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!
In this episode, Anthony Soohoo, CEO of MoneyGram, shares his vision for transforming one of the world’s largest global payments networks through what he calls a “refounder mindset.” Drawing from his experience leading digital transformations at major companies like Walmart and CBS, Soohoo discusses how MoneyGram is modernizing its platform while leveraging its incredible assets: a network of 450,000 retail locations spanning over 200 countries and 20,000 payment corridors.
He explores the company’s strategic partnerships with Plaid for seamless bank connectivity, collaborations with Visa and Mastercard, and their thoughtful approach to cryptocurrency through stablecoin partnerships with Stellar Foundation and Circle. Perhaps most ambitiously, Soohoo outlines his five-year goal of positioning MoneyGram not just as a remittance company, but as a global payments powerhouse with the scale and recognition of Visa or Mastercard, all while maintaining the company’s core mission of democratizing finance for consumers worldwide.
In this podcast you will learn:
- The three things that attracted Anthony to the opportunity at MoneyGram.
- How he describes MoneyGram today.
- The most popular remittance corridors for US consumers.
- The attributes of a typical MoneyGram customer.
- Anthony’s concept of re-founding and how he is bringing that mindset to MoneyGram.
- The lessons he has learned in his first six months as CEO.
- How the money actually moves internationally.
- How they are partnering with Plaid, as well as Visa and Mastercard.
- Why MoneyGram believes the future of finance is crypto.
- How Anthony views the alternative payments rails being developed.
- The biggest challenge for MoneyGram today.
- His vision for the next five years.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 535 – ANTHONY SOOHOO
Episode 535 – Anthony Soohoo
Anthony Soohoo: I think the biggest challenge is that when you think about the space that we play in, we’re talking the market sizes, like in the trillions of dollars. And I think for a company like ours is to realize and respect what we’ve built, but actually not be afraid to change and think about markets, new markets that we haven’t played in before. And really think about the market, the TAM, bigger than thinking about it first from a roomed standpoint, as well as the other key part is getting the organization to understand how we can do it faster, cheaper, and better.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. On the show today, I am delighted to welcome Anthony Soohoo, the CEO of MoneyGram, a job he has held for about six months.
Most people know MoneyGram, the company has been around for many decades, helping people move money around the world. Today, people can do that quickly and easily, either in person or online, to over 200 countries. While we do discuss all the details around that, what I found most interesting in this conversation were Anthony’s thoughts around reinvention, or as he calls it, refounding. Now let’s get on with the show.
Welcome to the podcast, Anthony.
AS: Thank you, Peter. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
PR: My pleasure. So, let’s kick it off by delving into your background a little bit because you’ve worked at some of the biggest names in technology, and you just came from Walmart, which, you know, is one of the biggest brands on the planet. So, tell us a little bit about your history before you got to MoneyGram.
AS: Yeah, maybe I should just start talking about my personal story. I was fortunate enough to grow up in San Francisco during the time before computers were actually cool and actually had an opportunity to learn to program when I was like 12, hiding out in the library. And that led to my whole career in tech. I would say when you think about what I’ve done, the whole, maybe the common thread between all of them is that it’s at the intersection of technology and consumers. And that’s really what I think has been the underlying thing. Then, depending on what I’m doing at that moment, it could be a large company or a small company. But what I found is that I typically have started in hardcore tech and then I found the second part of my career really focusing on helping larger companies transform using technology. That started with CBS when I led their efforts in terms of launching streaming at CBS.com, running the entertainment division, and then most recently, you know, helping lead digital transformation first on e-commerce at Walmart and then eventually running one of their six business units for Walmart across stores and online. And then most recently, after taking a brief retirement, I decided to come to MoneyGram to help the company modernize and become a modern financial tech player, but by also not abandoning, but actually embracing, a lot of their traditional physical assets as well.
PR: So, what attracted you to MoneyGram? Because it’s not the first company you would think of to kind of come and really get stuck into a consumer-facing tech play. So, what was the thing that really grabbed your attention?
