Fintech Innovation in Africa, the Blockchain, and Media Bias with AZA Finance’s Elizabeth Rossiello

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Elizabeth Rossiello – On Revolutionizing African Finance with Blockchain Technology.

Elizabeth Rossiello is the visionary CEO and founder of AZA Finance, a global fintech company dedicated to revolutionizing the financial landscape in Africa. Under Elizabeth’s leadership, AZA Finance has facilitated over $2 billion in transactions, serving SMEs and large corporations across more than 115 countries. Her efforts have been recognized by Fast Company, which named AZA Finance one of the Global Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in 2021.

Elizabeth gained extensive experience in the financial sector before founding AZA Finance. Since its inception in 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya, AZA Finance, originally known as BitPesa, has grown into a major player in the fintech industry, offering a comprehensive suite of foreign exchange, payments, settlement, and treasury services. She worked as an Africa Investment Associate at the Grameen Foundation, where she was involved in debt and equity investments in microfinance institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. Her career also includes stints at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs, where she honed her expertise in financial product development and risk management. She served as a consultant for prominent organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Acumen Fund, where she worked on financial innovations and regulations in developing markets​.

Elizabeth Rossiello is also a notable thought leader and advocate for financial innovation. She co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Council on Blockchain, contributing to global discussions on the future of digital currencies and blockchain technology. Her academic credentials include a master’s degree in International Business and Finance from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, German, and Italian from the State University of New York College at Buffalo. Elizabeth’s commitment to expanding access to financial technologies and her efforts to promote monetary policy sovereignty in African economies continue to drive AZA Finance’s mission to bridge financial gaps between Africa and the rest of the world​.

Episode Transcript

Elizabeth Rossiello: But we can say even in the ten years that I’ve been in this space, I’m seeing things that I hadn’t.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Elizabeth Rossiello always dreamed of traveling the world. After getting her master’s in international Business and finance, she took her talents to Germany, and Kenya and now lives in London, where she’s the CEO and founder of AZA Finance, a leading provider of cross-border payment solutions focusing primarily on African markets. The company aims to bridge the gap between African economies and the global financial system, and help small and medium-sized businesses be successful and be able to pay in their local currencies. She’s crazy smart, she’s very funny and has incredible insight into global fintech. Please welcome Elizabeth Rossiello. Your experience is vast. I want to start with your role as co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Fourth Industrial Revolution Council on Blockchain. So it’s a mouthful. There are many different parts of what has been called the fourth industrial revolution AI, the internet of things, quantum computing, robotics, and blockchain is another one. There are a lot of people who aren’t quite on board with the blockchain, or at least don’t see it as a way of the future. Tell me why people should be bullish on the blockchain.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Okay, well, a big question here. I think Tim Draper likes to talk about the curve of innovation, where there’s the initial curve. Everybody gets excited about something. AI, suddenly it’s on every list. It’s every question. The blockchain, the blockchain, every question. People get interested in it. Then they’re kind of like, is this it? I heard about it at every dinner party, but my life hasn’t changed. I still use my feet to walk to the store. I’m brushing my teeth with my own hands and a toothbrush like, wow, robots haven’t invaded my home. Then they go away. But graduates have entered that field. Companies have started building, and investments have been made. At least a part of that continues to innovate. Then after a bit of a sleeper period comes the next big bump and you’re like, oh, well, no, this is AI or this is blockchain, this is what it means. We’ve seen that a couple of times. It sounds very cliched or cheesy to say we don’t know how this will be, but we know it’ll be big. It’s David Bowie, I don’t know where I’m going, but it’s going to be weird.

Kevin Rosenquist: For the technology to become more mainstream.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Well, first of all, a lot of people on panels don’t know what it means either, so don’t worry.

Kevin Rosenquist: So it’s not just my parents.

