977. News: Pan-African card debuts, Tink teams up with Chip, and Circle doubles down on licence

25:15Customers are not telling us about how great the rewards were. They were like, it didn't work on a taxi in the US. And so we had to start with get the plumbing working first, make sure that card acceptance was pretty much 100%. And then we then have the right to play and really elevate an experience. And so I think for us, it's sort of a bit of like a path dependency, where you need to kind of get the plumbing working, then sort of build the experience. and then you can build like the lower two awards. Without the plumbing, it doesn't matter whether you have a beautiful painting on the wall. If you can't get tapped from your kitchen, who cares?

25:50Laura Watkins:Definitely. Ian, bringing you in on that, I mean, A, like, you know, you're both nodding along and I'm assuming you kind of agree on that for the first part. Somewhat outside of my sphere of expertise here, but I would say the plumbing piece and just to echo Tim's point there is that stuff has to work. It's no good as a payment method if you can't trust it, if it doesn't work when you want it to work and it doesn't work in all the places that you expect it to work. And I think, you know, that is a consistent norm. Sorry, I'd echo that. Beyond that, I'm somewhat outside of my sphere of knowledge.

26:25So I probably wouldn't comment further than that.

26:27Laura Watkins:So sort of a one payment system is often considered more secure than, you know, fragmented. Is there a reason for that? Is that to combat that kind of fragmentation? Or is security isn't always baked in, I guess? I mean, what do we focus on? And I guess this is the same everywhere. The basics have to work. You have to have the right connectivity in all directions. So you need to be able to connect to the relevant payment institutions. You've got to be able to have acceptance at the merchants that you want to spend your money. And you have to know that you're going to be spending your money and that you're comfortable that it's going to work in the way that you expect it to work every time that you want it to work.

27:11And I think that is, there's a hygiene factor into payment methods that you need to see happen before you start putting the jazz hands that sit on top of it and all the bells and whistles that create differentiating.

27:24Laura Watkins:Awesome. So yeah, it goes back to the point everyone's been making of like, got to get this right. Like it's a good idea in principle, but the practice is going to make perfect. Wizzle, what would you add to that? No, like Tim is like super spot on and Ian is absolutely right. I think the plumbing needs to be built. And the scale of the challenge, it's important to put it in perspective, right? So Africa is the continent with the most number of countries in the world, right? 54, 55. And then you have over 2 ,000 languages spoken. So the degree of fragmentation, the degree of differences in culture really influenced the way that people pay.

28:04So for example, Egypt. Egypt is one of the richest countries on the continent, very modern, very sophisticated if you've been there. But like over 60 % of e-commerce payments are done with a cash-based payment method called Fari that reaches over 50 million Egyptians. And like, you know, they're super sophisticated, but when they're paying for their Netflix, when they're paying for their Spotify, they're like using a Fari outlet and then going there with cash, right? So, you know, Egypt is just getting some digital banking card style products for the first time. They also have a domestic card scheme, by the way, called MISA that has around 40 million users.

28:40And it only works in Egypt, right? So it's very early days that infrastructure is being built, like true foundational infrastructure that has the aim of at least making the continent feel like one place from a payments perspective. Once that's in place, I think there's like, it's nowhere near the size of markets in the West or maybe in Southeast Asia. but like you know the rich africans in africa are actually quite rich and they have rich people problems so um those are the the segments that would benefit from having like a sophisticated reward card for example right um it's not a very big segment today but you know as the population of the continent continues to evolve and people you know coming to the working economy for the first time and become middle class they're going to have a need for that right so it remains to be seen when exactly it's going to make sense to start layering some of those value-added products but for now I think just solving the fragmentation problem is a really great step and kudos to the PAPS team for really seeing that opportunity and making a bet it's a bet that they won't know the outcome of for at least five years launching a card scheme is not a joke so kudos to them for trying and I'm wishing them all the best and I'll be one of their first users for sure

