The following interview is a conversation we had with Shamir Karkal, Co-founder and CSO of Sila, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $20+ Million Raised to Build the Money API For Fintech.

 

Shamir Karkal
Thank you for having me, Brett. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. Excited to chat with you. And before we begin diving into what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Shamir Karkal
Sure. So, my name is Shamir Karkal. I grew up india, came over to the US about 1819 years ago as a software engineer, worked as a consultant for a while, and then in 2009, I co founded Fintech Startup, a neo bank called simple, which was one of the first neo banks anywhere. And there wasn’t really that much of Fintech at all. So it was sort of very early in the fintech revolution back then and it took us three years to actually build and launch simple. The biggest problem was not finding customers. The biggest problem was just building the technology and finding the bank partners, the vendors. And I like to say that we did everything wrong before we did it. Right. Simple itself was acquired by BBBA, which is the large Spanish bank, in 2014. I then got excited about the idea of building API platforms and spent a couple of years doing that at BBVA. 

Shamir Karkal
Finally got frustrated with the big bank lifestyle and left BBBA, and then in 2018 started seller. And I feel like throughout all of this I’ve been trying to solve the same problem just in different ways, which is make it easier for innovators and builders to build and ship financial applications, right? Whether that’s a new bank like simple or just a payment app, crypto, whatever it is, it’s super hard if you’re an early stage or even if you’re a mid or late stage company to build financial applications. And there’s just so much demand in the space out there. And that’s where Silla comes in. Right. Our mission is to make it easy for everybody to innovate and program with money and financial networks. What that means is our core product is a restore Http API platform that enables our customers to build financial applications and offers tools like KYC and KYB APIs, digital wallets, virtual bank accounts, ACH payments, and buyer and card payment suit. 

Shamir Karkal
Right. And really it allows our customers to onboard their end users, verify their identity, pull in money, hold it, transform it, transfer it, program with it, and then pay out somebody else at the end of some funds flow. That’s really what the platform is all about. And we have dozens of different use cases and so many different exciting customers. 

Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. Before we dive deeper into the company, a few things I want to zoom in on there. So take me back to it was 2010, right, when you launched simple. What was the landscape like there for neo banks? I feel like that must have been very early days, right? 

Shamir Karkal
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think the word neo bank actually existed. We initially just called it bank. Simple, quickly realized that there’s kind of regulatory issues with that and switched to just calling it simple. And we managed to get the Simple.com domain. So that was awesome. And it was super hard to build and ship back then because the infrastructure didn’t really exist. Right. So if you went out and told people that you wanted to build a bank, most of them were like, are you crazy? And there was like all the people who thought it couldn’t be done and all the people who thought there were no customers or no demand for a near bank. And in between you had to find the people, whether it was investors, whether it was vendors, whether it was partners who actually believed that the demand existed and that it could be done and would work with you on that. 

Shamir Karkal
Right. But for us, from the earliest days of simple, it was very clear that everybody wanted a better bank. Exactly how they defined a better bank was different. But just the customer demand and the customer frustration with the existing banking industry in 2009, 2010 was very clear and very palpable. It was almost like that commercial. I was like, look at the simple app, then look at your bank app. If they have an app right now, look at the simple app, which one do you want to use? Which one are you actually able to successfully log into? And things have gotten better. I think the traditional banks have gotten better at building mobile apps and web apps. But even now, if you look at the best fintech apps versus traditional banks, there’s still a massive difference. And banks just don’t get technology even today. And I think were one of the early ones to kind of understand that and build products that actually help customers solve their problems. 

Shamir Karkal
And that led to a lot of success for simple. Right. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. One thing I’ve observed just as a consumer in this space, so I’m not a big fan of big banks and I want to be open minded to the challenger banks, to the neo banks. And I gave Chime a try, for example, and I was using Chime. It was great up until the point that I had to make a large deposit for a condo and they told me you can’t actually send wire transfers or ACH payments or actually send money in any way from your Chime account. And that just blew my mind that these startups that are supposed to be disrupting the banking space don’t actually lack the basic functionalities that you expect from a bank account. So I don’t know, what are your thoughts on this space? Do you think it’s falling short from meeting the needs of consumers? Or how would you think about the state of Challenger banking and neo banks today? 