Elizabeth Rossiello: A lot of investors and people who run conferences also don’t know. I think that’s also what tells me we’ve got a long way to go, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: I would say so.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes. My mom bought some bitcoin. Day one, be a supportive mom and she’s all in now ten years later. So hurray for her. She was a schoolteacher. So what would I talk about is very simplified terms. You have a closed database and an open database. This is a very dumbed-down version or very simplified version. You have your own spreadsheet that calculates your household expenses. But what if you could open that spreadsheet up to the world? And that spreadsheet had rules, and the spreadsheet itself was determining what you’re allowed to enter. If you were to lie and say, I didn’t spend that much on sweets, the spreadsheet would say, nope, you did. It corrected you and it wasn’t you making that choice, and it wasn’t your neighbor or anybody else. But actually, the spreadsheet had its own powers and it recorded things. So it’s kind of very scary for governments to use a blockchain or corporations, because that’s against the incentives of a corporation is, to protect private. They want closed-loop, governments too, central banks too. So that’s why I always take CBDCs and the central bank digital currencies with a grain of salt because it’s against the interest of a lot of players. So while the technology is there, imagine an open system where we can set some rules and then it keeps everybody honest. But in fact, many people don’t want that. So it hasn’t taken off as much as we wanted to because most people want privacy.

Kevin Rosenquist: people want transparency.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes, they want to control things themselves. So with the technology, it’s quite exciting. But I think the initial investors or governments have not fully gone into it yet. What we need is for students and the next generation to start building organizations that they’re excited to use.

Kevin Rosenquist: We’re looking at you, GenZ. It’s all on you.

Elizabeth Rossiello: GenL.

Kevin Rosenquist: GenL, yes, I have a three-year-old. I think I saw that he’s Gen-Alpha, Generation Alpha, so maybe Generation Alpha is what we need. What’s next? What about smart contracts? I’ve always kind of been intrigued by smart contracts where the terms are embedded into the code. Do you see larger use cases for smart contracts? Do you think that’s going to pop?

Elizabeth Rossiello: Are you kidding me? I’ve lived all over the world. How many times I’ve gotten my security deposit back? So imagine if it was automatically released. That alone, that’s what it would be. Imagine that. Imagine if you make a deal with your older brother and he’s forced to keep it. It’s pretty cool to have these kinds of things. It’s an automatic escrow, right? I just got divorced. Escrow still has a lot of rules. A lot of people, a lot of judges, a lot of things involved. It’s not so automatic. I think it would be seamless, seamless as going to your Amazon pick-up box and opening it and you guarantee that that’s there. I think that’s the goal of a smart contract where you make a contract and nobody’s feelings can change it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Is that going to be another thing people are going to resist? Because it’ll hold them to things no more.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Well, I know a lot of landlords who don’t want that, right? I’m sure but there are people who do. At least at the start of a lot of negotiations and agreements, people say they do. So they tend to change their mind when they disagree later on. So maybe the goodwill at the start of it will spread the use of good contracts.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. So you’ve been all over the world since graduating from Columbia in 2006 with an MA in International Business and Finance. I saw Germany, Kenya, and London. I’m sure there are probably more. What drove you to want to be involved? Is it so involved in the global financial world?

Elizabeth Rossiello: I am always a person who had maps all over my room, and this sounds clichéd, but my grandpa gave me a National Geographic subscription. I wanted to see the world. I’m the youngest child, the middle of a million cousins and a big family. So I was meant to go out of New York City, and I learned a lot of languages so I could do that. I thought that was my way out. I’d be a translator. When I think back to the women I saw with leadership roles, I was just like, wow, my rich aunt is a secretary. Maybe one day I’ll be a foreign language secretary. I did think that was going to be my career goal. I remember my counselor in school was like, are you serious, Elizabeth? What? You could probably go to law school. You had great grades. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I initially went abroad because of my language. Then when I got abroad, I was just like, wow. Eyes open. I remember saying, and I’ve said this before publicly, but it was the start of the Iraq war, and I saw things in the newspaper in Berlin that I hadn’t seen in New York, and I thought we were so liberal. So educated in New York City held it all for the rest of the country. How smart we were, meanwhile, still had a media blockade and didn’t feel a lot of things. So my eyes opened and I became quite curious. My German colleagues in the parliament where I was working were like, look, I watch your people they’re doing. I was like, I honestly didn’t know.

Kevin Rosenquist: I did, we don’t know.

