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Lee Murray
Hey, Larry.
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Larry Hipp
Really great to see you today. Thanks for having me.
00:00:05:10 - 00:00:27:18
Lee Murray
Yeah, good to see you, too. It's been a while. Good to catch up with you. And thanks for coming on for this. The series that I'm doing for the online course. You know, when I was thinking there's all these modules and I've interviewed a bank CEO for module one talking about finance, and now I'm module two, we're talking about technology and how it adds value inside of your company.
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Lee Murray
And the first person that came to mind was, you because you're CEO of Bright Well Payments Company. And I just thought, you know, Larry, I haven't talked to learning wireless. Get him on here and talk about, you know, technology and how it adds value. So tell us first a little bit about your company. You know, you know briefly what you do and your position there.
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Lee Murray
Yeah.
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Larry Hipp
So, Larry, CEO of Brite. Well, I have been in the money movement payment space for the last really 20 years. One of my first jobs out of school was writing check imaging software back in the day when you can actually log on to a website and see your check image and that was a novel concept. That's about how long I've been moving money.
00:01:13:08 - 00:01:43:12
Larry Hipp
I say I've been moving. I've moved just about every financial instrument out there besides gold and crypto and minute. We'll talk about blockchain and crypto and how to influence my future at some point. You know, it is. It's been a fun ride of watching the payments ecosystem mature and grow over the last 20 years here at Brite. Well, we focus on about three main areas, one of those being banking from a fintech perspective.
00:01:44:08 - 00:02:07:23
Larry Hipp
We were a neobank. If that word means anything to you before a neobank was cool and even something to be. And we, the large part of our business is taking banking and pushing that with cross-border payments. So moving money around the world. So so you got paid today in the dollar, but really you need to send the Filipino peso back home or the rupee somewhere.
00:02:07:23 - 00:02:30:02
Larry Hipp
You can think about our system kind of at the highest level is an international payroll system where we can take in really any denomination and push that denomination and around the globe with a really kind of cutting edge security apparatus that lives on top of that to make sure everything is secure and gets where it needs to go without the bad guys getting to it first.
00:02:30:15 - 00:03:09:02
Larry Hipp
And we do that. We send money to just about every country on the planet that the federal government will allow. And it's been an interesting business. We are a very global business. We've got employees in multiple countries. We're headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and the people that use our product on a daily basis literally come from every, you know, every corner of the world in the globe, which makes us solving payment problems a really interesting problem, because the way we use money here in the U.S. is totally different than the way you use it in Brazil or the way you're using it right now in the Russia, Ukraine region.
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Larry Hipp
And on a daily basis, we kind of have to adjust to those global macroeconomics to really get the funds where our users need them when they need them. There have been in business, probably been in business for about 12 years now.
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Lee Murray
Yeah. So before we jump into the questions real quick, I'm curious about your competitive advantage in the market. Is it it seems to me like the fraud component would be a big piece where you could really ratchet down.
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Larry Hipp
Yeah. So in the in the payment space fraud is I mean, it's massive. You've got, you know, the the financial crime dollar amount has now overtaken the drug trade. And there are institutions, there are people sitting right now at an office park on someplace that the governments are turning a blind eye to it. And all day long, they're sitting at a desk trying to steal money, whether it's phishing, whether it's scamming, whether it's some sort of bot attack, whether it's some sort of scheme to siphon money away from a card, a bank account, and anything you can think of.
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Larry Hipp
It's an entire industry. So it's not like we're working against, you know, some guy or person that put together a scam, an email and send it to you. And the Nigerian scammers like those type of things, like we're not fighting that battle these days. We're fighting really sophisticated software engineering based battles. And so what we did was, is we invested heavily into that technology of detecting it, stopping it, shutting it down as fast as humanly possible.
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Larry Hipp
And it's really given us an edge to where we can operate our business with very low fraud losses, which mean, hey, we don't lose money, B, our users don't have to deal with it. Because if you've ever had to call the bank and say, Hey, this charge isn't right, or Hey, my entire balance is gone because somebody got access to my account, that's a terrifying moment, and it often takes time to resolve.
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Larry Hipp
And you have no idea what your financial situation is going to be when that hits. And so what we've done is we've invested a tremendous amount of energy and brainpower and technology into stopping it before it happens, which should you know, it's what we all as financial consumers expect or somebody to do. But it's a really hard problem to solve.
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Larry Hipp
And because, you know, I use this analogy all the time and, you know, if you've never seen the movie Jurassic Park, it won't hit very well. But in the movie Jurassic Park, the old school, the OG, the original Jurassic Park movie, they pull up to a scene and the fins is all mangled up and they're like, Well, what's happening right there?
