How International Payroll Can Solve the Last Mile Problem

Albert Owusu-Asare:

One of the biggest challenges is that when I pay a worker around the world, it goes through intermediary banks. A big multinational bank would pass it on to a regional bank. That regional bank will pass it on to some sub-regional bank, and then all the way it trickles down. It's like a game of telephone, if I may. And by the time it gets to the worker, time has already passed and about five to 7% of their earnings are gone.

Steve Smith:

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Work Tech Weekly. I'm Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap.

If you live in a Venmo world, money feels instant. You send it. It lands.

Now try paying someone in Lagos. That paycheck gets passed from bank to bank before it reaches the worker. It's a game of telephone with somebody's rent money. It shows up days late and five to seven percent lighter. And the payroll system that sent it marks the job complete.

Payroll has a delivery problem. Nobody in the industry likes to say it out loud.

My guest is Albert Owusu-Asare, co-founder and CEO of Cadana. Cadana builds global payroll and payments infrastructure that other work tech platforms run on. Albert grew up in Ghana and built software at Goldman Sachs. He also studied astrophysics, which makes him one of the few people I'd trust to explain stablecoins without my eyes glazing over.

We talk about the difference between calculating payroll and actually paying people. And we get into why AI might finally make true global payroll possible.

If you work anywhere near global payroll, this conversation will change how you think about the last mile.

Let's get into it.

Albert, welcome to the podcast.

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Thank you, Steve. Good to be here.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, I'm really glad to have you join us 'cause I'm very interested to talk to you about everything that you're working on, but also your background. You went from studying exoplanet atmospheres to building global payroll infrastructure. So what's the through line there, if there is one?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I'll take you maybe one step before that. So, you know, born and raised in Ghana, West Africa. Came to the US at age of 17, first time on a plane, went to Iowa of all places for school. And so, you know, when you imagine America, you're thinking of skyscrapers, and Des Moines and cornfields was not the image you have, but ended up going to Grinnell, you know, and met my co-founder there, met my wife there. So I think Iowa brought a lot of joy in general.

And at Grinnell, was one of the few physics, computer science double majors. The only other one, actually there were two, is my co-founder now, Ameer. And astrophysics was just something that came very natural to me.

Worked on very interesting things there. Did a paper with NASA my third year or so, and so the direction for my life at that point in time was astrophysics, while Goldman Sachs came calling for an internship my third year. And my friends have a joke internally of whether that was a sellout call or not, but that ended up being a great summer on Wall Street working for a global bank.

Ended up doing very interesting things over there with software engineering, and then I never looked back from there. So my journey has just been Ghana, Iowa, Goldman Sachs, software engineering, and then, you know, that has ultimately led me to starting and building Cadana as well.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, both you and your co-founder came from, I guess, what we would, you know, call emerging markets.

And one of the things that I think has definitely changed about work tech over the past 10 years is the opening of sort of the global talent markets. And you're seeing not just companies in North America or Western Europe, but you're seeing companies literally all over the world that are emerging, and talent from those markets as well, you know?

But I mean, and I don't have to tell you this 'cause we're gonna talk about it quite a bit, it's also opened up the ability for global talent to compete on a global stage. And it's also opened up the opportunity to pay across borders, which, there's a lot of complexity to that. It's just, you know, when you think about paying people across borders for maybe employers that haven't done it or don't understand the complexity, what is it that people just don't get about how complex it is?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah. Yeah. It's such a great question and, you know, the vision and a mission for us at Cadana was, it's still a part of the story that I said earlier. I feel that I have lived my version of the American Dream, right? Being able to come from Ghana, you know, come to the US, work on Wall Street. But the truth of the matter is there were people in my high school that were way smarter than I was.

The difference was that I was able to afford the SAT and immigrate from the country. And so the thing that is nice about remote work and the ability to hire anyone from anywhere is that it allows really smart people and really brilliant people to stay put right where they are and live their version of the American Dream, right? And so it's such a great equalizing force, if I may.

And one of the things that was interesting within that is we did a study when we started the business, and we surveyed a couple hundred workers in these markets, whether it's Nigeria, Ghana, you know, Southeast Asia, those parts of the world. And we found out that on average, a remote worker was taking care of about five family members. And so when they get their salaries, they're obviously, you know, paying for housing, food, but they're also helping their families, their cousins, they're paying for school fees. And so that story is so impactful.

