🎙 F-Squared Podcast #11- "It Shouldn't Matter if Your Money is Going a Mile or 10,000 Miles": The Blueprint for a Financial Network as Seamless as WhatsApp
A conversation with Sling Money's Mike Hudack on why we'll soon stop saying 'cross-border payments', just like we stopped saying 'long-distance calls'.
Moment is payments built for the reality of African commerce, where cash is still king but sits side by side explosive growth in mobile money, cards, and bank transfers.
Across any payment method, Moment helps businesses get paid faster as they unlock the potential of the mass market. Regardless of how and where buyers pay, merchants benefit from a streamlined back office with unified reconciliation, settlement, and reporting, along with fast access to their funds.
With unique buyer insights from over 20 million customers across 44 countries, Moment helps businesses refine collection strategies and payment terms to maximize sales growth.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Make sure to Subscribe to the YouTube channel to get notifications when a new episode is out.
Want to reach Africa’s top fintech decision-makers? We’ve updated our offering with premium content, executive visibility, and strategic advisory options.
Click the link below for media enquiries
Click the link below for consulting and advisory enquiries;
Why I Wanted to Have This Conversation
Remittances have come a long way, but under the hood, the same old frictions remain: liquidity gaps, regulatory hurdles, and hidden costs across broken corridors. We celebrate lower fees and sleek apps, but the underlying architecture is still a patchwork of proprietary databases and messaging layers built for a pre-internet world. The experience can sometimes be filled with anxiety.
I wanted to talk to someone building on a completely new set of rails. Someone who believes the future of money is on-chain, and that sending money across the world should be as instant and free as making a WhatsApp or Teams call. That person is Mike Hudack, the CEO of Sling Money.
His conviction came from a personal experience: sending USDC to a friend and feeling a moment of pure terror, holding his breath as he sent money to a cryptic wallet address, hoping it would arrive.
In that moment of anxiety, he realised, "That's a problem I know how to solve."
Sling combines the power of on-chain stablecoin infrastructure with the simplicity of a social payments experience, creating a platform that’s fast, transparent, and built for real people, not just bank accounts. This conversation is about what it takes to build the "iPod of stablecoins", a product so seamless and reliable that the user doesn't even need to know how the magic works. It's a look under the hood at the future of money.
In This Episode, You Will Hear
Why the distinction between a local, long-distance, and international phone call disappeared and why the same will happen to money transfers.
The story of the "terrifying" USDC transfer that inspired the creation of Sling’s user-friendly directory service.
The fundamental architectural shift: how stablecoins on a shared blockchain database can make half the infrastructure of traditional finance just "go away."
Sling's ambition to build the "iPod of stablecoins", a beautiful UI that is incredibly reliable and "works every time."
How Sling proactively navigates global regulation by working with respected regulators (like the Dutch under MiCA) and building a robust, in-house compliance framework.
What "real internet money" actually means and how it differs from money held in separate, incompatible bank databases.
Key Quote:
"It shouldn't matter whether your money is going a mile or 10,000 miles. The transaction should be basically free and instant. And you should be able to send to a name and not a number. You should be able to just find the person, send to the person, and be done with it and not fill out a huge form. It should just be a couple taps."
🔑 Key Lessons for Fintech Builders
Technology & Product
Solve the UX Anxiety: The raw experience of crypto (e.g., wallet addresses) is terrifying for normal users. The biggest value-add is building a directory and user interface that abstracts this complexity away and builds confidence.
Reliability is the Goal: To compete with incumbents, a new system can't just be cheaper; it must be "unbelievably reliable." The goal is to reach an "Apple level of quality" where the product works every time.
Own the Experience: To deliver a high-quality user experience, you must manage as many aspects of the system as possible. Relying on too many third parties you can't control will lead to a disappointing product.
Regulation & Compliance
Build for What Governments Care About: Don't just follow rules; understand the principles behind them. Regulators care about AML/financial crime, currency policy, and consumer protection. Build your system to address these core concerns from day one.
Be Proactive and Strategic: Don't wait for regulation to happen to you. Engage with globally respected regulators, build novel compliance technology on top of the blockchain, and only work with high-quality, regulated stablecoin providers.
Flexibility is Key: The regulatory landscape will evolve differently in every country. Build your platform to be flexible enough to support multiple currencies and adapt to different regulatory approaches without compromising user needs.
Go-to-Market Strategy
Build Trust Through Performance: The product must work. When it doesn't, provide amazing support. This builds the trust necessary for users to become comfortable with a new technology, regardless of what it is.
