YouSaid · the spoken record

Pierpaolo Barbieri

lines on the record: 60
first: 2021-05-19
most recent: 2021-05-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My best weird work habit is that it's actually a non work habit. Now I really never try to do email in bed. I used to do a lot of email embed and cutting that out has been fantastic to being able to sleep better and create a boundary for your personal life. I think that the importance of sleep is one of those things that has been massively undervalued in the last 30, 40 years with our work obsession. And I God knows I work a lot, but I wouldn't be able to work as I do if I didn't sleep well. And so not doing email on your bed, not doing work on your bed is absolutely essential for that. And that's a relatively new development. And so, you know, I forced myself to actually gap, turn on the coffee machine, open the windows, and only then think about my email.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clears the mind. I work 14, 15 hours every day. And the run is, I think, when I crystallize my best ideas. And I think it's very important to part of the day to really think and clear your head. And I always go in with problems and come out of the run with solutions.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I think that the best way to learn history is to read history. And so I would choose a timeline or time period that you like and read some great books. If you like economic history, I would recommend wages of destruction by twos if you're interested in the Nazi period. I would you want to learn about the First World War, for instance, I would recommend sleepwalkers or Niels Pity of War. Great books teach you a lot on biographies are a great way to get there. Obviously, Chernow's biography of Hamilton has been so widely recommended that it can be more recommended. But lately, I read a fantastic biography of Bismarck. I read a great biography of Gabriele D'Anuncio, the proto-fascist poet. And I think that it could be a great way to read about personal histories if you don't love, as I do, diplomatic or military, how old-fashioned of me, economic history.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Latin America, I think it's a very American idea, which is that in order to spot the best talent, you need to attract people that have to be fully aligned with you. And so I don't know any other Latin American company where over 15% of the company is owned by the management. That allows me to convince all those people that we're in the diaspora to come back to Argentina and change the game with me. And when the big banks try to hire my people, they can offer me great salaries, but they're not going to offer them 1% of Santander. And they're not going to offer them the growth trajectory of what we're building here. And so that's how I've gotten people to quit from Goldman, from JP Morgan, from McKinsey, from Mercatal Libre to join voila and share in the dream. And I think that as a founder, you have to recognize that you don't have all the answers. And so when you build a better team, they improve on your idea. And I think the worst founders are the ones who obsess with their own centrality to the process.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gaul, for lack of a better word, to try to disrupt an industry. And it remains to be seen if I succeed or not. But if it does, it will have something to do with the fact that we wanted to start from scratch and ask the basic fundamental questions in a different way.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I run everything in the company. But the key job is to be to inspire, to set the direction, and to trust people and hire well. And so when you have the better people, the best people, and I've done that in a way that is different from most Latin American founders, because over 15% of the companies owned by the management team, and that excludes me. But that can only be born out of the humility that comes from the idea that I kind of do it myself. I cannot write the code. But I know where we have to go to disrupt the system because historically I've seen it elsewhere. I know what needs to happen to have universal financial literacy and financial education so that people can be integrated into the system. So I want us to take us that way. And I think that in that sense, this unusual background is useful. And some of the best backgrounds for founders are people who come from different industries, from different walks of life that have the”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly unusual on one of my investors said, I broke two rules with you. I never invest in Argentines and I never invest in non-technical founders. So I said, great, fantastic. I think the problem of contingency and understanding contingency in history allows you to be a great founder. And I think that obviously learning and knowing financial history is essential to wanting to disrupt a cartelized group of banks because I've seen it elsewhere and I know what universal banking can do to a society, to its development possibilities, to social mobility, to democratization, as I was saying earlier. But I think that understanding possible paths, and here's a good time to bring up another Borges, the divergent paths of your history and the possibilities of building a product are good for bringing together a team. I think ultimately what a founder does is provide a vision and hire people. I can't claim that I wrote a line of code and I can't claim that”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In wages of destruction, you ended up having 20% to 25% of GDP going into armaments. And that's wholly, you know, you're not going to sell that to the French. So ultimately war was decided upon as early as 1937.