And what we talk about a lot is the impact. I don't think this is anything not obvious, but the velocity of money starts to matter. Because if that money does not get to that Nigerian worker and there is a medical bill that they need to pay on that day, today being Friday, July the 31st, for example, if they don't get paid on time, that might mean a family member can't afford, you know, to pay for their hospital bills.

So the quantum of money matters, and that's very obvious, but the velocity of money, of how fast they can receive those payments, have implications that go beyond just they being able to do the things that they want to do, right? And so that's the framing for this. So now when you are a worker and your colleague in Amsterdam gets paid today, but you have to wait five days to receive your money, there is just an injustice in that feeling, right? You wanna be able to get paid as fast and as equally in full as possible. And that's not the reality today for those workers.

So, I know that's a long-winded way, but I think that framing is important. And so one of the biggest challenges is that when I pay a worker around the world, it goes through intermediary banks. A big multinational bank would pass it on to a regional bank. That regional bank will pass it on to some sub-regional bank, and then all the way it trickles down. It's like a game of telephone, if I may. And by the time it gets to the worker, time has already passed and about five to 7% of their earnings are gone.

And so that is just a reality for a hundred million workers around the world today, and that's what we are setting out to help fix.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, and thanks for that explanation, because I think that, you know, for, you know, those of us who live in sort of like the, you know, PayPal, Cash App, Venmo world, where it's just like the transfer of money is instantaneous, I think that there's not necessarily an appreciation for how much friction there is with moving money through payments.

And I think there's also, you know, in work tech, when you think about payroll, you don't necessarily think about payments. You think about those as being sort of two different things. In terms of explaining a little more about, you know, the differences and similarities between payroll and payments, what are sort of some things that would be helpful to keep in mind for those of us in the audience who may not understand that?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah. It's a great question. So payroll is this question of computation. I know that Steve needs to get paid, and when I hired Steve, this is the amount that we agreed on their contract, and I have to work backwards from there to figure out what does he actually earn, what comes into his pocket.

As you know, there are different counterparties, including the government, that have to get a piece of that. And so what payroll is, is really just a computation problem of what are all these counterparties and what pieces go to those counterparties, including Steve, you know, themselves. And so that's what it is.

And you can think about the output of payroll, when people say they're running payroll, as an Excel sheet, okay? And in Excel, there are rows. The rows are the people. The columns are basically all those counterparties and what is going to each of them. There will be a column for net pay. The net pay is what comes into your pocket. That column everybody's used to 'cause that ends up in your Wells Fargo, your Chase, and that's great.

Now, payroll technically ends when you figure out who gets what. Now on the execution side, it's how those counterparties receive their money. And so in the US, you might be using a big bank to route that money to your Chase. But remember that there are other counterparties. There's state, there's tax authorities, there might be the federal government. And globally, you multiply that by a hundred countries. Each of them have their own jurisdictions.

So the relationship there is that computation tells you what each counterparty should get. Execution and the rails tells you how those counterparties get their money, right? So those two things are intertwined because you can't just compute and call it good. You have to do the last mile of paying each of those counterparties as well. Does that make sense?

Steve Smith:

That totally makes sense. And I think that's an excellent explanation of it. You know, I think that, you know, just the getting through the payroll part of it, I mean, there's obviously a lot of complexity there when you're getting the global payroll. But I think that, you know, there's also, it's also worth keeping in mind that's just the first part of the equation. So I think that explanation is really helpful.

Well, and so, you know, you went from a startup that was solving, you know, credit access through rental payments to start Cadana, about solving payment speed and access globally. What's the connection between those two ideas?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

That's a great question, Steve. The connecting tissue is, what I realized building in the credit domain was that there is untapped potential when it comes to income. In terms of, you can underwrite a lot of things if you know how much someone is getting paid and if they're actually getting paid.

Okay. And so payroll was this very interesting domain to me because I couldn't understand why, for example, like I said, when I was getting paid a good amount of money, I could not get a credit card in the US. It's like, well, you could just look at my pay stub. Understand that I'm not as risky as you think I am. And so that was just me pulling down that thread of how do you do credit in a very interesting way.

And so our history actually, when we started out, originally as an earned wage access business in emerging markets. And so we said to ourselves, the payday lending domain is so bad, you know, you know all the history there. If we can build something that's more forward leaning in markets like Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Brazil, Bangladesh, Nepal, that can essentially eradicate this really bad industry around payday lending, then that'll be a good thing to do. So that was the connecting tissue there.