Elizabeth Rossiello: I swear I didn’t know. it’s not my fault, but it is my fault. And I just became curious.

Kevin Rosenquist: But you can blame me. I get it.

Elizabeth Rossiello: We don’t have the blockchain yet. Just hot male.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. Just hot male. Oh, man.

Elizabeth Rossiello: So yes. I went on a date and I stayed abroad.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s cool, that’s cool. It’s you’re in London now. Now you’re CEO and founder of AZA Finance. Is it AZA or AZA? Sorry.

Elizabeth Rossiello: AZA.

Kevin Rosenquist: AZA Finance is a leading provider of cross-border payment solutions, focusing primarily on African markets. What drew you to Africa specifically?

Elizabeth Rossiello: So I was working in investment banking. I left the Secretary’s work. And I went to Goldman Sachs.

Kevin Rosenquist: But you were going to be so rich.

Elizabeth Rossiello: And I somehow got into Goldman Sachs and M&A and then integrated suites. I was like, wow, I’m good at these obligations. Then I just hated everybody I worked with. They were just tool bags. I looked online. Mohamed Younis had won the Nobel Peace Prize in microfinance. I started reading about it, and I was like, yes, finance. I could probably do this and get a job with them and wanted to go to Asia. They were like, nope, go to East Africa. So that’s how I got there. I thought I’d be there a year, stayed eight in Kenya, had two kids, and did a ton of fieldwork. When I was doing this fieldwork, I kept seeing all these great institutions, well-meaning management, all this cool technology with mobile money coming in, but all of their financing and funding was in dollars or euros, and then they’re on lending in African currencies. I was like, this is so irresponsible. Who the heck is lending to them in hard currencies and not hedging it and making them eat the effects of loss? I was just like, it was going to Berlin and looking in the newspaper. I was like, what are these? The World Bank is doing this to these people, these institutions, and all these development institutions are doing this.

Elizabeth Rossiello: And I won’t name them here, but I wrote report after report about it and I was like, where’s the local currency financing? And you had it in Southeast Asia, you had it in South America, you had it in India, but you didn’t have it in sub-Saharan Africa. Then I started yapping and writing about, like, financial colonialism and how insisting on these hard currencies. It’s unfair. I just was quite interested in the topic, and in one of my projects, I met an investor who was quite interested in Bitcoin, and he was like, well, could you use this to trade with other markets? And I was like, how about we use it as a way to lower the cost of buying and selling African currencies? And that was initially the idea. We started to trade Kenyan shillings U.S. dollars via Bitcoin and we got down to quite cheap. I think it was 6% or 7% at the best bank. We got it down to less than a percent. Then we evolved from there and then we realized African currency pairs were unavailable.

Elizabeth Rossiello: So how do you trade Kenyan shilling Nigerian naira? How do you trade the naira and South African rand? Sometimes we use Bitcoin in the middle in the beginning. But as we grew our infrastructure, we realized we didn’t need to use it. So sometimes the blockchain or cryptocurrencies aren’t needed. In this case, we had our infrastructure on both sides. We were on the left and the right-hand side. So we just grew from there. Then, funnily enough, people wanted digital currencies later on and stablecoins as one of their currencies. So we started trading them again. So I think when you’re open to innovation and you’re not fixed on a thesis and you’re looking to solve a problem of creating liquidity between currencies. You can use different technologies along the journey. You don’t have to force it if there’s not a use case that that time doesn’t make sense, you can evolve it. Then when it comes back in favor, you’re open to it again. So as a trader, we’re all about optionality.

Kevin Rosenquist: That stuck to a thesis. That’s good. I haven’t heard that before but it makes sense that a lot of people are stuck to the thesis and aren’t willing to innovate and all that. One of your things is to kind of help break down barriers for small and medium-sized businesses that they face by providing accessible financial services is what you guys are kind of big on. So what are the most significant barriers you’ve seen throughout your career, and how have you been able to help SMEs overcome them?