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I think that what the Nazis needed from Eastern Europe was different, and yet I think that if Schacht had been able to implement the kind of policies that he wanted to start implementing in 1937 to avoid such large percent of net new GDP going into weapons, they could have had a different type of way out where they could have tried to craft. I'm not saying they would have been necessarily successful, but tried to craft an informal empire over Europe that would have allowed them to reduce the dependence that they had on final armaments. But I don't think that the leadership of the party and at that point of the state would have gone with that because the general conclusion of my book in terms of Nazi economic policy is that unless you really tap the brakes in mid-1937, war was the only possible way out. Because at one point, as Adam Toos wrote,”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less tied to old stigmas, but the civil war was a very dark time and a lot of the crimes were never prosecuted and a lot of the faults were never inquired about. And so they keep coming up in culture, just like the American Civil War is still really important part of American culture. And just like the dirty war in Argentina in the 1970s still defines our politics today. It's not that unique.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a long time ago, but as I say in the introduction of my book, there's a lot of bones hidden beneath the surface. And I think that the civil war itself crystallized many conflicts in Spain that had been brewing for 150 years. And Neil once joked to me that I wrote about Spain because I didn't feel old enough to write about Argentina. But the process of economic decline that Spain endured since the 1830s to the Civil War that culminated in the Civil War between a Republic in Spain that looked to France and a very Catholic conservative Spain that wanted to turn back the clock are still the dividing fault lines of Spanish society today. But at least Moncloa happened, at least democratization happened, at least European integration happened. And so Spain today has a developed open competitive democracy with a developed, open, competitive economy so people can be”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aspects of a liberal large education. And especially when you come from a geography of where I come from and I see what other people studied and how they were closeted into certain ideas very early on, I think that that's an amazing time, an amazing opportunity. And it remains a great luck I had in life to go from Argentina to studying at Harvard, having the friends I did there and what I learned there.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would have been in my first year at Har I would have just encouraged me to make mistakes and to enjoy the years of free inquiry in college. I often worry that the people that are there now don't get the freedom to explore ideas and explore different visions of the world as I did when I was there, at least from the general literature around what is happening in colleges and what kind of dissent is accepted. And I would certainly cherish my time with professors there and the time in the United States. I think it's important to really explore different visions of your life and areas to explore. I arrived at Harvard thinking I was going to do film. I ended up studying history and writing a book about Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War, as you mentioned in the beginning that nobody read, by the way. I've read it. Okay, well, that makes some of you, but I think that it's often undervalued in the world.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will guarantee you that the earlier me would not listen, especially if you were on the banks of the Charles as Borges is on that.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. Borges is my favorite author, and the other is my favorite story. If you haven't read it, you should. It's an amazing inquiry about Heraclitus and who we are, the one we are today or the one we were 34 years ago. It was about him meeting himself on the Charles River. And it makes me want to tell you that my favorite philosopher is Jorge Luis Borges, but I won't.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree. I love Rosario, and I go every time I can. It also has an amazing scene of not just food, but also entrepreneurship.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, first of all, the macroeconomic instability of Argentina, and if you come here with dollars, everything seems quite cheap most of the time, except for the very few times when it seems ridiculously expensive. But generally, it's the amount of Italians that live in Argentina, around 40% of the population is directly or indirectly descendant of Italians. And so there's this attachment to Italian culture and Italian food as a result. And my name should tell you everything you need to know about that.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a strong contender, but I would think El Secreto esus, the secret in her eyes, is my favorite film about Argentina because of what it says about the very difficult period of modernization and in particular the horrors of the last military regime that marked us so much that it still defines our politics 50 years since.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really enjoyed that book. I think he was the right personality at the right time, but ultimately overrated as a political leader. And my Macronista friends will have to forgive me for that.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's my favorite French novelist right now. I think that nobody has been able to epitomize or put in words the angst that have seen over the course of my lifetime in a Europe that feels sometimes aimless and in particular France that feels at odds with the modern world.