So we started out with earned wage access. Then over that, we realized the ADPs of those markets don't really exist to begin with. We followed that thread, started building payroll infrastructure, and then layered on top of it payments. And then, you know, we get to where we are. So it's all intertwined. Believe me, I know it doesn't feel like it is, but it's just this constant pursuit of how do you give people a better life, and how do you give them much more rapid access to their money so that they don't have to resort to things like payday lending and going for, you know, predatory types of credit.

Steve Smith:

Well, and I'm glad you brought up the whole earned wage access thing, because in my opinion, that's been one of the most amazing developments in payments and payroll over the past 10 years or so. And I know that there's a lot of misunderstanding around it, where there are, you know, I was gonna say some people and entities, but also in the United States, you know, state governments and tax entities that are struggling to separate it from payday lending. What's your take on earned wage access, both as a payments professional, but then also, you know, given the mission of your company?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah. You know, we've evolved a lot since we started. But a lot of that consumer desire is still there, and it's in our DNA today. An example of this is when you get paid on Cadana, you might be getting paid into your Chase today, but a lot of folks around the world, they're getting paid through what we call the Cadana Wallet.

And this is a multi-currency, stablecoin-backed wallet that essentially is acting almost like a financial hub for the worker. And in that wallet, we have things like earned wage access embedded into it. But we also have things like virtual cards. We also have things like ability for workers around the world to even buy tokenized stocks of Nvidia and so forth.

So the larger category here for us is how do you go from a payroll system to a system that allows workers to do more with their money, and earned wage access is just one way to do that. Now, the thing about earned wage access is it's a bit of a bug, not a feature, because you don't have that problem if people are able to get their money fast and on time.

One of the issues around the monthly payroll cycle is that you get paid once a month in a lot of jurisdictions, but your expenses don't fluctuate. That hospital bill is not, you know, once a month, right? That child that just has their school fees paid in the middle of the month. So you have this thing where your expenses are during the month, but then you're getting paid at the end.

And so in a world, for example, where your wages were able to be streamed as real time every day as possible, you don't need a whole industry built right around earned wage access. So, it's really one of those things where I think what we've realized is we have to innovate around the problem of just faster access to money, giving people ability to use their money for different parts of their financial journeys. And so we've taken a bit of a holistic approach, right, to the problem versus, you know, solving just that particular point problem today at Cadana.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know what I think is also interesting about, you know, what you're working on is that Cadana really is a good example of what's exciting about payroll right now. I mean, payroll for a lot of, even sort of like the SaaS era, was, you know, not that exciting. You know, it was great. We're going to take manual processes and we're gonna put them in the cloud.

But it really seems like over the last decade or so, there has been the ability of payroll to jump into a lot of other categories, like earned wage access. You're talking about stablecoin, you're talking about, you know, global payroll and payments. And when I look at it, what I'm kind of excited about, especially when I look at your company, what is neat about it is it's very much an employee-first or worker-first view of the world, you know?

So, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, how what you're doing is really more than just administering a payment. It's really about almost, in some ways, advocating for the worker and putting the infrastructure to work for them.

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah, it's the irony of the industry, because the literal existence of the word payroll is how do you pay someone? And I think somewhere along the way, we started interpreting that as a database and a pretty UI, almost like a CRM where you just store some records about people.

And I think what happened in the evolution of the industry is we started building, you know, workflows, reports, security, data privacy, which are all great things, but we start to forget about the person that should actually remain core and central. And so again, because of the way that we started with our business, that has continued on, where we have this core, and the core is the employee, and we've built around the employee. And that's what makes it interesting.

Steve Smith:

Well, and I think what's interesting is, like, a lot of companies in the payment space are more consumer oriented. And, you know, Cadana really is taking a straight ahead, you know, you're talking about selling to talent marketplaces, to staffing platforms, to payroll providers. You know, what's the trade-off to being, you know, the infrastructure instead of that consumer-facing brand?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah, we are super excited about that opportunity. And the thing about infrastructure is, you know, I mentioned the too-many-hands-in-the-pot problem. That was just payments. Now when you go to the global world, things like gross-to-net computations, things like how do I pay the tax authority in Peru? Things like how do I pay the Kenya Revenue Authority? Those also are equally fragmented.

And so you have this situation, Steve, where when you go global, payments is one horizontal. Governmental filings is another horizontal. The payroll and the decision engines are another horizontal. And all of these today are being handled by fragmented players. And so to even begin to automate, what you end up doing is you end up building a number of integrations.

