Aaron Marsh
Hello and welcome to “The Buzz,” a Bank Automation News podcast. I’m Associate Editor Aaron Marsh, and I recently spoke with Lawrence Pruss, senior vice president at Memphis, Tenn.-based Strategic Resource Management, a consulting firm to financial institutions and others in areas such as digital transformation, payments and artificial intelligence. SRM has a new service, “Cryptocurrency and Blockchain for Financial Services,” and I heard from Lawrence about the new service and the opportunity here for banks and financial institutions — and what they could lose if they remain on the sidelines. Lawrence, tell me about this new service. What is it?Lawrence Pruss
Sure. Thanks, Aaron. So this is something we started about a month ago as a result of demand from our clients. Our journey around cryptocurrency really started about a year ago, a lot of that came out of a series of announcements about PayPal, launching a crypto trading business. And I kind of followed that I was amazed at how many people I think it was, like 40 million people started trading the month following in the name net added net new like 14.5 million net new customers, the quarter afterwards. And about that same time I was seeing those announcements around PayPal, my kid came into my office and asked “Hey, dad, do you own any Bitcoin?” I said “No, actually, I don’t. But I just saw this thing about PayPal, and you’re asking me about Bitcoin, maybe I better look into it.”So we started looking into it. And we started down this path, which is really an education effort internally, because I figured if PayPal was getting into this, there’s probably enough demand in the marketplace, that this might end up impacting financial services outside of, obviously, fintech. So we started doing some research internally, we ended up building up a group called Crypto University, we met every other week to talk about everything related to crypto and how it might have an impact on financial services. And if after a few months of that, we started getting requests from our clients to have similar sort of conversations, trying to understand crypto service or cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance, and what might be the impact to them. And so we started on that education effort, probably a couple months or so ago, have had a lot of conversations, I have probably, maybe a dozen conversations with C level folks, every week, and then probably do about a half a dozen presentations at various conferences. And we’ve clearly seen a lot of demand from an education standpoint. And then we started getting questions from our clients about how would you implement this? What would this mean, for my interest, non interest income standpoint? How would it benefit their clients? And then it kind of led us to believe well, maybe there’s actually some some demand from a consultancy and advisory services standpoint. And so we launched this business, and we’ve had lots of demand, and we’re now as busy as we could possibly imagine.Aaron Marsh
So if I’m a financial institution, I’m a bank, and I’m thinking about the crypto space right now, what might the opportunity look like for me? I mean, what would be my incentive to get involved in this? And how would I do that?Lawrence Pruss
Yeah, so a couple of opportunities. I think most of them probably get into this either, because you’ve heard it on the news, or they’ve been looking at their ACH outflows and they’re realizing that the vast majority of their ACH outflows are going to the crypto exchanges. So they’re kind of putting two together and saying, “Wow, this is going to be impactful to our business because we’re losing deposits.” And obviously, deposits are a source of lending. So a lot of them have real life impacts — crypto is starting to impact your business line just in terms of taking deposits away.That kind of leads him to look into well, what’s the opportunity around crypto, we’ve actually seen a couple of financial institutions start to get into offering crypto services. One of the first ones first FDIC insured institution in the US was a band called Vast Bank out of Oklahoma. And when they launched, they saw basically eight weeks post launch a 25% increase in their net customer base. So really a lot of growth, but the opportunity isn’t just defending their deposits, but there’s opportunities to drive non-interest income in terms of trading revenue. Interest income in terms of lending against crypto firms is a huge first mover advantage. So there’s an opportunity to gain additional clients and market share.You know, I’ve got crypto on my phone — and I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many times I looked at my phone today — but there’s a huge opportunity to increase client engagement. So like when PayPal announced theirs, they saw that their clients interacted with their app more than twice, I’d say it’s probably much more than twice what they had been interacting. So that’s an opportunity when you’ve got those eyeballs on your mobile banking app is to be able to offer across all other sorts of products and services, maybe even education.And then the last piece, just an opportunity, but more avoiding kind of a downfall is avoiding being disintermediated. So what we’re seeing with crypto is his whole world of kind of decentralized finance being built, is gone from about a $20 billion industry to about $110 billion industry over the course of 12 months. And what’s happening is decentralized finance is using software to connect lenders and borrowers which is what banks do. But they’re also doing not just lending and borrowing, they’re doing trading derivatives, synthetics, insurance type products, all without any bank involvement whatsoever. So we’ve got some real concern from our clients in terms of being disintermediated.

