Why The ATM Still Matters In a Digital Age

Alex: Hello everybody and welcome to the Curiosity Code podcast. I'm your host, Alex Chamikov and today I'm joined by Paul Gardner, founder of Marine Fintech and former Cito and CTO behind the world's largest ATM and payment networks. So guess what? Today we're going to be talking a lot about ATMs and infrastructure of money from cash to AI, legacy system and future of global payments. Paul spent over 25 years building and running some of the world's largest ATMs and payments networks. So I'm very excited about these conversations and learning about things that we pretty much use quite often without realizing how complex they are. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Paul: Hey, thank you, Alex. Thank you for having me here today. I'm really looking forward to sharing a little bit with your audience around the the humble ATM which everyone's familiar with, but not many people know what happens behind the scenes.

Alex: Paul, anything else that I missed while I introduced you? Something important that's hidden somewhere under the public pages that I have access to?

Paul: Yeah, no, you got most of it. I love your pronunciation of my surname. Gardener is how we say it in Scotland. But Gardiner is much better. No worries at all. No, you kind of got it. I've been working in the payments and the ATM industry for the last 25 plus years. I've worked on ATM, I've worked on Point of Sale, I've worked on E Commerce. I've really seen that the real change in the industry over the last 20, 25 years, but also seen what stayed consistent during that period. So as you said, now I'm based in the San Francisco Bay area and Marin. FinTech really sits between the intersection of those traditional financial technology platforms and all of the emerging technologies which are being created every day here in the Bay Area. AI as well as a couple of more interesting areas around decentralized finance and how that's starting to merge with traditional finance as well as security and cryptography, which is a huge area for ATMs due to the fact that shares and send so much personally identifiable information around the planet. People's information, bank balances, PIN numbers, etc. And everything that's potentially coming or will be coming with the quantum computing world is also going to start impacting the ATM space over the next couple of years. So we really sit between those helping banks, credit unions and fintechs themselves navigate the adoption and ensuring they succeed when these new technologies come along.

Alex: Well, thanks for sharing the context and the background. I'd like to start with perhaps fundamental question about how money actually move behind the scene. Because we especially these days we're all used to mobile apps and websites and banking, so we don't touch cash much. But it seems like with your experience, you know, handling the mechanics of money like the actual real objects that we call money. I'm curious to get your perspective on in your opinion, what people misunderstand most about how money actually move behind the scene.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, I think let's talk about that specifically and then I'll cover a little bit about cash later in the podcast because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around the usage of cash, a lot of pr, which I'm happy to dig into a little bit. But speaking specifically around the ATM and how money moves, it's interesting in that almost everyone in the world has used an atm, so it's a really familiar device. You know, you walk up card in you're pin, you ask for your money and the money comes out. So it's a really simple device from an end user perspective. The user interface is really, really sleek and really simple. But behind the scenes things can either be very simple or can be very complex. And it's a bit of a depends on the type of ATM you're using and the type of card you're using to perform your transaction. So the simplest