We've built, you know, a hundred-plus integrations in payments alone. And what we do is we go and we set up subsidiaries around the world. We hook into the local rails. So when money moves at Cadana, it's a perception of money actually traveling across the borders. In reality, because we have all these hubs, we're able to just move the money locally, right?

So that's just payments. And then say I wanted to go further with automation. I would have to build the same thing on the payroll compliance side of things. I have to figure out what my gross-to-net engine is in Philippines, in Brazil, in Bangladesh. And you start going through that journey and you say, okay, now I also want to do my consumer financial features. We talked about the worker being important. Now you're gonna have to figure that out on a country-by-country basis.

Steve Smith:

That's interesting because, like, you know, there has been, you know, for a lot of even the cloud era, just like payroll, you know, very few, you know, vendors could do it. SAP could do it. ADP could sort of do it. But it was sort of the appearance of, oh, you're able to pay globally. But really it is, there's a little bit of tech, and then there's a whole lot of, like, you know, connections to, you know, basically payroll bureaus in specific countries.

And I know that of late, you've had different, you know, brands like Rippling and Deel that are coming up and saying, we're, you know, we're gonna build true global payroll infrastructure for every country, which sounds great. But then when you kind of know how things kind of work behind the curtain, you understand just how complex that is. What do you think has maybe changed, you know, based on your experience, that could make, you know, truly kind of global payroll possible for the first time?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

It's such a great question. And when we started out with our automation journey, we started out with a payments horizontal, and we've done a ton of work there. And the next horizontal we wanted to take on was the in-country compliance, basically the work that the payroll bureaus you mentioned, Steve, are doing.

And there's just a few big problems there. The first is that you have to figure out what the rules are, what are the statutes in these countries to begin with, and then you have to codify those statutes. And as soon as you do that, there's a rug pull moment where something changes. Then you have to do that again, and then you get rug pulled again. You have to do it again.

And so eventually what happens is that companies start to go on that automation journey, and they figure out, why am I paying engineers money to codify something that keeps changing every second? You know what, I'm better off just using the payroll bureau. And they get it done, and it's not automated. It's not nice, it's not sexy, but it gets the work done. And then they give up.

But a couple of things have changed since 2023. The first is now we have AI. What that allows us to do is to be able to understand these statutes a lot faster. So we've integrated with so many different public data providers, with governmental institutions themselves. We're able to take in these rules, understand a lot faster than we could well before 2023.

And the thing is, those opportunities are there for everyone, right? Anyone can do so. The real competitive moat here is no longer understanding the statutes, because anyone can hook up a Claude and figure that out. But the competitive moat becomes, again, how do you do that and also execute the payments to the government? How do you do that and pay the worker?

So it's becoming a real opportunity, because the hardest part of really understanding the statutes is, over time, getting better. And every new model upgrade by Claude makes that problem a lot easier. But the verticalization, right, the too-many-hands-in-a-pot problem, still remains. And so companies like Cadana are taking a very vertical approach. We're saying we're gonna solve the payments piece, we're gonna solve the computation piece, but we're also gonna solve the last mile delivery, right, to the governments. That entire stack is super hard.

The other thing I'll say is, you know, what happens over time is when each of these payroll bureaus are being automated in silos, the signal you get and the learnings you get from when things may not go the way you wanted it to also gets siloed. Remember that over time, what this is, is just expertise, 'cause what people wanna buy from you is trust. And when you are not really getting those signals, it's like you're not able to learn from them.

And so now those signals are fragmented in every single country, but pulling it all together under one brand and one platform, like a Cadana, means that a learning from Germany can be applying, say, wait a minute, is this type of thing also happening here? Is that type of thing happening here? And those data silos now are all compressed under one infrastructure, under one roof, with AI, makes the world a little bit more possible to automate than the world before 2023. So those are some of the key "why now" types of changes for why this is possible.

Steve Smith:

Well, and I mean, it's interesting you brought up the word trust, because that's an idea and a concept that has definitely been coming up a lot in the AI era, and not always in a positive way. But what you just described is something that, I mean, does seem like a net positive for a company and ultimately for the worker. I mean, are you seeing the same kind of issues around trust, and is that something that you and your team actively talk about and wrestle with as you're building your products?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. In our world, trust is everything. And this is also why a lot of folks in our industry, and finance operators, they get a little bit not as comfortable when they hear the word AI. There are a lot of companies out there today promising AI-native payroll. But what people are really buying is not the prefix before payroll.