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Larry Hipp
And they're like, look, the the dinosaurs will hit every part of the fence trying to detect a weakness. And when they do, they're going to run right through it. That's the way the financial crimes people are. As soon as we put up one fence, they're going to hit it. They're going to hit it, and then they're just going to move on to something else.
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Lee Murray
It's their fulltime.
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Larry Hipp
Job every day, just trying to steal money. And it's it's amazing that some of the governments around the world will turn such a blind eye to it. But it is our reality. So we've got to spend a lot of time making sure our consumers are protected.
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Lee Murray
Yeah, well, it's true. And there's so many other tentacles too, like human trafficking and, you know, the modern, you know, slave trade kind of thing. Yeah, that's very interesting things from my perspective, you know, because I don't I don't live in that world. It's all it's just sort of surprising and not surprising at the same time.
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Larry Hipp
Yeah.
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Lee Murray
Okay, so to the questions. So this is, you know, oriented to technology and how it influences the organization. You know, the question that it gives us, think about future technologies that will influence your organization. What technologies come to mind? What are the most important examples? So to our first question is, can you think of future technologies that will likely make your business more successful and increase the value of your products and services to customers?
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Lee Murray
And I have to think that you're thinking about this all the time. You're a technology company, right?
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Larry Hipp
Sure. So, you know, when I think about technology, that's really going to change what we do for financials perspective. You know, the blockchain is the thing that I've got my eye on very, very heavily right now. Take away the meme coins. I'm not talking dogecoin and I'm not talking.
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Lee Murray
You're talking to infrastructure.
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Larry Hipp
The infrastructure, the stuff that's under the hood of those transactions. There's some real innovation there right now. And right now it's a tinkering, it's a hobby. There's very few like enterprise payment level things that are happening right there. But, you know, I think I think that's really going to come around. You know, if you think about the networks that are payment Rails, Visa, MasterCard, you name it, those rails are sophisticated.
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Larry Hipp
They are they've been built for decades. Right. The new payment rails that are going to show up are going to look a lot like a blockchain. And right now, they're just not there from a tech perspective. You know, if you look at Visa and MasterCard, they can process 75,000 transactions a second. Like these are massive schools because the the Bitcoin chain can process like eight a second.
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Larry Hipp
So the tech is not there, but fundamental. Finally, the idea that you can build a, you know, a write once ledger that is always accurate and always, you know, never can be changed in a digital framework that's going to revolutionize payments at some point. And, you know, for us, we're watching it very, very closely to try and understand kind of when's the time to jump into it.
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Larry Hipp
Because the reality is, if I had jumped into it in, say, January of this year, that ecosystem is changing so rapidly that the tech I chose January of last year or this year even is already out of date. And so we're watching it very, very closely for when's the right time to jump into it, where we feel like it's stabilized enough, but also kind of right at that point, we're getting into an early enough, provides us some sort of competitive advantage, but it's still a long way to go.
00:09:43:11 - 00:10:06:17
Larry Hipp
I believe the global money movement, the thing that we do very specifically, ultimately the blockchain technology when it matures, is going to be the cheaper, faster, better, more transparent payment rate for the consumer and the customer. I just don't know when yet. So we're watching it very closely. And, you know, to be is technology clear? It's that it's that infrastructure under the hood.
00:10:06:17 - 00:10:20:11
Larry Hipp
You know, we're not going to be moving money with, you know, with Dogecoin or any of the things that pop up. But you can see, like the patient has signs of life, like this thing is going to fundamentally shape how we do payments out into the future at some time.
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Lee Murray
Yeah. And you know, I'm not super deep into this domain, but, you know, know enough to to be following what you're saying. The way I think about it is, is sort of an and versus an or, you know, like I see a lot of technology, gee, we're still using cash, but we have credit cards that are sophisticated. So does cash ever fully go away?
00:10:43:07 - 00:11:01:04
Lee Murray
Maybe not. Does cred, do you credit cards full ever go away? Maybe not. Maybe there's a place there's a portfolio of payment rails that exist. And I think to your point, you know, it's determining the trajectory of of adoption for those rails and trying to figure out where do you fit.
00:11:01:04 - 00:11:06:07
Larry Hipp
Yeah. And the interesting thing is, you know, we're a global company, so our users are from all over the world.
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Lee Murray
Mm hmm.
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Larry Hipp
When you look at, say, a blockchain technology through an American lens. Yeah, it's like an it's a it's an add on. We've got cash, we've got merchants, we've got credit cards, we got prepaid cards. We have all types of cards. Yeah. There are many economies around the world that are coming from cash right now to a QR code in a wallet.