Shamir Karkal
I think where Challenger banks, neo banks, and I say in general sort of fintech applications do very well, is serving a narrow set of needs for a group of customers. Right? So Chime specifically, my understanding is I had a Chime account, I think I still have it actually, but I think their focus has always been towards sort of more, I would say middle income customers, maybe even lower income customers. And so they never positioned themselves as a high end bank. And so I’m not surprised that they didn’t have wire capabilities. I don’t know, they might have built wire capabilities by now, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have it when they launched. In fact, simple didn’t have outgoing wire capabilities when simple launched, whatever, ten plus years ago. Right? And it’s just because the infrastructure that you need to build all of that is so complex and each payment system on the back end is completely different and works differently. 

Shamir Karkal
And when you’re building a financial application or a fintech application, like a simple or a Chime, or like any of our customers, you can’t just go and get a core banking system from FISA or FIS, which is 30 years old and highly outdated, but has all of these capabilities built in. Right. Because what you end up with is you end up exactly the same like every other bank out there. Right? So part of the downside of having to rebuilding everything and making it better is there’s a lot of building to do and a lot of it is deep in the minds of the payment systems. Right? And so you just have to prioritize, right? Like you’re like, hey, do I invest a lot in building out wire functionality, which maybe only 5% of my customers are interested in? Or do I spend more? Take those same investment dollars and engineering time and effort and build it. 

Shamir Karkal
Put it into building, like, whatever, a savings feature or something else that my customers care about more. Right? I think in general the traditional banks have a lot more breadth of functionality, but really suck at helping customers solve particular problems. While the neo banks and especially more and more now just like point fintech apps, which do one thing only, they tend to be really good at doing one thing, but that breadth of functionality isn’t there yet that makes a lot. 

Brett
Of sense and that’s really good context to have just to better understand the space. Now, two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur. What CEO do you admire the most and why do you admire them? 

Shamir Karkal
I was thinking about this, and I think the one that comes to mind is actually Cristo Carmen, the CEO of Wise. Wise used to be called TransferWise. And they rebranded a couple of years ago, I think, and they were a London based startup that got started, oh, I think about 1112 years ago, right around the time that Josh and I were starting simple. And I met Christo and his co Founder, Tavith. And I actually invested in them as one of my early agel investments. And they took that initial vision of solving the problem of cross border payments, which was a problem that they were running into sort of deeply on a daily basis as Estonians living in London. And they built out the Transfer Wise app and grew it and scaled it. And now they are in, I think, like 60 plus countries doing almost a billion dollars a year in revenue. 

Shamir Karkal
Went public on the London Stock Exchange last year. Right. I had the privilege of having, like a ringside seat to that whole story and watching them from literally when there were two guys with a deck till I don’t know how many thousands of employees Wise has now. Right. And what has always impressed me about Christo and Thomas both, but Christo is the CEO right now is that through it all, they’ve just stayed very genuine, very humble people. Right. Every time I kind of run into Christo, or Thomas, for that matter. And I think they’re both billionaires now. Right. But I don’t feel like he lives his life any differently. I don’t feel like he’s any different of a crystal than the 30 something struggling entrepreneur I met twelve years ago. Right. Like, none of that stuff has gone to his head. He just works really hard, like he always has, is very humble and very dedicated to that problem that they’re trying to solve, which is making it easy to move money across borders and help those customers solve their financial problems. 

Shamir Karkal
Right. And that always inspires me. 

Brett
Amazing. I love that. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be a business book or it could just be a personal book that’s really shaped how you view the world. 