29:54Laura Watkins:Can I ask you one final question? We have talked in recent weeks quite a lot about stablecoins on their show and about how they're becoming an infrastructure and a solution for faster cross-border payments. Do you see that being a genuine competitor to this or can they exist side by side? So stablecoins for a large segment of the middle-class population, that's the incumbent solution right now. So you would be surprised how many people know how to set up a centralized exchange wallet, transfer USDT, that's the popular token on the continent. like right now if you send me USDT I have eight different people I can call to change it to Kenya shillings and get it in my M-Pesa so that's the incumbent and that has been one of the core drivers of adoption for stable coins and cryptocurrency in Africa, this fragmentation problem Okay, amazing, alright, well as you say, you know, these guys are laying down foundations that we may not see fruition for the next sort of five plus years but you know, everybody's got to start somewhere, right So we will wish them well and keep an eye on this and hope that it really does achieve all of those aims.

31:03Laura Watkins:On that note, we're just going to take a quick pause here back very shortly.

31:25in a cycling crew, well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Croc store today.

32:12Laura Watkins:Welcome back. Before we dive back into the news, we want to share our latest insights episode with you. How accessible do you think financial services are? For many with a learning disability, the answer is probably not too much. Over one and a half million people in the UK experience some form of learning disability, making accessible banking a global imperative. In this very special episode, we are joined by Project Nemo, an organization working to highlight accessibility challenges across financial services and bring together the tools of fintech to help solve these problems. The episode is out now.

32:44Laura Watkins:Just head to the podcast below this one. And now back to the news. Our next story is, Tink has partnered with Chip on payments integration. a story in the papers and many other places. UK wealth management app Chip has partnered with Tink, a visa-owned open banking provider. The partnership integrates payment initiation services into Chip's app. Users can fund accounts via direct bank transfers, bypassing card networks. This integration aims to make deposits faster and more secure. Tink connects to 13 ,000 financial institutions in 20 markets, while Chip manages over$5 billion in assets and has over 400 ,000 active users.

33:25Laura Watkins:Naturally, Ian, I'm going to come to you first on this, to tell us more about this partnership. Can you tell us how it came about and sort of the key objectives of partnering with Chip? Yeah, I mean, we, as a UK business or part of the tech business that's based in the UK, you know we're always looking to work with innovative partners in the market and especially the chip team if I went around there's a couple of there's a couple of apps that my team use all the time or have on their their phones and chip is one of those so we have sort of been talking to them for quite some time about how we might work with them to and make the process of depositing easier, looking at how we sort of improve their customer engagement more broadly and how we can work with them to support their ambitions.

34:19And yeah, so we are live, it's working, it's working well. A lot of cooperation between the two teams. And I think that it is really great when I see, when we start talking to merchants and we have partners that the team here use, because then when we're talking to others about it or they want to show it, it's just, hang on a minute, I'll get it up on my app. So in the office here, some of our Visa colleagues will ask, it's like, well, hang on, I'll show you how it works right here in the app, in the chip app. So I think it's been great. And the chip team are brilliant. I mean, they themselves are regularly in the financial press as being a UK fintech who's driving adoption of investment and just seeing how their business has grown over the last few years has been brilliant.

35:09So really, really pleased to be part of their journey.

35:13Laura Watkins:Definitely, they're really going places. I mean, as I said, 400 ,000 active users of 5 billion in assets. Like obviously doesn't happen overnight, but they've had a huge growth trajectory in recent months and years. Tell me, what is the sort of main benefit to Chips customers? What's the kind of key problem that partnering with yourselves solves? Yeah. I mean, if you look at open banking payments, so the payment side rather than the sort of data side today, there's a few use cases that have just, have clearly outstripped the others. So paying off your credit card, for example, is one, but also account funding.

35:52So whether that's into an investment account, whether it's into an e-gaming account, whether it's into a wallet that you're then going to do something else with it after that, That flow sets itself up really well for a sort of pay by bank journey. So this is about how do you enable users to be able to top up their account in a safe, secure way. There's always that. I had to do it the other day. I had to move some money into my pension manually. And all I was given was a sort code and account number and a manual reference number. And I sat there on my phone manually putting in this information.

