Most fintechs treat cross border payments as a cost centre. George Davis built a business that treats it as the $100B infrastructure opportunity nobody else is rebuilding, and grew 55X in 12 months doing it.

In this episode I speak with George Davis, Co-Founder and CEO of Lorum, a global clearing and settlement infrastructure business serving financial institutions across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and beyond. George is a serial founder who previously co-founded BVNK before leaving to rebuild the layer of the payments stack that big banks have left untouched.

Key takeaways:

• The payment system isn't broken; banks running it are wrongly incentivised
• Why stablecoins add friction to cross border payments rather than removing them
• How mid market fintechs can access wholesale treasury rates and turn FX into a profit centre
• What access to clearing infrastructure actually means for remittance, payroll, and import-export businesses
• Why Lorum 55X'd in 12 months by going after the bottom of the payments stack

George also shares the founder mindset behind Lorum's growth: first principles thinking, radical adaptability, and hiring for obsession over experience.

👉 Connect with George:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgedavis-lorum/

Website: https://www.lorum.com/

👉 Connect with Monica:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicamillares/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@moni_millares

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@moni_millares

Website: https://www.purposedrivenfintech.com/

[00:00:00] Why clearing and settlement is the real barrier to cross border payments

[00:01:00] George's journey: machine learning startup to co-founding BVNK to Lorum

[00:04:00] Why big banks are wrongly incentivised

[00:07:00] What clearing and settlement actually means in plain English

[00:10:00] Access is the real problem; not speed, not cost

[00:18:00] How to turn FX and clearing into a profit centre, not a cost centre

[00:26:00] Why stablecoins don’t fix cross border payments

[00:35:00] The founder mindset: first principles thinking and obsession as a superpower

[00:46:00] Lorum's OCC banking licence application and the road to $100B

[00:49:00] Why the opportunity outside the US is bigger than inside it

Production and marketing by Monica Millares. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email Monica at fintechwithmoni@gmail.com

Disclaimer: This episode does not constitute professional nor financial advice and does not represent the opinion nor views of my current, past or future employers. The guest has agreed to record and release our conversation for the use of this podcast and promotion in social media.

George. Pod

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And so we started the business for that.

Monica: You have an amazing career as a FinTecher as a founder, and now you're touching a fundamental problem that it's infrastructure.

Usually I talk about Neobanking, a few times the infra, but I've never gone into the detail of clearing and settlement, that it's genuine infrastructure.

sometimes I want to innovate and it's frustrating because the banks, for whichever reason, can offer me a solution that is not fit for purpose or it takes too long or it's too expensive and then I cannot because it doesn't make sense to do it.

Became extremely obsessive with the infrastructure that sits below a payment experience, so ledgers, virtual accounts, central bank settlements, et cetera. , And we really pivoted TrueLab into a payment business. It became the core, core business line of TrueLab, so I got to see a lot of scale with it.

And that business became really, really large. You'll have seen recently, with acquisition announcements, et cetera. But actually fundamentally saw that, A, crypto doesn't really solve this core problem and B, you are still reliant on core treasury and trade services with banks, and that these services really are the piece of infrastructure that haven't been rebuilt.

And the deficiencies in that will lead everyone to tell you that the system is broken because it costs these kind of systemically important banks the same amount to service you, whether you have $100 million or $100 billion. They are gating their service. It's very manually driven. It's built in large silos.

And everyone then turns to these regional community banks, these small banks that are effectively kind of misappropriating their charter to offer correspondence , services. They are spending their time actually building lending businesses and often, especially in the US, they're mandated by law to lend, like they have a community reinvestment mandate, and so they have to lend.

But B, they're not really incentivized to build you the more complex treasury products that you would buy from a Citi, from a JPM, from a BNY, like the ability to hedge currency risk the ability to earn interest in money market funds, buy wholesale rates. Because if you think about the incentive of these banks they either wanna lend your money, so they want cash that they can convert to a loan, or they wanna shift it off their books so they don't incur a capital requirement for something they're not really monetizing effectively.