And what I often tell them is, what happened, what’s happening with decentralized finance, and crypto is making this possible, is the same thing to happen with the taxi industry in Uber, where Uber just said, Hey, we’re not it’s actually industry. We’re a software company. We’re gonna connect people who have cars to drive and people who need rides. Well, you think about banking, we’re just trying to connect people have money to lend and people who have borrowing needs that can be done with software, all of a sudden, you realize it’s a very competitive environment outside of just the FinTech world, which just started kind of biting at their heels for a number of years.

Aaron Marsh
Yeah. Lawrence, do you see this space is something that is sort of heating up? I mean, we’ve seen interest in cryptocurrency trading certainly kind of skyrocket this year. Is this one of these situations where it’s probably better to think about this sooner rather than later?

Lawrence Pruss
So we’ve talked to a bunch of crypto firms, these are ones that are implementing solutions in the marketplace, working for financial institutions, good example would be NYDIG. Coinbase is doing it, Fireblocks, and a number of them. But it’s anticipated somewhere between 500 and maybe on the low end to high end, at least 1,000 financial institutions are going to launch some sort of crypto service next year, whether that’s crypto custody, whether that’s crypto trading, whether that’s lending against crypto, whether that crypto rewards in terms of debit and credit cards, or paying on interest. And so if we have 1,000, or even 500 financial institutions launch next year, one, that’s going to hopefully start to win back business from the crypto exchanges. But anyone who doesn’t do it is going to be at a severe disadvantage.

So going back to that example, of that bank out Oklahoma, they saw a 25% increase in their client base that was a client base that took them 40 to 50 years to grow. They saw that increase in eight weeks, because they were one of the first early adopters. So we’re telling our clients, look, you don’t want to be the one down the street that doesn’t have a crypto trading platform, when what are your competitors do and so there’s some stats right now, about 20-25% of Americans with investable assets, hold cryptocurrencies. And this is some stats from both NYDIG as well as Visa had some similar stats from the did a presentation a few weeks ago. But one of the things with people who have crypto, you’re holding these cryptographic keys, and if you’re holding them yourselves, there’s a lot of risk of them being lost, stolen, whatever.

And so the majority of them, over 80% of people who have crypto would actually prefer to hold it with their financial institution rather than holding it was a crypto exchange. And here’s another interesting part, not only would 80% choose to hold over the financial institution, more than 70% of them would actually switch providers and go to another financial institution that offered that so there’s the both the risk and opportunity because if you’re not going to offer it and someone down the street does, you’re gonna see a vast majority — if not the vast majority, probably 18 to 20% of your customers might move over the course of a few weeks. And that’s going to be pretty impactful.

Aaron Marsh
So if I’m, if I’m a bank, if I’m a financial institution who that is looking to get involved in this and wants to reach out to your service, can you help set up like a crypto trading? You know, can you recommend vendors I should go with for what I’m looking to accomplish?

Lawrence Pruss
Absolutely. So we do a couple of things. There’s still a huge need for education so that maybe education at the C Suite level with the boards or even internal employees of that bank. So we offer those educational services awfully often on a pro bono basis just to get them understanding what is the risks and opportunities and we’ve been doing that for a while and then what’s grown out of that quite organically is them coming back to say okay, we get it now. We see both the risk and opportunity Can you help us develop a crypto go to market strategy? So that might be understanding what’s out there in the marketplace today. So there’s probably about a half a dozen to a dozen, already implement patients in the marketplace with various financial institutions understand what are the products that they could potentially be choosing. So again, custodial, services, trading, reward lending, there’s a number of others, who are the providers in that space, and then how to set all this stuff up.

So, depending on your choices, it’s very important, how you make your choices around custodial services, in that can drive what you can do from a trading standpoint that can drive what you can do from a lending standpoint. And so it’s not just having a crypto solution out in market, the fastest is having one that is going to be scalable and is going to meet your customers needs. And that’s going to be competitive because if we see 1,000 banks lunch crypto services next year, they all want a similar service, maybe that service only offers a couple choices in terms of trading coins, or or cryptocurrency. If you’re the one that gives you 12 options in terms of trading, whether it’s eight, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, whatever it may be, and the bank down the street just offers Bitcoin, then you got a competitive advantage. So it’s all about having the right strategy.