is when you're a bank customer, so you work for say Bank A and you use Bank A's ATMs. That's a really simple environment where the ATM is directly connected to the bank's own infrastructure. So it's effectively a closed network at that point. Everything stays within the bank's ecosystem. And in that type of environment, banks will ensure that, even though there's a cost of putting cash into an atm, because any cash which is in the ATM is no longer generating interest that's not sitting in a account which has impress payments happening to it. So that's effectively a cost to the bank to put money in an atm, but they will put a lot of money into those ATMs specifically to ensure customer satisfaction, because customers get really unhappy when they go to an ATM to either get their cash out to pay for their groceries or to pay their babysitter or whatever use case they have for the cash. But they also get really upset, they can't deposit their cash. If they've required to put cash into their account to pay a bill that they have, they have upcoming and the ATM is not working, then the customers get really unhappy and as a result the banks get really unhappy. So in that environment, it's the bank's own cash that they typically put into those ATMs and they will put a lot of it in to ensure customer satisfaction. On the other, the other end of the industry and the network is where it's independently provided ATM. So these are your ATMs in say a grocery store or in a pharmacy location, typically sitting in the corner of the store and not directly connected to the bank's systems anymore because it's an independently owned and operated ATM that connects over more traditional payments. Rails, the type of rails that anyone with experience a point of sale, for example, will recognize because it goes over the typical networks that you know are out there. So it'll go over the big card scheme networks, it'll go over some regional networks and there it's a lot more complex. So there, although ultimately to you the transaction is exactly the same, you put your card in, getting your finger and the cash comes out. Behind the scenes there's a huge amount of additional complexity moving the real time transaction request over those networks. The cash in those ATMs is not typically owned by the banks themselves. It's provided by the big armored companies that you see their trucks rolling around the world loading lots of cash into lots of different areas. So the cash there is loaned and there's a huge amount of daily settlement that needs to occur to ensure that the right people get the right share of all of the transactions that happen across that network. Each day there'll be a big, a big settlement activity occurs and the money moves across all of the different partners there. That's funded by interchange. So the card schemes provide a small cut of the transaction to the ATM acquirer for performing that transaction, which is then paid for by the issuer of the cards. And in addition to that, some of those ATMs will charge a surcharge. So as well as getting your cash, you'll get a deduction from your account of a couple of dollars or a couple of pounds or a couple of euros, depending on where you are in the world or paying for that transaction. So those are typically the two parts of the network in the past when ATMs were created back in the 1960s, the first ATM was put into production in 1967, a long time ago in Enfield in England for Barclays bank. Back then all ATMs were connected directly to the banks. Over the last, say 20 or so years, the independent ATM network has really come to the fore. And now we're starting to see a convergence between the two, where banks are outsourcing their ATM to those networks because A, they want to focus on things that are more core to them, like digital banking and other areas, and B, it could be more cost effective for them to outsource the running of the ATM network. Although that does come with some challenges that the banks need to resolve.