AS: I think there were three things that really attracted me to this opportunity. One is I love the mission of the company. In fact, the whole idea of democratizing finance and providing ability for anyone to actually access the financial system speaks to me. And if we can do it in a way that is faster, simpler, more reliable, more secure, and do it in a very cost-effective way, I think we get more people into our financial system. I think it works well for the world. At a high level, that was one of the things that attracted me. Number two is I saw a company that actually leveraged, and you wouldn’t see this when you first look at it on the surface, a lot of my skill sets, actually. One is obviously the consumer nature of the business, which allowed you know, you can see I can leverage my background actually understanding consumers and how to leverage tech there. But, you know, deeper down inside, MoneyGram actually runs one of the largest global payments networks in the world. And when you think about the movement of money around the world, it’s actually supply chain challenges or problems that you’re trying to solve. Network optimization, which leveraged a lot of experiences I actually had at both CBS as well as Walmart, and Walmart on the supply chain side. And then a lot of stuff we had to do in terms of thinking about network optimization for our streams at CBS kind of lends itself to thinking about these optimization problems we have here too.
And then third is that when you transform a traditional financial services company, and I’ve never seen this actually in any other businesses that I’ve come across, because typically when an organization has traditional assets and you move digital, the unit economics actually get worse. I’ll use a case of enterprise software, a client server was a much better business than SAS because you don’t have to pay for the servers streaming the same thing because you were just giving your streams to the cable companies, and having them distribute for you. And then when you think about e-commerce, you have to pay for shipping to the customer that last mile. In the case of financial services, as you go digital, it actually enables you to build a platform that delivers more valuable and better unit economics because it’s just a much more efficient way to deliver services to your customers. So, the way we look at it is our physical network of 450,000 retail locations is our channel to provide full service. And then we have a self-service channel, and we want to make that as cost-efficient, and as successful as possible to our customers where self-service makes sense.
PR: Okay, so then maybe you could sort of take a step back, and I totally get you still have these physical locations that I think MoneyGram is renowned for. But take a step back and tell us how you describe MoneyGram today.
AS: The way I would describe MoneyGram is we are one of the largest global payments networks in the world. And people are using MoneyGram to transfer money across over 200 countries, across 20,000 corridors, and they’re using things in terms of sending money either back home, or using it to pay bills across the world, as well as using it to send money actually to themselves as they’re traveling. So there’s a lot of different use cases of how they use it.
It’s probably not as well known as some of the other global payments networks you can think of, such as Visa and MasterCard. But we are all in the same business of trying to move money around the world and do it in a regulated way, which satisfies the regulators, but also doing it for our consumers, where we abstract the complexity of moving it around the world.
PR: Right. And so what are the most popular corridors when it comes to, particularly for US consumers, shall we say?
AS: In the US, some of the most popular corridors include Mexico, but also some of the other corridors that are very popular are US to UK, and US to Canada. And what I would say is that depending on the month, we’ll notice that the corridors that come up change and fluctuate and can range anywhere from moving money to the Philippines to moving money to parts of the Middle East like Dubai; I think it depends on honestly the weather. And it also depends on where patterns are where people are kind of moving to and moving out of. Areas where there’s high immigration, like as an example, I just came back from a trip to Dubai. You see a lot of action there. And also places where people travel, especially during the summer, we see a lot of calls for remittance and sometimes because, you know, people are sending money back and forth to their loved ones.
PR: Gotcha. Well, maybe we can get into the consumer itself. Who is the typical user? And I imagine you’ve got lots and lots of repeat users, but what are those attributes of the typical MoneyGram customer?
AS: Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of layers in that, and we’ll try to peel it back like an onion. I think that traditionally, at one layer, people think about the MoneyGram customers being remittance customers, the people that actually are working overseas or in one country that want to send money back to the country where they permanently previously resided, either to the family members or actually back to themselves because they have bills to pay back home. So that is one area that we kind of call the working immigrants overseas.
I think that we also see a lot of customers that are high dollar senders where they have many assets, and these people live in multiple different countries around the world, and they need to be able to send money across borders to pay for either bills or send it for the family for birthdays and others. That’s the other segment of customers. And then I would say that the third segment that we see a lot are customers that are actually travelers because using a service like ours is actually more cost-effective than many times trying to do currency conversion when you land at the port.
PR: Interesting. So, I’d like to kind of ask you about an article that you wrote, it’s on the MoneyGram site, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. And I’d never heard this word before, I don’t think, but you’ve talked about the refounder mindset, and maybe you can describe what you mean by that and how you are applying that to MoneyGram.
