Emmanuel Daniel, founder of TAB Global, on the new building blocks needed to succeed in the future of finance

Enjoying the podcast? Don’t miss out on future episodes! Please hit that subscribe button on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform to stay updated with our latest content. Thank you for your support!

Emmanuel Daniel, Author & Advisor Pioneering the Future of Finance and Global Thought Leadership, TAB Global

The financial system has become so much more complex over the last couple of decades that it is difficult to know what current trends will have staying power. How will the future financial system organize itself and will it look that much different to what we have today? I put these questions to one of the global thought leaders in fintech.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Emmanuel Daniel, the founder of The Asian Banker (now part of TAB Global) and one of the most interesting people in fintech today. He talks about the Great Transition, the title of his recent book, and details what is going to be important for the success of the financial institution of the future.

In this podcast you will learn:

  • How starting The Asian Banker launched a global platform.
  • A short history on the rise of fintech in China.
  • Why the Chinese regulators found the rise of fintech so challenging.
  • Why China will struggle to be leaders in the AI revolution.
  • Why Emmanuel decided to write a book on the personalization of finance.
  • What the U.S. needs to do to ensure the dollar remains the reserve currency of the world.
  • What is to become of platforms and the whole of idea of intermediation.
  • Emmanuel’s advice to innovators when it comes to regulation.
  • How the next banking crisis will unfold.
  • What could precipitate a change away from the dominance of the large banks.
  • What is needed for the safety and soundness of the financial system of the future.
  • Why the most important thing in the future is to be networked rather than large.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 496 – Emmanuel Daniel

Peter Renton  00:00

Peter, welcome to the Fintech One-on-One Podcast. This is Peter Renton, Co-Founder of Fintech Nexus, and now the CEO of the Fintech consulting company, Renton and Co., I’ve been doing this show since 2013 which makes this the longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. Now let’s get on with the show.

Peter Renton  00:32

Today, on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Emmanuel Daniel. He is the founder of The Asian Banker now called TAB Global, and he’s also an author, a futurist, and someone who has a lot of interesting things to say. So I wanted to get him on the show. We cover quite a bit of territory here. We talk about China, provide some perspective on why he doesn’t think China is going to lead in AI, which I thought was interesting. He talks about the personalization of finance and some of the points that he made in his book. He talks about crypto and platforms. We discuss the next financial crisis, the US dollar and the reserve currency of the world, and how that may change. We talk about big banks and networks. And he’s got some very interesting things to say there as well, and how he thinks the next couple of decades in finance is going to play out. It was a fascinating discussion. Hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to the podcast, Emmanuel.

Emmanuel Daniel  01:35

Hey, Peter, good to see you again.

Peter Renton  01:37

Yes.

Emmanuel Daniel  01:39

The last we met was at your penultimate conference in New York.

Peter Renton  01:43

Yeah, I think the event in New York. So anyway, great to see you again. You have a long and storied background in Fintech and financial services. So why don’t you just share with the listeners some of the highlights about what you’ve done in your career to date?

Emmanuel Daniel  01:59

So Peter, how it started is I spent 10 years of my life after graduation working in corporations, trying to be a lawyer, then not being interested in it, and all that. And then I went into the publishing business, and I found that banking was very interesting, because I call it the cathedral industry. All of us have something to do with banks from cradle to grave in the same way that we have to do with a cathedral, and a cathedral always sits in the center of the of the city, so it’s an important institution. And I started something called The Asian Banker. And The Asian Banker was a platform by which I got a front seat view of some of the fastest growing economies in the world in that time, and the fastest of which was China. So I started The Asian Banker in Singapore, then grew it into China, the Middle East, and now we’re not called The Asian Banker anymore, we are called TAB Global. And just most recently, I completed my first book. You will see that even in the US, I have a number of very interesting, very high level, high profile relationships because we were the go to people when American bankers and American corporate leaders and politicians came to Asia. They looked us up. So, it’s interesting that I actually built a platform from which I was able to make a global footprint and a profile for myself. And after I wrote my first book, I found that a number of corporations are not just interested in financial services, but also on geo political issues arising from how finance is evolving. I’m interested to tap what I see. And so today I speak to large corporations, Korean corporations, American corporations, and also governments. And especially, I’ve had two invitations to speak with countries that are thinking about their their own financial infrastructure and so on. So, it’s been an interesting ride, and because of these conversations, I have a perspective that sometimes doesn’t show up in the newspapers, and that’s why I’m going to enjoy this conversation with you.