Alex: So you would think that as you mentioned like 60 years ago, that's when the technology been introduced. And then based on what I know about the industry, ATMs were the most widely used piece of technology on the planet at some point. Right. And that was before the smartphones existed listed. I sort of understand the direction where the cashless transactions are going. Like myself, I probably withdraw $2050 from ATM and sometimes I keep it for months, you know, without touching. So, you know, I understand it's mainly driven by particular consumer behavior. Like I'm a heavy user of, you know, Apple pay and direct debit transactions. In your opinion, why does this channel, I mean the ATM still matter today? And why isn't cash disappearing the way everyone predicted?

Paul: Yeah, that's a great question. It gets to kind of the, the root of the, of the industry itself. So the, the ATM industry within the wider payments and fintechs area talks about this a lot. As you'd imagine, being the now main provider of cash to the global economy, it is in our interest to ensure that cash continues to be something that is used on a regular basis. And to be honest, that's exactly what happens out there. So when you hear about the death of cash, and I think I'm on to my fifth or sixth iteration of public relations, stating that cash is dying and it's going to go away and each one has come to nothing. You know, originally credit cards were going to mean we'd not need cash anymore. Then debit cards, then crypto was going to mean we didn't need cash anymore, and then Covid was going to mean that no one touched cash anymore because there was fear of actually touching cash. Even though in the end it became clear that Covid itself was transferred through air as opposed to through touch mostly. So it's fairly regular that you hear about the Death of cash and often the amount of cash being used as well into the, into the public is often underestimated. People look at their own behaviors with cash, as you've just done, Alex, and kind of apply that to everyone. That's really not what's happening out there. Cash isn't disappearing. Cash in circulation continues to arisen in every major economy. Over the past decade, the Fed reserve itself was in the US currency in circulation has more than doubled 2010. So if you think about that, in the last 16 years, the amount of cash in circulation has gone up two times. A lot of that cash is dispersed through the ATM networks. What most people get wrong is when you read about the death of cash and where cash is going, it's often what I recommend is people look at where that story is coming from and more often than not it's coming from places where there's an interest in there being no cash. So say payments companies, lobbying groups, people who are founders who have created digital only platforms, they will often look at their growth being a reduction in cash usage. Cash itself. The advocates for cash tend to be the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, et cetera. They don't have PR bodies who are out there publicizing the use of cash. Albeit in the last couple of days there's been, there's been stories in the UK press just yesterday around the fact that the UK population is expecting to use more cash in the next 12 months because they feel that it's a better tool for budgeting. So cash itself continues to be very robust. And if you look at where cash is being used, there's lots of parts of the economy and parts of the global population who still rely on cash on a day to day basis. In the underbanked, underserved networks, often people will point to more elderly users of cash and say, you can't leave people behind because there's still lots of people out there who are using cash. When you look at the details though, you'll find often that a lot of millennials, a lot of Gen Z are also using cash. Because of that much more tactile nature of spending cash means it's much easier to budget. If you're out there tapping your card 15 times a night when you're out for drinks with your friends, then that cash can, that those transactions can be forgotten about, can be really not noticed. When you're physically removing your wallet to take cash out and hand it over to someone, then it becomes much more of a, you know you're spending money. So cash as a Budgeting tool is something that has really come to the fore in the last the last few years. What you'll often hear about as well alongside cash and why cash matters, you'll hear about ATMs going away. And it's inarguable that the number of ATMs that are deployed out there have gone down over the last few years. But if you look at the reasons why, again, they don't always tell the same story. The amount of people wanting to use cash remains pretty static. And what's driving a lot of the reductions in ETN numbers over the past few years has been things like banks closing branches to consolidate the real estate. Anytime you hear about a branch closing in the high street or the main street, that could be anything from one ATM to sometimes eight, nine, ten ATM and some of the large branches going away and all of those customers are moved to another branch four or five miles down the road and all those customers start using the 1, 2, 3, 4 ATM in that branch. So what we were seeing, what I've seen over time is that although cash usage may go down due to banks consolidating and ATMs being harder to get to, what I've seen in the past is people then taking more money out transactions that they are performing. So whereas 10 years ago they might have used the ATM five times a week and taken $20 out on each transaction, now somebody will use the ATM maybe once a week because it's harder to get to, but they'll take out 150, $200 because they know that they need more money in their pocket for emergencies. So ATM still matter. Cash offers the ability to perform instant settlement when there's a major event. You always see people revert back to cash usage. There was a huge power outage in Spain last year and immediately people started using cash again to by supplies. They needed to be able to get through that multiple day power outage in large parts of Spain. And that happens at least a couple of times a year in different parts of the world. And the story is always the same that people are reminded that they should always keep some cash to be able to buy goods and to care for their family in the event of other alternative payment schemes being down. When you look back at the atmosphere usage as well and cash transaction usage, it's often worthwhile to look at it in the context of other payment solutions coming to market. So you'll often hear about ATM transaction numbers being down. That's often down as a percentage of overall transactions because new things are coming to market, which is always going to erode your percentage of a total. But number of ATM transactions has been pretty static over the last few years. There was a dip during COVID when there was a lot of lockdowns and people couldn't get out. But I'm not seeing any real reduction. That would mean I'm concerned about the future of the atm. The opposite is the case actually. It's now the ATM is often the only means of converting from digital to physical. And as a result ATMs and cash will continue to be a core part of any bank, credit union and financial technology solutions offering during around the world.

Alex: Makes sense Paul. That's a very detailed and interesting perspective on that. Let's talk about security. So in essence ATM is a box of cash with some sophisticated technology, you know, in terms of user interface and counting mechanism, but still it's a box of cash. So I would imagine, you know, throughout the history of this technology lots of people tried to got their hands on this. So how do you approach security of ATM both from the physical perspective and cyber aspects? And do you see anything that AI brings to the table in terms of securing these devices?