AS: Yeah, sure. So, as I referenced earlier when I was giving my intro, my background, while I’ve worked at large companies, I’ve also spent a portion of my career actually starting businesses. That came about as an entrepreneur because I grew up with very modest means. So ever since I was a kid, I was always looking at businesses to start. As a founder, what you’re doing is you’re trying to create something out of nothing. You’re trying to recreate and rewrite the book of how things work because as a founder, what you typically are doing as an entrepreneur or founder is you’re trying to find a more efficient way of working, finding opportunities in the market. Now, when you look at every company, though, every company I would say was founded, and when they become successful at some point, they actually need to assess what they’ve done that’s gotten them here. Will that be the thing that makes them successful looking forward? And while you wanna pay respect to a lot of the traditions and some of the assets which will always be there. There are some things that a company needs to do to reevaluate what they need to do to be a little different, to compete more competitively, and to change the way they work maybe to be more efficient. I would say that companies that have gone through this, just to use some examples, I would cite Microsoft as the most famous case where Satya Nadella was the first CEO at Microsoft who was not a founder because it started obviously with Bill Gates, then went to Steve Ballmer. And when he came in, Microsoft was probably not doing as well as they are now. And the reason for that is that the original mission of the company was to put a desktop or a computer on every desk. And at that time, when you think about the late 2000s, that mission probably got worn out because every desk already had a computer.
PR: Yeah, well, it got accomplished, really.
AS: Yeah. And so Satya’s mission was to really refound that company to think about what is their purpose. And I think that they started thinking about how software can match and extend and help enable people to meet human potential. And that’s when they started making big bets in terms of trying to build things, focusing on trying to make human beings more productive. Double down initially on the cloud and, as you’ve seen now, doubling down around A.I. And since that time, I think Microsoft stock has just been on a tear since Satya came in because, I attribute a lot to, that refounding moment of rethinking. He didn’t completely write the book on everything that Microsoft did. He just remapped it to the new purpose and the ready definition of what the company was going after. The same thing happened when Tim Cook came in at Apple. He was not going to be Steve Jobs. So he added services, and I would say he never called himself this, but I think Tim Cook refounded the company. Now you also see this with Amazon, Andy Jassy’s refounding the company because he’s trying to get it to be much more lean and much more focused in how Amazon previously was under the company. And in the other case, and then I’ll bring it back to MoneyGram, that I find most interesting is Dell. Michael Dell started the company out as a 19-year-old out of his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin. Had a great run out of PCs and then eventually, actually someone else ran it, now he came back. His key focus was to make sure that Dell became a services company versus a PC company. And he made big bets on VMware, made big bets on providing services to departments, and they’ve had multiple refounding moments under the same founder, in fact, which is fascinating.
When I came to MoneyGram, what I saw was a company that was very established that had a lot of great, amazing assets. But there were some things that needed to be modernized, some things needed to be rethought in terms of how the company worked. And so we are refounding the company, leveraging the assets of our global payments network, and thinking about, how can we work better in this day and age in 2025 and beyond? What are things that we can streamline? What are things where we can get the employees to feel like they are part of the refounding team? So, I’m just not just a refounder. I’m one of 2000 refounders, and if you include our partners, maybe I’m one of over 200,000 refounders of MoneyGram around the world. And what we’re trying to do in this moment is to allow our customers really to save money, save time, and save effort while they’re trying to send money across the globe.
PR: Okay, so you’ve been on the job, I think it’s about six months now, if I’m not mistaken.
AS: I tell the board, I get precise with my board. I’m here for five months and two weeks so far. I never want to cheat the extra two weeks.
PR: Right, well, by the time this is published, it’ll be over six months. But anyway, in this approximate six months that you’ve been in charge, what are some of the things you’ve found out? What are some of the lessons you’ve learned?
AS: You know, one of the things that I have really learned is that we have a really amazing brand. I mean, if you look at it, the brand operates and is recognized globally in like over 200 countries, and people really are passionate about it. The other thing I’ve realized is that if I were to start from scratch as an entrepreneur and try to build a network like this, it would take, you know, me 50 years based upon what is required here. So on that one, I think that it creates a pretty amazing, interesting moat to build a business around. The third thing is we have some really passionate employees here who want to do the right thing, who want to see MoneyGram win, including our partners, I would say, our 450,000 retail partners around the world. And what they need is direction in terms of where True North is for them. And I think we’re starting to apply that because, you know, the main job of a CEO is to provide clarity on purpose, vision, and goals for the organization and to be able to achieve and say things we will do and things we won’t do. And, you know, in my five and a half months of knowledge, even though it’ll be six months when this comes out, but I will still be at this point in time, five and a half months into it, I would say that we’re saying no to a lot of things and yes to some very strategic areas which is the focus on strengthening our network, figuring out how we get more competitive on pricing and also streamlining how we get work done so that we hide and abstract the complexities of money movement around the world so that our customers really have a fast, simple, reliable and secure method of receiving and sending funds.