And so then you're asking them to custody a money market fund position, and it increases their capital, but they can neither lend it or shift it. And so this creates a really weird incentive i-i-in the market and, um, everyone will tell you because of these things you must rebuild in crypto, you must rebuild outside of the central banking system, and we actually believe that's fundamentally not true.

It's a large majority of what BNY does, and no one's really focusing there. Everyone builds this kind of thin layer at the top, these remittance companies that just leverage the same services. Maybe they get innovative with netting their book off so that they can make a payment look and feel instant that isn't really.

And, and so we started the business for that. We started in the Middle East 'cause it had no infra, but so much money moving. Some of the world's biggest remittance corridors exist in the Middle East or out of the Middle East. And, the market really was built around commodities, and so you don't see a lot of complex banking products, and it's an area where correspondent banking is relatively poor.

And so we had to build a lot of the infrastructure for our banks and our partners. We used to clear... I always say on these that I used to clear payments with paperwork, with wetting, couriering the paperwork to branches- ... 'cause there was just no, no infrastructure. I mean, there wasn't client money products.

So you couldn't really even try to hold money with a bank as a fintech effectively. There was, a handful of products that were very much geared towards wealth management, maybe buy now, pay later, but not much. And that's given us a really strong monopoly in the Middle East to the point we now clear for some of the largest names in the world, some of the largest banks in the world.

And I think this concept of building this 100% reserve-backed institution really resonates with a lot of customers because they can really trust our incentive as this kind of neutral central clearing house to support their business.

Monica: That's an amazing, amazing intro. And just for everyone to follow with the conversation, because we'll have all sorts of people listening, I want to step back a little bit.

At the bottom of the stack. Yes. Yeah. Which is amazing. Can we-- before we go deeper, can you explain in plain English what is clearing and settlement?

George: Yeah. So clearing, you can think of clearing as a fancy word for payments. Clearing fundamentally is the settling of some transaction on behalf of other parties.

It's a very, very established function of equities markets. So, when trading securities, you always use a clearinghouse that is a neutral party that takes one side's money and delivers the other side's equities in exchange. And, uh, it's something that has existed in payments for a long time but has been consumed by the large banks.

And so it's not a phrase you hear so often other than I think, I think really ClearBank in Europe socialized the name again. And, um, then you started to hear the words clearing much more and it-- but it's always been a core function of treasury and trade within-- inside these large banks, is that that's how they facilitate the movement of money or the settling of a transaction between two of their customers or of their customer's customers in this case.

Monica: Exactly. So in this case, your customers are financial services institutions that move money

Um, and so we never really serve anything direct, even direct to corporate. We always direct to FI, and we allow them- Mm-hmm ... basically the building blocks to operate their financial service for their end customer.

Monica: Amazing. And then if we were to summarize the pain point that we're sol- that you're solving for, speed and cost I'm assuming.

Can you expand?

Access. It's actually that today, if you want to buy these services as a mid-market financial institution or a smaller payments business or anything like that, you have to work with a smaller bank with worse technology who's actually using the bigger bank. And so when you are going to them, you're getting a lower quality of service, and you're often not getting a full, uh, like a fully addressable service that you would get directly from a Citi or a JPM.

And it's often purely just a clearing and account relationship. It often doesn't come with any form of treasury management. It's really hard even for a PSP to add interest on the funds that they hold, for instance, because these services are very gated. And so if you are an institution in the US, you have great services because actually the OCC in the US has a mandate for the banks to not debank local companies.

And so giving access to nested financial institutions has been one of the biggest drivers for the growth in our business, is that we are set up so that we can give a smaller FI who has another FI as a customer or, or a customer who has a customer access where normally that would be a compliance nightmare.

It would be really hard to manage. These banks don't like to take it on. And so I'd say, like the first thing is, is really access, whether that be to more complex treasury services that you find from big banks or to more complex currencies like the Middle Eastern currencies where they were more difficult.