How do you get to market? There’s a number of vendors out there, a number of good vendors, that can actually stand up a trading platform custodial services pretty quickly. But one of the things we’re finding is that people don’t want to know what to ask for what they should be looking for in terms of building out these products and services. But also, how do these things get priced? Is it done from a revenue share standpoint? Are they getting the part of the revenue that a trading firm is getting? Are they getting some kickback in terms of customer service costs, they don’t really understand the pricing? So our primary business for the last almost 30 years has been helping people negotiate with their third party vendor relationships.

So we’re not only understanding this corner of the business, we’re understanding how it works from a financial standpoint, you know, how many basis points can you make from holding custody? How many basis points can you make on trading revenue? How much can you make from a lending standpoint, and then understanding how much the vendors might make versus how much the bank might make, and then make sure that they get a fair deal when it comes to selecting these vendors.

Aaron Marsh
So where, where should this interest fall? What size banks should be into this? Would this be applicable to community banks, or regional banks, large banks?

Lawrence Pruss
Interestingly enough, I said community banks have the biggest advantage here, because it’s not that huge of a technology lab, there’s a lot of barriers to entry in terms of understanding the space. But once you understand the space, in terms of coming up with solutions that can be implemented, it’s not that heavy of a technology left, because the vendors are the ones that are going to provide that, in fact, a number of these vendors have already integrated with mobile banking providers with the processors, whether it’s Fiserv, FIS, NCR, Allied Payments, they’ve all got solutions out there now that you could roll out with this making sure you’ve got the right solution.

But the advantages is that the community banks, some of the smaller ones, can implement this just as easy as one of the larger ones. And some of the larger ones are a little bit more conservative, because they’re working a little bit more closely with the Fed or they’ve got a little bit more closer relationships with Treasury. And they may be getting a little bit more pushback in terms of rolling out a solution that maybe community bank is going to get an impact. from a regulatory standpoint, there’s nothing that is disallowing banks from getting into the space. In fact, there’s been a number of interpretive letters that the OCC has put out their allowing banks specifically giving them guidance to get into the space. So we’ve seen give you an example, again, Vast Bank, they’re about an $800 million business. From an asset standpoint, that’s not that huge. So we’re talking with financial institutions as small as $200 million. They’re looking to roll out a crypto solution. So you could be fairly smaller. You could be a multi-billion-dollar institution. It would fit in any of those scenarios.

Aaron Marsh
That’s interesting. You mentioned some of the smaller banks, the community banks, maybe a little bit more flexibility there. And we’re seeing some creative activity. You said this launched officially, I guess about a month ago, Lawrence, is that correct?

Lawrence Pruss
Was it two or three weeks ago? We’ve been soft launching it for a while because we’ve actually had crypto engagements now for three or four months.

Aaron Marsh
Okay, so what kind of interest are you seeing so far in the service?

Lawrence Pruss
It’s huge. I mean, our biggest challenge is probably going to be hiring enough people to help make the demand and we’ve got a number of internal experts. But we are surprised at how much demand there is in the space, not just from an education standpoint, but again, developing those strategies selecting the right vendors. We’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean, I’ve been in financial services 25 years, I’ve given presentations on everything from artificial intelligence to how do you manage your credit card portfolio. I’ve yet to have any presentation I’ve given that resonates like a crypto presentation, I can talk to any C-level individual and get their attention for as long as you want talking about crypto, because people realize it’s a $3 trillion asset base. It’s grown over the course of 10 years to that all by itself. There’s no there’s no central bank helping them along. There’s no marketing teams. It was grown organically started by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and launched in the wild in 2009. Now it’s a $3 trillion dollar asset class, with decentralized finance being $110-$115 billion asset class doing exactly what banks do, without any bank involvement.

So banks realize not only is there a revenue opportunity, a pretty significant revenue opportunity, it’s an opportunity to defend those deposits, but also to stave off any sort of attack from decentralized finance and taking away the business that traditional finance has been involved in.

Aaron Marsh
Yeah, Lawrence — if you can’t beat ’em, right, join ’em.

Lawrence Pruss
Yeah, there’s something to that.

Aaron Marsh
You’ve been listening to “The Buzz,” a Bank Automation News podcast. Thanks for your time, and be sure to visit us at BankAutomationNews.com for more automation news in financial services. Please don’t hesitate to rate this podcast on your podcast platform of choice.