Ride the Macro Wave: Success depends on two things: offering a great, reliable product, and the world becoming more comfortable with the underlying technology (stablecoins). Focus on what you can control (your product) to be ready for the wave.
Start with the Tech-Savvy: Your initial user base will naturally be younger and more comfortable with new technology. Serve them exceptionally well to build the foundation for mainstream adoption as the market matures.
🧠Strategic Takeaways
For Operators: The most valuable position in the new financial stack is owning the consumer network and the brand. Focus on solving real human problems (like payment anxiety) rather than just building infrastructure. If you're solving a problem that doesn't exist yet, have a powerful "reason to believe" because the journey will be incredibly hard.
For Investors: The core bet is that a new, open architecture (blockchains) enables superior products with higher efficiency and lower costs. Back teams who understand that this technical advantage is meaningless without an obsessive focus on building a simple, beautiful, and trustworthy consumer experience.
For Policymakers: Dollar activity isn't changing, but the rails it moves on are. Proactive KYC and AML frameworks can be built on these new systems. Working with compliant innovators provides more visibility and control than allowing activity to flourish on opaque, unregulated channels.
🧾 If You Are Interested In...
How the fundamental architecture of money is changing from closed databases to open, shared ledgers.
Why user experience, not just technology is the key to making crypto mainstream.
The real-world application of stablecoins to solve the decades-old problem of cross-border payments.
How to think about building a company in a highly regulated, rapidly evolving industry.
→ ...this episode is worth your time.
Transcript
Mike Hudack: I think that probably 10 or 15 years from now all money is going to be, or a lot of money is going to be, on chain. I don't think it's just going to be digital dollars. I think that there are going to be tons of currencies that are online. I owed my friend a few dollars and he was in California and I was in London and he wanted the money with USDC on Solana. He gave me the wallet address to send to which had no link to him whatsoever other than I got it through some Google Doc that he gave me.
Mike Hudack: And I texted him and I was like, "Is this the right number?" And he said, "Yes, the right address," and he said, "Yes." And I sent it to him and I held my breath and it was terrifying. And then a second later, he texted me and he said, "I got the money." And I breathed a sigh of relief. And I had this moment where I was like, "Oh, well, that's a problem that I know how to solve".
Samora Kariuki: Remittances have come a long way with transfers, lower fees, and sleek apps. But under the hood, the same old frictions remain: liquidity gaps, regulatory hurdles, and hidden costs across broken corridors. Today on the F Squared podcast, I'm joined by Mike Hudack, CEO of Sling, a company building the next chapter of global money movement. Sling combines the power of on-chain stablecoin infrastructure with the simplicity of a social payments experience, creating a platform that's fast, transparent, and built for real people, not just bank accounts. From London to Accra, Nairobi to Dubai, Sling is redefining how money moves and who gets to move it. Let's dive in. So, thanks for having us, Mike. I've been really looking forward to having this discussion. I think you guys made quite a splash last year in Nairobi. You're the most downloaded app for some time.
Samora Kariuki: And I think Kenyans even crashed your servers, so many people are signing on. So, good to have you on the show. We're going to talk about Sling, stablecoins, remittances. But before we do that, probably just give us a small intro to yourself and then we can jump in.
Mike Hudack: Cool. My name is Mike. I grew up outside of New York. I live in London now. I met an English girl in New York probably 20 years ago or something like that. And I dragged her to California, and then she dragged me to London. She doesn't like it when I say 'dragged'. I've lived here for the last 10 or 11 years and I've been building stuff on the internet since I was a kid, since I was like 15. I dropped out of high school and started building stuff. So, I was at a startup doing online video back in the day. I worked as an engineer for a while at a bunch of different places. I was at Facebook for a while where I did ads and sharing and all sorts of things like that. And then I did food delivery at a company called Deliveroo. And then I was chief product officer at a neo-bank called Monzo. And then I started Sling money maybe like two and a half, three years ago after having a crazy experience with stablecoins and just becoming convinced that they were the future or a large part of the future of the way that money was going to move around the world. And I just love building.
Samora Kariuki: Got it. No, fantastic. And that actually leads us into the first question. And I like that you ended the part from Monzo to an experience in stablecoins and now the idea about stablecoins being the future. And so, Sling, you communicate yourselves as helping people send and receive digital dollars across the world. A big chunk of that is remittances, right? And so, we'll start at remittances, especially in the African context, because this show is primarily about FinTech in Africa. Now in the last 10 years, the likes of Sendwave, Zeps to an extent, Wise, Nala, Lemfi, they've all built decent, sizeable businesses, very successful businesses on the idea of making remittances more efficient, right? In some corridors, the fees have been reduced significantly, and now there's almost an instant aspect to it. Of course, behind that is bank partnerships, FinTech partnerships, PSPs, mobile money and all that kind of stuff.