Shamir Karkal
Yeah. So I’d say a couple, actually, of David Graber’s books. And David Graber is this, like, sociologist, anthropologist who he just he died, actually, I think, last year. But he wrote this book called Debt the first 5000 Years. And I’ve always been a bit of an armchair historian, especially about everything financial related, right. Like, the history of payments networks and money has kind of always fascinated me, but he took every preconception I had about things, about what even is money and just kind of blew it all up. Right. And so I felt like before reading that book, I thought I knew a lot about payments and money and debt, and after reading it, I felt like I knew nothing at all. Right. And that was one of the frustrating parts. He raised all these deep philosophical questions about what money means to society and humans and then didn’t answer any of them. 

Shamir Karkal
And I’m like, well, what’s the solution, David? What are we supposed to do now? And there isn’t one, right. You have to figure it out. But I’ll just give you one tidbit from the book that stuck with me. Right. Socrates, the Buddha, and Confucius were all alive at the same time. 

Brett
Wow. 

Shamir Karkal
Right around 500 BC. These three philosophers who completely changed philosophy in three different cultures, quite widely separated, yet they were all alive at the same time. And you’re like, that’s weird. What happened? Why weren’t more philosophers around 500 years before in thousand BC? And why aren’t more around, like, what was happening around 500 BC. In Greece, India, and China that caused an explosion in philosophy? Because that’s actually what happened. It’s not just like Socrates was isolated or to put that there was, like, major philosophical kind of movements that got started, and these were just the most famous philosophers of that. And we don’t know why, but one of the explanations is that all three of those cultures started minting coins right around 550 BC, and suddenly you start minting coins, and 25, 50 years later, there’s a philosopher on every street corner. 

Brett
Wow. That’s fascinating. Well, I know what I’ll be doing this weekend now I’ll have to read that first book. You said there’s three of them, right? 

Shamir Karkal
Two, actually. He wrote another book just before he died called A New History of Everything, which I have not finished reading. I’m almost at the end of it. And that completely blew up all my understanding of the evolution of humanity, agriculture, the US. Constitution, actually. And so now that he apparently liked to do that, it’s like, rewrite the narratives we tell ourselves about how we got here. 

Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. I look forward to diving into that. One thing I want to ask, based on what you just said there, and I think this will be helpful for our listeners, could you maybe take us back through the history of the US. Payment system and explain a little bit about that history and how it’s evolved over the past 50 or 100 years? 

Shamir Karkal
Oh, wow. I mean, we could spend hours just talking about it. Right. Like, at the time of the founding of the US. There was a mini financial crisis because the colonies went into a lot of debt to finance the Revolutionary War, and most of that debt was to France, which had seen the opportunity to beat its old rival England, and heavily supported the revolution. And it worked out right, like the US became independent, but then owed all this money to France. That led to bunch of problems. And that was from those early times, literally from the 1780s, there was this whole pro central bank and anticentral bank movement, which still is still here in the US. There are still people who hate the Federal Reserve. There were multiple attempts to create a central bank of the US. I think Alexander Hamilton started one, but then it kind of was shut down by like the 1830s or something. 

Shamir Karkal
And it was exactly because of kind of the same sentiments now, where a lot of people just don’t trust government and don’t trust the government to create money, right? And so the US ended up on the gold standard just like all of the rest of the Western world. But there was always a movement to try and make it a silver standard rather than a gold standard, because one of the problems of money that’s linked to commodities like gold or silver is like, as the economy expands, you need more money, but you might not have more gold. The amount of gold you have is dependent on how much you can find. And mine and the US actually, throughout the 19th century had a lot of silver because it kept finding silver in places like Nevada, but didn’t actually have a lot of gold. Most of the world’s gold came from like Australia and South Africa. 

Shamir Karkal
So lot of things of course, the Civil War is when greenbacks were created and then there was a lot of monetary policy changes that happened around the Civil War as both the north and the south tried to finance their sides of the war. But if you look at it, post Civil War, from 1865 to 1914, on average, every seven years, the US had a recession and a financial crisis. So every time there was a recession, everybody would be like, oh, s***, the local banks are going to go out of business because they owe all these debt to these they hold all the debt of these businesses that are going out of business and there would be a bank run and that would cause banks to collapse. And this problem just got bigger and bigger as the US economy got bigger and bigger. And finally there was enough sort of consensus for the Federal Reserve to be created in 1913, just in time for World War I and the massive amount of money and debt that had to be created to finance World War I. 