Aaron Marsh
Hello and welcome to “The Buzz,” a Bank Automation News podcast. I’m Associate Editor Aaron Marsh, and I recently spoke with Lawrence Pruss, senior vice president at Memphis, Tenn.-based Strategic Resource Management, a consulting firm to financial institutions and others in areas such as digital transformation, payments and artificial intelligence. SRM has a new service, “Cryptocurrency and Blockchain for Financial Services,” and I heard from Lawrence about the new service and the opportunity here for banks and financial institutions — and what they could lose if they remain on the sidelines. Lawrence, tell me about this new service. What is it?Lawrence Pruss
Sure. Thanks, Aaron. So this is something we started about a month ago as a result of demand from our clients. Our journey around cryptocurrency really started about a year ago, a lot of that came out of a series of announcements about PayPal, launching a crypto trading business. And I kind of followed that I was amazed at how many people I think it was, like 40 million people started trading the month following in the name net added net new like 14.5 million net new customers, the quarter afterwards. And about that same time I was seeing those announcements around PayPal, my kid came into my office and asked “Hey, dad, do you own any Bitcoin?” I said “No, actually, I don’t. But I just saw this thing about PayPal, and you’re asking me about Bitcoin, maybe I better look into it.”So we started looking into it. And we started down this path, which is really an education effort internally, because I figured if PayPal was getting into this, there’s probably enough demand in the marketplace, that this might end up impacting financial services outside of, obviously, fintech. So we started doing some research internally, we ended up building up a group called Crypto University, we met every other week to talk about everything related to crypto and how it might have an impact on financial services. And if after a few months of that, we started getting requests from our clients to have similar sort of conversations, trying to understand crypto service or cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance, and what might be the impact to them. And so we started on that education effort, probably a couple months or so ago, have had a lot of conversations, I have probably, maybe a dozen conversations with C level folks, every week, and then probably do about a half a dozen presentations at various conferences. And we’ve clearly seen a lot of demand from an education standpoint. And then we started getting questions from our clients about how would you implement this? What would this mean, for my interest, non interest income standpoint? How would it benefit their clients? And then it kind of led us to believe well, maybe there’s actually some some demand from a consultancy and advisory services standpoint. And so we launched this business, and we’ve had lots of demand, and we’re now as busy as we could possibly imagine.Aaron Marsh
So if I’m a financial institution, I’m a bank, and I’m thinking about the crypto space right now, what might the opportunity look like for me? I mean, what would be my incentive to get involved in this? And how would I do that?Lawrence Pruss
Yeah, so a couple of opportunities. I think most of them probably get into this either, because you’ve heard it on the news, or they’ve been looking at their ACH outflows and they’re realizing that the vast majority of their ACH outflows are going to the crypto exchanges. So they’re kind of putting two together and saying, “Wow, this is going to be impactful to our business because we’re losing deposits.” And obviously, deposits are a source of lending. So a lot of them have real life impacts — crypto is starting to impact your business line just in terms of taking deposits away.That kind of leads him to look into well, what’s the opportunity around crypto, we’ve actually seen a couple of financial institutions start to get into offering crypto services. One of the first ones first FDIC insured institution in the US was a band called Vast Bank out of Oklahoma. And when they launched, they saw basically eight weeks post launch a 25% increase in their net customer base. So really a lot of growth, but the opportunity isn’t just defending their deposits, but there’s opportunities to drive non-interest income in terms of trading revenue. Interest income in terms of lending against crypto firms is a huge first mover advantage. So there’s an opportunity to gain additional clients and market share.You know, I’ve got crypto on my phone — and I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many times I looked at my phone today — but there’s a huge opportunity to increase client engagement. So like when PayPal announced theirs, they saw that their clients interacted with their app more than twice, I’d say it’s probably much more than twice what they had been interacting. So that’s an opportunity when you’ve got those eyeballs on your mobile banking app is to be able to offer across all other sorts of products and services, maybe even education.And then the last piece, just an opportunity, but more avoiding kind of a downfall is avoiding being disintermediated. So what we’re seeing with crypto is his whole world of kind of decentralized finance being built, is gone from about a $20 billion industry to about $110 billion industry over the course of 12 months. And what’s happening is decentralized finance is using software to connect lenders and borrowers which is what banks do. But they’re also doing not just lending and borrowing, they’re doing trading derivatives, synthetics, insurance type products, all without any bank involvement whatsoever. So we’ve got some real concern from our clients in terms of being disintermediated.