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another great question. I'm not an expert in Chile. I would think that Chile went a little bit too far in the neoliberal playbook. And there are certain things that in Chile that are private or overwhelmingly private that make it difficult for social mobility to exist. And so the amount of privatization in the healthcare sector and in the education sector make it difficult for families from the lower income quintiles to have the ability to access the services needed to move to the third or second or first quintiles. And so that reduces social mobility. However, you should still think about Chile as an amazing success story of the last 40 years. Development, much lower poverty, much lower hunger, much higher educational achievements. And so I think Chile is still a success story, especially when you compare it to Argentina, which has created net poor people in the last 30 years versus reducing it. But I think it could have been.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Center left and the left, and then it remains to be seen at Bolsonaro can still build an anti-Lula coalition. Who has been trying to build a coalition that is becoming smaller on a resurgent left? And so it's very difficult for Bolsonaro not to give in to spending as much as he can, as fast as he can, to secure re-election next year. And that bodes ill for Brazil's long-term reform since the Cardozo administration. So Brazil is at the risk of throwing out wasting the difficulty and the time spent in lowering inflation and building credibility in its domestic economy by spending too much too fast to stave off Lula's return.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the largest companies in the country by an army person, and everybody's thinking about a coup. And this following day he puts forward a very liberal tax reform plan designed by Gedesh. And so that kind of player has taken over the center-right in a similar way to how Donald Trump hijacked and replaced the elite of the Republican Party in 2015 and 2016. And then on the left, you have a deepening problem of the judicial issues associated with Lavagato, which was a little bit of a Brazilian money polite, going back to the Italian scandal in the early 1990s that imploded the political scenario until Berlusconi appeared in 94. And so you have a vacuum of power. And so Lula has been in jail. Now he's out. And I expect him to form back together the PT, which is the workers' party, the Partios Travalladores. And I think that Lula will become the rallying cry of...”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, Brazil, for Argentina, is a necessary partner. Brazil is at the heart of Mercosur, which should have become a European Union for Latin America, never did, and never embraced free markets in the way that the free trade area of the Americas would have done, but Chavez and Lula and Kirchner stopped it, I think, negatively, affecting the whole region back in 2004, 2005. when Chavez famously said alca, Alca, Al Carajo. I think that what Brazil has is a profound political crisis where you've had a loss of representation on the center-right. So the center-right has been hijacked by Bolsonaro, who has a very free market thinking finance minister in Paolo Geres, but remains somebody that you cannot predict because one day you think that, you know, Bolsonaro is going to do the right thing and then he suddenly replaces the managerial head of Petrobras.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a UK degree or a French degree, what's your incentive to go back? There is no capital. It's hard to hire. The incumbents are powerful. And a lot of the sectors like banking are capitalized. So why am I going to go back? I'm just going to stay in New York, make a better salary, take less of a gamble, and not have to explain to my family why I'm betting my farm in coming back. You know, we've hired a lot of people from Walla that have moved back from the United States or from the UK to work at Walla and they've had to explain to their families why on earth they were headed back to Argentina when they had made it to America. You know, it reminded me of what my forefathers used to say in Italy when you left to Farrell America to make it in America and you certainly never looked back.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interpret in a different way, slightly more negative than yours, which is that there's a lot of the European cultural aversion to the kind of risk inherent in entrepreneurship. And I think that's a bad thing. And so especially when you want to get into the technological sector, which is a less certain sector, a less known sector, a less stable sector where change happens a lot more drastically and rapidly. Think about the last three years in crypto completely changing paradigms and even three years. And so I think that in Latin America, it's less widely accepted that people are going to go into that kind of risk and take that kind of risk. And a lot of the people that are willing to do it just find their way to the United States or find their way to the UK and never come back. And so for instance, we've had a hard time and we've talked about this with many prominent American entrepreneurs, how hard it is to find talent in Mexico. Because unless you are an AR or an RS, if you found your way to an American college or an American business school,”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also because of its availability of a huge domestic market. And a lot of entrepreneurs saying, well, if nothing else, I'm just going to copy that American idea or copy that Chinese idea and bring it to Brazil. And finally, if people are willing to deploy the capital, I think Latin America is generally grossly underinvested outside government bonds and the energy sector.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Francisco, we might sit in New York three, four hours away from Mexico, but we don't look at Mexico. We don't look at Brazil. We don't deploy any capital in Argentina. Please don't bring me your idea if you're based in Argentina. That's too unstable a market for us to invest. And so, you know, in 2019, when we raised our Series C, it was the first time Tenson invested in Argentina. It was the first time that Softbank invested in Argentina. And only the first time in 20 years, that Goldman Sachs invested in Argentina in a real economy play. we represented 96% of all the venture capital funds raised by Argentine companies in 2019. And yes, 2019 was the year when Macri lost a re-election. We can have that conversation. But the truth is that there's a dearth of capital. And you cannot really have entrepreneurship and people willing to take the bet if you don't have readily available capital. And that has changed first in Brazil. Why? Because of its macroeconomic stability, generally speaking.