Samora Kariuki: So that's the kind of market that Sling is getting into, where some efficiencies have been built up over the last 10 years. Now, for you, fundamentally, how then do you get into this market? What fundamental problem is being solved that stablecoins can uniquely solve that the existing system may struggle with to solve?
Mike Hudack: My view is that, first of all, I don't think about remittances as a separate category. I think that there was a time when I was growing up, you either made a local phone call, or you made a long-distance phone call, or you made an international phone call. A local phone call was free. A long-distance phone call was maybe like between 10 and 50 cents a minute, and an international phone call could be like a dollar or two a minute. And now I don't think we think about it at all. We're having this conversation over a thousand miles or more. Nobody's charging us for it. I guess we're paying a little bit for Riverside, which is a great platform. I think that we've got the internet has gotten us to the point where most communication is instant and free around the world and borderless. And I just think the same should be true for money. And I think that that was impossible 10 or 15 years ago, but stablecoins actually make that possible. It shouldn't matter whether your money is going a mile or 10,000 miles. The transaction should be basically free and instant. And you should be able to send to a name and not a number. You should be able to just find the person, send to the person, and be done with it and not fill out a huge form. It should just be a couple tasks.
Mike Hudack: I don't think you can build those kinds of experiences on top of traditional money. I think you need to use something like a stablecoin to do that.
Samora Kariuki: I think that's a very interesting point and actually interesting, it leads me to the next question. So you keep leading me to the next question. So that speaks around foundational architecture and by talking about the idea of sending to someone, it means that you kind of have to have some internal address system that says that this is Mike, this is Samora, this is so and so. And so, what you're saying is that it's fundamentally a UX differential where now you can actually send money to someone, and that's the whole thing. So behind the hood, how do you make that happen? And just make that experience seamless.
Mike Hudack: Well, a couple different pieces, right? I think that probably 10 or 15 years from now, all money is going to be, or a lot of money is going to be, on chain. I don't think it's just going to be digital dollars. I think that there are going to be tons of currencies that are online, with CBDCs or stablecoins or tokenized deposits, we don't really care. It doesn't really matter. So, there's a ton of infrastructure to support on-ramping and off-ramping for us, making that really seem and instant and inexpensive.
Mike Hudack: And what you're talking about is a directory service. So one of the first experiences that I had moving stablecoins, it was about three years ago, and I owed my friend a few dollars and he was in California and I was in London and he wanted the money with USDC on Solana. So I went to Coinbase and I bought a bunch of USDC and then I transferred it into a Phantom wallet. And then he gave me the wallet address to send to which had no link to him whatsoever other than I got it through some Google Doc that he gave me. And I texted him and I was like, "Is this the right number?" And he said, "Yes, the right address," and he said, "Yes." And I sent to him and I held my breath and it was terrifying. And then a second later, he texted me and he said, "I got the money," and I breathed a sigh of relief. And I had this moment where I was like, "Oh, well, that's a problem that I know how to solve, and it's a real problem". That anxiety that you feel, whether you're using a traditional payment system, which is just a bit slow and you don't know if the money's going to get there and you're nervous, or you're using stablecoins and wallet addresses, just knowing that the money is going to the right person is unbelievably important.
Mike Hudack: And so, we operate a directory where we KYC everybody on the way in. We check ID and then we put you in the directory with your name and all of your details and that resolves to a wallet address. And we take care of making that link for you so that you can be confident that whatever you're sending is going to the right place.
Samora Kariuki: And so, correct me if I'm wrong, there's two sources of value, I'm slowly starting to understand. There's the moving money aspect and there's the address and directory aspect, right? And one could argue that the address and directory can actually be a utility that you give other FinTechs and neo-banks, saying that, we've solved this specific hard bit. Because Mike might not be on Sling, he may be on Monzo for example, and I'm here on M-Pesa, but if I send money to you, I'm using Sling's address system to kind of know that I'm sending money to Mike. But so far it seems that you're building all this in-house, right? So what's the logic behind that?