And what I often tell them is, what happened, what’s happening with decentralized finance, and crypto is making this possible, is the same thing to happen with the taxi industry in Uber, where Uber just said, Hey, we’re not it’s actually industry. We’re a software company. We’re gonna connect people who have cars to drive and people who need rides. Well, you think about banking, we’re just trying to connect people have money to lend and people who have borrowing needs that can be done with software, all of a sudden, you realize it’s a very competitive environment outside of just the FinTech world, which just started kind of biting at their heels for a number of years.

Aaron Marsh
Yeah. Lawrence, do you see this space is something that is sort of heating up? I mean, we’ve seen interest in cryptocurrency trading certainly kind of skyrocket this year. Is this one of these situations where it’s probably better to think about this sooner rather than later?

Lawrence Pruss
So we’ve talked to a bunch of crypto firms, these are ones that are implementing solutions in the marketplace, working for financial institutions, good example would be NYDIG. Coinbase is doing it, Fireblocks, and a number of them. But it’s anticipated somewhere between 500 and maybe on the low end to high end, at least 1,000 financial institutions are going to launch some sort of crypto service next year, whether that’s crypto custody, whether that’s crypto trading, whether that’s lending against crypto, whether that crypto rewards in terms of debit and credit cards, or paying on interest. And so if we have 1,000, or even 500 financial institutions launch next year, one, that’s going to hopefully start to win back business from the crypto exchanges. But anyone who doesn’t do it is going to be at a severe disadvantage.

So going back to that example, of that bank out Oklahoma, they saw a 25% increase in their client base that was a client base that took them 40 to 50 years to grow. They saw that increase in eight weeks, because they were one of the first early adopters. So we’re telling our clients, look, you don’t want to be the one down the street that doesn’t have a crypto trading platform, when what are your competitors do and so there’s some stats right now, about 20-25% of Americans with investable assets, hold cryptocurrencies. And this is some stats from both NYDIG as well as Visa had some similar stats from the did a presentation a few weeks ago. But one of the things with people who have crypto, you’re holding these cryptographic keys, and if you’re holding them yourselves, there’s a lot of risk of them being lost, stolen, whatever.

And so the majority of them, over 80% of people who have crypto would actually prefer to hold it with their financial institution rather than holding it was a crypto exchange. And here’s another interesting part, not only would 80% choose to hold over the financial institution, more than 70% of them would actually switch providers and go to another financial institution that offered that so there’s the both the risk and opportunity because if you’re not going to offer it and someone down the street does, you’re gonna see a vast majority — if not the vast majority, probably 18 to 20% of your customers might move over the course of a few weeks. And that’s going to be pretty impactful.

Aaron Marsh
So if I’m, if I’m a bank, if I’m a financial institution who that is looking to get involved in this and wants to reach out to your service, can you help set up like a crypto trading? You know, can you recommend vendors I should go with for what I’m looking to accomplish?

Lawrence Pruss
Absolutely. So we do a couple of things. There’s still a huge need for education so that maybe education at the C Suite level with the boards or even internal employees of that bank. So we offer those educational services awfully often on a pro bono basis just to get them understanding what is the risks and opportunities and we’ve been doing that for a while and then what’s grown out of that quite organically is them coming back to say okay, we get it now. We see both the risk and opportunity Can you help us develop a crypto go to market strategy? So that might be understanding what’s out there in the marketplace today. So there’s probably about a half a dozen to a dozen, already implement patients in the marketplace with various financial institutions understand what are the products that they could potentially be choosing. So again, custodial, services, trading, reward lending, there’s a number of others, who are the providers in that space, and then how to set all this stuff up.

So, depending on your choices, it’s very important, how you make your choices around custodial services, in that can drive what you can do from a trading standpoint that can drive what you can do from a lending standpoint. And so it’s not just having a crypto solution out in market, the fastest is having one that is going to be scalable and is going to meet your customers needs. And that’s going to be competitive because if we see 1,000 banks lunch crypto services next year, they all want a similar service, maybe that service only offers a couple choices in terms of trading coins, or or cryptocurrency. If you’re the one that gives you 12 options in terms of trading, whether it’s eight, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, whatever it may be, and the bank down the street just offers Bitcoin, then you got a competitive advantage. So it’s all about having the right strategy.