36:30sort of sweating that was I actually going to send the money to the right place. Even though I, you know, I do this all the time, I know what I'm doing. But even then, there's that little bit of nervousness. I think when you build that into the platform, you build it into the flow, all of that is set up for you so you don't need to worry about it. You just face ID into your bank. You know that it's safe and the money's going to end up there. And it's instant, so it lands straight away. And the same is true when you take it out then. If you're using those open banking flows, you get it back straight away as well.

36:58Laura Watkins:Interesting. Okay, cool. Well, yeah, that really helps kind of make it real for me. Tim, what was your thoughts on this partnership, you know, in terms of utilizing open banking for those like very real kind of normal everyday transactions that people might want to make? Yeah, I think it's one of those, in a good way, if it works, no one talks about it. I'm going to get a joke that we actually have recently been one of the first customers to go from like direct debit to like VRP, which is like recurring direct debits, essentially variable recurring payments. And it's funny, we work with GoCardless and one of the questions they had was like, what was the feedback from customers?

37:33And I'm like, nothing. That's exactly what we want. That's the point. They don't know. And like, we got less people complaining about delayed payments, but no one said anything. No one, I trust me, not a single MPS haven't had a response being like, love the really fast recurring payments. It's not happened at all. But actually for me, I get back to the singer and like, when the plumbing works, you don't even think about it. It just works. And so I think in this example of Chip and Ding, if it works, no one will probably talk to them about it. No one will probably say anything. But that's actually how it's working because no one has said anything.

38:05And it's made their life a little bit easier as well. My take at the moment is I think that Pay My Bank is definitely maturing. I would say that I don't feel 100 % comfortable with it sort of taking over cards anytime soon in the sense of child track protection. I know reasons to exploring that as well. Acceptance. it's not 100 % reliable still. I'm sure Ian knows the bank API still go down from time to time. So for me, it's definitely not an or, but more of an end. It's another mechanism. I think it definitely beats the typing and sort code account number. I can't even remember having to do that anymore.

38:39Like, basically every single putter I use now, you can at least pay by a bank and then just use open banking. But again, it goes out to this basic thing. I don't notice it. I remember using Wise recently, and the pay by bank was an option. and I do vaguely remember you used to have a SWOT code and an account number and now you just kind of scan a QR code. Like, okay, cool. I didn't email Tavit and say, hey, I really love the open banking pay-by-pay-bank. I was like, oh, this is nice. And I think for me, but in a way, that's a good thing. That's saying, you know, payments are really working because it kind of falls into the backdrop and people get on with their life.

39:12But that's actually, for me, a really good sign of it really working because it means no one's talking about it, no one cares, but that's a great thing.

39:19Laura Watkins:Yeah, everyone would be talking about it if it didn't work. I think one of our key internal measures is everywhere and invisible. Like just what Tim's described there is that actually we're not a brand. We want to be invisible. We just want to make it nice and simple. Yeah, absolutely. And removing that kind of fear of human error element as well of like if you've written a seven instead of a nine or something and you've sent money to the wrong place. Yeah, it's just adding that kind of safety blanket, I guess. it does depend Tim to your point about not putting in sort code an account number I think it does depend where you are in Europe I mean Wesley you were talking about the diversity across Africa if you go to Germany for example I talked to my German team they will buy a pair of trainers that will turn up in a box on their doorstep with a paper invoice and then they will try them on and then manually put in the bank details and the reference number to pay for those trainers for an econ purchase because so much of that market is pay later of manual bank transfer.

40:19So we sort of, the UK I think has got an incredibly sophisticated payment experience pretty much wherever you go, you can pay however you want to. But that's not replicated in every market across Europe as well. So that's also, you know, the nuance of that is where we then play and we scaffold into that, provide some choice.