Paul: Yeah, it's a good question. We need to stay very high level here. What we don't want to become is an education space for people who want to try to get their hands on that cash. So I'm not going to share a lot of detail here because obvious reasons, but it is a. You're right, it's an area that ATM operators, ATM technology companies think can invest a lot in into securing that cash. And it's really think about it on three different fronts that the fraud is happening. You have physical attacks, you've got cyber attacks and you've got fraud attacks. And that's consistent across lots of banking infrastructure. It's not specifically just the atm, but the ATM being that point where there is a lot of cash in the ATM themselves often attracts people as being an area that they think they can get their hands on some easy cash. And that's more often than not. 9.999 times out of 100 is probably the worst place for people to put their efforts due to the amount that's invested into these areas. So physical first you'll see people reverse trucks into ATMs. You'll see people try to explode ATMs, they'll go to some building sites, steal some building equipment and then try to rip it out of the wall. That has got lots of hardware and physical deterrence stop that occurring. So in some Instances, a lot of ATMs have got some exploding cartridges into the cassettes that contain the cash. And in the event that you rocket too much, all of the cash in the ATM is destroyed in a way that the bank can then recreate it and swap it for new replacement cash. So if the bad guys do get their hands on that cash, they can't spend it anyway. So you'll see a lot of that. One of the other really interesting things in the last couple of years that we've seen is that due to lobbying of the industry, the penalty for being caught performing those crimes in a lot of countries is actually starting to move towards being a true deterrent. Now in the say 15, 20 years ago, if you got caught trying to do this, you might get a fine, you might get a couple of months in the prison of your choice or conquest choice. Now a lot of legislation has been put in place in the last few years where it can now be 10, 12, 15 years in prison for performing this type of attack. So that really helps with some of the deterrent physical on the cyber side. This is the one where I'll keep it at the highest level because this is where you have folks on the dark web doing stuff and trying to attack weaknesses in the platforms. The technology providers are always both working ahead of the curve, ensuring that there are no weaknesses where they can. But with technology there's always risk, it's always zero day vulnerabilities being released across the entire software ecosystem. And ATMs are no different in the industry focus heavily on ensuring that we can detect those type of fraud attempts and stop them accordingly. So on there, you know, that often requires some deep access to the atm. So it'll be a combination of a physical attack and a cyber attack at the same time. I'll talk a little bit about how AI can help in that space as well. And then the final one is fraud attacks. That's where rather than attacking the cache on the APN itself, it's attacking the people using the atm. So that's when you see like card skimming devices that are attached to the front of the atm. It steals your card number, it steals your PIN number through a little hidden camera and then somebody can then go and recreate your card and then use that card elsewhere. There. There's a lot of security added into the actual infrastructure that performs those transactions as well. And almost identical to the same fraud attempts that happen at point of sale devices where you know, not allowing fallback to the old school magnetic stripe and PIN transaction means that it can be almost impossible to recreate a transaction and perform that fraud unless some of the older ways of doing transactions are still enabled. So that's kind of where the fee that we look at and we invest a huge amount in the industry to mitigate the risk to banks and to end users of ATMs across there. AI and to answer that question is obviously an area where the ability to detect these things is enhanced by AI. So across the board on the physical side, there's a couple of companies who have now got camera systems which can detect trucks reversing towards ATMs and immediately call the local police, start sending an alarm, and that's cutting off a lot of the attacks before they even occur. Whereas in the past you would have needed 100 banks of screens in a central location somewhere and someone looking at all the screens at the same time, that's not really realistic. AI is now doing all of that automatically with video feeds coming in from the devices. Similarly, a lot of the cyber attacks that you see, the ones where people are trying to get the money out of the ATM by targeting weaknesses, they can often look like normal transaction behavior. An ATM can suddenly get busy and lots of transactions can start occurring for those. The AI can help identify patterns of transactions that are suspect and then provide those to some humans to verify whether it is or is not an issue. Because what really you don't want to happen in a self service, unattended environment like an ATM network or like a point of sale network. You don't want to start shutting down everything anytime you think there might be a problem, because there's a huge amount of false positives out there. Where a great example of what can look like fraud is an ATM which is a farmer's market, only open on a Saturday, and then suddenly sees a big spike in usage on a Saturday morning. That's the same type of behavior you see when somebody is behaving with an APM and trying to get the money out of it. So lots of false positives and AI could really help tidy up, clean that up, and provide a much more accurate list of potential fraud transactions that should be looked at. So AI is making a big difference and also helping across the that cross platform and cross country network that I mentioned earlier. Some of those more complex ATM networks, you can have four, five or six different companies all participating in that ecosystem. AI is helping those companies coordinate information across each other in a way that they wouldn't have been able to share it before, making the ATM channel even more secure than it's always been but just to be 100% clarity clear on this. ATM security has always been a de facto requirement of the ATM channel and fraud is pretty rare on a number of ATM transactions that occur. We talk about it a lot, we invest a lot in stopping it occurring. It's a pretty rare thing. You're pretty unlucky if you fall to one of these attacks. When you look at the number of transactions that occur and the number of fraudulent transactions, that's a minuscule percentage of the total.