Mike Hudack: Well, what you describe would be a great thing, a great product, and we thought about building it. We've got some early design documents that outline something like that. I think though that in order to be able to offer a great experience to people, you want to be able to control as much of the end experience as possible in a good way. We're building an open platform. So, you can take stablecoins in and out. Your wallet is owned by you. It's a self-custodial wallet. You can export your keys and open your wallet in some other Solana software if you want to. It's a very open system. But for the average user, we think that in order to offer a great experience, we need to kind of own or control or manage as many of the different aspects of the system as possible because there's so many things that can go wrong. It's like you're adding money in the US, you're withdrawing money in Kenya, you're sending to somebody in between. There's just a huge amount of work to make that work well. And when you introduce other players that you have no oversight into and you can't get to a certain quality bar or to commit enough to the network, I think that you just end up in a situation where the user experience is disappointing.
Samora Kariuki: That makes a ton of sense. But going back into the underlying infrastructure and how Sling works, what partnerships have you worked with, like Stripe Bridge, what partnerships and ecosystem partnerships make the entire thing work?
Mike Hudack: So the app is available for download in about 120 countries, and we have fiat on and off-ramps in about 90 of those. Which are a combination of debit cards for both adding money and removing money, so you can do a debit card push payment. And then local payment methods such as Faster Payments in the UK, SEPA in Europe, M-Pesa, Airtel Money throughout Africa, PIX in Brazil, and Spei in Mexico. Each one of those is integrated to some level of depth with a partner. It depends on our licensing in that country, our legal opinion, what kind of infrastructure we need, how big the market is, all of those things that determines whether or not we're going all the way to the bare metal or we're operating at some higher level of abstraction. It is honestly a huge number of partnerships. And one of the things that we've had to get good at over the course of a couple years is finding the right partner, signing a good deal with them, and integrating them to a high quality and a high standard. With payments, it's fascinating because just doing that integration is insufficient because it's a game of exceptions. So there are a million things that can go wrong along the way, and so you have to find and fix all of those things in all of those edge cases across all of them. In some countries we have two or three or four partners. In some countries it's one, and all at different levels of depth.
Samora Kariuki: And I'm glad you walked us through that, because as you said, in payments there's so many things that can go wrong, especially the higher dependencies you have, the bigger the probability of things going wrong. And a lot of time is spent figuring things out and sorting out issues as opposed to actually building the business. But speaking about that and going back to the original idea about Sendwave and all these players, they've perfected the thing, at least as close to perfect as can be. Still there are a few chinks in the armor, but the customer experience over time has become more predictable. Whereas for you, you're promising something very interesting, especially the user experience aspect of that, of sending money internationally and sending to a friend and the anxiety of him receiving the money or not being there. But you have to make a trade-off, and now because of all the partnerships, do you feel one could argue that, "Listen, the most important thing is that the payment is reliable, and therefore I'd still stick to the old system because it gives me, I'd rather the reliability than the consumer experience"? Is that something that you come across in your business, or is that a trade-off you guys are grappling with?
Mike Hudack: Well, I think that we have to be unbelievably reliable. I came across one of the first emails that I wrote to somebody about wanting to build this thing. I think that the first couple sentences were saying, "I believe that stablecoins and fast blockchains are going to be the way that money moves around the world long term. We're going to get real internet money for the first time." And what I mean by real internet money is it's like a true digital good. And we can talk about the difference between that and Nala or Sendwave or Wise at some point if you want. And I said that the user experience of these things so far is pretty awful. And we want to build the iPod of stablecoins and fast blockchains. Which means that the UI is really great. The experience of using the thing is wonderful, and it works every time. These are very, very important principles. As you say, when you start, especially when you're building something which is quite broad, you're going to hit all of these things. You're going to have problems as you build, and you have to find a way of rapidly improving and getting to that level of quality, getting to that kind of Apple level of quality, which is what we've been doing for the last year. We removed our waitlist last September, and we've been doing all of that work for the last several months. I think that it's very clear to me that this new way of money moving is going to be the way that it's going to work, as I said, 10 years from now. I think that the reason for that is it is truly faster and less expensive, and it requires a lot fewer people to build and a lot less infrastructure to build. If you can get it to the same level of quality execution, then you can beat everybody on price and speed and features over time. And that's our bet.
Samora Kariuki: Maybe walk us through, because I've got a question that stems from that, but probably walk us through now that fundamental difference between stablecoins, the digital good, and this is just to educate. I've written a lot about stablecoins on my newsletter, but I want to get your perspective of the fundamental difference between digital goods as stablecoins and a FinTech that operates over incumbent systems.