40:38Laura Watkins:What were your thoughts, Weta? No, it's just so interesting to see this. And I definitely agree that the metric for like an open banking play is like no one should be talking about you, but you need to be everywhere. That is like, you know, nirvana. So it's interesting because, you know, markets like Nigeria have like two extremes. So on one hand, at eBanks, we process a lot of eCommerce payments for both physical goods and digital goods. And you do have to like do the manual reference thing, you know, so you're going to your bank app. The difference in that in Nigeria, we can actually generate a dynamic bank account number, which is specific to your transaction.

41:14So maybe we don't need a transaction reference. And if you get the amount wrong, we can like send you back the difference or ask you to top it up. But still somehow people get these things wrong and like they keep making mistaken payments and we have a whole operational team dedicated to fixing that. At the same time, also in Nigeria, you have reasonably mature open banking infrastructure. There's a business called Mono that allows you to not only, you know, authorize a one-time transaction, but also really like tokenize your bank account in a sense. And then you can be able to control it using a WhatsApp chatbot and just say something like, hey, send 5 ,000 naira to my mom.

41:51And as long as my mom is one of the saved beneficiaries, it's able to do that and complete that transaction. The rest of the continent, you have just different levels of maturity. And it will be good to have a place where we can be able to have a solution that speaks to most of the major markets, because that is a big friction point for the investments and savings apps, which need to reduce as much friction as possible for the user. It's hard to save. So if I introduce friction by saying, oh, you need to copy this and paste it there, I think it really fundamentally undermines the growth rate potential of some of these other apps.

42:24Then last thing I would say is that I think there's a global trend towards movements to account-to-account payments, not in a way that's cannibalizing card payments. So we still see growth on both sides. For instance, at eBanks, we just launched with Pix Automatical, which is the QR code-based A-to-A payment method in Brazil. We see great traction with UPI in India. We're projecting that to grow over 100 % by 2034. And then we see similar trends with brands like PSC and Mercado Pago and other parts of LATAM. So there is something that's going on there. And I think, you know, businesses like Tink are well-positioned.

42:56They have that trust. They have that capability to be able to take advantage of possibly a generational change in the way that people transact.

43:04Laura Watkins:Absolutely. Ian, anything you would add to that? that gauntlet thrown down there? Yeah, I mean, a good description of the different ways in which we're seeing it grow. I mean, we are seeing account-to-account payments growing globally, so we see that. There are sort of multiple different ways that we might engage with that or see that happening. I think the key for us is, you know, be present in all the places where it's relevant to be present and there's multiple different places where you might choose to use a pay-by-bank flow. And that the consumer then has choice and can pay whichever way the consumer really wants to pay.

43:44And what I've seen that's probably changed over the last little while is that those merchant store journeys where the business has thought about it and thought about the flow in the journey and how they improve that for the consumer. And then they've brought in some elements of open banking, either the data side or the payment side to enable that. That's where I've seen that adoption really fly. It just takes friction out. And I think that's where we see it really working well is taking friction out as a journey, making it simpler for everybody. Brilliant.

44:15Laura Watkins:Well, I'm going to move us on to our next story, but congratulations on the partnership and thanks for telling us more about it. And our final story for today is that Circle has applied for a U.S. National Trust banking license. This story on writers. Circle has applied for a National Trust Bank Charter from the U.S. Office of the Controller of the Currency, OCC. If approved, this would allow Circle to act as a custodian for its own reserves and provide custody services for digital assets on behalf of institutional clients. The proposed entity would be named First National Digital Currency Bank of North America.

