Real-Time Payments and Financial Inclusion in Asia Dwight Willis on DSGPay’s Journey

Episode Overview

Dwight Willis is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of DSGPay, a leading fintech company specializing in cross-border payment solutions across Asia. Under his leadership, DSGPay has expanded its services to tens of thousands of customers, businesses, and merchants globally, offering state-of-the-art real-time payment and collection services, as well as multi-currency virtual accounts. The company’s innovative approach has been showcased at prominent industry events, such as Money20/20 Asia 2024 in Bangkok, where DSGPay highlighted its expertise in cross-border payments and engaged with industry leaders through insightful discussions and interactive activities. Before founding DSGPay, Dwight amassed over 30 years of international banking experience, holding global management positions at prestigious institutions including WestLB AG, St George Bank, and Standard Chartered. His career spanned major financial hubs such as London, Sydney, and Singapore, where he focused on innovating banking solutions and bridging the divide between technology and banking. In 2017, Dwight served as the Head of the Committee on Technology within the Australian-Thai Chamber of Commerce . contributing to the development of policies impacting businesses and enhancing commercial collaborations between Australia and Thailand. Dwight’s academic background includes degrees in business administration, economics, and law, providing him with a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted aspects of the financial industry. His diverse expertise has been instrumental in navigating the complex regulatory landscapes of Asia’s diverse economies. Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Dwight leverages his deep understanding of Asian cultures and markets to drive DSGPay’s mission of revolutionizing international payments. His leadership continues to position DSGPay at the forefront of fintech innovation, particularly in the realm of cross-border payments and financial inclusion.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, and welcome to Pay Pod where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Today I’m chatting with Dwight Willis, co-founder and CEO of DSGPay, based in Asia. DSGPay supports tens of thousands of customers and merchants globally, offering services like real time payments and multi-currency virtual accounts. We discuss topics like embedded finance, financial inclusion and open banking, and what you’re going to find really fascinating, as I did, was his perspective on these topics. He’s located in Thailand and works primarily in Asian markets. He sees things firsthand that many of us in the West know nothing about, and his perception of topics like open banking differs from many people I’ve talked to. His insight definitely made me think and I have a feeling it will do the same for you. So please welcome Dwight Willis. So your career experience has been all, or at least largely based in tech, but I noticed your education was focused on things like business administration, economics and even law. How did you end up in such high level tech positions?

Dwight Willis: It was always mainly in banking. Right. So,  it was bridging that divide of technology and banking. I can’t actually code. Right. But I can have pretty good discussions on technology with technologists and get to the right areas. So you probably put more in a business analyst sort of area and grew out of that space. And that’s where it really came from. have you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Always been a tech guy, though?

Dwight Willis: Well, I can hold my own in conversation, right. But I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say, you know, I’m a programmer or anything of that nature. Right. So but asked me to normalize the database and I can probably help you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. All right. Have you always had, like, an interest in computers and stuff? Did you have a good background in that before you got involved?

Dwight Willis: Yeah, it kind of fell into it. Right. So, yeah, back in, I, I’m, I’m a little bit old. So back, back when I first started was the end of batch cards with computers. Right. So,  yeah, I’ve, I’ve been around for a while. Seen centralization, decentralization, centralization again. Right. So, yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: You’ve seen it all. You’ve seen it all.

Dwight Willis: All right.

Kevin Rosenquist: You founded DSG over a decade ago now. What was your motivation for starting your own company in the payment space.

Dwight Willis: Where we’re headquartered in the northern part of Thailand, a place called Chiang Mai kind of doesn’t have the size of mountains like Colorado and the US, but we have we’re at the base of the Himalayas. Right. And,  beautiful. I’m looking at a view of the rice fields and mountains up here. And I married a girl from up here and I’m increasingly spending time commuting from Singapore up here and eventually left banking and got bored of being semi-retired for six months and we decided to focus on a problem. And back in those days, the cost of moving money as an individual was still really, really expensive and there weren’t many options around. So yeah, we formed,  myself and now my co-founder, who’s the real technology brain,   harmonic formed Dollar Smart Global up here in Thailand. And we focused on money transfer from Australia to Thailand and very rapidly got 20% of the overall flow,  because no one else was in that market in the beginning and grew the business quite rapidly and thought, this is very easy. We’re going to conquer the world. Right? And it’s been a bit more difficult since then, but a lot more competition.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, there’s a lot of competition in the space, no doubt about it. No doubt about it. Yeah, well, your world domination could still happen. You don’t don’t don’t sell yourself short.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. We’re a bit of a different beast. We’re an organic funded beast. So bootstrapped off my balance sheet. So we’ve organically grown, been profitable since the first six months and continue to be. So, Yeah, we’re a little bit different. We operate at a different speed, but we have quite a few of the things that the major players have in the payment space. So in terms of virtual accounts, in terms of pay and payouts, etc.,  particularly focused on Asia.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay, okay. And is this your first foray into entrepreneurship?