Shamir Karkal
And then there was like the boom of the bust and the US going off the gold standard and then finally World War II. And that’s kind of like the monetary history of the US. I don’t think the Fed actually figured out how to run monetary policy properly until around the early 80s. So there’s been a lot of learning about inflation targeting and all of that took the Fed like 60, 70 years out of after its founding to figure out. And they made a bunch of mistakes, like during the Depression, for example. And that brings us to kind of where we are today, right, with the Fed rapidly raising interest rates in an effort to pool the economy. And now they understand that’s how that all works in terms of payment systems, right? Now, the US cash, whether that’s coins or paper notes, is kind of the oldest one and has been around for coins, have been around for thousands of years. 

Shamir Karkal
Cash has been around for centuries. And then there’s cash, coins, cards, whether that’s debit or credit cards, there’s checks, there’s ACH and then there’s Fedwire, right? And just to put it in perspective, the card networks move about $9 trillion a year. In the US. The ACH system moves about $73 trillion a year. And then Fedwire moves about three to $4 trillion a day. So I think this year Fedwire will move more than a quadrillion dollars in 2022, which is sometimes these numbers are very hard for people to even understand. Like what is a quadrillion dollars, right? Like this number does not compute. 

Brett
Hurts my brain. 

Shamir Karkal
It does. And what you have to realize is that there’s levels of payments, right? Like cards. The average card transaction is I think it’s like sub $100, things like about $40 for debit cards, maybe 60, $70 for credit cards. The average ACH transaction I think is like $2,000 because ACH is how businesses move money. It’s how people’s paycheck gets deposited. But typically when you walk into a store to buy a coffee, you’re not using ACH, right? You’re using a car. So it’s different use cases. The average payment on Fed wire is like three and a half million dollars. So it’s a large amount of money, but it’s being done in relatively fewer transactions. Right? And what you have to realize is, like, the US. Payment system is also the backbone of the global payment system. So when somebody in South Africa decides to buy a company in Japan, that payment is probably getting routed through New York and some of it gets settled in Fedwire, right? 

Shamir Karkal
So the Fed wire essentially is like the backbone of the US financial system, but also of the global financial system to this thing called the Continuously Linked Settlement Bank. Let’s not get into all of that. But it is a large reason for why the dollar is so dominant globally and why the US. Has so much economic power to do things like impose factions or whatever, is because all of that has to go through dollar clearing in New York and all the world’s money, actually. And if you don’t have access to dollar clearing in New York and through Fed wire, which is how all settlement happens, you basically can’t do business globally. 

Brett
Wow. I think I just learned more in the past eight minutes about money and how payments works than I’ve learned in my entire life, renewing my entire life. So appreciate the crash course there. 

Shamir Karkal
I’m sorry, man, you asked for it. I could go on for another onward on each of these payment systems, but I feel like that might defeat the purpose. 

Brett
Hey, no worries. And I love when guests come on and can give these types of explanations and really educate me and educate the listeners. So really appreciate that. It’s all super fascinating. Now, to switch gears a little bit, or in a major way, I would say let’s dive deeper into the company. So could you explain to us just at a very high level, how would your customers articulate the problem that you’re solving for them? 

Shamir Karkal
Yeah, typically what a customer is looking to do and what they are trying to do is build a fintech application mobile web. Sometimes it’s some sort of automated back end process as part of, like a business application. It’s many different things. But they’re writing a piece of code that needs to do something with money. And typically it needs to take money that’s in a bank account somewhere and move it into another bank account somewhere else. Now that I’m generalizing at a super high level, right, sometimes it’s just straight payments of like, hey, I’m building a fintech application as an example to do payments in the chemical industry. And so I need to take money from a bunch of companies and pay it out to a bunch of other companies and it’s just straight payments transfers. Or it could be somebody who is in the commercial real estate space where they actually lend out money and so they give money to people first and then collect it later over a period of time. 