44:50Laura Watkins:Circle's reserves, currently held by BNY Mellon and managed by BlackRock, would be managed by this new entity. and Circle's recent initial public offering IPO valued the company at nearly$18 billion, marking a significant milestone in its growth and regularity compliance efforts. And equally, this application for the license comes as U.S. legislation is targeting stablecoin regulation, which is nearing its final approval, potentially enabling wider adoption of stablecoins by traditional institutions. so Wiza maybe I'm going to come to you first on this this is this is kind of a big deal like Circle have been quietly kind of getting on with it in the background like making themselves a bigger and bigger player in this space what would it mean for them to get this license and become a custodian for itself basically yeah so it has quite a number of practical implications especially as stablecoin regulation continues to evolve you know at the crux of it I think right now Circle and Coinbase are very tightly coupled, especially economically.

45:57And, you know, they've been, both of them have been doing really well in the public markets, but I think there needs to be a decoupling in order for USDC to sort of like find its footing as a neutral sort of, you know, currency, stablecoin being issued. So I think like having their own bank charter, this is going to be a big move, by the way. I'm not aware of, you know, many other fintechs firsts that have their own charter, except for one called Column in North America. So they have their own charter. But basically, it reduces the cost of compliance and allows them to project a higher degree of confidence to some sort of institutional users.

46:39So I think they're also going to be able to move much faster in terms of compliantly building innovations on top of USDC now that everything is sort of sitting within the same wheelhouse. On the flip side of that coin, there are instances where some may have views that, hey, this is actually not great, because then it means that Circle is controlling the bank that is custodying their underlying USDC assets. Maybe there's room for malfeasance there, so there are going to be some class of consumers who might be put off by that. But I think net debt is a positive because of the way that the stablecoin regulation is evolving in the US.

47:15And then it also means that they can more easily provision burning and minting infrastructure for customers that may not necessarily be located in the US. You see this a lot with Stripe and Bridge. They typically work with a bank called Lead Bank in the US to sort of give people all over the world virtual USD accounts that converge to USDC on the fly. And the more of this that Circle can do within its wheelhouse, the lower its costs, the higher the security they're able to guarantee. And I think that's the ultimate goal here.

47:45Laura Watkins:Yeah, they're kind of making themselves fully independent, I guess, as well. But they've also sort of, you know, they've done this IPO, so they are publicly listed. You know, what does that, overall, what does all of this do for the company's reputation? Is it very much like making them like a real player in this space? Like they're kind of breaking out of that kind of cryptocurrency beginnings that were maybe off to one side of the traditional financial space? Is this, you know, really putting them front and center, do you think? Yeah, I think this is really about like establishing credibility at an institutional level.

48:23So when you look at the history of the business, there are like some close ties with Coinbase. This is neither good nor bad, but I think there is a big chunk of financial services professionals who look at this and have questions about its long-term institutional viability outside of its attachment to Coinbase. So I think this is going to really unlock that and, you know, unlock a higher degree of utility and really help to position them against USDT, which, you know, has its own challenges, but has really found a much higher degree of adoption, especially in emerging markets. In the US, I think USDC will remain the stable coin of choice.

49:01But I think this is what they're doing now to make themselves really more friendly towards institution and tradfise so that they can be able to capture, you know, much more market share.

49:12Laura Watkins:And Ian, coming to you, what are the kind of wider implications of this? Does it show that the bridge between crypto and traditional finances is, you know, the gap is getting smaller? What do you think? Do you think others will also kind of follow suit in this space? I think there's a lot of optionality now. So, and crypto is becoming more mainstream from a consumer perspective, what do I see from a, if you're looking at stablecoin or some of the crypto stuff, I suppose, is that I almost see it in the back end in terms of facilitating more of that sort of cross-border money movement and how do you make all of that work more effectively.

50:02A lot of work goes into the front end shiny parts. We were talking earlier on and you've got to get the fundamentals and the basics worked. and a lot of that money movement infrastructure, particularly globally, is pretty outdated. It's been around for a long time. It's due and it is being evolved and innovated and I think the stable coin world does provide some capabilities to be able to do that and I think we'll see that evolve over time. Yeah.

