The Better Money Company raises $10M to build a stablecoin clearinghouse for traditional payments companies

don't know. Uh anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room. Let's bring in Sam Brona from Better Money. Sam, how you doing?

I'm doing great, guys. First guest of the day. This is fantastic.

Yes.

Starting the week off strong.

And kick us off. We The whole problem uh we we're facing is there's not enough noise. There's not enough uh soundboard. So, kick us off with your news so I can slam the gong as hard as possible.

Well, look, we we raised $10 million to build a stable coin clearing house. We're h Yeah, hit that gong.

Um, yeah, we're here to solve the problem of doing payments with stable coins and making stable coins really work for payments companies.

Okay, but back up and explain what is what what is a clearing house broadly? Give me like the trap. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you use clearing houses all the time. Like when you do an AC, you're going from you're sending money from one bank to another bank. Yeah. Um

this is uh a clearing house is just how you connect financial institutions. There's a bunch of them. They're used frequently in in payments.

Uh today, just so you guys know, for stable coins, when you want to go from one stable coin to another,

it's the equivalent of if you had to like sell Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars. And we know that's not how payments work. you probably have an intuitive understanding for that. Uh, and if you're a trad company, you're confused by this. And so we solve that problem. We make uh stable coins sort of work how trad payments companies expect them to work.

And

okay. And is that is that going from USDT to USDC or there are a bunch of other pairs? What pairs actually matter?

Yeah, there's a bunch of pairs. So we support uh the genius build compliant stable coins and we work with a bunch of the stable coin issuance platforms like bridge like Braille we can work with um Agora M0 and FRA and so we have a bunch of great partners that uh that we support their stable coins

and walk me through the background how you got to this moment launching the company all that. Yeah. So, I uh I worked at the Boston Fed on their stablecoin initiative. Pretty tradent institution uh and loved that experience. And then I was an investor at Andrea Horowitz crypto for three years. Priced off 300 Andre Explain Andre Horitz.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, A16.

Wait, what was the Boston Fed project technically like a CBDC?

Yeah, it was. It was It's kind of controversial, by the way. real stable coin land. They don't love CBDC's but uh it was very interesting.

Have have it feels like the CBDC movement has like very much lost momentum. Is that your read or do you think there will be like a resurgence and central banks will actually play a role in the stable coin ecosystem maybe a few years down the line.

Yeah. I think that stable coins work well now and the fact that you can send any amount of money anywhere for a fraction of a penny. Yeah,

is good thing and so the need might have dried up like private stable coins that are well regulated are working.

Are there are there people in government who who are still like oh we got to get you know the Fed to control this like we just like as a matter of like political ideology like the the the Fed must h must have control over uh the issuance of of something that looks like US dollars. I I don't think that's a huge narrative right now. Mostly because when you go to a bank like you're you're relying on their balance sheet to do your banking. So there's the Fed doesn't really get involved with everyday consumer payments anyway. They like to work through these institutions. There's this big bill called the Genius Act that came out in in July of 2025 that sets for the regulatory tone for for stable coins. and and it builds into that that meta like the Fed expects to work with other institutions to make payments happen.

Yeah. Yeah. Walk through the the genius you said it's uh it's like be still being implemented like we've covered it a few times but like where are we in the roll out and like the calcification of the actual law and rules that will all be downstream that like wind up getting implemented into stable coin platforms.

Okay. Yeah. So July the legislation comes out and it has really widespread bipartisan support.

Over the last few months the rules are now getting made more specifically like you know literally how do you do the accounting? What is the compliance obligation? Where's the money have to sit?

Um the more interesting thing though is that uh big companies now feel very ready to adopt stable coins. We hear about multiple RFPs for stable coin projects a week. You get to work with smart people.

Yeah.

Uh and that's actually sort of break neck pace for these big orgs. Like they're not a big payments company is not accustomed to shipping a whole new product line on a whole new payment rail in seven months. But that's what's happening right now.

So what what yeah so so a big institution is like okay stablecoin seem to be sticking around. I kind of need to create a strategy here. What are the things going through their head that they care about in terms of actually, you know, integrating them into their product suite? I'm assuming they want to figure out how to make money from them. I'm assuming they they are very riskaverse early on, but how how are they thinking about um you know setting up a project?

Yeah, I mean the first conversation probably is what should we do about stable coins and then you know that's not the right time. uh to to really launch into a a new stable coin product, you got to identify a real need. Yeah.