Mike Hudack: I'm going to go all the way down to a different layer of abstraction, far away from the user for a moment. Physical money is printed by the government, and you have a physical representation of it. If it goes into a bank, it goes into a vault or something, and then it's given back out, and the bank holds a ledger. Digital money, the bank vault is replaced by a database which is operated by the bank. There's no physical money, there's no physical cash, but the bank operates a database which is the equivalent of that safe. And the databases are not compatible with each other. So even in the same country, the Monzo ledger and the Barclays ledger are not compatible with each other. They can't really talk to each other, and so every country then has a layer, a messaging layer for communication between these databases, or multiple ones. So in the UK there's Faster Payments, in the US there's ACH and soon to be RTP and so on. The thing that stablecoins do, stablecoins and fast blockchains together, because I think that one is not very useful without the other, they really go together. Everybody now is on the same database. And the database is a shared ledger across every single participant in the system.
Mike Hudack: And so there is no messaging layer anymore. And the thing about the messaging layers is that when they're domestic, some of them are good, some of them are bad. When they're international, a lot of them are actually quite poor. They're very slow. Swift is super slow. And what you're seeing, what Wise and Nala and all of these people have done, is they built their proprietary closed messaging layers to link a bank in the UK with M-Pesa or whatever. And I think that what's happening now and what's going to continue to happen is everybody is going to move to these kind of more open systems with everybody being in the same database. Which means that as a provider of software for money movement, you don't have to worry about ledgers anymore. You don't have to worry about having correspondent banking relationships in every one of these countries. You don't need to have local accounts in all these countries. Half of the moving parts, half of the infrastructure just goes away, which means there are fewer things to go wrong and it's far more efficient. And you can build really incredible consumer experiences on top of that.
Samora Kariuki: And maybe this is stepping outside of that. You've raised a very valuable point. It's fundamentally an innovation in database and especially how open the blockchain is in terms of interoperability. Whereas previous systems, everyone has their own ledger, and they have to build these workarounds to speak. But then one of the kind of, maybe I can ask you, how do you see it evolving? Is it that everybody now starts issuing their own stablecoin, like JP Morgan issues their stablecoin? Because, using the unique case of JP Morgan, not that I know much about their stablecoin plans, but you're saying that, "Okay, let's move from a proprietary database, let's now put money, our database online so that it can work with everyone else," right? And then everyone does that, and now we're all on the blockchain, and now we can send money easier, right? If everyone does that, then what role does Sling play in such a system?
Mike Hudack: I really wanted to answer the first part of your question. I think that we may go through a period of lots of different proprietary stablecoins or different brands of stablecoins. So the JP Morgan coin, the Bank of New York Mellon stablecoin, the Circle stablecoin, the Coinbase stablecoin, the Stripe stablecoin, whatever. I don't think that that world is going to last forever. I think that there is actually network value in stablecoins. USDT is widely accepted. USDC is widely accepted in different regions. And I think that there's true value in that, and it's very hard for every financial institution or non-financial institution to compete with that kind of network value. That doesn't mean that the current leaders are going to be the future leaders, and so there's going to be a more vibrant ecosystem for a few years while people try to figure that out. But I don't think that we're going to end up in a world with a million different stablecoins. I think that's not a good world, and it's not one that consumers are going to like, and so there will be centralization of some sort, selection of some sort. In terms of the role that Sling plays, I think that the most valuable position in this market is with the consumer and building a consumer network. A lot of it comes back to the directory that we were talking about earlier. And I think that if you can offer people a really seamless, beautiful experience that solves real problems for them, that is built on top of that infrastructure and abstracts away that you don't have to worry about it, but it facilitates magic, that is the most valuable place to be. It's a place of highest leverage.
Samora Kariuki: It makes a lot of sense. And in any business actually in financial services, you want to be as close to the customer as possible. Of course there are some players who play at an infrastructure level, but sometimes infrastructure becomes commoditized in the long term. So how are you guys making money because a lot of your payments are promoted as free. So what's the monetization there at least for now and how do you see it evolving?
Mike Hudack: So we make some revenue when people buy stablecoins with Sling and hold stablecoins. We get some stablecoin yield, that's the first part. The second part is that there are some markets where there is an arbitrage between a US dollar stablecoin and local fiat, and that allows us to offer users a free transaction at the mid-market rate but still make a little bit of money on that transaction. And then over time we will introduce some additional features that intrinsically make money in a kind of indirect way. So you can imagine for example we might introduce a debit card or a credit card from which you make interchange revenue. I think one of the really interesting things about the thing that we're building and the way that we think about it is that this is a domestic bank business model. Domestic banks don't charge a lot of money for transfers and all sorts of services. They might sometimes have a minimum deposit value, a minimum balance before fees kick in, or they might have some fair usage fees on certain things or there might be certain unprofitable things that they charge money for. But I think one of the really cool things that stablecoins make possible, we believe they might make possible, is this kind of expansion of that kind of business model to be everywhere. And that's the really cool thing I think about what we're building and why we're building it. We want to connect a billion people around the world to an instant free or nearly free financial system. And we think that the tools to do that have recently become available.