PR: Right, right. So, Walmart is a partner of MoneyGram. I’ve seen them around. Did you have any exposure to MoneyGram while you were at Walmart?
AS: Well, I did not because I ran the home division, and that was considered the services part of MoneyGram was part of services, which we call the front of the store because typically that’s where you see those services. That being said, my family were customers of using remittance services growing up. So I remember that. Just a little background on me: I’m the first person in my family to graduate from high school. And my family’s been in America for five generations, but because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, they weren’t citizens until about the 40s or 50s. So they kept sending, you know, people came to America to work, and it would go back, kind of the typical immigrant story. And I remember my family and sending money back home for holidays and birthdays and other reasons back to the relatives back home, even when I was a child. So I was very familiar with the red logo that we call MoneyGram, just growing up as part of my childhood.
PR; I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about technology. And this is a really key piece, I think, of what MoneyGram provides. Like maybe you could just take us through how the money actually moves. Say you go into Walmart, for example, you want to send $500 to Mexico in the equivalent of pesos. How does that actually move?
AS: Yeah, I’d say there are a lot of layers in that. So the very first layer is when someone walks into a store, and you talk about wanting to send money. The very first thing we need to do legally is identify that person, if they are the person that they say they are. So, there’s a whole authentication piece that’s similar to how you log into your PC. A second thing we actually then need to do is, depending on the regulations in the jurisdiction that we are currently operating, there are laws that we need to follow. And then, depending on the corridor they’re trying to send the money to, it can either be a direct hop from our country’s bank to another country’s bank in light of where the customer is. Or if they want to receive it, let’s just say in a remote town, it could hop between two or three different banks before it lands in a place because every send has to, you need to have a direct relationship with each of those banks.
PR: Right.
AS: When you do it on a digital side, it’s a little bit different where you’re sending money actually through a ledger. And then when in that country, at that moment in time, when you want to redeem, then you go through those hops that you’re talking about. But it is very much; maybe I could use the Walmart analogy you mentioned. If you think about it, what you see on your shelves does not get there by accident. It started in a factory. It went to a certain port where it had to share a manifest. It came through boats and through customs. And when they go through customs, they eventually make their way to a warehouse that went to the store. If you think about those warehouses, those stores, and those ports as either core stocks, bonding banks, or you think about those stops as customs with regulatory actions, it works basically the same way.
PR: Are you using the SWIFT network to move money internationally then for the most part?
AS: Well, have our own networks of proprietary relationships that we’ve built over time. But I think the SWIFT network is a partner that we use from time to time. We also have signed a partnership, as you know, most recently with MasterCard and Visa. So we use them as well for sending money from the US, for instance, to cards overseas. We had this partnership with Plaid that we just talked about in terms of open banking. I would say that, you know, our goal is to be as agnostic as possible and work with everyone.
PR: Right. That makes sense. I’d like to dive into the Plaid thing because we did talk about it, but that was before we hit record. We need to sort of talk about it now. What did you, I mean, Plaid is obviously extremely well-known in the fintech space, really great way to connect bank accounts. Is that primarily what you’re doing now? Is it through the bank connectivity for your online offering?
AS: I mean, there’s a certain percentage of our customers that want, well, first, let’s take a step back. As I mentioned, our goal is to make our services fast, simple, reliable, and secure. And depending on how you want to get money in and you want to get money out, we want to make that as simple as possible for you. For those of our customers that have accounts at banks where they want to say, “Hey, I want to send this overseas,” we want to make that as easy as possible for them. You know, leveraging an open banking partner such as Plaid with their coverage allows us to do it a seamless way where within a click or two, you know, they can get their sends funded, and we get to send it to any of our 20,000 corridors around 200 countries in the world. So that’s actually just the goal. And we’ll continue seeing the expansion of some of these relationships because I think the interesting thing is, you know, Peter, in this space, no one can build all of it. I spent some time recently with Visa and MasterCard, and even for giant players like that, they can’t own the whole ecosystem. So, partnership becomes a very important piece of kind of connecting the world through payments.
PR: So I’m on your homepage right now on your website, and I’m scrolling down here, and I see in bright red letters, “The future of finance is crypto. Unlock a world of digital assets.” So maybe you can talk about what you’re doing when it comes to crypto.
