enjoy success but they don't have scale yet. They see it early on as high potential and they say, Hmm, you know what? We're very interested in the technology you are developing. Let's partner with you guys or work with us on this." Because at the end of the day for those companies, it's much better to take something that's, it's been organically designed then to develop the resources in house to design that from the ground up. You don't have the same sense of spirit, you don't have the same drive. And that happens all over again in developed companies. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, and I mean there's a couple of angles there. I mean first off when a large company announces something like this, and I'm going to pick on Facebook and Libra because there's no company I trust less than Facebook in this world. The reality is, is that look at the blow back they got and one of the best quotes I heard about Libra was, "You know what? This is a great idea. If anyone other than Facebook had brought it forward." Like that's the thing, right? If Apple had come forward with this, with a consortium of all these vendors I'll be like, "Wow, Apple's changing the game." But because the masters are not giving a crap about your personal life and exploiting it basically came out with it. It was toxic. So I don't know. I think Libra might be DOA. I'm not really sure. But I think it's going to face a lot of... In a world where trust is what matters, which is with every currency. I think that there are, they built a lot of bad reputational credit there. They're going to suffer from. 

Filipe Castro: I don't know, I actually think they will launch successfully. That's my entirely personal opinion. I think they have a great team. They have great engineering talent- 

Jason Pereira: Technology is sound. The technology's, I've heard great reviews about it, but it comes down to, it's going to come down to user adoption and I don't know. Especially, can you imagine that you adopt Libra, which also by the way makes Facebook your central bank, which I don't want that either. You adopt Libra and then there's another Facebook scandal regarding lack of protection of consumer data and just like blatant, not malfeasance but laziness and some of the sloppiness we've seen from them in the past regarding our privacy. Can you imagine that? And then you're a vendor associated with something that's associated with Facebook. 

Jason Pereira: It doesn't look good on you necessarily. I think that if anything, there's a decent probability of basically the smaller players like yourselves organically coming up and then yeah, a larger player like a Google whatever or Apple saying, "You know what, this is how we're going to do it. We're going to adopt, we're going to basically do an acquisition to then throw gas on this fire and move forward." Because I think you guys don't have the reputational risk issues that a larger company has when they want to try to adopt something like this. 

Filipe Castro: Yeah. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. 

Jason Pereira: So before we wrap up, there's three questions I ask everybody just to make you think and get some insight. The first one is if you had one wish for something you can change in the industry, what would it be? Or your company for that matter? 

Filipe Castro: Well, looking at the Blockchain industry, one of my dearest wishes is to for all the communities to actually get along better. I think there's a lot of unnecessarily infighting between different communities, different protocols. Everyone's trying to prove their protocol or their currency or their favorite project is the best. But guys, there's space for all of us. There'll be different use cases that will require a different approach and they will co-exist. So I personally think there needs to be less anger and hate in the community, more cooperation across the community. We don't need to hate each other guys. We can all- 

Jason Pereira: It's hard to bring together that many anarchists and libertarians without rattling different [crosstalk 00:28:19]. 

Filipe Castro: No, no, no. It's not all. I think there's a perception maybe in some communities, but I don't think that represents the overall community. I think in most communities- 

Jason Pereira: No, no, no. It's enough to create tension, that's for sure. 

Filipe Castro: Well, there's bad actors everywhere, and I think it's our duty as members of those communities to actually cooperate and don't, disregard those more toxic elements. And of course it needs to be some dissident voices as well to balance things out. But guys, we don't need to hate each other, we can all work together. 

Jason Pereira: And all get along. All right, cool. So let's see. Next question is, what's been the biggest challenge in getting to where you are today? 

Filipe Castro: Oh, I would say growing our team has been the greatest challenge as in any Startup. So forming a culture around your Startup, around your venture. It's one of the most difficult problems for every entrepreneur. Sure, with money, with resources you can develop, you can hire people, but having people stay with you and join you because they love what you're doing, they love your mission and they would work for you almost for free during the first stages. That's something money cannot buy and that's the most difficult thing to nail down. Your culture, your objectives and what unites your whole team together. From development, marketing, to finance under one vision. 

Jason Pereira: The response of people being the biggest challenge is often the most common response I get. And lastly, what is it that gets you up in the morning and excites you to keep doing what it is you're doing and press on? 

Filipe Castro: Well, continue to grow your Utrust. We believe this something that is absolutely great for the markets we want to be part of the future payments. We're willing to really change the way things are done. To empower consumers and buyers, consumers and merchants to use something better. Better solution, future forward solution and it's inspiring every time I look at payments and different parts of the world, I always recall to the moment I lived in China for a few years and the fact that I didn't have Wallets. I didn't carry a Wallets, I didn't carry cards. I only carried my phone. 

Jason Pereira: [inaudible 00:30:30]. 

Filipe Castro: Everywhere you go it just scan a QR code and you pay. And I want that future of payments, that seamless experience. I want it to be like that for me, for my generation for the next generation, all around the world, be it online or offline. And that's what drives me to continue Utrust to get [inaudible 00:30:49]. 

Jason Pereira: As someone who rolls their eyes and gets annoyed every time someone tells me that there's no tap-to-pay. Yeah, I agree with you. The sooner I can ditch my Wallet, the happier I'll be. And for those who say, "Oh, what happens if your phone is dead?" Well I've got my watch, I've got a backup plan. So in general I agree with you and I would very much like to see a Walletless future, which means it's going to get on digital identification as well. So Filipe, thank you very much for your time. This has been great. I'm sure everyone will appreciate this. I can check you out at utrust.com and once again, thank you for taking the time. 

Filipe Castro: My pleasure Jason. See you guys. 

Jason Pereira: So hope you found the interview with Filipe interesting and informative and that you take the time to check out Utrust and who knows, maybe in a very short period of time, you too will be transacting online in Crypto. As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care. 

Speaker 3: This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award winning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals and their families. To learn more, go to woodgate.com. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google play, or find more episodes at fintechimpact.com. 

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraCryptocurrency, Payments