Peter Renton  02:08

Right, yes we’re going to dig into some of that. Let’s start off by talking about Asia, and particularly China. As you know, we had some Chinese events in the 2010s, it’s a fascinating place. I think I did about 15 visits to China over several years, and I always felt like it was traveling to the future, because things were just so far advanced there. But I haven’t been back for several years now. We’d love to get your perspective. It felt like China was leading the world in Fintech five to ten years ago, do you think that’s still the case?

Emmanuel Daniel  04:59

Peter, I remember when you were doing that conference on peer to peer exchanges in Shanghai, that period, okay? And if we were to break down China’s progress into very important specific periods, I’d say I’d start from 2001 which is when China became a member of the WTO. But before that, since the Cultural Revolution, 1976 to 2001, China had invested a lot in education, in skills development, in infrastructure, and been doing that very quietly in a very profoundly meaningful way, which, to me, any country can learn from, because that creates the industrial quality from which a country can take off in any direction. And then in 2001, the funny thing is that that’s when the platform economy was solidifying, because that was also the period of the .com bubble, you know, the original one. From that cauldron came the strengths of Google, Microsoft, and then later, the founding of Facebook, 2004 or 2005 or something like that, and then the iPhone in 2007. The interesting thing is that was also the same period where the analyst and investment banking community were writing papers saying that China was the future. So if you’re looking at platforms, and the idea of platforms was to onboard millions of customers and then monetize them, you have to be in China, because that’s where the future is. So the Chinese initial initiatives on platforms, you have Renren, and you had some of the smaller players. Today we look back and think it was very childish at that time, the Chinese were not even starters, but by the time the funding arrived in China, that was about 2007-2008 and that’s when we saw the serious players like WeChat and Alipay starting to take shape. And it was 2010 where they started to financialize their platforms, meaning that WeChat then started WeChat pay. Alipay started at the same time, and so on. And then 2010 was also the period where the mobile phone infrastructure matured, the start of the smartphones. Because I moved between China, the US and the rest of the world, I was able to see how Facebook was suffering, making that transition from desktop to mobile. And it didn’t make that transition naturally. It actually had to reinvent itself several times before it found its way. But Alipay and WeChat pay were native to mobile platforms because they came of age at exactly the same time. So by the time you were running your conferences, your peer to peer platform conferences, 2000 and — when was your first one, 2012?

Peter Renton  08:23

No, 2014.

Emmanuel Daniel  08:24

So that actually was the beginning of the end of something. So 2020, to about 2014 was the period when the state didn’t know how to handle the innovations that were coming on the platform economy, and they didn’t even have the laws to navigate them, because the laws were all provincial. And Alipay, or even the companies that you were dealing with CreditEase, for example, and the other one from Ping An Bank, the Ping An Group.

Peter Renton  09:03

Lufax, right?