Shamir Karkal
Right. Or it could be a fintech application doing PFM. Right. Like, one of our customers basically does credit monitoring and credit improvement for low to moderate income Americans and they use us for that as well. But fundamentally, it comes down to writing a bunch of code that needs to take money from somewhere and move it somewhere else, operate on a set of rules in between, whether that’s lending, whether that’s payments, whether that’s savings, whether that’s neo banking. It’s quite broad. And the core payment system that’s most heavily used is ACH. Right. And that’s where we come in because we tend to be ACH experts and we have the ledger and all the tools to be able to create wallets, create accounts, move money, program with it, keep track of all of this and then do it in a regulatory compliant fashion. 

Brett
Interesting, and one thing to ask here on ACH, and this is probably a dumb question and you may have covered it already, but who owns ACH? Is that owned by the government? Is that comprised of different banks and financial institutions coming together? Who owns ACH? 

Shamir Karkal
Oh, brett, that’s a great question. It comes down to what you mean by the word owned, really? So I’ll explain how ACH actually works. ACH is a system that was created in the early 70s by a consortium of banks. And it is an electronic system, but you have to realize it predates the Internet and it predates personal computers, right? It was the early days of the mainframe computer era in the 70s. So the way it works is that you create a file, a text file, actually, which has a bunch of payment instructions in it to debit and credit bank accounts. And you send it to your bank, typically, but through the bank it goes to one of the back end processors and they basically do this giant file merge and then they send you a file back right, with which transactions got executed and which got returned and all of that. 

Shamir Karkal
So that’s conceptually how it works. And you’re like, wow, that’s how they move 73 trillion a year. It’s like, yes, that is how they move 73 trillion a year. And there’s two main processes. There’s only two processes actually, at the back end for ACH. One is the Federal Reserve, and they process slightly less than 50% of ACH payments. I think it’s about 45, 48. I haven’t looked it up recently, but I call it. Half of ACH payments go through the Fed. The remaining half goes through, essentially the Clearing House. The clearing house is a consortium. It’s a company that’s owned by a consortium of basically large banks, right? Like the chases and profiles of the world are the ones who kind of own the largest chunks of the Clearing House. And the Clearing House operates one switch for ACH, which is typically used quite heavily by the large banks. 

Shamir Karkal
The Fed operates another switch for ACH, which is, again, typically used by mid sized to smaller banks more heavily, and the Fed and the Clearing House route payments to each other, right? So it doesn’t matter if you’re sending a payment to Chase, you don’t have to send it to the Clearing House. You can send it to the Fed and it will make it to Chase just on the same schedule. And if you’re Chase and you want to send it to a small community bank, you send it to the Clearing House and they’ll make sure it gets to the Fed. So that’s kind of how the system operates on the back end. And it’s very outdated. It’s not real time. Payments take multiple days to get, and especially it doesn’t work on nights, weekends and holidays. This is mid December, so we have a lot of holidays coming up. 

Shamir Karkal
So it can be quite frustrating when you look at payments innovation across the world and most of the world now, pretty much all the developed countries and most of the developing countries in the world now operate on a real time payment system where you send a payment and it’s received in like a minute rather than two business days. But the US has not yet done that. 

Brett
Makes sense. I’ve heard that from people from Europe. When they come to the US or move to the US. They’re mind blown how bad our banking system is. And the idea that a transfer can take a couple of days, I feel like in Europe, that doesn’t really exist. 