Alex: Paul, I'd like to talk a bit more about transformations and general fintech landscape. So you recently led to billion fintech carve outs with 2,600 people and 26,000 users. Transformation like this required a full tech stack to be created for the spinoff. What does it take to execute transformation at this scale without breaking mission critical systems?

Paul: Yeah, yeah, great. So not really an ATM question now. More around the question of delivering large scale technology transformation in an area that is seeing a lot of merger and acquisition. So if you look at the payment space there's a, every year, every month there's a major transaction announced now. So alongside keeping the world's payment infrastructure running, keeping the world's point of sale networks and ETM networks running, one of the key things that us folks who work in fintech do now is facilitate the acquisition, the integration and the divestment of businesses because everyone's always buying each other or spinning off different parts of the company. So it's interesting that a lot of the time we think of ourselves as payments experts but we're actually becoming M and E experts at the same time. Quite, quite amusing. So that was a hugely complex deal without getting into the details of was a very large company that had existed for 140 years. So one of the very oldest companies in the world decided to split into two ensure that they could focus on the different areas that the company was focused on. So we had to spend a lot of time facilitating that separation. And you asked how do you navigate that transformation? And there's a few things that make it work but number one is the team and trust in the team to deliver. It takes thousands of people to unwire a decades old platform and rebuild it while keeping the existing payment solutions, the daily money movement, everything else that comes with running a large financial network all up and running 24, 7, 365 to 5 nines availability. There's no ability in our, in our world to say we're going to turn everything off for a couple of months and Then we'll be back. Don't worry, that's not allowed. We have to be on all the time. So without the people being aligned, without the team being there to deliver it, it would never happen. And the teams really rose to the occasion globally to deliver that hugely complex transformation. And when I say transformation, I really mean the stand up of a new $2 billion company with everything required to run that business. It wasn't just the mission critical payment systems, it was also the back office, the ERP systems, the Salesforce platforms that drive the sales teams, the HR systems, the marketing platforms, everything had to be either copied and replicated or replaced in a very short period of time. We had about 18 months or so to deliver that investment. So alongside the people, relentless old school program management was the other key fundamental. Nothing fancy, just disciplined, cross functional delivery. Third, separating the mission critical platforms into their own tracks. You don't treat them in the same way that you treat state systems that are unless mission critical. So making sure that they had their own path that they were, they cannot be touched at the best of times, these systems have to undergo significant levels of approvals before you can apply any change to them. And we were a little bit fortunate in there that due to the history of how all the companies came together, they were still a little bit out on their own and able to be kept separate without really impacting too much elsewhere. Patience and fast recovery were the other key factors. Although a lot of people wanted a lot of stuff done really quickly, we needed to ensure we did it all in a very correct order, in a timely way and then really react when things went well. Because 140 year old company, there's processes and systems that people haven't really looked at or haven't touched for a long period of time. So when things will break, everyone accepted that there would be issues. It was about identifying it, getting resolved quickly and trying to minimize the impact on our customers through that process. Constant communication was key. People really got tired hearing from me and hearing from the team towards the end of the journey. But communication is everything when you're delivering that level of change and then something that a lot of companies don't always have up to date and really helped us was a really solid asset management plan platform where we knew every different system that we had, what it was doing, what it was connected to and we got the opportunity to really build that, rebuild that as we went, as we were separating the company. There's not often you get the chance to completely refresh your asset management platform which really Served the transition well, but will serve the company really well in the next few years because it makes technology businesses much easier to run when you've got an up to date, upto date system. So most Carvites struggle because they underestimate the hidden dependencies across all the systems. And a, a really solid asset management platform that's interconnected really helps ensure that you can understand that complexity and, and change things in a consistent and and safe way.

Alex: And now you're launching Marine Fintech so you're shifting from a global enterprise execution to quite boutique kind of consultancy. Found a role. What problems in fintech and payments today are the most fixable if I can say that, but only with the right expertise.