Samora Kariuki: Makes sense. One of the things that speaks to this and something you mentioned earlier. You mentioned that 10, 15 years time, the native way of sending money, and I think it might even be sooner, it's gaining traction, will be through digital money, stablecoins. And now you just mentioned the idea of Sling as a domestic bank equivalent and that's true, right? It's a store of value, and so it's a retail bank, a global retail bank if we could call it. But if you were to invert and just look at what's the thing that kills this vision, one huge thing is regulation, right? Now the Genius Act has passed in the US, I think there's a crypto friendly government in place, at least the fact that it's now legislation makes it harder to remove. But a crypto-friendly administration cannot be taken for granted, things can flip, right? And so, one would say that the biggest thing about the thing that can actually destroy this vision is just global regulatory pushback. Because as well as I know that central banks have a lot to lose or gain, lose if the entire world moves off-chain, what you mentioned earlier about proprietary databases, standalone databases, they're kind of administered or governed by the central bank and that's why it gains a lot of its value. So how do you think about regulation being the thing that destroys this vision?
Mike Hudack: We thought about it very deeply from the beginning. And I had this experience of being on the senior leadership team at a very closely regulated bank in the UK, very well-respected regulators. And so being both a technologist and having that experience led me and then our founding team to think very, very deeply about this. And we started by just thinking about what are the things that governments really care about? Put aside current regulation and everything else, what are the things that they truly care about? Two of the things are anti-money laundering and financial crime controls are deeply cared about by most governments around the world. And the other is currency policy. So that might be currency controls. It might be the ability to set your own interest rate. It might be the ability for your currency to float appropriately or to be controlled versus another currency. Those two things are incredibly important to all regulators around the world. As is credential quality, credential regulation, whether or not somebody's going to lose their money, right? So, those are kind of the three things.
Mike Hudack: On that point, we have only ever worked with incredibly high-quality stablecoin providers. We don't support every stablecoin in the world. We support credibly regulated, high-quality purveyors of stablecoins that are regulated and trustworthy. And store their funds at very, very high-quality institutions. So we thought about that deeply in terms of currency management and control. We don't necessarily believe that the world is going to fully dollarize. And we know that there are lots of countries in the world that do not want to dollarize. And so we've built the entire platform to be able to support multiple storage currencies and to accommodate central bank regulators' desires in that regard. So, for example, we use a US dollar stablecoin as the default in a lot of the world, but we use a Euro stablecoin in the Eurozone. We can do that anywhere as long as the stablecoin is high quality enough. And then we also put a ton of work into figuring out how to build a proper financial crime and anti-money laundering program on top of a blockchain, and have developed a lot of novel technology in order to be able to do that. So, we put that foundation in from very early on and then started working with regulators. So we are, for example, regulated under MiCA in the Netherlands, and we have very carefully picked regulators who are very globally respected. The Dutch are good at what they do in this field. So instead of going to some random country in Europe that might issue MiCA registrations faster, MiCA licenses faster, we went straight to the Dutch and worked with them so that our partners around the world can have confidence in that. That kind of approach, those things together, it's crucial.
Samora Kariuki: Got it. And speaking on that, and this is my personal view, you may agree or disagree, but I think that the underlying thing of making payments easier and giving people better store of value capabilities is fundamentally a global south problem. That's where the need is biggest, right? And even if you look at USDT, it's grown on the back of enabling the global south to send and move and hold dollars more efficiently, starting with Greater China and moving to the rest of the world. And so, the issue of currency controls plays a bigger role in your roadmap because I'd imagine that the value of a dollar account, an accessible dollar account, is much higher in Argentina than it is in New York, right? But the currency control issue is also much bigger in Argentina than it is in New York, right? So, how are you navigating that? And that is two things. Number one, do you agree that the biggest problem is in the global south? And if you do, then the capital controls will be bigger in the global south?