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Larry Hipp
And they've just skipped cards altogether. Yeah. And you know, they are. It's kind of like my kids will never know what a phone on the wall was. Yeah, they showed up in the era of cell phones.
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Lee Murray
It's like eight track to vinyl. And, you know, you just skip cassettes and see, you know.
00:11:48:15 - 00:12:19:05
Larry Hipp
When you look at it from a global money movement point of view, I think there will be regions of the world that adopt it faster because they're jumping way over card networks and build mature technology frameworks that are just modern for their ecosystem and monitoring for their economy. And so it's going to be interesting. This isn't just a US problem to solve when it comes to payment rails, modern payment rails and you know, a global perspective on it says this stuff is going to be in our hands faster than faster than we.
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Lee Murray
So yeah, that's an interesting take. And so these it almost seems like the lesser likely to adopt it might make the developing countries might develop adopted quicker.
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Larry Hipp
Yes.
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Lee Murray
You know what would you what single factor do you think is going to be a catalyst for adoption? And the one I'm thinking is governments around the world adopting it. Be curious to hear what you think.
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Larry Hipp
Yeah. I mean, so, you know, one of the questions that you have is also kind of what what's going to hurt our organization, what tech is going to increase the value in our products. And actually, you know, I might am thinking about this is I think it's not going to be a technology so much as a technology that we can't use yet here in the States because of those regulations.
00:13:09:11 - 00:13:31:02
Larry Hipp
And, you know, the the the catalyst is going to be when the U.S. regulators are blessed and many, many companies like mine are kind of on the sidelines waiting to jump into it because we don't know how it's going to be regulated yet. And there is a tremendous amount of consumer protection on financials, financial transactions, and those are good.
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Larry Hipp
Like I'm not a anti regular regulatory person when it comes to, you know, financials. Like we don't want another, you know, 2008 style recession because people are in risky business with our financial sector. Right? Right. The regulations that are there are there for a reason. And, you know, some of us may not like all of them we have to deal with, but they're there for a reason.
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Larry Hipp
The reality is the tech that we are probably going to want to use might not be regulated yet enough in the United States and to a place where we can use it. So is there a tech that's going to likely hurt my organization? It's probably going to be a tech. And we'll keep on the blockchain theme just as an illustration where other countries have developed a sophisticated technology that is outpacing our ability to tap into this.
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Larry Hipp
I've now and I've got a global audience, right? I'm not just working with folks in the U.S. where I can say, well, I'll get to that blockchain thing at some point, but you got a credit card. We'll be fine, right? Like, you know, I've got a global audience to service and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of users around the world use it.
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Larry Hipp
Our product. And look, the regulators, they've got a really hard job, right? They are. You know, fintechs move faster than the regulators can keep up with. And, you know, they've got to think about how do I allow innovation to move forward, while also not hurting the financial economy, because we've seen how that story plays out before. You know, for me, it's a balance.
00:15:07:03 - 00:15:24:17
Larry Hipp
And what could hurt us into the future is just, you know, there's something out there we want to use. We just can't. And in other economies that skipped over the card economy, they're moving faster than we are. And so for me, it's a balance. I hope the regulators find a way to keep up with the pace of innovation.
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Larry Hipp
I know they're trying really hard, but like I said, with the blockchain tech, if you can, you imagine a regulator's job where, you know, six months ago you started investigating how you're going to regulate a blockchain style technology and then six months later throw that whole thing out the door because somebody just yeah, a better one.
00:15:41:09 - 00:15:42:04
Lee Murray
Just learning.
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Larry Hipp
It. Just look, just look. It takes me a tremendous amount of time to keep up with it and I'm in the middle of payments. So, you know, I think that like what happens for where our regulations here in the U.S. have got to keep up? Like that's going to be a thing. We're all we're all battling here in another, you know, another three or five years.
00:15:59:15 - 00:16:19:06
Larry Hipp
And lot of the fintechs in the U.S. have kind of sort of turned their nose up at the regulators and said, hey, we're going to we're going to innovate and you'll need this later. That's not how we operate here. We're you know, we're pretty we're pretty much we're going to keep things in in the window of what we can do within the regulations that the government has put out there.
00:16:19:12 - 00:16:43:21
Larry Hipp
And so, you know, maybe some other competitor of mine will throw that out the window and jump into it. But we take that we take the regulations pretty seriously because we you know, we move money around the world, and that's a highly regulated industry. And so I just hope that when we get there and the techs are ready to go, that, you know, our our our regulators inside of the US will be ready to, to, to rule what we can do and what we can do so a few more years out.