Emmanuel Daniel  09:04

Yeah. So these companies were protected by their respective provincial governments, and so they were able to grow those businesses dramatically. But out of the 7,000-odd peer to peer players, at least 1,000 of them were fraudulent, or had issues, and so on. You think 7,000, 1,000 doesn’t sound like everybody, but it was sufficiently large enough that the Chinese regulators just had to step in to figure out, how do we deal with this? And what they ended up doing was to shut them down. So it was, in fact, in 2014 when I had conversations with the regulators, and they were asking me questions like, “how do you regulate a non-bank, digital wallet?”  And I said, “well, we all use WeChat. How is it that you are asking me this question in 2014?” Then I realized that at the national level, they were trying to figure out what they needed to do to get a hold of all the innovations that were coming on stream. So when they tried, the state understood this and then started putting in the regulations. And even when they put in the regulations, the original regulations on the website or PBOC or the CBRC. The PBOC, being the central bank, the CBRC, being the banking regulator, were almost unenforceable at the state level, because the states just did what they wanted, and then they had to create a super national regulator that that usurped all the overrides the respective states had. By the time they did that, it was 2018, and that’s when they started cracking down on the peer to peer players, and also started cracking down on things like data privacy and data issues and so on. So now we’ve arrived at a point where the state has a pretty good handle on innovation in China, and by the time AI arrived, they were way ahead in terms of putting in the rules for what an LLM can draw from and what sort of inferences it can make. They have government officials going out there and actually reading the algorithms and so on. So now you have an ecosystem, or a functioning system that is dramatically different from what it was between 2010 and 2014. And today I look back and I say 2010 to 2014 were the golden years where the platform players could do whatever they want, and today they just don’t. They have to keep second guessing the state. Now the thing is this, at one level, all states wish that they had the kind of control over innovation that China has. At the same time, I think that the next 10 years or so, the state will have to go through a process where itself will have to learn, you know, what is control? What can they control? What should they control if they’re going to allow innovation to continue? And the other thing, the other element in there that is changed a lot, is the funding for the innovations. So there are one or two funds in AI right now, in China, where I think there’s one fund started by Neal Shen, who was previously a fund manager out of Hong Kong, who says that he’s raised more than $1 billion, maybe $1.2 billion. A lot of that is actually provincial governments throwing in their money into a state sponsored fund. So China now has to figure out if it can, in a state sponsored system, raise the same kind of funding that the AI innovation players can raise in Silicon Valley, or a US system in general. You know, out of Connecticut, you know whether the funds will be of a similar size. So, without the size of funding, there will be very different dynamics in terms of what Chinese players will invest in and what they will be good at. There are certain things that the Chinese players are good at, but doing breakthroughs in artificial general intelligence, I don’t see that happening. You know? I see 1,000 applications blooming on the GPT front, but any other layers of breakthrough? Something has to happen in the US before it finds its way into China. But applications? Yes, I already see a lot happening on the robotics front. Anything that is application centric, the Chinese players are fast followers, and they have sufficient funding to do what they need to do at that level, but not at the platform level.

Peter Renton  14:16

Right. That makes sense. So I want to, I want to talk about the book that you published. I think it was 2022, the book is about the personalization of finance, which is obviously a very hot topic and will continue to be for some time, I expect. Maybe start off with saying, why did you decide to write this book?

Emmanuel Daniel  14:36

Oh, well, in a way, I started by thinking of it as a culmination of my career in banking and everything that I see in it. At the same time, extrapolating it into the elements that will shape finance into the future. And I didn’t want to write a book that was same old, same old, you know, being written by everybody else. I wanted to get down to the brass tacks of the most important elements that we need to put our fingers on. And although the title sounds over arching, two years later, what I find myself repeating are the first principles. For example, I say, if the product doesn’t change, nothing changed. In other words, let’s not talk about innovation in finance. If the product still remains the same. If you’re still selling the good old mortgages, you don’t need innovation of any kind. But if mortgages are going to become something totally different, the tenure of a mortgage is