Mike Hudack: Well, I think that there's a set of benefits that you get from a product like Sling that have varying value depending on where you live, right? I do think that having access to dollars is for sure more valuable in, for example, Argentina than it is in New York. Not because having access to dollars in New York is not important, but because you can just walk into any bank branch in New York and get a dollar account, where it's harder in other countries. Solving that problem of access to dollars is important to us, but not the only thing that matters. The other thing that really matters to us is that if you are in Argentina and you have family in New York and you have family in Spain, you should be able to transact with them instantly and for free. For sure, you as the person in Argentina would also love to have access to dollars. It would be great. I use Sling today for moving money between my account in the UK and my account in New York. And it's differentiated for me because the funds are immediately available. It's instant across that corridor. It's instant across all the corridors that we operate in.
Mike Hudack: Now, are regulators over time going to crack down on stablecoins as part of their currency controls? I don't know. We work with phenomenal regulatory counsel all over the world who kind of give us some sense of where things are and where things are going and how we need to operate and how we need to think about these things. I don't know what the future of this is going to be, and I'm not sure that anybody really does right now. And I imagine that a bunch of countries, if you took six countries, there are probably going to be like four different approaches to how to apply currency controls or not apply currency controls to stablecoins. We will see. And we've built a system and an infrastructure which is sufficiently flexible that we can flex with that while meeting real user needs.
Samora Kariuki: And I think so far, if you look at it just practically, and I always tell people this, take Africa for example. I'm 100% sure that all the central banks know the stablecoin volumes that are moving within their countries. The CBN knows, the Central Bank of Kenya, they're not blind to this stablecoin activity. I think if it was a massive problem, we simply cannot have it, they would have cracked down a long time ago. I think for me, when I look at it, is that ultimately dollar activity is not changing. It's just moving through different rails, right? There's no fundamental change in the volume of dollars getting out. Maybe there's more coming in, but it doesn't change anything from the FX perspective. What it changes is that money is now moving through stablecoins as opposed to moving through Swift. If anything, I see the big thing happening is more around KYC and AML and kind of roping stablecoins into the KYC and AML framework. Because to be honest, some of the stablecoin activity is just companies who a normal bank wouldn't bank, and it's true. So that's probably what's going to happen.
Mike Hudack: I think that there's some truth to that, and I think we've built Sling from the get-go with the KYC and AML capabilities built in because it's pretty clear this is where everything is going, even if it's not there yet. And we wanted to be on the right side of that history. So when you sign up for Sling, you have to complete full KYC. And we do have transaction monitoring and all those pieces, which I think is a very important part, again, if you go back to what governments care about, it's a very important part of what they care about.
Samora Kariuki: Exactly. And I'd imagine for Sling, especially since you're a consumer business, a consumer FinTech business, brand building is an extremely important thing. First of all, people, you have to build awareness. You also have to build education, right? One of the things is that for a lot of average Joe around the world, sometimes crypto is seen as a scary thing and a scummy kind of thing, right? And that speaks to your market communications and how you go around building awareness. So I think there's two things to this now. Who are you seeing Sling building traction with? What kind of consumer demographic really resonates with your messaging? And then how do you now take that mainstream such that some guy on the street, some grandma, maybe not a grandma, maybe someone a bit younger, will adopt stablecoins or at least adopt Sling as the primary way to use money? And the reason I'm asking that is that especially in markets like Africa, if you look at M-Pesa, the agents did a huge job in building that trust, and it's a shopkeeper, it's someone I know, and there's trust. But for Sling, it's purely digital. So how do you build that trust? So there's two questions in there.
Mike Hudack: Totally know that. It's a great question. I think the first thing is we've gone back and forth a ton on how much to abstract away the stablecoin, how much to talk about it. And there's just a reality that when you build on top of stablecoins, some of the physics are different. And so, I think you do have to, people need to know what they're using. I think that's very important. So, we have to say something. We have to talk about the stablecoin in some way. And we do. That naturally leads you to a younger, more tech-savvy user base. And it's funny, there are lots of people, I'd say under 35 maybe, who will do a user interview and we'll talk to them, and they'll be like, "Oh, I'm not sure that people trust stablecoins, but I love the product and I use it all the time". And you're like, "Oh, well, you use them. You trust them. It works for you". And I think that's all about there are two things happening at the same time. One is we have to offer every user a great experience. We have to make sure that this thing works for them. It works every time, and they feel like they can rely on it and they can trust it. At that point, I don't think it matters whether it's a stablecoin or something else, it's just, "Okay, it works great". Then there's another thing which is happening in the world, which is the Genius Act, all of these announcements that are happening every day. I think Zeps just announced that they're going to be using USDC for a bunch of stuff. Stripe is doing a ton of stuff with stablecoins, etc., where the world is clearly moving in this direction. And so I think that if we can offer people a great experience and great support and have the product work for them, and when and if it doesn't work, give them amazing support around that. And then the world becomes more comfortable with this new technology over time and differentiates it from the casino of crypto. I think we'll be in great shape.