Paul: Yeah, it's a good question. It's a bit of, a, bit of a learning curve for me as well at the moment. I founded Marin Fintech back in the second half of last year. I am my own Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Financial Officer. So it's been interesting to. I worked for a startup back in my early career so it's not necessarily new to me. But having worked in a large enterprise for a long time, there's very large teams that provide all of those functions. So starting to get back to building all this from scratch has been really exciting, really great fun. I'm having great fun every day talking to people and trying to answer that question that you just asked Alex. Because Fintech itself is an area where there's always huge amounts of innovation, there's always lots of companies being founded. A lot of, you know, there's lots of startups that fail, that don't get to where they want to get to. But the ones you hear about tend to be things that everyone in the world knows about. So you know, the small percentage of unicorns that do end up being very successful, Fintechs had more than its fair share of those across companies like PayPal, Stripe Square and many, many others. So where I think that there's opportunity for me, for the company that I'm leading at the moment is around what I said at the very start of the conversation. It's around helping with the traditional finance and modernization. Because there's a lot of change happen, there's a lot of change coming. And a lot of the time when I was in that space, when I was leading those large enterprises, I often looked out for people who could help, someone who could come in and help me understand how do I take my 40 year old platform and allow it to interface with all these on and off ramps for cryptocurrency that I'm hearing about or how do I deal with all of these post quantum regulatory changes that are about to come. So for me it's mostly about helping in those areas, being here in the Bay Area, immersing myself into all of the rapid change that's occurring and then translating that back into projects and ways of working that will help the world that I used to work in be able to continue to succeed in a continually changing environment. AI is another great example of the large banks. The large fintechs have really struggled to get the benefits of AI because they were so scared about the potential leakage of information through AI, which is a valid concern. But I think that companies like mine can really help accelerate the onboarding of those new technology solutions. Outside of consultancy, I think that there's going to be a lot of change driven by the convergence of decentralized finance or defi and traditional finance. We're seeing now on a weekly basis people who you would not have expected in the past to be talking about what is effectively crypto now launching their own stablecoins, launching their own digital currency. With the Genius act last year, which really facilitated the ability for large enterprises to start playing in that space because there was then rules and regulations that they could then show the shareholders and show their board of directors that they were, they were meeting. That really opened up the ability for companies to get to grips with how the new technology, the defi space can start to help in the tradfi space, the ones that you're seeing that are most successful, the real pain points in the industry. And it's probably no surprise that cross border money movement is currently one of the biggest areas for growth in the defi and traffic space. Because it's been a challenging area in past few years to move money about through the legacy systems or legacy, not even systems per se, more legacy regulated bodies who dictate how large banks move money between each other through bank to bank transfers. So that is all being ripped up and replaced with startups who are delivering real money movement across the world order with instant settlement and starting to deliver real use cases that banks can see the value of. So I think that's why you're seeing a combination of the there now being regulations that banks can say yes we meet and then starting to see that the evolving of that technology to the point where it is meeting all of the requirements of a tier one bank, which is that it's always on, it's reliable, it's recoverable in the event of an issue. So it's really interesting times in fintech globally and especially here in the Bay Area, where I'm seeing a lot of opportunity in that space that will continue to grow.

Alex: Well, I'd like to wrap this episode up by looking at the future state of financial infrastructure. So if you could design this future state from scratch payments, ATMs, digital cash, AI, you name it, what would you keep and what would you replace and perhaps what would you invent?