going to shorten from, you know, 30 years to three minutes. The nature of a mortgage is going to turn into more of a lease because it’s now digital, that sort of thing. And it’s going to appeal more to willful lifestyle rather than careful asset building and so on — the whole idea of what an asset is. If those things don’t change, we can just all switch off the television set, we didn’t miss anything 10 years from now. So that’s one element that I have in place. The first principle I work from. The second principle I work from is that innovations in finance actually always only take place in times of stress. So it’s not a design element that creates the next layer of innovation. And so then I look back at the history of finance, and every institution, every business transformation that you’ve seen in finance over time, the creation of the of the idea of central banks in the US; 1913 was the first Federal Reserve Bank System, after having rejected the idea of federal reserve banking. All through its history, the US just didn’t want to be the same as the UK and then finally succumbing to the idea of setting up a bank of last resort came because of a crisis. The issuing of the gold standard in 1971 was because the US just got into a situation where it couldn’t pay its bills, it couldn’t hold the value of $1 to the price of gold, and then it started the whole world on a journey of floating the currencies and so on. So always look out for the crisis points in history. And now we are arriving at an interesting crisis point where the dollar feels like it’s being threatened by a lot of other initiatives trying to take its place as a reserve currency, and the US is genuinely afraid of that. It’s a bipartisan issue, regardless of whether you’re Democrat or Republican, you are afraid that if other countries don’t buy US debt, then the days of issuing debt freely, comes to an end. So what does the US need to do? One of the things it needs to do, in my view, is it needs to digitize its currency in order to make it a lot more accessible worldwide, and also keep the trend that all currencies are being digitized in one form or another. So I make this prediction that the dollar will become digitized. What’s interesting is that the bipartisan attitude towards central bank digital currencies is now a closed door. Legislation is going through in the US where, Republicans especially, don’t want a central bank digital currency because it infringes on personal liberties and so on. So if the US issues that and closes the door on that, it’s got to find another way in which to be digital and I can see, to cut this long story short, that commercial banks in the US will be able to tokenize their deposits, and that will function almost like a bank issued stable coin. And that kind of development may not come immediately, but I think that’s the general direction in which the US will evolve. Then I look at what the Bank for International Settlements is doing, and I’m probably one of the first people who can see that there’s something very wrong with the Bank of International Settlements, because the days when it was able to work as a unified body, bringing the whole world banking system together to agree on structures such as Basel 2, Basel 3, that helps us to evaluate banks universally on an objective set of criteria, and that those days are coming to an end. Because China is doing its own thing, the US is doing its own thing, and the whole idea of CBDCs is like a moving target. At first, the Bank for International Settlements says that it’s a good idea to have retail CBDCs. And now it’s back tracking on that by suggesting that, “you know what better to have a wholesale CBDC. And I leave it to each country to decide on its own retail CBDCs”. So, those were the real value of the book that I wrote, and there are a number of other first principle issues. What’s to become of platforms, of the whole idea of intermediation? All the technologies being created in the crypto space suggest that we are coming to the end of the intermediation era, meaning that the role of a financial institution being an intermediary, intermediator for payments, for asset management and so on. You know, today you have the technology where you don’t need an intermediator. However, because of regulation and because of this continuous platform approach to finance, all of the players who are building platforms that are meant to be permissionless or peerless, are themselves platforms. They have to be funded by a venture capitalist who wants to be rewarded at the end of the process. So, that’s watching brief like, you know, how will the whole intermediation business evolve over time? And like that I just keep going on and on. There’s a number of different issues in there. What I should be doing, really, is to rewrite that book or write another book, just pinning down the first principles that we need to look at in terms of trying to shape the future of finance. I’ve actually, to be honest, I’ve sort of stopped following incremental trends, because to a large extent, they tell us nothing. Like this week, Revolut got a banking license in the UK. Often, of itself, it’s really not consequential. But of a longer term trend, it’s really a question of, will the platform model continue to work into the future all of that?