And the real need is typically we can improve the quality of our treasury management or we have a product that involves payments that we could do much better. So that might be remittances, it might be agentic payments, it might be streaming payments, it could be trade finance. Um and uh you know that that's often be but this is this is the kind of thing that they're excited to improve on. At what level of abstraction is integration actually happening? Because I imagine if I'm like if I'm a big company, can I just go to my bank and say, "Okay, I'm sick of like these AC fees. I want you to figure out how to use stable coins and then I want to pay less or whatever platform they're using to move money." They like the platform probably jumps on it. At what point is a company that's not a financial institution integrating stable coins?

So, first I just want to give a little context on this. There's been a long history of big enterprises getting deeper into the payment stack. Okay.

Airbnb, Shopify, Square, these companies like kind of own banks now because they want that additional level of control to make their product better. Yeah. and they can do all of this interesting next generation stuff once they get that integrated. And so we see a similar thing where for many companies going to your bank or your payments provider is the right place to start. Um but there's a ton of ambitious tech and fintech payments and banking companies that want to get even closer to the rails so they can optimize the the quality of their product. Um we'll see all things happen. I mean, there's always been retailers to simplify the stack.

I remember it might have been Uber or maybe it was Airbnb, but there were a few companies that sort of launched like instant payouts for it happened a lot on like gig work platforms and it felt like the platform was basically just eating two days of working capital by paying for the service that's rendered immediately even though they weren't going to get money from their customer for two days because of like the transfer. Uh, is that is that the main motivation like speed?

Uh, I love that you brought that up by the way. That's like a pretty deep cut. Um, the so that whole thing is unlocked by Durbanexempt debit cards. This is the ability to charge a higher fee on cards. Okay.

Yeah. Totally a wonk thing. Yeah. But there's this um this rule in the US where if a bank has under a certain amount of assets, they can issue a debit card that takes a higher fee on the swipes. That's how they pay for the working capital in that example. Like they don't just front the the the two days. I thought they were just like raising debt or so or doing some financial engineering and just being like, "Look, it's going to be so valuable for our customers to pay on Monday and then the gig worker that delivered the food or delivered the car on that day to get paid the same day that they were just like, "Yeah, and we'll just have this massive two-day growing working capital bill." But it's interesting that they've already found a workaround. So then does that make the stable coin argument like weaker because they already figured out a hack or will stable coins allow them to like drop the cost of doing that project?

Okay. So I think it's both like okay is often about cross-selling. The Durban exempt card pays for part of that working capital bill but not all of it. Yes, it makes for a more compelling product but probably the most interesting part is to build that product takes a ton of engineers and a ton of money. And there's a there's many businesses who can't afford that and would like to still offer that kind of compelling product. Yeah.

And and mind you, like that's a pretty limited product. We've only figured out instant payout for that one category, big workers, debit cards. Yeah.

There's a ton of other places.

Maybe it's buying groceries, maybe it's a payments where you might want that similar instant payout facility.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, yeah. What uh what has like the launch of the company uh looked like? Is it like are you dealing with regulatory filings and getting like banking licenses? Is it writing code? Like what's the shape of the business?

Yeah. Well, we you we write a lot of code. We uh I'm an engineer. Like that's one of my favorite things to do. Um we rely on great partners for uh the regs like that, you know, they help us with with that. So we build on their infrastructure. Um but the shape of the company is really figuring out how um we can build better products for for payments codes, fintex, money apps generally where they get this onetoone guarantee. One stable coin equals $1

and they know when the money will arrive. Those are two things that don't exist right now for a lot of stable coin offerings. Might be surprising, but that's something that that payments companies really do require for them to run their business. How are you thinking about the strength of the dollar broadly? Is that like an important thing to track? I I mean, we we saw the news about Tether buying like an insane amount of gold and then there was this sort of narrative violation around the the war causing actually a flight to the dollar and the dollar strengthening even though obviously it's a very tumultuous time. Like how have you been processing just the the the the demand for the dollar generally because that's like the the entire stablecoin boom is sort of predicated on it.

Yeah. I mean, I'm unabashedly pro dollar, but that's kind of sort of besides the point. There's no pro there's no product in the world that has more product market fit in the dollar. You could get there's like nothing you could give anyone in the world that they everyone agree is valuable more than a dollar. Yeah.