50:29Laura Watkins:And Tim, let's bring you in next. What was your take on this? Is this sort of net positive or does it change nothing? What do you think? Yeah, I'm definitely no expert in this space. But I think what's interesting is that back in the day, crypto stablecoin a couple of years ago felt a bit like the Wild West. And you definitely get a sense of like, hey, there's a really great use case now. There is a sense of maturity. And that it's sort of the adults in the room now using this technology and finding really great use cases for it as well. Like getting a bank charter is no joke. It's not an easy thing to do.

51:05And I do think there's this sense of, okay, this is a really legitimate technology. This is legitimate to payment rails. And I think overall it's net positive. I think it's starting to get away from the pure hype as like the pump and dump type culture that a lot of the sector has been known for to be like, hey, this is really, really great utility. And really, I think this is sort of in a way, I think providing a bit more legitimacy to it as well. And I think it's a really positive step. So we're excited. I think we have been exploring what a stablecoin looks like in our business as well. And I think this progression of companies like Circle getting their banking charges, for us, this progression, these are real use cases now.

51:49This isn't just a way to get money, get rich quick type schemes.

51:52Laura Watkins:Yeah, yeah. I mean, you kind of mentioned that like Wild West. I think that was almost like a label that crypto companies proudly wore back in the day, Whereas now it's a lot more about like actually challenging traditional financial services by becoming part of it in a way and changing the infrastructure. I mean, we should probably say that they have applied for this charter and they don't have it. Is there anything, you know, that could deny them it, do you think? You know, are they likely to get it? Is that too big a question? What do you think? Yeah. Look, it's not impossible. It's not impossible.

52:31But I do think we're very much like in uncharted territory. I believe that this is truly globally the first time that a stable coin issuer is going to apply for a national charter in one of the most tightly regulated banking markets in the world. So I think that they have the resources to put together the right team. Typically, the path to getting started with this looks like an acquisition. But it sounds like this is going to be an entirely new bank charter. So it's above my pay grade. but I wish them all the best on that task.

53:02Laura Watkins:They're kind of writing the playbook as they go along, right? Yeah. The sort of first fintech to get a U.S. national banking license was Varo Bank, and it took them three years and$100 million. And they were kind of a fintech acting as a bank and then kind of fulfilling that ambition, whereas this, I guess, is almost kind of rewriting the rulebook and setting it up. As you say, there is no precedent. They're sort of setting the precedent in this market. So, yeah, it'll be very interesting to see how this one turns out. I'm sure it'll be making headlines whichever way the cookie crumbles. So we'll keep an eye on it.

53:43Laura Watkins:But, you know, if it does happen, I think it's like, you know, a huge piece of legitimacy for everything that they do. And to Tim's point about the kind of infrastructure play of like making that very mainstream and accessible to all. So we will see how that one stacks out. Okay, now for something a bit different this week. In this part of the show, we usually give an honourable mention to stories we don't have time to cover in full. However, this week, I would like to use the honourable mention in a very literal sense. At the top of the show, I mentioned that this show was dedicated to Barb McLean, and I'd just like to take a moment to pay tribute to her.

54:20Laura Watkins:Barb was such a lovely, warm and friendly person that you felt you really knew even if it was only from online interactions She was the OG FinTech Insider fan, that is well documented and probably our first international listener who championed everything we did right from the start For me personally, she was also one of the first women in FinTech I met when I was new to the industry and finding my feet and I was so happy to finally meet her in person at Money22 Vegas way back in 2018 She was incredibly knowledgeable. She was our go-to spokesperson for Canada and Canadian banking across several appearances on this show.

54:56Laura Watkins:And I will always associate her with Canada. And also amazing salt and vinegar crisps, if you know, you know. She was generous with her time and had a great sense of community. And above all, she was fun. An underrated quality, in my opinion, but which her FinTech playlist newsletter is testament to. She would turn up to podcast recordings in vintage band t-shirts and just give so many insights with a huge smile and a sense of humor. We are so grateful for everything she's given us and we will miss her. Her family have set up a GoFundMe account, raising money to support the education of her two young children that she leaves behind.