Peter Renton  22:43

Interesting. I want to actually talk about the intermediation piece. Because, sure, the technology is in place. We don’t need intermediation. You can send money in all kinds of different ways, like through crypto, without any intermediation. Although, as you point out, there is someone that has created the technology that is a platform of themselves. But regulators want intermediaries, right? They want to be able to regulate somebody. When you have the technology to send money without intermediaries, we live in the real world, right? Regulators want to have someone to blame if there’s a crisis and if someone loses their money, how do you see this actually playing out?

Emmanuel Daniel  23:19

You know now, with quantum computing coming on stream and the speed of computing and the speed of processing coming on stream, it’s the same story as 1901 Henry Ford perfects the process of mass producing cars. All of the first rules put in place in New York were against the motorized vehicle, and that’s because the motorized vehicle was heavy, it was noisy, it startled the horses, it was uncomfortable, it was slow, so they get to make it have rules about which side of the road it needed to ride on, all of that. But as the automobile became faster, quieter, easier to use, comfortable and all of that, all the regulations just dropped by the wayside. It just became irrelevant. And now, when we see what’s going on in cyber security, for example, the regulations come out of a different era trying to deal with problems that exist in a different era. In fact, in my book, I say that human society goes through four different phases, from tribal to institutional, and then to markets, and then to networks. Now we’re in a transition between markets and networks, and therefore, we need to be mindful of when we’re thinking about market rules and when we’re thinking about network rules, and they’re fundamentally different. So the issues that are coming on to cyber security, you know? Network rules. In other words, the best security you can have is to be more networked. The more networked you are, the greater the safety that you create for yourself. And for that, you need to think differently about who your clients, who your counter parties are, and how you relate with them. So this transition, and that’s why the book is called The Great Transition. We are going from here to there. And so we need to be mindful of what it is that we’re dealing with, you know? So the thing about regulation is that it has enjoyed a phase of being trusted by platforms, because platforms needed a kind of referee, an intermediary between them, to keep the playing field even. Otherwise, you have platforms that will dominate and wipe out everybody else. So it’s more like an honor between thieves kind of a system. But as the technology evolves and puts more power on the individual to create his own community; the whole idea of crypto is that you and I can create our own cryptos today, and that was what the Sam Bankman-Fried problem was. He created his own crypto, gave it his own valuation, and everybody believed him, and he got into the troubles that he did. And the thing is that that ability is going to accentuate in the future. So the rules by which we govern a society where anyone can create their own digital asset and give it a value, is going to be totally different from the world in which we put every asset on a market, on a centralized market to be traded and to find the value between authorized players. So the simple point here about regulation is that the nature of regulation will change, and I think we will move more towards self regulation of communities, and there are lots of examples to draw from. The funny thing about writing this book is that I started writing it, thinking of writing about finance. And then by the time I ended I was writing about things like social dancing. And I say, you take any form of social dancing, whether it’s, you know, Tango or ballroom dancing or Salsa, which is what I do, and you think about it. You go anywhere in the world, dancers recognize each other’s steps for, you know, Tango or Salsa. And then you ask, there’s not been any regulatory body that created the rules that the cross body lead in in Cuba is the same as the cross body lead in Singapore. And yet the whole world of dances is subscribed to the same exact rules. And the beauty of rules in dancing is that it keeps evolving. It keeps absorbing new fashions, new frills and stuff, and everybody understands it together. So the ability of the world to self regulate and to create an ecosystem that everyone understands is amazing. It’s just that we will see that evolve over time. Those of us who sit in institutions or sit in startups thinking that we need someone external to validate us, those of us that think that way, that we think that, oh, you know what, having a regulator is a good thing, and yet it’s so temporal that’s going to change very dramatically as we go forward. And honestly, the advice I can give to innovators, disruptors, people who are creating new ideas, is always push the envelope, you know, always ask the regulator, “why can’t I do this?” Rather than to say, “what can I do?” And just wait for the day where you have the upper hand and you can dictate how an industry evolves. And I think we should always have that mindset. You know, too many people in finance, especially the fintech players, have become too afraid of maybe and also compliant to regulation, thinking that without regulation, we’re all doomed. There is a bit of that, which is why we all flock back into the regulatory camp, but I think that with new technologies and new speeds and processing powers are just going to take that away from us.

Peter Renton  30:01

Interesting. Another thing you mentioned in your book was the next financial crisis. Maybe you can explain what you actually were talking about there, and if you still believe that it’s going to happen the way you laid out.

Emmanuel Daniel  30:15

So what I did was I just laid out all the financial crises that we’ve seen since 1984. And you can even go back beyond, to 1971, the end of the Bretton Woods era, which is 1971 to 1984, when the American banks discovered that they weren’t able to hold the value of the assets, because after the dollar was floated, a CEO of a bank couldn’t be sure what the interest rates will be tomorrow and how much assets he needs to hold in stock and all of that. So by 1984 you had the first savings and loan crisis, where the savings and loans bank couldn’t match the value of the balance sheet to the value of actual mortgages. Okay? 1984 was actual mortgages; 1987 was securities. That was the first banking securities crisis in the US. Nineteen ninety-six, 1995 we had a glimpse of what the perception of national obligations could have on a banking system in Mexico. And then 1996 was Asia. And then 2003 and then 2006, 2007 and 2008 right? Which was the so-called global financial crisis, which is actually an American financial crisis, where the balance sheet an average bank did not even have a real mortgage sitting on the balance sheet anymore. So the balance sheet had transformed dramatically from 1984. Nineteen eighty-four the mortgage actually sat on the balance sheet of a bank. By 2008 the mortgage had been sold to another bank and then had been sold again and and changed into all kinds of derivatives and other assets that are not endemic to the bank’s real business. So in other words, the bank was carrying securities and derivatives of securities as it’s performing assets. So the story here is that the assets that are on the bank’s balance sheet are becoming increasingly ephemeral. They are not based on any underlining asset, actual easy to hold assets. So my point about the next banking crisis is that asset is going to become even more ephemeral, and now we’re thinking about digital assets and securities that are based on the digital assets. So you can imagine how ephemeral those assets are. In other words, they’re not based on any underlying asset which you can buy and sell in order to realize this actual value. But the value is now based on the perception of the market, on the derivative asset that you’re holding. So that’s essentially my thesis on the next banking crisis. And, of course, the next banking crisis will be based on digital assets and assets that are ephemeral to the business of banking. And so the operating rules by which we deal with that kind of a banking crisis are very different from looking at the balance sheet and asking a bank how much capital you need to hold in order to be able to survive a bank run. You know, a bank run itself becomes meaningless, because it can happen in a second rather than in a day. So all the capital you hold is only a cost to the bank. It’s not a security in any form. And therefore, how should we think about banking? And again, we are moving from a market economy to a network economy. A bank has to be far more network than it is today.