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that, first of all, there's a huge cultural difference in the proclivity of people to go into startups. I think it's only become cool in recent years to become an entrepreneur in Latin America. Even when I grew up in the early 2000s in Latin America, I wasn't very cool. A lot of the people that I've gone abroad from Latin America stay abroad. They don't want to go back. And I live 12 years in America and then return to Argentina to start voila. But those two lead me to a more important point, which is the availability of capital. And so there's a lot of people that want to deploy more capital into Chinese tech or Indian tech. And their relative stability, demographic profiles, and size of domestic markets means that every VC fund that loves risk wants more exposure into those. Whereas for Latin America, that has lagged behind. When we started voila, I can't tell you the amount of funds that tell me, yeah, we might sit in San Francisco.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I think Miami is making strides, but for now, the tech center of Latin America remains Sao Paulo. I mean, the Brazilian companies are five, seven years ahead of the rest of the ecosystems in the region. I think that it's a great place to start a company. And we had credible success stories, starting with my competitor, Newbank, which has started there, as well as Banco Inter or Quinto Andar or Loft, which has started by a friend in college. All those companies are there and there's readily available capital. Everybody wants to invest more in Brazil. And you have a huge domestic market. So as I always say, you know, when you're a Brazilian company, you have zero incentive to go abroad because you have such a large internal market in a way that also the United States does. But, you know, a lot of the internet revolution, if you think back to 1998 and 1990,”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uruguay has a very good economic future. I think it's a very, you know, if you're on a PPP basis, very successful economy, open, small, you cannot really be close when you're that size. And it has a great future exporting digital services to the world. I personally believe that that's what also Argentina should be doing. And that's part of what I did Walla and started Walla here is because I think that Argentina has needs a digital soy. Argentina has had a very efficient agro-exporting sector since the 1860s and 1870s, which led to its fantastic wealth in 1880 and 1890 and 1900. But it hasn't reinvented that model and hasn't reinvented itself. It still has a fantastically good educational system. It creates a lot of interesting companies and great talent. And so it should be exporting services. And I think that's a little bit of what Uruguay is doing with a more pro-market, pro world integration view that is making Uruguay.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Successful he did to bring down inflation, it takes years and it needs a broad consensus because you cannot avoid doing it between one election and the other.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep reforms done in 2001, 2002, but there was a social collapse that led to a very radical change in the Peronist Party and a destruction of the consensus that had existed until then. And suddenly Argentina was able to grow at Chinese rates with no inflation despite fiscal spending because the FX was just so high. And ultimately that was not used as a time to do the necessary reforms for long run economic growth. And a lot of the political timelines and the personalities involved can be blamed for that. But I think we can all agree now 20 years since then that Argentina didn't enact the reforms that Mexico did, that Colombia did, that Peru did. And a lot of it, there's a cultural answer to this, which is that Argentines think that we can take the easy way out. And for these things to be fixed, we cannot. We have to do it as everyone else did with Israel did, with Peru did, what Mexico did to bring down inflation, what Brazil.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think, look, Argentina was an amazingly successful reform story in 1995, 1996, 1997. And so, you know, the convertibility that Domingo Cavallo brought and the liberal presidency of Aperonista, Carlos Menem in the 1990s under the aegis of the Washington consensus was successful. And I think the problem there was that Argentines became enamored of the idea that they were suddenly a rich country that were suddenly developed, that were suddenly had this peg that nothing could touch. And so they kept it too long. And so if Argentina had exited convertibility in 1997 or 1998 after the Russian crisis, let alone after Tequila in 1994, if they had known that they needed to float the currency to avoid an unsustainable fiscal path, then you would have avoided the collapse of 2001, which caught me as a 14-year-old. So I know at firsthand what it is to feel it. I think that there weren't”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is also a great question and one I think a lot about. And first of all, I don't have the magic answer. I wish I did. I think that historically speaking, I think that generally we have oscillated between these two models. And it is not widely understood sometimes in Argentina by certain politicians that eventually if you run persistently large fiscal deficits, you eventually have to monetize them. And demonetization of those deficits leads to inflation in a way that it hurts the people who have the least in society because the rich are able to hold real assets that generally do well in an inflationary scenario. And so the losers of that are the people that end up voting for those policies. But we do have politicians that don't really see that. And even just 10 days ago, there was one very prominent politician that is part of the governing coalition who said, we need lower inflation for the elections.