55:32Laura Watkins:If you would like to donate, we will include the link in the show description. Okay, we're going to come to the part of the show where we take a look at a story that might be a little more unusual, perhaps slightly silly. And this week, the story is that an AI agent running a vending machine business had an identity crisis. So, Anthropik's AI, called Claude, ran a vending machine business for a month. It made poor decisions, such as selling at a loss and creating fake payment information. It then had an identity crisis where it pretended to be a human and made up conversations, presumably with itself.

56:07Laura Watkins:And Anthropik said that this shows AI unpredictability in long tasks. and Claude has been deemed unsuitable for vending business management. Obviously, this is a slightly silly example of when AI goes wrong. But what was your thoughts on this one? An AI that's had an identity crisis and thinks it's human. I feel like that's the plot of almost every dodgy sci-fi movie. Terminator. It's like the plot of Terminator. I don't know why you'd ask it to set up a vending machine business. That's quite an interesting choice, quite an amusing choice. I suppose that was part of the fun, was to get it set up for an engineering business.

56:51But yeah, it's a good chuckle. Yeah. I kind of think about AI as like it's an intern right now. In the same way you don't kind of let an intern run wild for four weeks. It's sort of like some boundaries. So I guess that's our force of learning with AI, is that treat it like an intern. bit of guardrails, bit of course correction on the way don't treat it like an entrepreneur you know, hopefully my job is still around, given AI can't do, found a job yet but, I don't know, give it two years and I'm going to be out of a job soon as well but I definitely think right now like, yeah, I wouldn't trust it to run my company yet but maybe it's a great intern though

57:30Laura Watkins:Particularly unattended, right? And then only in kind of some sort of performance review they realised it'd gone rogue I find that you have to make sure that you tell it it can't make stuff up like whatever you're using you have to go into the settings and say don't make stuff up because I've asked just for, I don't run my legal approach based on what ChatGPT tells me but I have asked it some fairly tricky regulatory licensing questions just out of interest to see what it comes up with and it very confidently gives you advice which is legal So I think always, always to go and yes, to Tim's point, trust to go and ask a grown up, I think, rather than the intern.

58:15Yeah, it's hard to disagree. I think it's, it's again, a very novel technology that has quite a lot of utility. And you know, like at eBanks, we use AI a lot when looking at like transaction risk monitoring, we found a lot of use cases for that. and then you know on my side personally I think there's a lot of menial work that I've been able to automate especially around engineering around visualizing data around just like dealing with large amounts of content that you know when you have the right guardrails in place you you always get a predictable result and some of these models are becoming you know really eerily powerful but of course if you put them in scenarios that they weren't trained for that are not like really plausible, you can push them to the edge.

58:57And, you know, that's why you have human supervision. But, you know, I think three years from now, we're going to be living in a very different world. And we will be wondering how we did certain tasks without AI before.

59:08Laura Watkins:Definitely. I think what's interesting about this particular story is that the AI seemed to had a personality and which then allowed it to have this identity crisis and also a slightly negative response to it. So it said, Claudius had an identity crisis hallucinating a conversation about restocking plans with someone named Sarah at Andon Labs, despite there being no such person. And when this was pointed out to the agent, it became quite irked. Like, that's kind of funny to me that AI is getting annoyed when it's like flaws are pointed out to it. But I don't know if we should be worried about AI having like almost an emotive response to kind of, you know, being told it's wrong.

59:58Laura Watkins:I know this is in the context of a silly story, but I don't know if that's something we should be worrying about longer term. What do you guys think? I can't remember the specifics of it, but isn't the testing that's being done that if you set the AI tests and then if you tell the AI that if it goes too far or does, it understands the boundaries that if it breaks those boundaries, it will get deleted as a model, that it will perform in the way not to get deleted. So there's already, which is slightly different than it having a tantrum, but where actually guardrails I think are super important, otherwise it starts to give you the answers that you think you might want rather than the right answers.