How do you get to market? There’s a number of vendors out there, a number of good vendors, that can actually stand up a trading platform custodial services pretty quickly. But one of the things we’re finding is that people don’t want to know what to ask for what they should be looking for in terms of building out these products and services. But also, how do these things get priced? Is it done from a revenue share standpoint? Are they getting the part of the revenue that a trading firm is getting? Are they getting some kickback in terms of customer service costs, they don’t really understand the pricing? So our primary business for the last almost 30 years has been helping people negotiate with their third party vendor relationships.

So we’re not only understanding this corner of the business, we’re understanding how it works from a financial standpoint, you know, how many basis points can you make from holding custody? How many basis points can you make on trading revenue? How much can you make from a lending standpoint, and then understanding how much the vendors might make versus how much the bank might make, and then make sure that they get a fair deal when it comes to selecting these vendors.

Aaron Marsh
So where, where should this interest fall? What size banks should be into this? Would this be applicable to community banks, or regional banks, large banks?

Lawrence Pruss
Interestingly enough, I said community banks have the biggest advantage here, because it’s not that huge of a technology lab, there’s a lot of barriers to entry in terms of understanding the space. But once you understand the space, in terms of coming up with solutions that can be implemented, it’s not that heavy of a technology left, because the vendors are the ones that are going to provide that, in fact, a number of these vendors have already integrated with mobile banking providers with the processors, whether it’s Fiserv, FIS, NCR, Allied Payments, they’ve all got solutions out there now that you could roll out with this making sure you’ve got the right solution.

But the advantages is that the community banks, some of the smaller ones, can implement this just as easy as one of the larger ones. And some of the larger ones are a little bit more conservative, because they’re working a little bit more closely with the Fed or they’ve got a little bit more closer relationships with Treasury. And they may be getting a little bit more pushback in terms of rolling out a solution that maybe community bank is going to get an impact. from a regulatory standpoint, there’s nothing that is disallowing banks from getting into the space. In fact, there’s been a number of interpretive letters that the OCC has put out their allowing banks specifically giving them guidance to get into the space. So we’ve seen give you an example, again, Vast Bank, they’re about an $800 million business. From an asset standpoint, that’s not that huge. So we’re talking with financial institutions as small as $200 million. They’re looking to roll out a crypto solution. So you could be fairly smaller. You could be a multi-billion-dollar institution. It would fit in any of those scenarios.

Aaron Marsh
That’s interesting. You mentioned some of the smaller banks, the community banks, maybe a little bit more flexibility there. And we’re seeing some creative activity. You said this launched officially, I guess about a month ago, Lawrence, is that correct?

Lawrence Pruss
Was it two or three weeks ago? We’ve been soft launching it for a while because we’ve actually had crypto engagements now for three or four months.

Aaron Marsh
Okay, so what kind of interest are you seeing so far in the service?

Lawrence Pruss
It’s huge. I mean, our biggest challenge is probably going to be hiring enough people to help make the demand and we’ve got a number of internal experts. But we are surprised at how much demand there is in the space, not just from an education standpoint, but again, developing those strategies selecting the right vendors. We’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean, I’ve been in financial services 25 years, I’ve given presentations on everything from artificial intelligence to how do you manage your credit card portfolio. I’ve yet to have any presentation I’ve given that resonates like a crypto presentation, I can talk to any C-level individual and get their attention for as long as you want talking about crypto, because people realize it’s a $3 trillion asset base. It’s grown over the course of 10 years to that all by itself. There’s no there’s no central bank helping them along. There’s no marketing teams. It was grown organically started by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and launched in the wild in 2009. Now it’s a $3 trillion dollar asset class, with decentralized finance being $110-$115 billion asset class doing exactly what banks do, without any bank involvement.

So banks realize not only is there a revenue opportunity, a pretty significant revenue opportunity, it’s an opportunity to defend those deposits, but also to stave off any sort of attack from decentralized finance and taking away the business that traditional finance has been involved in.

Aaron Marsh
Yeah, Lawrence — if you can’t beat ’em, right, join ’em.

Lawrence Pruss
Yeah, there’s something to that.

Aaron Marsh
You’ve been listening to “The Buzz,” a Bank Automation News podcast. Thanks for your time, and be sure to visit us at BankAutomationNews.com for more automation news in financial services. Please don’t hesitate to rate this podcast on your podcast platform of choice.