They're not buying global payroll or AI-native payroll. They're buying trust. They're buying accountability. They want to look you in the eye and say, you are gonna get this done and you're not gonna screw up. And by the way, they also want to be able to point to you when things go wrong and say, it's your fault, figure it out.

And so I think this is the thing that people ought to remember, that the technology waves are gonna be there. And we apply all of those. We're one of the first to pay into things like M-Pesa, which is your T-Mobile basically being your bank. We were literally one of the first in the world to pay workers into that payment channel. We were one of the first to build, you know, financial solutions backed by stablecoins before it became popular two years ago. We are also now one of the first to pioneer an AI-driven workflow to make things better.

So don't get me wrong, I'm a technologist first, but what we have learned is that people are not buying technology per se. They're buying accountability. And that comes with also how you show up when things don't go right. It comes with the urgency that you take when they ping you and they say, hey, can you help me with this? Hey, I'm seeing something that I don't understand.

So we obsess about getting to our customers very fast. We obsess about owning up when things don't go the way we should be going. And then we obsess about just making sure that the human part of the game is also shown. So every single person is interacting with an account manager. Every single customer gets to meet with us every couple weeks, or at least once a month.

Those types of things is really what increases the confidence around trust. And then when you have that as a foundational layer in culture, and you have the technology underneath, then you have magic, right? That's what we're building at Cadana.

Steve Smith:

Well, you know, let's talk a little bit about stablecoins, because this has gone very quickly from, you know, talk of it in payroll as that's super niche, to really becoming no longer optional. For those of us in the listening audience that maybe don't understand exactly what is stablecoin and why does it matter to payroll, what's the simplest possible answer to that?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

A good question. Let's see.

Steve Smith:

This is where the astrophysicist part really comes in handy.

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah, exactly. So this is where, you know, I want to just drill down to the essence of what this is, and the essence of what this is: programmable money. And that even sounds buzzwordy, but it's really a question of access.

And one of the things we say at Cadana is that the world is increasingly global. The genie is out of the box. We are not going back to a place where people are not traveling. We are not going back to a place where people are not on TikTok, understanding different cultures. We just went through the World Cup. What a beautiful sight to see all these people come to the US. We saw the Norwegian team, we saw the culture. We saw the Scottish people, we saw my homeland, Ghana.

So this is the truth of where we are today. The world is only gonna get more and more interconnected. So that's the foundation. And then when it comes to money, the question then is, how does that interconnectedness show up when we have borders, and borders have currencies, and those currencies are very hard to sort of move around because those are very jurisdictional in nature.

And that problem has already been solved, because there's something like the reserve currency of the world, USD. I'm not even getting into stablecoins. Today, a lot of countries buy oil, they trade with things like the USD. They trade with things like euros. They trade with things like pounds. So we already have a bit of a vocabulary just around a shared sense of base currencies, I'll call it, that the world can transact in.

The problem is that access to those currencies becomes very hard. So the promise of stablecoins is that it digitizes those core currencies that we all are familiar with, and it makes it easy for someone in Nigeria to have access to that stablecoin as easy as you, Steve, or I, walking into a Chase and getting dollars out of our ATM.

So the core problem that it solves is really access, and the democratization of base currencies that we can exist and trade with as global citizens. That's, I think, the simplest way that I can try to explain. Lemme know if I did a good job there.

Steve Smith:

No, two thumbs up. That was great. I think that, you know, the other element to it is, you know, I think for years we've been talking about, you know, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, and a lot of the people I've been talking to said, you know, crypto and Bitcoin in and of itself is probably not gonna be the thing that is really innovative about it. It's the infrastructure that it's built on, it will have the most application.

And it seems like stablecoin is sort of the realization of that, because when you think about kind of the up-and-down nature of most cryptocurrencies, it's really built on a belief, which, you know, it might be around. And as we've seen it with Bitcoin, where it was at 120,000, then it's like, it's 60,000. Who knows what it'll be next week. But that's sort of been sort of the downside.

But with stablecoin, you get the benefits of cryptocurrency, but it's backed by, you know, bona fide securities like US treasuries or other, you know, established financial assets that take the variability out of it and make it, I guess, stable. Did I get that right?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

You got that right. You got that right. And the thing is, I just remember a couple years ago, you know, during COVID, and inflation was on the rise in the US, and everybody was, you know, rightfully talking about 4%, 3% interest rates. And, you know, there are parts of the world today, Steve, that are, you know, 10%, 20% inflation.