Paul: Yeah, okay, so keep. We're definitely keeping cash, Alex. Just you don't want to use it anymore. But the keeping cash is a resilient option. Physical currency is incredibly important to the global economy, to underserved communities, to various different parts of the global ecosystem. So we're keeping cash, but we're going to make sure that it's as easy as ever for the transformation of that cash from physical to digital. That's where in the next few years you're going to see ATMs, which a lot of your audience might have started the podcast thinking that, what's this old guy talking about ATMs for? They're a thing of the past. You're going to continue to see ATMs evolve and continue to see them be a key part of the global payments ecosystem, because no other platform is as good at doing that digital to physical transformation than cashes and ATMs are. So we're keeping cash, but we're going to make sure that there's more places for you to perform your banking without having to go directly to your branch of your bank. So you'll see more utility networks where you can go to a safe location and use an ATM and say a grocery chain. When you're doing your shopping, you'll be able to go to the ATM in the corner and do your deposits as if it's your bank. So I think that's where you'll see a lot of change happening. Ironically, the thing I'd replace, and it's already being replaced, so this is already ahead of me. But I was a big advocate for Bitcoin and crypto back when it started to come out. It was an underlying set of technologies that anyone in the space that I work in, in payments understood immediately as being valuable. So a blockchain with although personal work wasn't part of Bitcoin itself at the start, distributed blockchain to allow instant settlement makes perfect sense. And the underlying technology of crypto is hugely important. Bitcoin itself was unfortunate in that it was the first. It's not fast enough. It's too energy intensive to be the platform going forward. And that was kind of known at the very start. Everyone knew that it would need to be significantly improved in its performance to be able to be a valid payments platform. And that's what we're seeing now with all of the other stable coins and all of the other crypto platforms and blockchains that were invented over the past few years. So we're not replacing Bitcoin per se, we're just going to leave it as what I think it is now, which is digital gold and an asset that people will continue to see value in. But we're not going to build anything on that. And to be fair, the folks building all of the defi platforms aren't building it on block on Bitcoin anymore. They're building it on much more robust platforms. Specifically in the space that I was working, the one thing I would replace is the concept of dynamic currency conversion. Always an area where you know there's value in it. When you, you go abroad and you use an atm, you've got no idea how much is going to be taken from your bank account if you, if you use an atm. So people can be quite reticent to use an ATM abroad because you think you're going to get big, big charges. In some cases you can. So the industry came up with this concept of dynamic currency conversion which will allow you to see exactly what you're doing, pay when you do the transaction. It may be a little bit higher than it would have been if you left it to the card schemes, but it gives you that guarantee. But we named it a terrible thing DCC across both ATM and point of sale. It doesn't make any sense to anyone. If it had been called something like guaranteed rate offer, I think consumers would understand a lot more what it is. But I still go to talking about an ETN here, but I was in a hotel in Scotland a couple of months ago and I was asked what currency I wanted to pay in and the little, the tiny little screen on the Point of Sale device actually had dynamic currency conversion as the header of the screen I was looking at, which doesn't help anyone. I could barely work out what to do and I've been in the industry for 20 plus years. What my. I always had a thing when I was developing technology that was customer facing, which was that my mum should be able to use it and my mum wouldn't have had a single clue what button to press when it came to that screen. So rebrand dynamic currency conversion to Guaranteed rate offer and then nven I think that we kind of covered it earlier that the thing to invent at the moment is a cross border quantum safe, low fee digital settlement layer that blends the best of cash transactions, blockchain and stablecoin and there are several people building several versions of it at the moment. My concern is that we're going to see a lot of smaller players, which isn't a bad thing to be clear. But the industry is going to be overwhelmed with 15, 20, 200, 250 different participants in a global ecosystem which can be really complicated. We'll see the convergence that you always see. We'll see the big guys all start, start acquire things and then there'll be a few providers of that global ecosystem. But I think that's, that's what's needed. We definitely need, we need a platform that is more reliable. Big payments networks still go down far too often. They're still vulnerable to things that aren't their fault, to be fair. So communications platforms going down because somebody accidentally deletes a VLAN somewhere in a subnet and a central router in the middle of a data center somewhere isn't the fault of the payment schemes, but the impact is the entire networking thing. So having a blended solution where everyone wants to be able to perform digital transactions immediately but everyone wants to have the ability to use cash. I think the terminology that the crypto folks have been using for the last few years of on rats and off ramps. We just need to make sure that this still an on ramp or an off ramp for cash and the ATMs are the perfect pre existing ramp that everyone can use, everyone knows how to use and everyone Trusts. So the ATMs being part of that future is something I truly believe in. I look forward to continuing to work in the ATM space, continuing to use ATMs and continuing to use cash for the next 30 years at Macrio. So Alex, thank you for the answers. Been great to talk to you. Thank you for the time today.

Alex: Paul, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and experience building and scaling ATMs and yeah, that's been a great conversation.

Paul: Thank you. And just one final word to you and your audience. Please get out there, use your ATMs and make sure you've got some cash in your pocket in case of emergency.

Alex: All right, thanks, thanks. Thanks for the conversation for the listeners. Thanks for listening to the end as usual. Hit the like button. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and see you in the next episodes.

Paul: Bye bye.