Dwight Willis: Yes. So apart from being a 12 year old delivering medicine. Yes. Yeah. Yeah okay.

Kevin Rosenquist: All right. That counts.

Dwight Willis: That counts.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you, do you.

Dwight Willis: It counts. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you like it? Is it something that you feel was a natural fit for you?

Dwight Willis: I do, I quite like the freedom, right? You know, I like to say I had a different man. I’m reporting to. You. Right. So in the bank, you always had a boss and a boss of a boss, right? But,  when you’re running your own startup, you know, we’re reporting through to our regulators, our customers and our, our bankers, etc., and other partners. Right. So you have different kind of reporting lines in a way, but the more abstract than what they are in an organization and,  more freedom, more ability to do the things I want to do and try and mix the lifestyles together, which I quite appreciate and enjoy.

Kevin Rosenquist: Is leadership something that comes naturally for you, would you say?

Dwight Willis: Yeah, I think so. To come. But yeah, I’d fallen in or got asked to be mentored to be a leader at a very young age. Right? It’s such a nebulous term, but, effectively put in a position where you’re taking on a lot of responsibility, people, budgets, etc. and,  and trying to figure a way through for that makes the strategy, the organization and all the other stakeholders that are involved in it yet. So it’ll be doing those sort of roles for a while. Quite, quite enjoy it. Well, that’s cool.

Kevin Rosenquist: Probably helped you in becoming an entrepreneur. At least you had some experience in leadership positions where you could kind of pull from that.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. And I think when I look back on my academic record, the thing that has helped the most, especially with the organically funded startup, was the MBA. And actually knowing a little bit about a lot is really helped, right? And, you know, legal. So I have a law degree as well. So I was doing a lot of our internal legals is really helped from a cost perspective. Right. But also understanding the business and making sure we’re protected from a legal perspective. So yeah, all of that academic background has been quite useful in a way.

Kevin Rosenquist: I like knowing a little bit about a lot. I think that’s that’s an interesting that’s an interesting thought from for for especially for an entrepreneur, just because there’s so many different things that you. So many different areas that you have to become, you know, cognizant of or proficient in. Like you have to figure out so many different things, so many aspects of business that maybe you don’t have experience in.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. And working for big banks in Asia, you get a great grounding. Right. So eating well, even things like,  how to manage offshore headcount right now, how to manage HR issues, all that sort of wonderful stuff that you need to do as a, as a startup. Yeah. It’s very grounding. Great experience.

Kevin Rosenquist: So good. All right. Well, let’s talk aboutDSGPay.  it’s your API driven platform that provides seamless connectivity to local payment networks across Asia. Can you talk about the importance of open banking, especially with cross-border payments?

Dwight Willis: Yeah, it’s, it’s a difficult one. You probably not going to find me fully in the I. I bought the Kool-Aid camp. Right? I drank the Kool-Aid. I think there’s some huge challenges around open banking, particularly in Asia. Europe. You’ve got one big, gigantic market with one direction coming from a regulator. Right? And it’s a lot easier to get economies of scale with open banking in, in, in Europe. But in Asia, you know, you kind of roughly talking Southeast Asia, probably roughly talking same size as Europe, but you’re talking what, seven, eight, nine different countries, if not more, ranging from very kind of   least developed economies like Myanmar, Lao through to a highly developed economy like Singapore,  with different cultures, different legal systems,  and some of them very large populations, some of them very small populations. So it’s a real challenge in Southeast Asia to drive that forward. Nate, I was just refreshing myself on some,  what’s happening out, out in this part of the world and Australia is a good example, you know, a highly developed economy, small lot. There’s a government directive on open banking back in 2019, inspired of what was happening in Europe to give consumers access to their data, from the banks.