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A wider backing for the kind of reforms that he needed to enact, like Spain did in 1975, if you will, or Chile did after Pinochet having some basic agreement with the opposition that would outlive a defeat in the elections.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consensus. And so I think there is no question that Argentina needs to modify how the state spends money and what's its propensity to have larger fiscal deficits that eventually need to be monetized. And then we restart the process. And so there's a great scholar locally called Pablo Garcunov, who's written a very good paper that analyzes Argentine economic history since the 1950s and sort of shows how we move very schizophrenically between two models, one with a high exchange rate where we all want to export a lot. And then when elections approach, people want a stronger local currency so that we can import a lot and feel richer. And then the two models don't have a wide acceptance on what are the reforms that are needed. And so I think that in retrospect, Macri would say that he didn't seek enough of a bad...”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. There's a very big ongoing debate about that. I think that there was a huge divergence between fiscal policy and monetary policy in the first two years of the macro administration. And so the fiscal consolidation was not done fast enough in 2016 and 2017 and then needed to accelerate dramatically after the taper tantrum, if you want to call it or perceived higher global rates of 2018. And so Macri had to run to the IMF and then do a lot of fiscal consolidation that hadn't been done in 16 and 2017 in 18 and 19. And ultimately, that's why he lost the election. But generally speaking, I think that's the short-term electoral answer. There's a wider answer, which is that I think that many of the deep reforms that Argentina needed lacked or lack wide.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone else, and so that should help you keep staying ahead of the game. And in the steady state diversify away from having 80% revenue from lending institution to a 20% revenue from lending institution, which I think is also from a stability perspective, smarter in a place like Latin America, where historically speaking, you have a lot of potential macroeconomic negative effects.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few platforms and then different platforms are able to channel a variety of services. Tomorrow in Argentina we're launching insurance in partnership with Willis Towers. We're going to be the first FinTech to offer direct access to insurance product on a fintech platform. And so there you want to move faster and offer services that are similar to what the banks do in a more digital way without the associated costs of the banks. But I think eventually there are positive externalities that come with having the best and fullest ecosystem in the same way that Facebook was able to profit from having the network effects of having just a better ecosystem where more people wanted to join. And then economies of scale also help financial institutions because unsurprisingly when you have 10,000 cards, nobody picks up the phone. When you have 100,000 cards, people start picking up the phone and we have 3 million cards, then everybody wants to be your partner and everybody wants to sell services through you. And that means that they want to sell it through you and know.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a fantastic question. I think it depends on a variety of factors. First of all is the macroeconomic stability. And in a place like Argentina, if you only depend on loans, there are times when you have a recurrent crisis. And if you have a crisis every 10 years that used to be the norm or a crisis every four years, your whole lending book could blow you up if you don't have access to any other type of fees. And that is why, historically speaking, Argentine banks have pivoted in and out of lending a lot very regularly. In a more stable economy, I think it depends on the kind of quality of the ecosystem that we have and what kind of competition exists out there. So I could have a very profitable asset management business on its own, but it's less defensible. And so eventually there's going to be more competition and more people are going to get into that business. And so eventually, I think the value is in the whole ecosystem. And that's something that we can learn in the new steady state that we learned from China, where people want to have all their money managed in very”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutions in Spain that don't charge opening fees, maintenance fees, renewal fees that do so in Latin America and places like Mexico or Colombia or Argentina, where every time you go to the bank, they charge you for an opening fee or a maintenance fee or a renewal fee. So we insert competition and we do it with radically lower costs because we lower the cost of running a financial entity by 85%. Why? Because we don't have any branches. We don't have any of the fiscal infrastructure. We don't do our credit history on paper as the banks still do in Latin America. And we give an account to everyone. And so that gives us an economy of scale that other people just cannot have and the banks don't move fast enough.