And so, look, we we could talk all day about whether that changes a little bit, but um for now um people want dollars. Yeah. And then in terms of your sort of go-to market growth, are you focused on those big companies, Fortune 500 companies, are you selling deeper in the stack, B2B or B2B T2? Like like how how are you actually uh sourcing customers, growing the business?

Yeah, it's a little bit of all of that. like our we see big companies who really want to be on stable coins now because they can simplify a global treasury or build a new product

and we see a ton of very fastmoving very savvy vintex who want the same

luckily for us it's the same platform it's the clearing house and that's similar to how JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo all use a but so does Ridgewood Savings Bank and Seattle First Chemical Bank you know uh all types of um of money apps.

Sorry, we just had somebody fall in the studio.

Uh just a chair or something. Uh I want to talk about um particularly um other movements to like stableish things on chain. There was a there was talk like a few years ago about like mortgages on chain, real estate on chain. Have you been tracking any world like Yeah, I ras was like the buzz word. Have Have you been tracking any of that? Is there progress?

There's a ton of progress. I mean, the

certainly we're I think today uh there's a big announcement about another large trading venue trying to do onchain securities.

Yeah.

Um I think that's likely to happen because people want access to 247 trading. There's events that happen outside of trading hours where it's helpful to have deep liquidity to react to it. certainly at ACC, you know, saw so many of these stable coin companies and so many of the RWA companies that were bringing the rest of finance on chain. Um, in the recent months I've been pretty narrowly focused on payments, but they they touch uh RWA because often you're paying into a trading venue in order to do trading there. Um, we'll see a slow drip over months. This is not the kind of infrastructure that gets built in a day, but I think it will surprise people by being the type of infrastructure that gets built in a year or in 18 months and you start to see a lot more access soon.

Yeah. Why why is it slow? Is it is it because I understand with like Bitcoin, you know, you have this consensus of all these different developers. Uh it takes a long time to get agreement. Uh but at some point it feels like the pace of acceleration in software needs to catch up. Are you feeling that at all?

Yeah, it's definitely happening right now. I'll give you one little example. You own some public equity and you once a quarter get this thick booklet of paperwork from them that tells you all about their quarterly. Yeah.

This is a requirement. Like when you own a stock, you are getting that paper in the mail with their quarterly earnings.

And so

you got to bring all of that infrastructure to interact with onchain ownership. And there's these little pieces that all need to be solved well in order to bring all these assets on chain. A lot of financial assets still involve paperwork and they just aren't situated for a digital world yet, but I think we're all going to enjoy it when they are.

Yeah.

Yeah. Another way to think about it, like bringing bringing um uh you know, real estate on chain, right? It sounds like cool and futuristic, but then like for transactions like somebody buying their own home, if somebody's comes to them and says, "Hey, I can help you buy your home

on chain

and you'll save, you know, a couple thousand dollar on this part of the process,"

that's not a very that's not a super compelling pitch. Whereas, you know, Sam over here, if you're saying like, hey, you're moving, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars annually, you can save a very meaningfully meaningful amount by adopting stables. It's just a very different

kind of uh

trade. I I agree with that. And I think you there's still home ownership records that are in some basement underneath a municipality's uh you know, building. That's uh going to take years to digitize those files. So these are the kinds of things where you really got to think through the weeds of how you bring things on chain. I will say if you're using the same technology every day, people get accustomed to it much faster. I think that's likely to happen with the payment scenario where

you're saving a couple bucks on a daily transaction and it starts to feel like part of your life and something you can really rely on.

Last question from the chat. Do you see prediction markets driving stable coin adoption?

Oh man. Uh

easy one.

What was that? What was what was that reaction?

Yeah. Well, the truth is that as the onchain world gets more active, it's a positive feedback loop because more people have wallets, more people have identities, um, and people get more comfortable with the UX. Yeah.

So, there's sort of this general network effect similar to what the internet had where actually one more popular website begets the next popular website because you're accustomed to going into this the search bar and and googling the next thing. And so, yes, I do I do think that uh will draw more folks into disabled.

Yeah. But probably like less important than the genius act, but uh but but still like, you know, one link in the chain metaphorically. Uh well, thank you so much for taking the time to come shout with us. Congrats on the round. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you, Sam.

See you guys.

Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have uh John Slotkin from Geisinger to revisit the story of the $1 billion on