So if they want to emulate a faster experience with their own treasury, they can absolutely. We're gonna give you the absolute best rates to do it with. We're gonna give you wholesale treasury rates so that you can build margin on top of those so that we can be a kind of modular building block for your business.

But we do a lot of large value payments. Where this fits the best is that we work with import-export financing businesses and payroll providers through to platforms, et cetera, where actually they're moving quite substantial amounts of money, and the rate really matters. And, um, often these smaller banks sitting on top of a medium bank, sitting on top of a large bank, sitting on top of Citi, they've already put so many spreads on that you really just cannot get a decent rate out of them.

Whereas we can-- we manage our rates directly with prime brokerages. We are running a quite intelligent treasury at a lot of scale because we're doing so many of these large payments that we can actually afford to offer a very, very tight rate on, on currency that, that allows our customers the best opportunity to monetize that.

Like if we're working with a, a remittance-style business, they're often gonna be creating local accounts in the name of their payer, of their originator in every market, so that they can collect in the name of the originator and pay out in the name of the originator to make it a really premium experience, and they're gonna use our rates in the middle to be able to monetize their product.

If we're working with an import-export business, they're-- they really care about what I call a very high-quality payment, where actually you need to make sure it arrives exactly when you say it will with all of the principal intact. So all of the money you sent is still there when it leaves the Swift Network, which is, um, a more common problem than you would expect, so that it isn't still the same balance when it gets to the other side and is in the currency on the invoice for currency control, et cetera.

You want to make sure the employee gets all of the money that they're meant to get 'cause these things can really affect an employee's ability to get credit, et cetera, or the livelihood of those employees. And it's a very high-stress sort of payment. Uh, and if you're doing that from abroad, it can be very difficult.

And so it's always this kind of high-quality payment that we really focus on. We're less focused on What I call like throwing $100 over the wall in a remittance. It-- where it, you know, it doesn't always matter, if it comes in the correct name, you just need to get that money into that end bank account as fast as you can.

Whereas we're really much more of a high-quality infrastructure piece that, that can do that, um, but also can be used to-- for much more kind of complex payments where there's a lot of security involved.

I'm like, "He knows everything,

George: all the details." I'm very, very obsessive. With everything I got, I'm very zero or 100. I'm either interested or I'm not. So... And we try and hire people as well that are extremely obsessive. It's a trait that we, we look for, for better or for worse. So- Yeah.

Monica: Yeah. And I want to touch on that later, later.

But, uh, I loved like you speak, of course, like a founder, but you speak like a technical PM that knows their stuff really, really well, and that's amazing to see. I'm like, "That is cool." I like that combination. So I want to step back 'cause people are listening to us, they may not be as technical as you.

George: So I think you could look at-- you can always look at payments as a cost center and the movement of money as a cost center, because it-- that's the, the simplest, kind of almost laziest way to look at it. Because you are going to someone like us, and you are paying a fee, and therefore it is a cost.

And yes, it's a, it's a cost of goods sold for the product line, um, because you're monetizing a transaction fee with your end customer, presumably. I think it's when you start looking at the combination of foreign exchange and, uh, and clearing and the account that you start to see actually how can I shift fees around in a way that feels or near free for my end customer but actually can be a major profit driver for me.

And, and especially you'd obviously see this if you're not doing any conversion do- uh, in the flow. They're, they're trying to obviously get their overall fees low. But I think when you work with a partner like us, there's a lot of opportunity to turn the FX side into a profit center because the rates can be so good.

And I think looking at that properly is, is the right way to go. Most, most of-- most fintechs when they build these products, they tend to actually just sit on top of bank rates. They don't do anything complex underneath the hood. You know, if they're processing in Asia, they're probably buying currency from DBS, and if they're very lucky, they're buying it from Standard Chartered.

And the same thing is true in Europe. They're probably buying currency from Banking Circle, which who is in turn buying currency from JPMorgan. And no one's really doing anything advanced with that, so they tend to take the rate and just add a spread on top, and depending on who your customer is, that might be bigger, that might be smaller.