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you need to end up lending. I think that lending eventually becomes 20 to 30 percent of your revenue share. That's what we project five years from now. But it's not, you know, there are other fintechs that rely more heavily on that because they don't have a full ecosystem. And so if you look at the Chinese players like Baba and Tencent, Tencent full disclosure and is an investor in voila, you don't need to rely on lending for so much if you have a very good payments product and if you have fee earning products on the asset management side or on the merchant acquiring side, in fact merchant acquiring for instance what Square does is more profitable on a per dollar invested than lending is even in geographies like Argentina where lending is very has very low competition. The problem at the core is what you said. There's cartelized banks that never wanted competition, that always charge for things that were never a reality in the developed world. It's the same.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Side, which is kind of reverse square. And Square started with merchants and then it went into personal accounts. We started with personal accounts and eventually moved into merchants. But all those transactions are amazingly profitable. And we are once again the most competitive player in the system because lo and behold, the only player that existed in Argentina doing merchant acquiring at this level, giving you live transactionality, used to charge 6% of every transaction versus 2% that you pay in the United States. Why? Because there was no competition. So what did we do? We launched a product that was 45% cheaper than the competitor. And guess what? We're growing 100% month on month. And so we have a suite of products that allows us to be competitive and drive a lot of revenue without having to lend deposits.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From lending. In fact, most of the revenue we derive is either from the very low fees that we charge on asset management, which are the lowest in the market, which charge less than one-fifth of our competitors. Because I'm sure you're not going to be surprised when I tell you that in Argentina and in Mexico, the incumbents charge 45% fees on AUM just to give you a low risk money market fund because inflation's high. And so they charge you egregious fees. Second, we make quite a bit of money on interchange. In that sense, we are more similar to the United States than we are to the European neobanks because interchange in Latin America is quite high. And so we can make a lot of revenue just by having those MasterCard transactions on our network versus someone else's network. And thirdly, we're also in the business of merchant acquiring, which is growing a lot. And so once we've built the network on the payment side, we can build the network on the merchant.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fantastic question. So it depends on the geography and it depends on what we do. First of all, we operate like a narrow bank. We can have the argument about whether I should be regulated as bank or not. In fact, it was reported on Friday that we bought a traditional bank, although we are waiting for central bank approval to integrate it because obviously you need central bank approval. But we've always operated 100% of reserves. So we never lent out deposits. And so the rule in Argentina has been if you operate with 100% of reserves and legally you don't lend those deposits. you do not need to be regulated like a bank. Why can I have a business model that relies on that? First of all, we do have lending, but we do it with investors' money. We don't do it with our deposits. So the deposits are kept on separate accounts that are never lent because otherwise I would violate the rule by the central bank and therefore I would have to be regulated by the central bank as a bank. And so unlike other fintechs, we don't derive most of our income.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For something on Steam, buy something on Mercatal Libre or Amazon. None of those platforms take crypto. And so the day after tomorrow, when they do, maybe there's an argument to be had, but only, you know, it's not that first transaction you do when you digitize to go buy a Tesla line Bitcoin. It's quite rare.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, Mexico has pretty good financial stability, at least since we see very high levels of adoption in places like Venezuela and Argentina for crypto. I respect that. I think Bitcoin is a very useful store value. Not great to transact on your daily needs. I don't remember ever seeing anyone pay for a coffee in Bitcoin. And those people who used to sell coffees in 2011 for Bitcoin, now they want to forget about those transactions given what they missed out on. There could be a crypto option and I think it's part of the ecosystem. But when you think about it, when 50% of adults have never had a payment mechanism, what they want to do when they first get it is sign up for Netflix, sign up for Spotify, pay for a game on PlayStation.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All those financial services that are readily available in the developed world, in the developing world that are really interesting cost structure.”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and the same in Argentina, and the same in Brazil, where another company like Nubank is triumphing. And so what we see is a Latin America where we need a lot of people to provide those services so then we can build the credit history and we can insert some competition into a system that had been kept for very few people by a few people. And so I always say the same thing. We ask the public to believe in democracy and capitalism and then we don't even give them a way to pay for Netflix. And so it's very inherently unequal situation where we, you know, when we launched Wala in Argentina, people used to sell Netflix subscriptions on our eBay, which is Mercatol Libre. And that's outrageous because Netflix prices their services to be freely available to anyone for these geographies for four or five dollars a month. And yet they couldn't access it because they didn't have a payment mechanism. And so the payment mechanism opens the door to a credit history, to savings funds, to insurance, to make”
2021-05-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Pierpaolo Barbieri on Latin American FinTech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source