Shamir Karkal
And it hasn’t existed for a while. Right. Again, when you say Europe, there’s a bunch of European countries, some of them more advanced than the others. But the United Kingdom, as an example, had launched its faster payment system in 2007, I believe, and they call it Faster pay. And across all of Europe, they launched Sepa, this single Europe payments area system in I think it got launched in like, 1615. It’s at least five years old now. And the US, the Fed, is now building a new system, which they call Fed Now, which is a real time payment system. It’s supposed to go live in Q Three of next year. So in Q three of 2023, the US will have caught up with Europe as of 2008. 

Brett
Wow. So no more waiting around for a couple of days for transfers to go through? 

Shamir Karkal
Oh, I wouldn’t say that, but the system will go live. It actually needs to be adopted by 4800 banks and 5000 plus credit unions. They need to build it and integrate it into their systems and then make it available to customers. Right. In a way that customers can then use. My expectation is that I actually did the math on this. There is an alternative payment system. It’s called RTP, and it’s a private system run by the clearing house. It has all the big banks on it, but I think it has, like, 250 or 300 banks on it. But there’s a long tail of community banks and credit unions who haven’t signed up to RTP. But RTP launched in 2019. It’s been growing rapidly. I think it’s growing, like, more than 50% a year right now. Right, but it’s starting from zero. Right. And if you assume that RTP and Fed now grow at the same, whatever, 50% a year rate that they have, like, in the last year, and they keep that up forever and that ACH stops growing, it will still take 13 years for RTP and Fed Now to catch up with ACH. 

Shamir Karkal
13 years? We’re talking 2035. 

Brett
That’s crazy. All right, so it’s going to take a while then. 

Shamir Karkal
73 trillion, man. I mean, old payment systems, they literally never die. Like, every payment system that ever achieved broad adoption across multiple geographies in human history is still with us today. Coins, 600 BC. In Lydia. We still use them cash, whatever, 8th century Tan Dynasty in China, we still use them. Cards. I mean, depending on how you define it, that’s either 40 or 80 plus years ago. Right. Still use them. Checks. The Persians invented that around 2000 years ago. Still use them, I kid you not. I don’t know if you know about this, but there’s this like one island in the Pacific off the coast of like Papua New Guinea and Australia called Yap and they actually used to use big round stones. I kid you not. These stones weigh like hundreds of kilograms with a big hole in the center. They look like giant doughnuts. 

Shamir Karkal
They used to use those for money. And there’s a whole kind of cultural and historic reason why they actually still do. I mean, they were a German colony in the 1880s and so now they use modern money, but for some ceremonial purposes. They still use Yap stones on the island of Yap with old forms of money. And payments just don’t die out. Before World War I, when everybody in the planet was on the gold standard, they would ship gold between countries all the time to settle payments, right? Gold was a form of payment, and especially if it was large amounts, you wanted the actual underlying gold that stopped during World War I because the Germans started sinking ships and you didn’t want all your gold to go to the bottom of the ocean. So you would think that gold as a form of payment died out. 

Shamir Karkal
It has not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the vault in New York City, I think they keep like 800 tons of gold. Something like 4% of all gold mined in the entire history of humanity is sitting in that one vault in New York. And it all belongs to the world’s central banks. Everybody from the bank of England to the Reserve Bank of India. They all keep their gold in New York. And every now and then when the Central Bank of the UAE decides to pay the bank of England a few billion dollars, they’ll call up New York and somebody in the New York will go and take a rack of gold out of one vault and go put it into another vault. So they still do gold payments. It’s only used for very specialized purposes and it’s all done mostly within one vault in New York. 

Shamir Karkal
But our payment system has not died out. 

Brett
That’s so fascinating. 

Shamir Karkal
So ACH will be with us for a while and I’m sorry to say, checks will probably be with us for a while as well as will cash and cards. But we will have a lot more new payment system and I think a lot more of the innovation and the innovative use cases will move to the new payment systems and the old payment systems will just become niche ones used for like specialized payments between central banks, for example. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Wow. Such fascinating stuff. A couple more questions here for you on the products. I know we are up on time here. Are there any numbers you can share just to highlight the growth in progress and adoption that you’re seeing so far with customers. 