AS: So we believe that, first, there are a lot of things about crypto, from meme coins to others. We’re not dabbling in meme coins.
PR: I expected that would be the case, but thank you for clarifying.
AS: I just want to make sure that for people to know we do not do meme coins. But we do believe that the future of finance, a portion of it, will be stablecoin, especially as we think about real-time settlement. So we actually have done a partnership with Stellar Foundation, and we look to and are excited to work with many other players where it enables us to be able to access and provide on-off-ramps for people that are building services on stablecoin where they need an on-off-ramp to get cash in and to get cash out through our network. And at the same time, when they’re within those rails inside, they can move money into a service such as Circle. They either hold interest or when they are looking to get cash in or get cash out, they’re going through our MoneyGram rails to do that.
PR: I just want to be clear then: are you using the stablecoin rails just in that last mile, or are you actually using the rails themselves to move money internationally?
AS: I would say no. Right now we are not yet using rails to move money. There is an on-off chain, but when they are off-chain, they’re on the MoneyGram network to move money in and out. And then when they get on-chain for some of these players, they are using whatever stablecoin they’re using in an instance since right now our partnership with Stellar and Circle.
PR: Gotcha. Okay. Do you expect the backend technology that you’re using to move money right now? I mean, do you expect that to change dramatically over the next five-plus years? What’s your view on all the alternative payment rails being developed beyond what stablecoins are doing? I’m just curious to see how you view that.
AS: You know, it’s been amazing going back to the story about the refounding where there’s a key thing about refounding is you’re like Satya Nadella did at Microsoft. You’re not throwing away everything, the baby with the bathwater. One of the things in our company that’s been a true asset, maybe I didn’t get to mention, is our ability to kind of translate and have multi-currency conversions across different currencies, right? That’s one of the magic of our system. So, I think that we will continue doing that because it lends itself to having the ability to translate and pay out in many and most of the currencies around the world. And we will continue doing that. But I think that there will be parts where, as we look at currency, where there are going to be some things that become popular, such as USDC or other forms of stablecoin, we’re certainly going to look at those, as long as it solves a real customer problem. And I think that you know, I know in terms of store of value, there are some countries with high inflation which customers can’t wait to run towards storing value in something that’s not their local fiat currency. And there could be a lot of, I would say, benefits for having a multi-currency store, a value wallet in those types of countries.
PR: So you don’t have that today then? You move it into local currency?
AS: Right now we do. You know, I’ve been here five and a half months. That’s as much as I know. Peter, I don’t know much. But I would think that someday we might want to do more.
PR: Yeah. Okay. So then when you look at the company today, what do you see as your biggest challenge right now?
AS: I think the biggest challenge is that when you think about the space that we play in, we’re talking the market size is like in the trillions of dollars. I think for a company like ours is to realize and respect what we built, but actually not be afraid to change and think about markets, new markets that we haven’t played in before. And really think about the market the TAM, bigger than thinking about it first from a remnant standpoint, as well as the other key part is organization to understand how we can do it faster, cheaper, and better. And you know, it’s a journey. I think we’re coming along there as an organization. I would say, you know, the challenge is, like any CEO, is you are always impatient, and you would love the company and organization to run faster, better, cheaper. And that’s, you know, testing me, but I think I’ve prepped for it because I have two kids.
PR: Right. Okay. So, last question. If we were to get together in five years and I was going to interview you and you’re looking back over the previous five years, what is the vision that you would like to have achieved over the next five years?
AS: I would say that over the next five years, we want to make sure that we modernize this platform where MoneyGram is known beyond just a remittance company and much more as a global payments company that has the scale and has the familiarity as a Visa or MasterCard. That would be, I think, our long-term ambition.
PR: That’s a lofty goal, and it’s one, I’m sure that Visa and MasterCard, obviously, are massive, and it’s great that you’re aiming high. I think that’s wonderful. Anyway, Anthony, it was really great to chat with you today. I appreciate you coming on the show.
AS: Thank you.
PR: Okay, see ya.
It’s clear to me that Anthony is very aware of the valuable assets that MoneyGram has, that he’s not afraid to think differently about how best to leverage and grow these assets and look to new technologies to make the customer experience better. I think that is the challenge for companies like MoneyGram that have been successful, but are in a rapidly changing industry. You need to adapt to changes, while at the same time leveraging what you have already built.
Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe. Tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.