Elizabeth Rossiello: It’s so hard for businesses in one country in Africa to buy hard currency, and it’s still hard for them to buy other African currencies. they have an invoice. Right now, most of the FMCG goods are sold across the African continent. Remember, these are populations that are booming. Most of planet Earth will be African at the turn of the century. Imagine that. So soap, shampoo, razors, toothbrushes, clothes, everything, everything you see in a store is coming from the Middle East, coming from Southeast Asia. All the pot noodles, all the instant ramen, all the cool stuff in the grocery stores, all the stuff from Asia. All of it’s coming into the continent. How do these buyers buy it? I know so many people, so many clients who are buying anything from half a shipping container to a container, a day of goods. How do they make those payments? And maybe they’re selling them across the border. They’re they’re exporting tea to Sri Lanka. Kenya is the second largest tea exporter. Aluminum which comes out of Kenya, Uganda. Sugar out of Senegal.

Elizabeth Rossiello: There’s so much happening on the African continent and they can’t pay simple invoices. It would take them two weeks because they couldn’t get access to those currencies. Now we let them pay in local currency and we find a swap for the currency payment abroad. We now see customers start out with us still trading with us seven, or ten years later. Just today, a seven-up importer in one of my markets. I see his invoice every couple of weeks. I’m like, yes, we brought him on so many years ago. He’s one of our smaller clients. But we see his steady trade growing. Other big clients want to enter a new market. They might want to enter Francophone, or they might expand their business to southern Africa. They can start trading with us. Then since they’re already onboarded, it’s very easy for them to just access the different currencies. They don’t have to even think about it when before it would have been a major impediment to growing their business and why.

Kevin Rosenquist: Why was it so difficult? Why did AZA have to come in and make it think?

Elizabeth Rossiello: Foreign exchange is not the first product a lot of banks like to invest in. With such a young population, the retail market and retail products were very popular and the high-end lending was very profitable. So even the worst banks and I won’t name them, were being quite profitable with very few products and terrible customer support. Trading is difficult, but so that’s number one. Number two, the banking groups across the continent have different operational codes or OP codes in each market. So you have one big brand bank. It’s a different bank in Senegal than it is in Ghana. They don’t have the same IT system. They don’t have the same PNL, they don’t have the same trading, the same risk. So they have no idea how to trade. Across HSBC, Hong Kong and Singapore. Samsung can communicate in a way that they weren’t across Africa and that created a huge cost impediment to trading ethics, because ethics means instant settlement, because the currencies are moving, you can’t take a long time to settle. The currency will have moved. Number two, you need to know how much you have everywhere at any given time to be able to price that. The systems weren’t interacting. So a lot of operational and technical reasons why the banks weren’t good at ethics, and then just a lot of social and demographic reasons about easier places they could make money.

Kevin Rosenquist: And technology technological advancements certainly have helped ease the burden of cross-border transactions. What’s been the most significant change since you founded AZA that has allowed cross-border transactions to happen more seamlessly?

Elizabeth Rossiello: Well, I don’t want to toot our own horn too loud, but I do think it’s about the team we’ve built and our operations. We’ve done something rare, which is build Pan-African, seamless operations. Now, a lot of fintechs are like, I have a great product. It works well in one market and they kill it in that market. But they struggled to offer it in many markets. If you look at the top 510 fintechs there, they’re really big in 1 or 2 markets, but not across markets. Our product and our DNA have to, by definition, be continental, international, be global. You can’t trade FX and domestically. So from the beginning, we had to make sure one team trusted another, one fixed trust, and the other same risk, the same onboarding a lot of processes and procedures. We are good at that technology. It’s helped with modern team culture, and working culture, agile methodology has helped with that. We do a whole bunch of mushy stuff. We do coaching, we do team building. We do KPI monitoring. We use a lot of online tools from Lattuce to Bamboo, Slack Atlassian a million things to make that easier. I think a lot of old-fashioned financial services companies, especially those in effect, don’t do that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, I would guess that. So you’re not just helping transactions. You’re kind of trying to help these businesses just succeed in general.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes. I mean when our customers grow, we grow. I spent the whole day in Nairobi with one of our biggest new customers entering the continent, and they’re like, how do we grow in all these five markets? And we’re like, this is how you do payouts, this is how you do collections, this is how you do settlement. We can handle those facts. We offer many services, we do payouts, we do collections. But we focus on the effects. But I will do those other things because the customers need them and it helps them give me more effects. We always talk about it as a restaurant that offers delivery. I don’t talk about the motorcycles that deliver the food but the glamorous part. But you need them because if they don’t get the food there on time, nobody will order your delicious, expensive and fancy food, right? So we have very quality food. We have the best effects wholesale in the market, the best prices, fastest settlement, and then we are able to give our customized customers great APIs for payouts and collections as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: Politics and humanitarian issues plague Africa regularly, whether it’s dictatorships, genocides, hunger now, the war in Sudan, or the situation in Haiti. Every country and every continent has its fair share of disasters and turmoil. But it must be hard working with African companies and people when there are so many issues that pop up regularly. How do you manage that?