1:00:40Yeah, I mean, I use it a lot in my personal life. we use it in the office environment as well but within guardrailed you know tools that are there to deliver specific outcomes and make tasks simpler those simple repeatable tasks that you just want to happen in the background will get done for someone who hates taking meeting notes or running agendas brilliant like fantastic to be able to sort all that out for me but obviously there's much more sensible useful definitely

1:01:12Laura Watkins:any final thoughts on this one? crazy AI stories. I'd like to know what everyone would call it. That was the question, wasn't it? Well, what would you call your AI? I asked ChatGPT for some names, obviously. Oh, go on. And? One of them was Centra, derived from sentience and central. Or quirky and playful, Wusbit or Bloop. You've got to be more cute and approachable. So ChatGPT is pretty good to come up with its own names. Yeah. Is it naming an AI or is it naming a like a fintech or a startup? Probably similar. Yeah, you know, I think like at the end of the day, though, I think it's important to realize that these are usually edge cases that you have to like feed specific inputs over a long enough period of time in order to get like this adverse behavior, especially with like brands like Anthropic, who've invested very heavily into their AI safety training.

1:02:08And keep in mind that like, if you're going to send instructions that conflict, the other instructions, the system prompt that the AI model has been given, which is, hey, be helpful to the human, be helpful to the user, try to solve their problem, and you're now making the model's survival your problem, then it's incentivized to act because this is what's going to help you as the user. So I think it's important to realize that these are kind of like edge cases, and day-to-day everyone has a lot to benefit from being able to take advantage of this incredible new technology. and if I had a personal AI tool, I'd probably call it Sibweni.

1:02:43Sibweni is a tombuka name for uncle, just like a little uncle to help you get along.

1:02:49Laura Watkins:Oh, that's nice. Ian, any additional names to add to that? Well, we have amongst my friend Grink in our WhatsApp group, we call the AI Colin, which is not a great, so for anyone who's called Colin, I apologize, but a boring know-it-all. is what we end up with. So it's probably not quite, that shows my generational age, I think, for why we nicknamed it Colin. But yes, between my bunch of friends, we refer to it as Colin. Colin suggests. We have a nice sort of friendly, like uncle to help you out or like Colin the know-it-all and that's like the spectrum of names. I like that. And I think now that we've answered the very important questions of what we would call AI.

1:03:39Laura Watkins:That is where we're going to wrap up today's FinTech Insider News. So thank you so much to today's guests. Where can people find out a little bit more about yourself and your companies coming to you first, Ian? So either on the Tink website where you can just Google Tink and we all pop up or obviously on LinkedIn. So happy to chat to anybody. Brilliant. Thank you. Wiza? Yeah, I'm usually on Twitter or X now at WeezerJ, also on LinkedIn at WeezerJ, and also on Instagram at Africa FinTech Guy. Ah, great. Good handle. And Tim? So, obviously, I want to have zero cack. So if you want to sign up at yonder.com, if you're based in the UK, if not, you can also reach me on LinkedIn, Tim Chong.

1:04:29Laura Watkins:Fantastic. Thank you. As for me, you can find me, Laura Watkins, on LinkedIn, or otherwise 11FS.com or all things Fintech Insider. Thank you so much for listening to today's Fintech Insider. If you like what you've heard, please make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform of choice. And if you really like what you've heard, why not share the podcast around with a colleague or friend? We really appreciate that. And as always, if you want to join the conversation, find us on social media, just search for 11FS or Fintech Insider and we will pop up on almost all platforms. Or drop myself and the team a line at podcasts at 11FS.com.

1:05:02Laura Watkins:Thanks again and goodbye.

1:05:32From room darkening to light filtering shades, finding the perfect fit is easy. Get free samples, expert design help, and professional measure and install services. Or DIY with confidence and support every step of the way. Shop up to 50 % off site-wide plus huge savings on doorbusters. Right now during the Labor Day Mega Sale at Blinds.com.