Samora Kariuki: That makes a lot of sense. So you have to focus on yourself, make sure you're doing a great product, and then hopefully ride the wave. And at the end of the day, I think every great business has ridden a wave, you need to catch a wave and you need to ride it. And so makes a ton of sense. What does success look for you guys, right? And the reason I'm asking that is because even some of these traditional, traditional in the sense that they're not using stablecoins, they're tech-savvy companies, but you're seeing at least in the African context, companies like Lenfi moving beyond traditional remittances. I think they bought a credit card company in the UK. And there's a move towards now moving beyond remittances. And so the space is getting heated up, and more people are seeing the value in just moving beyond facilitating payments to offering a more comprehensive financial service. What does the future look for you guys? What is your right to win specifically, at least what you think of internally as your right to win? You've mentioned the system, you've mentioned customer care and the customer experience. Maybe talk us through about the right to win.
Mike Hudack: And speed and cost. And I do believe that over time we do need to offer additional services like the card and so on in order to deepen the relationship with users and make sure that we earn the right to be front of wallet by offering all those services, right? But I think that a huge amount of the value really comes from the network and comes from building social experiences.
Samora Kariuki: It's interesting because I think there's a World Bank report that came out last week or the week before, the Global Findex survey, and they found that close to 80% of people in Africa are now using mobile money as primary financial services. And what that told me is that you might have a whole generation that may not even open a bank account, and it seems crazy, but if you look at how people are spending and moving their money, some of the traditional value sources of value from a bank account may be spacious in the years coming. Now, I had one question for you, and I actually had to write it down so that I can remember it. So Mike, you're tackling a problem that financial institutions and FinTechs have struggled with for decades, right? What is the single hardest non-obvious lesson you've learned so far while building Sling that you'd share with another founder trying to solve a foundational hard problem, be it in Africa or anywhere in the world?
Mike Hudack: It's a very broad question. Do you want to narrow it down at all, or is it just generally what is the lesson that, what's the biggest non-obvious lesson you've learned? Non-obvious. I don't know about non-obvious, but building companies is hard. Building great products that people love that work every time is hard. Building great teams is hard. You really have to believe in the thing that you're building and why you're building it in order to get through all of the hard elements. Starting a thing from scratch is just difficult. And so I think you have to really make sure that the thing that you start is worth years of your life, working incredibly hard, and that the people that you do it with are people that you want to spend time with every day. And that the problems that you're working on are valuable not just to you but to the world. I think that those are very important things, and I think that it's very easy when you start a company to get excited about a shiny thing or whatever and to go, but I think that it needs to pass all of those tests. Because it will be incredibly hard work, and it's not always easy to predict in what ways. But if you ask yourself why something doesn't exist, there is usually a reason. And then you come back to your reason to believe, your reason to win, your right to win. What is it about you and the team and everything else that are going to allow you to overcome the challenges that are the reason that that thing has not existed yet? And are all of those things going to be in place for you? I think is incredibly important.
Samora Kariuki: Makes a ton of sense. And, maybe a leadership lesson. Everyone has natural aptitudes and everyone has things that they don't enjoy doing. What's the one thing you don't enjoy doing about your job?
Mike Hudack: For me it's the admin. I hate it. I hate the admin 100%. I know there are people who love going through the spreadsheet in detail every day and all that kind of stuff, and that's what they love. It's not what I do.
Samora Kariuki: And also, the thing that you naturally enjoy and you can do in your sleep?
Mike Hudack: I just love building things for people and talking to the people who use the thing that I build and solving problems. I just love it.
Samora Kariuki: Great, Mike. That's been amazing. I think I've gotten a deeper understanding about Sling, especially the idea of now building this kind of address system so that you can build a social experience beyond just moving money and then riding the waves of the fundamental stablecoin wave that's coming. And I think it is coming. I wrote five years back, I think I wrote five years back, about stablecoins being the thing that excites me the most about crypto, and at the time maybe 2021, people thought stablecoins were this kind of boring thing that is anathema to the idea of decentralized crypto and everything. But I was like, if you think about it, it is solving the biggest problem. If you have a stable value and you can send it across the blockchain very quickly, then that's a thing that actually unlocks value. So, really keen to see how your journey goes. And thanks for joining the show.
Mike Hudack: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. I'll see you soon.