Elizabeth Rossiello: Well, I’m from New York. I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. I’m not from Connecticut. If life wasn’t easy for me.

Kevin Rosenquist: Whoa whoa whoa. Right hit on the Connecticut folks.

Elizabeth Rossiello: I grew up in an inner city. Life wasn’t easy. I’m used to all sorts of lifestyles. That’s the economics. I’m not afraid of any of that. So that didn’t faze me. I’ve worked across so many regulatory regimes. When I was working in microfinance, I was writing reports on what the regulation was, and I visited a lot of central banks, and I met with them. I just just anything, when you study a whole group of something, you see patterns. So I would be like, okay, these couple of countries have the same sort of regulatory regime. These ones have the same sort of incentives. This one is this one. So I thought of patterns, and we grouped them, structures into ones that were forward-thinking, ones that were on the Anglophone legal, one on the francophone, and ones that were commodity-based. So yes, there are 55 markets, but I do see similarities in some in others. I also think if you have a model of approach where you’re coming into something and you’re like, these are the five options, it could be if each five option, this is the way we’re going to go.

Elizabeth Rossiello: And it’s a menu choose your adventure and you have a structure for it. You have a structure for flexibility. Does that make sense? I think the problem is when you come in you’re like, this is our model and it must work everywhere. Then you’re like, oh, it doesn’t fit. So for us, we assume everything is going to be custom, almost a pimp my ride show. Each market will be custom, but we know it can only have so many parts. It’s got to have wheels, a hood, a roof, a steering wheel. It might be different colors or different combinations, but it’s going to have these components and we just expect it to be custom every time. So that’s how we handle that. I mean I don’t freak out with volatility. It’s a place to find arbitrage. I think also America’s bonkers.

Kevin Rosenquist: No, you’re not wrong there. Trust me. I live here. So yes, you have no idea.

Elizabeth Rossiello: For many years, you were like, oh my God, come back home. I’m like, why?

Kevin Rosenquist: Why would I do that? You just said I’ll leave. What are you? Nuts?

Elizabeth Rossiello: They’re like, how can you have your kids in kindergarten? And I’m like, how can you have your kids in kindergarten? I think it’s also just perception. I was the poorest person in my neighborhood when I lived in Nairobi. It’s a very affluent place. People would be like, do you have shampoo? Do you have salt there? My neighbors got Green Range Rovers. So I have an incredible sushi restaurant I go to. So I think it’s also the perception of how wild it is. Of course, we don’t have all great elections there. But again, neither is America. I think it’s just more out there. People admit it. More people talk about corruption more. It’s more open about it. I think in other places I’ve lived, Luxembourg or the United States, maybe not mentioned as much.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, yes. It’s hidden, hidden more.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, I think a lot of times you see the footage of and it’s not that it’s not real, but of people with guns and walking around the streets and stuff. So I think that that Wild West kind of perception, you’re right, kind of is perpetuated here in this country.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes. There is a lot of poverty in America and you can drive around your neighborhood and not see it. I think the difference in a lot of African capitals is the poverty and the affluent neighborhoods mixed more I live in London, where every few blocks there’s a council estate, even in the fanciest neighborhoods, and it’s mansions, council mansions, council. There are parts of New York where you can go for a long time where you don’t see that. I think it depends. So is it more on your fate for sure? But I think for us on the continent, we just take it as it is.