And so we can give you much more attractive rates. And then it's up to our customers how they use that. Like some will append a big spread to justify the leverage of their treasury. So if you are building like a Wise-style business, then you need to be repaid for the fact that you're holding hundreds of millions of dollars around the world to make instant payments, and so you're taking a lot of your money in spread.

And lucky for them, most banks, most fintechs, they just... A good rate for them is to apply like the MasterCard rate you will often see is the rate everywhere. But you know, MasterCard's doing the same thing underneath. MasterCard's got a rate on top. And so, um, with a Kind of a much tighter spread at the bottom.

Monica: Mm-hmm. Awesome. When we think about cross-border payments, SWIFT always comes in the picture. Where does it fit here and in your hypothesis?

And so everyone will tell you SWIFT is broken, um, and it doesn't work 'cause SWIFT is slow, etcetera And that's not true. What it is, is settlement banks on either side or in the middle are not delivering funds adequately. Um, and so it depends on the participant, like I said at the beginning, really.

And so for us, SWIFT is a great rail, and we will continue to interface with our settlement correspondent banks in end markets via SWIFT as long as we can really, because as long as you can remove a number of hops and you can settle directly, we have no trouble with SWIFT. Uh, we are, we s- we, uh, settle directly in most of the markets that we operate in, but we still use SWIFT in the middle to rebalance, to move funds, to work with our correspondents, to interact with our correspondent partners.

And so you're still adding the same number of correspondents. You're actually just kind of de-standardizing the messaging for it. And, um, you end up creating a lot of the same problems. And so we really don't believe that SWIFT is the issue here. It, it's the settlement bank that is the problem, and you're still having to use that even if you're liquidating a trade for now.

And, um, all you're doing there if you, if you look at that fundamentally is just adding on extra spreads, extra stops in the same way Swift adds hops and it's just a different hop. You're just kind of replacing it for a different thing, and no one is really focused on how do we reduce those steps, how do we reduce those hops directly.

Uh, and so and if you can do that with Swift, great, and we, and we do. Um, we, we settle usually with one hop everywhere. Um, so I think, uh, it's a powerful way of messaging the correspondents, and it probably always will be, and I think people really conflate what Swift is with what the experience of an international payment is.

Monica: Yeah, and I think when you touched about stablecoins I was like, people have approached me and we have these conversations, and then I'm like, "I still don't get it. I have an extra step." You know, why is it cheaper, faster? Like, I need to move my local currency to a USD account to then put in a USDC this the other, right?

Uh, so I think it's like that bit of your explanation was also very informative, so that then we are aware of all the... If we understand how the money moves, not at a consumer bank level, but at a deep level, then we can make better, more informed decisions as fintechs, as neobanks, as, as an ecosystem.

And probably this conversation we are lacking in terms of understanding across everyone. Not everyone. The experts know it, but, uh-

However, this only really works at a low scale, and now low scale is still billions. But if you think JPM moves $10 trillion a day, like this is the real scale of, of money in the world. And, um, those markets where they're currently dollar illiquid And stablecoins see a lot of success, I would say in the long term will become as illiquid with stablecoins, because the, the reason they're illiquid is governments hoard the dollars.

And the more people that come to the market, the more of these stablecoin companies that come to those markets, the more of that liquidity they're eating up. And so I think right now it does solve a difficult problem there. I think where I see the value in stablecoins over the long term, where they don't have this liquidity issue, is in markets where you don't have trust in your end currency.

Hmm. Argentina, for instance- Yeah ... where you don't actually trust your government with the local currency, and you don't trust them with your dollars. You don't trust the banks with your dollars. And so you need to hold a dollar value that is not inside that country, and I think that can be powerful.

I think it doesn't solve the core problem unless you are in the highest, least liquid market possible, and even then you're playing a short-term game.

Monica: Thank you for saying that. Sometimes I'm like, "I just don't get it." And then I say, "Oh, maybe it's because I don't know enough." No. It's because sometimes I'm like maybe

George: it doesn't make sense for everything."