Shamir Karkal
Totally. So we have close to 100 customers in total, more than 50 of whom are live, and a couple of dozen are still in the process of integrating and going live. And we’ve seen, let me see, what’s the latest numbers? We’ve seen like about five X growth in total transactions this year. And yeah, almost six X, actually. And we do anywhere from ten to 25% transaction growth month on month right now. And that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Our big customers continue to grow and scale and we keep adding new customers. Right. And we still like when you look at the overall numbers for ACH or cards or any other payment system in the US. We’re just a flea on an elephant. Right. They’re so large, these financial services industry overall is so large that we could grow at this rate for at least a decade and then we’d be an overnight success. 

Brett
And what do you attribute to your success so far and the growth that you’re seeing? Obviously, there’s just a lot of noise in Fintech. There’s a lot of startups that have been funded in the last couple of years. So what do you think you’re getting right? How are you breaking through all that noise? 

Shamir Karkal
I’m not sure we are in the sense that there is a lot of noise. And I feel like I still run into a lot of people who have no idea what Sila is or what we do. And I’m like, really? But we’re the perfect solution for your problem. How is it that you’ve never heard of us? But I think there’s I saw a number that said there’s like 5000 fintech startups in the US now, so it can be hard to kind of find the good workable solutions out there. I think probably back in 2010 there might have been like 50. So the industry has grown a lot. It’s going to a bit of a bust right now, 2022, the stock markets are down, interest rates are up, crypto is going through a big crash and Fintech is also going through a crash. The thing is, in Crypto there’s a crash every three years. 

Shamir Karkal
Right. It’s a highly cyclical business, but for Fintech, this is the first time that there’s been a real fintech bust. From 2010 till this year. It was pretty much a story of like, steady growth until 2021 and then there was explosive growth. Right? And the underlying dynamics are great. Everybody from PayPal 25 years ago to Cilla now. All of us together. We don’t even have 2% market share of global financial services. So there’s a long way to go before we even get to 10%. And the secular growth trends that have been driving down. It’s just that the industry managed to get ahead of itself in terms of valuations and investment and everything else. What I tell everybody is what we try to do at Sella as well, which is just stay focused on your product, your customers, and just keep building. And shipping and startups are not like an overnight success. 

Shamir Karkal
Right. It takes years, sometimes decades of building before you do become that overnight success and everybody hears of you. So it is 99% perseverance. Anything to that remaining 1%? I think it’s staying true to the mission and staying true to your customers. 

Brett
I love that last question here for you. If we zoom out three years from today, what’s the vision for the company? What does it look like? 

Shamir Karkal
I think three years from today, we’ll still be serving the same customers with the same products and continuing to grow and scale that. I think what we will add is support for a lot more payment systems. I’m quite excited about Fed Now and RTP and their growth over the next two, three years. We’ll definitely start supporting them, especially as Fed Now rolls out next year. But also the kind of the old payment systems, right. Cards, of course, ACH, wires, checks. There’s still so much work to do on all of those. And everything about payments, especially, it’s not about the 99 or 99.9% of payments that work fine. It’s all about that .1% that have a problem. And how do you make that easy for your customers to solve, deal with and free up their ability to go and build wonderful applications for all of us? 

Brett
Amazing. Well, that’s certainly an exciting vision. I look forward to seeing that happen. We are up on time here, so we’re going to have to wrap before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Shamir Karkal
Well, so the Silla website, right? Www.cillamoney.com is always the place where you can track us. And then we’re also pretty active on Twitter, so it’s at the ratesilla money on Twitter. And if you want to follow me personally, I am at the rate shamir K on Twitter, so all of those places are good to follow me. And also on LinkedIn, right? Like, just look me up on LinkedIn and you can follow me there as well. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share all this wisdom and educate me on how payments work in the United States, in the world and sharing your vision. This is all incredibly exciting, so let’s keep in touch. 

Shamir Karkal
Thank you for having me, Brett. This was fun. 

Brett
All right, take care. Now you. 

Shamir Karkal
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