00:16:43:21 - 00:16:46:07
Larry Hipp
But you know, hopefully when we get there at all, it'll work.
00:16:47:14 - 00:17:03:14
Lee Murray
So on the regulation side, do you think that a central bank digital currency is a critical inflection point for how that moves along quicker? I mean, from from the reading and listening, I've done that sort of our island.
00:17:04:07 - 00:17:28:23
Larry Hipp
I think that I think that central bank coins will show up at some point. And, you know, the the real thing that's going to be the catalyst for the regulations is maybe not necessarily the central bank aspect of it, but but the identity aspect of it, right? So there's this great promise in the blockchain world that is you can move money anonymously.
00:17:29:01 - 00:17:48:02
Larry Hipp
Right? And this is when you hear this is where the drug cartels use it or the financial crunches. And certainly that happens. Right. But I mean, they also do that with cash. So it's not like it's like, oh, it's a brand new concept for the for the bank under concepts now. And but the reality is if I move money, you know, a bank with Bank of America, I got a Visa card in my hand.
00:17:48:02 - 00:18:13:23
Larry Hipp
Like the government shows up and says, Hey, I need to know all of Larry's financial transactions. They can do that. They can't do that in this kind of decentralized, ized, web3, blockchain world. And so I think the catalyst will be how do you have identity in a decent realized world? And that right now is like two things rubbing up against each other because the centralized world wants no identity.
00:18:14:18 - 00:18:44:11
Larry Hipp
But I think the governments around the world aren't going to really embrace it until they can get what they want from the payment grid. And so maybe it's a coin and maybe that coin introduces some level of identity, and that's what ultimately solves that like regulation hurdle or just a way that the federal government can say, Hey, this is how we're going to regulate this thing and you got to have a KYC process for all of your all of the people using your your system, I don't know.
00:18:44:11 - 00:18:48:23
Larry Hipp
But my guess is as identity becomes the biggest issue, yeah.
00:18:49:19 - 00:19:09:23
Lee Murray
Yeah, I would agree 100%. And to the questions, you've really kind of answered a lot of the questions, you know, external technology that could potentially decrease the value of products and services, external that could is unclear if it could hurt your organization. Anything else you want to say about that for you at all?
00:19:10:21 - 00:19:34:04
Larry Hipp
Yeah. I mean, I would say, you know, if I think about the blockchain and where it's going to go there, shows real promise there. One of the analogies that I use over and over is 15 years ago we were all running massive data centers and we just had servers and servers everywhere. And I asked people like think ten, 15 years ago, you're in the airport, what are the ads like?
00:19:34:04 - 00:19:53:08
Larry Hipp
You're on the escalator going down the baggage claim, big old ad space. Like, what are you going to see right there? IBM Cloud, Amazon Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. And you know, back then we were running data centers and we were, you know, we were like, oh, that cloud thing. It's going to it's going to be the future, right?
00:19:53:18 - 00:19:59:13
Larry Hipp
Yeah. And today, like the cloud is. It's the standard, right? Yeah.
00:19:59:13 - 00:20:00:10
Lee Murray
It's infrastructure.
00:20:00:17 - 00:20:22:05
Larry Hipp
What do you see if you're down that escalator right now? Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, you know, and so it's like it's a a visual representation to me where that technology can go. There's a lot of steps between now and then to figure out if it's going to be something that really accelerates our business, hurts our business, hurts our business because we can't tap into something is coming, right.
00:20:22:06 - 00:20:28:04
Larry Hipp
And, you know, there's a lot to figure out between now and then, and it'll be a fun ride when we get there.
00:20:29:01 - 00:20:33:12
Lee Murray
For sure. And I'm sure it's been a fun ride up to this point, so why not continue? Right.
00:20:33:19 - 00:20:39:02
Larry Hipp
Like I said, I've moved everything but gold and crypto and you know, crypto has got to come up next at some point, it seems like.
00:20:39:03 - 00:20:43:20
Lee Murray
That's right. Well, hey, you never know. Maybe you'll end up back around a gold, you know?
00:20:43:20 - 00:20:54:11
Larry Hipp
You know, hopefully not. If you look at the gold prices today, then, you know, that might that might be a thing, but hopefully will hopefully will move beyond that as a as a need currency, so to speak.
00:20:55:16 - 00:21:05:00
Lee Murray
Hey, thanks for your time. Thanks for answering these questions. Excited to have you be part of this and reconnect. So appreciate all your your effort.
00:21:05:00 - 00:21:05:21
Larry Hipp
Hey, thanks for having me.