And people are building very good businesses in it, but when you, when you look under the hood, often, often there's dollar settlement all over the place in there. Um, which is fine, and, and they are a payment business like any other using those rails. But I think it can be easy to not analyze well enough, like what is the foundational problem?

And this is what gives way for companies to specialize in the exchange of stablecoins like BVNK, like Bridge, where actually you just want a partner to deal with it, and they've built really strong businesses just dealing with it for customers. And, uh, but to use it as an end-to-end cross-border payment solution is, is difficult.

Monica: I want to expand while we're in the topic of stablecoins, and then you just said BVNK. What you touched at the beginning of the pod, basically, you were a co-founder and then you decided to leave. Can you tell us a little bit more behind that story?

George: Sure. I mean, so when we started BVNK, Jesse and Don had a previous business, Coindirect, which was like Coinbase for Africa.

And so it was always a very large business from the beginning. And I think at some point I had this itch of I wanna solve the real problem here. I think this does solve- Mm-hmm ... a problem, but I want, um, the part of the stack that really interests, interests me is the bottom, is the fundamental change at the bottom, and I don't feel like I'm solving that, and I need to go do this for myself really.

So it had less to do with BVNK. I mean, we had a-- we got a lot of scale really quick because we managed to, uh, build out great payment services and merge in great exchange capabilities from the Coindirect time. And so we got to scale really quickly without really always having to think about what is the core issue here.

I always have. I love a, like an API-based business. You know, I want to enable other people to build great products. I'm not a consumer product person. I don't have the ability to do that. And I think often even SMB products like Airwallex, et cetera, that-- they are consumer products.

Monica: They are, they are consumer products, yeah.

George: Yeah. And, um, I mean, I love this enablement, this infrastructure, and I felt like there was a way for me to enable to the nth degree at the bottom of the stack and, and wanted to solve that. And my co- co-founder James and I have worked together for 14 years on, on these problems. I mean, um, we have a 20-year age gap.

I brought him to Tula to build payments there. I, uh... he, he then became VP of engineering at, at BVNK. And through that time we just developed the same love, the same obsession for this part of the stack and the same frustration o- over not being able to solve it or having to focus on things that we felt didn't solve it.

And, um, so it was just really clear for us when we saw this opportunity that we needed to go and do that. And I firmly believe this is a, this is a $100 billion business line to, to build. Um, the opportunity is far larger than, than a couple hundred million dollars, a couple billion dollars. I think to these banks, this unit is worth $80, $90 billion of their valuation.

They're never gonna be able to rebuild their stack, and that's really exciting to me. And so, I just couldn't really resist doing that. We have shared investors with BVNK because we've built such kind of a rapport at the time, and we had such a good understanding of how actually this could be an enabler for BVNK.

It would not be a competitor, and it enabled a very, very smooth transition into doing this.

Monica: Amazing. So I'm going to totally deviate. You are clearly super smart. Uh, you've got the passion, you've got the technical, and you're tackling a huge problem statement. There's-- It could be awesome to understand, I think there's people working in the industry that they are like, "Argh, I'm so frustrated about..."

Like, if it was so easy, what is that mindset that people like you and I working in the industry when we have this idea of, "This is broken, I want to do it," what's the mindset that goes For your mind as a very courageous founder to do this, to be like, "You know what? Do it," instead of, "Oh, I'm competing against city," or, "It's a ton of money," or, "It's hard.

I don't have the funds, I don't have the team." It's very easy to say, "I don't have all of this."

I think in first principles a lot. Again, it's something I look for in our team a lot. And I have this ability to drill down into first principles very quickly, and doing that inside someone else's organization can be frustrating because, look, I know exactly how to solve this problem, and we're wasting all this time on this other piece and, uh, not getting it.

And not having that control was always frustrating to me. I'm very impatient as a person. I'm very obsessive- Mm ... as a person, and these traits really help me. They sound like they're all negative words, right? Impatient, etcetera But that impatience really drives me, and I think I saw that even when I went to university and I hated it because I was just sat still.