Kevin Rosenquist: When there is a kind of larger government turmoil like what’s happening in Haiti is a good example. How big of an impact does that have on the way you do business?

Elizabeth Rossiello: Well, definitely in elections we’ve set home sometimes or changes of control. There have been floods. Every kind of thing has happened in 11 years and all these markets, it’s a horrific flood. Flooding in Nairobi, etc.. I was living in Nairobi, really at the Constitution came in and obviously, it was a little hectic right before police would stop you all the time. Things were that. There was a lot more violence after the Constitution. It was very peaceful. So I think for us it’s just like, how do you operate through all seasons? How do you operate when the market’s up or down? How do you operate when there’s election or non-election season? How do you operate when there’s cash from VCs or no cash from VCs? I think the idea is how to have a defendable revenue model in all seasons.

Kevin Rosenquist: That makes sense. Then you mentioned 11 years, I think. You’re almost 11 years old, right? You hit ten years in business somewhat recently. Congrats, by the way, on that.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes. But 11, I think, it’s October.

Kevin Rosenquist: October is 11? Cool. Did you have a ten-year plan when you started this thing?

Elizabeth Rossiello: Oh my God. I just wanted to make a salary for a year. I want to employ myself, so I get make the salary. That’s it. This is beyond my wildest dreams. I think a lot of women, even nerdy ones like me, just don’t dream big enough. I’m like, whispering in my daughter’s ears every night. They’re like, mom, like, go watch Netflix. Leave us alone. I’m like, dream big, dream big, anything.

Kevin Rosenquist: I just want to go to sleep.

Elizabeth Rossiello: They are like, Mom, go, have a snack, and get out of our bedroom. So I didn’t think it would get to this along the way. It’s been so wild, but I think in the last couple of years, we’ve hit our stride. We see these gigantic clients that we always dreamed of coming in and like, no, we have a motto inside the company, no clients too big anymore. There were times when that client was too big for us.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, especially, in the beginning stages.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes. You’re like, clients too big and, like, stealing clients from our clients. Or we’re like, get the middleman out of the way. That’s a good feeling. And then you feel we own the ground. We own the territory. I think market positioning is tough to acquire. If you want to go big and you stake your camp way out, way out beyond where everybody else is, you’re like, haha, I’m a genius or a fool. You tell them. It takes a while to realize that that property is worth something. So that’s where we are right now. It feels really good. It feels like we have a lot of energy to keep going because this is the fun part.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. I’m either a genius or a fool. I feel that’s probably every entrepreneur’s start, right? That’s what you’re going to say right off the bat as well. This is either going to be successful or I am screwed.

Elizabeth Rossiello: I say this every day. Pretty much how we start our morning stand-up.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s your morning breakout. You’re like, okay, all right, we might be crazy or we might do well. We’ll see. All right. It’s a day-by-day thing for you guys, huh? What’s next for AZA? Would you have anything in the pipeline that you guys are working on?

Elizabeth Rossiello: We want to see our exchange rate up there on Bloomberg. We want to see our rates all the way to the top. We want to be known as the market maker. I think that’s the next big goal. First, we wanted to see that clients wanted the product. We found that product market fit. We wanted to see if we could expand and get regulated, survive the fintech desert, which is a great area until regulation is gone, and get a license. We’ve done that. We’ve got over five licenses and even more coming and now it’s just establishing ourselves amongst the incumbents and more and more legitimacy and changing the way the market is priced. That was the initial goal, right, is a more accurate risk analysis for this continent. If you price the risk more accurately, it won’t be overpriced and it won’t be indebting people who shouldn’t be indebted.

Kevin Rosenquist: It sounds like a great goal. If not, you always have a secretary.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Yes, yes, I could go back to Germany and translate documents.

Kevin Rosenquist: You could be a secretary and make the big bucks.

Elizabeth Rossiello: Well. My secretary is like Elizabeth. I could do this. Leave it. Leave me alone.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, Elizabeth, thank you very much for being here. I appreciate your time, and I enjoyed talking with you.