So if you say you're gonna build a global payroll product, you ought to help those folks also hedge against the ups and downs of their own currencies. And so stablecoins and global payroll particularly is intertwined, again, because each of those global citizens working remotely, they want to be able to hold their currencies, make sure that it's stable, make sure that it's not moving up and down.

So the beautiful thing about Cadana is that we have this stablecoin-linked wallet. You can get paid as a remote worker. You leave your money in USDC, USDT, and when you wanna go to the restaurant and pay for something, you convert. When you want to pay for a hospital bill, you convert. And so you don't have this situation, again, the banking analogy, where your money automatically converts to something that's gonna lose value 40% in a year. You're able to hold it.

So I think it's so applicable in the payroll space, more than people actually, you know, talk about. And I can see a future where you cannot be a global payroll provider if you don't offer some type of stablecoin features for your workers.

Steve Smith:

I think that sort of the next question for me is that you look at stablecoins as, you know, two years ago, it was something that was so cutting edge that, you know, there was a lot of skepticism. Two years from now, I mean, as fast as things are moving, it could be a commodity, you know. If that comes to pass, I mean, you know, how much of that eats into what makes Cadana differentiated? What sort of, you know, what sort of your moat and the thing that is truly differentiated about you?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

Yeah. It's a great question. The theme that keeps coming up with all of these topics is that global payroll is a coordination problem. It's a coordination problem across all these domains, because the promise we make in the industry is making it seem like a payment to Amsterdam is as easy as a payment to Singapore, or computing payroll in, you know, Singapore is as easy as computing payroll in Buenos Aires.

The reality is there are borders. Each of these borders have their own laws. Each of them have their own different reasons to set up things the way they are. And so what it really is, is making something seem very ubiquitous that is very complicated behind the scenes.

And so the moat is not any one of these sectors. The moat is our ability to take out all that mess and those coordination issues, present it in a very unified infrastructure so that our customers don't get to deal with it. So again, we are solving problems across all the verticals so that our customers don't have to solve them horizontally, one by one.

And so the moat becomes just the compounding effect that we get from time. All those flows, up from the worker finance to computations across jurisdictions, to being able to pay workers, to being able to pay governments, and putting all of that up under one platform, that is extremely hard to do. And I wager that we have a head start, and there's nobody today that is able to do, you know, all that we do in a very unified manner that we do today.

Steve Smith:

I do have a couple more questions for you. One is, with everything you just said, Albert, does that mean that stablecoin is the thing that removes the bottleneck to instant global payroll, or is instant global payroll something that is on the horizon, you know, regardless?

Albert Owusu-Asare:

I think stablecoins are tackling a big part of the way that money moves fast. But ultimately, to automate payroll, you have to digitize the manual backend process, the things that you don't see: the in-country partners, the accounting firms, the Excel, the emails, the spreadsheets. Okay. So it's an equation.

Automating payroll equals jurisdictional intelligence, like knowing the rules, and then execution, right? So jurisdictional intelligence plus execution equals payroll automation. And stablecoins are helping with some of the execution part of the problem. But ultimately, you still need to know what those jurisdictions are and how they operate. And then the combination of that is the secret sauce.

And so that's the way that we are thinking about our roadmap. That's the way that we're building, is by solving the execution problems, which stablecoin helps with, but also solving the jurisdictional intelligence problem, which is all of the know-how and the local expertise that we're building up over time.

Steve Smith:

Albert, thanks so much for the conversation today. This has been eye-opening for me, and I am incredibly impressed with what you've been able to build. I wish you nothing but the best of luck in the future, and I have no doubt that we're gonna be hearing a lot more from both you and the company.

Albert Owusu-Asare:

No. Thank you so much. It is such a fun time, and hopefully we can do this again at another point.

Steve Smith:

For years, the industry treated payroll as a math problem. Figure out what everyone is owed and call it a day.

Albert calls it "the irony of the industry." Payroll is supposed to be about paying someone. Somewhere along the way, it turned into a database with a nice interface.

That works fine until the work crosses a border. Then the calculation is the easy part. The money still has to reach the worker and the tax authorities in every country involved. Each one has its own rules. Those rules keep changing.

The good news is that AI is actually helping. Reading and updating the rules gets easier with every model release. Moving the money is still the hard part. That takes local rails in every country and someone willing to own the whole chain.

And at the end of that chain sits a person. Someone paying school fees and hospital bills for an extended family. For them, five days late is a lot more than an inconvenience.

The companies that win the next decade of global payroll will be the ones that remember who's waiting on the money. A slick dashboard doesn't get anyone paid.

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