I didn't want to be sat still. I wanted to be solving things, and I'd done it- Yeah ... for four years part-time, and I just wanted to get out and continue doing it. And so I've always had this complete pull for doing my own thing and solving these kind of difficult problems. I think you have to be extremely motivated by it.

Yeah. Like, it needs to be your life and you need to love, love that and live for it. And I think if you can find an a big enough problem that you feel you really know how to solve and you have that drive, it can be amazing. Fantastic. The worst founders, I think, in the world are ones that apply, some technology and try to look for a solution.

Like- Mm ... look for a problem for-- that they've built a solution for because they just want to be founders. And I always advise people, like, never do it just because you want to be a founder. Do it because you're in pain not solving it and you're bored not solving it. If I'm not challenged, I'm inc- I get bored very quick.

Like, it would be really hard to build this business if I had a business full of founders.

Monica: Oh.

George: Um, but it's not always, it's not always the right way to solve the problem is, is it's not always to, to go and be the founder unless you feel you have some kind of outsized ability to influence that, um, that market.

But then I would also say when you're not a founder, you can tend to look at things and think, "Oh, that's, lined up so well, everything's perfect, such a smooth journey." And I think that stops a lot of people when it shouldn't, because it's really not a smooth journey. We all, all kind of bumble around trying to work it out in the beginning.

And, uh, when, when you do that, I think you can have a great opportunity.

Monica: There's two things that kind of stood out. Can you expand on the... When you meant-- when you said you, you can sprint through this pain, basically, what does that mean?

George: So I think some people tend to labor over failing. Whereas I always say to the team, like, "I'm wrong so often, I'm desensitized to it."

Why was I wrong?" They have that shame. Maybe they're defensive about it. It doesn't work, and it's something that's kind of a mandatory trait for working at Lorum really, is you need to be able to drop the ego and just embrace being wrong. Like I'm-- as I say, I'm wrong so often, it doesn't matter to me. Like, it's totally fine to be wrong, but it's the fact that I will pivot my entire view on how to do that thing in seconds when I learn it's wrong, because all I care about is achieving that- outcome.

I don't really care how we achieve it. And we even drive this into our goal setting inside Lorem. It's actually I really-- I couldn't care less about what tasks you're gonna do to achieve your goals. I ca- I care about what are you gonna do to achieve, like, outcomes. Like, what are the outcomes you're gonna move?

I think that outcome focused and being able to go through the pain of being wrong about how to achieve that outcome and excited that you've learned how to do that process is very, very important.

Monica: I love it, and I think I could speak with you for three hours or so. Can you expand on-- you said about obsession, and you look at your team.

Everyone you hire, you look for the obsessive trait.

George: Yeah. So, and I would say there's, there's two ways to look at obsession. Like, I think there's two forms of it. There's a very hungry form of obsession that we love, which is like I just really wanna solve this problem. And I don't always look for people that are obsessed with the problem we solve.

And, and I always say to people, like, working at Lorem is not gonna be for 99%. It's gonna be for 1%, and that 1% are gonna really love it. And we can't build a company around what the other 99% will love. And so we look for this really obsessive type that just can't sleep till they've solved the problem, and that problem might be completely external to what we do, um, but it's that capacity that's important.

I think where obsession can be dangerous is you can be obsessed with doing things the right way, et cetera, and, and that can slow you down. And so, we sometimes frame this more as like a hunger for something versus, versus just purely obsession. But yeah, I think that obsession is required for you to be highly adaptable.

We're gonna have no ego with these things because we wanna be the best at what we do, uh, as quickly as we can possibly do it. I think that's the only way we grew 55 times last year because we have a team that is obsessed with getting things right and getting them done, um, and, and they're not opinionated about how we get them there

Monica: I don't know if this question makes sense to you, but how did you learn to think like

George: that?

It's the same thing, right? Like, you can spiral on the good, and you can spiral on the bad. And I learned to channel, channel this energy into what I do, and I think it, it... What was a massive inhibiting factor in my childhood, something that really gave me very poor mental health as a child, became my superpower at work because it meant that I could really dive in, and I would be quite intensely self-critical until I got it right as well.