Peter Renton  34:30

How quickly it can happen with SVB last year. But anyway, I want to close on a question related to that. I’m curious about your perspective on whether you think large banks will still dominate finance in, let’s just say, 20 years time. And as you answer that, you could sort of tease out what the factors are that could change this domination of large banks.

Emmanuel Daniel  34:58

The first, most important reason why large banks dominate finance is because all of the smaller institutions have discovered that the best, most secure assets a bank can hold are the Counterparty risks of other banks. So you take a bank in Australia, for example, the big four banks, 80% of their lending is actually to each other. You know, it’s not to the community. And yet, there are countries where 60% of a bank’s book is mortgages, for example. So different countries are different levels in terms of this journey. The countries where you have a very well developed banking system and a very layered banking system, especially in a large country like the US or China or somewhat India, maybe, but Indonesia for sure, because the whole idea of intermediation is the large banks can’t get to the last customer, and so that’s why you need to have community banks, rural credit cooperatives, the last money lender down the street, because that’s the amount of intermediation and distribution infrastructure that you need in order to reach the customer. However, because of all the regulation in banking, the community banks, the rural credit cooperatives, when they get deposits, instead of lending it out, they end up investing in the larger institutions to keep to the rules of safety and soundness, and that’s how we’ve created the largest banks in the world. That’s why there are the JP Morgan, you know, the Bank of America, of the world today. They’re institutions that are very different from how they started off, which was to go out there and lend money to the end user, to be a retail bank, to be loved by the customer, all that. JP Morgan today doesn’t need to be loved by the customer. The biggest income generator is the other banks buying its asset-based assets. So when will this ecosystem start to fall apart? When the risk dynamics change, when the assets of larger corporations or larger banks begin to have less value than they have now, and the other intermediaries, the general distribution base below, can’t find safety in being invested in the larger corporations. Then they have to start looking for other forms of safety and soundness. And honestly, as I said, to come back to the point is that the best safety and soundness of a banking system is that it’s fully well networked, where all of the players are equal to each other and only as important as their network. The more network you are, the more important you are in a financial system, and that gives you your safety and soundness. And it’s the same rules that apply to finance as it will apply to us as individuals and to any business with this kind of blockchain thinking, blockchain technology type of thinking is that each of us are platforms, and the value of our worth is dependent on how many people we are networked with, you know? So the rules of safety and soundness are evolving, and I think that that’s when we will start seeing that the large institutions are not even necessary in the first place, you know? So that’s in theory, how I think it will evolve. In practice, however, because all of the different players have vested interest in self preservation, they do tend to ace the system over a period of time. So when you take Visa and MasterCard, for example, right? Because of the technologies that exist in payments, if I can send you a text message or a WhatsApp message for free, if money is information, then I should be able to send you money for free. You know, the whole idea of innovation in payments is that payments should cost no more than the cost of a message. However, that’s not what happens, because the regulators put a layer of regulation in terms of KYC, in terms of deposit-taking institutions, all of that. So then the larger players continue to accrue interest in that. And then, when you take companies like Visa and MasterCard, they perpetuate their livelihood by investing in all of these innovations and then absorbing it back into their business feed. So when some of these new innovations, like, there are players in Singapore that I know who tell me that, “oh, you know what, we’ve just been accepted by Visa. Now we can now use our business on 30,000 merchants around southeast Asia and so on”. And I said, “it’s actually the other way around. Visa has just extended its life by making you one of its transmitters, and therefore you actually accruing value to Visa”. So this whole ecosystem by which the incumbents absorb the innovations taking place, that slows the whole process down, you know? And so that kind of scenario that I’m thinking about, where you need to be networked, rather than large, in order to be safe and sound, might take longer to get there than the technology already suggests today.

Peter Renton  40:57

Wow, well, you’ve given us a lot of food for thought there, Emmanuel, it’s really, really interesting stuff. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Always great to chat with you.

Emmanuel Daniel  41:07

Likewise Peter, and always great to catch up with you, and always interested to know how things are going.

Peter Renton  41:13

Well, I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Please go ahead and give the show a review on the podcast platform of your choice, and go tell your friends and colleagues about it. Anyway, on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening, and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.