And, um, that's why I always say I sort of feel like you have to be a little bit broken because I, I was broken. I was a child that was really, really anxious and relatively unhappy, uh, as a, as a younger child. And, uh, that same energy actually just made me really grow as an adult, uh, in, in the work world.

It- it's, as I k- as I keep saying, it's, it's a little bit broken, so it's not like the way the human brain naturally works, I think with everyone, is to just embrace being wrong and sprint at being right. A lot of people like a lot more structure, and you have to embrace a lack of structure to think that way because things aren't just gonna go exactly how you planned.

Monica: This is so interesting because it's more on the personal side. You're kind of describing me with a podcast. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense, right? But I've never seen it as a trait. It's just what I do, right? Yeah. And I hadn't thought that people are not that curious or that obsessed. But

George: you're right I'm sure you have to be super curious to do this because you need to be able to just get really excited about what someone's saying and ask more questions.

And I think that same process is what you have to go through building a company. You have to just keep constantly going, "Hey, that's interesting. I'm gonna ask more. I'm gonna look more."

Monica: Yeah. So I'm very conscious of time. What's next for you? For Lorum.

George: I think at the moment for us the big focus is just scale.

And so we're very excited about the things we can do there, the cash management side of our business, all of this FX, derivatives, uh, interesting products, et cetera. These are all really, really important parts of our future, but we're on a very, very long journey here. Like, if we're gonna build an $80, $100 billion business in this space, and I truly believe we can with the incumbents that are there, this is a 10-year-plus journey from now, and, and we're really still at the very beginning at year...

or now year three we are in. And so, I think we've got a long, long way to go, and I wouldn't pretend I know exactly what route that will go, um, based off of our conversation here. But, um, I think we're very, very clear on what we're building and, and really that is this kind of new era Bank of New York, Citi, et cetera, um, treasury products, and, uh, that is gonna be a really long journey.

George: Yeah,

Monica: absolutely

George: be a

Monica: competitor.

George: We're, we are getting a specialized type of license, hopefully, which is, um- Okay ... which doesn't do lending, which fits with our core thesis really very well. And so that application with the OCC is really important to the future of, of what we're building here. Um, whether it be in dollars or not really, it's that first step towards actually becoming a real player in that world against these Citi, BMY, JPMs, et cetera.

Monica: Amazing. And currently Lorum operates globally.

George: Yes. We have team across Singapore, Dubai, uh, Switzerland, London, New York.

George: Our core business today really is selling like a dar- dollar correspondent service to places that don't have dollars.

Well, even Europe struggles for dollars, et cetera. And so really this banking license allows us to really own the dollar stack if we achieve it versus being reliant on others, which is really important. Um, but it doesn't change the target of customer. I think like the US market is, is interesting, but actually I think people often mistake mistake this for saying, "Well, the US is the market, so we must go there."

Exactly. When actually, when you look at the aggregate markets around the outside, that's actually a much bigger space, and I think it's really underserved today, selling US financial services to a Asian business, a Middle Eastern business, a European business, et cetera. And so that's really how we use that.

But should we achieve this banking license, we'll be we'll be owning fully the dollar stack, which is very, very exciting for us.

George: Absolutely.

Monica: It sounds like a very exciting business.

George: Thank you. I

Monica: think so too. A super opportunity. I'm like, amazing.

Congrats. Well, it's been a pleasure speaking with you, George. All the very best. I think, yeah, it's like we only spoke for one hour, and we hadn't met before. I think you're amazing in so many ways. You're the type of founder, because I speak with many people, and there's a few here and there that I'm like, "Yes, that's the type of founder I would love to work with."

It's not that I would love to work with you, but it's more the, the energy, the vision, like the product, the thinking process, all of that. I'm like, "He's cool." So yeah, it's super cool. Well, thank you for the

George: kind words.

Monica: Yeah, it's super cool. Awesome. I'll let you go. Thank you very much, and all the very best.

George: Yeah, thank you so much.

Monica: Thank you, everyone. See you next week.