Dwight Willis: And we’re, what, three, four years into that project now and about 0.313 0.31% to check that number of consumers take up. And the project is in a kind of,  frozen or staid status with the banks complaining about the cost of providing APIs.  there may be an argument made about they not want to give out the data, right? They want to protect the data and their consumers,  and their customers. And then you’ve got the fintechs on one side who want access to the data to be able to provide more open banking services, right, to consumers,  complaining that the banks aren’t providing what they’re going to provide. So it’s a really interesting use case on the development of open banking. I think there’s a use case there and we’ll get there. It’ll just be a lot slower than what people think. I think the force is around regulation, around protection of consumer data, around the diversity of the economies in Asia make it particularly difficult to get something going on scale. And a lot of what I’ll talk about refers to China, right. And experiences in China when we talk about embedded finance a bit later.

Kevin Rosenquist: So yeah, that’s an interesting an interesting angle. I feel I talk to a lot of people who are very bullish on open banking and,  you know, that’s an interesting,  an interesting part of that. I definitely could definitely see what you’re talking about. What did you said, what was it, 0.0031% or something like that. Yeah, really small percentage. The reason for that is because people are interested or because it’s not available.

Dwight Willis:  It’s a mixture of both and getting to that answer is really, really difficult when you got different stakeholders with different needs and directions. Right? And if you look across broader Southeast Asia, you’ve got either government led, initiatives on open banking or you’ve got the governments left it up to industry. And it’s still very, very nascent in Southeast Asia, for sure.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, there’s security concerns that people have mentioned as well. There’s just there are yeah. There’s a lot of logistics going on there.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. Correct, correct. And you know, we live in Chiang Mai, Thailand, right? 300km away from us is Myanmar. The mountain areas of Myanmar, where there’s a lot of there’s been a war going on with the Myanmar government for, you know, since, what, 1940s or earlier. And there’s huge scamming centers that have been set up in casinos, old,  Chinese kind of built casino areas on the border there. And,  just the prevalence of scamming across Southeast Asia is just huge. We as a business deal with it every day of the week, right? But, and the amount of effort the government puts in to educate the populace,  on the risks of scamming. And then you have open banking, you got to balance those two,  two drivers somehow. And I don’t think we’ve got the right balance yet.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s a good point. You have another product that is your multi-currency virtual accounts, which I was looking into. I thought those were pretty cool. And please correct me if I’m wrong, but it allows businesses to manage and hold funds in different currencies, therefore making international transactions way more efficient. Is that correct?

Dwight Willis: Yes. So yeah, we we have,  multi-currency accounts in, in Hong Kong that are in the 14 major currencies, primarily to give customers, particularly SME customers, but through our mobile app, but also large merchants who want a footprint in Asia, an ability to be able to get access, access to Asian markets, Asian prices, Asian currencies. So they’re both majors and then they’re also Asian. More Asian exotic currencies like Korean won or  Singapore dollar, etc.. Again, the challenge out in Asia is  say Europe, US, Japan, big markets, free moving currency, free movement of money generally. Right? Particularly out in Asia, after the Asian financial crisis, what, 1997?  a lot of the central banks had a very hard learning process about protection of local economies, protection of currencies,  and regimes, currency regimes. And so the challenge out in Asia is a lot of the currencies aren’t free floating. And so you’ll find that there’s an ability to buy a local currency but not sell a local currency without having to go through a lot of kind of government restrictions, uh. Policies around what, what reasons currency can be bought and sold for or what what? Reason the local currency can be sold for. So, yeah, we provide virtual accounts in a. Lot of Asian currencies.  but it’s quite interesting. it put my legal hat on. It’s quite interesting to look at it from a local economy perspective, and how the government is trying to protect their local economies through protecting their local exchange rates. So a very long winded answer to say we hopefully make that a lot easier for our corporate SME customers to get access to,  virtual accounts in the local currencies in, in Asia. Well be.

Kevin Rosenquist: And being an international payment solution certainly has its challenges. I mean, moving money across borders isn’t always easy, which you’ve already alluded to before. I mean, that’s a tough challenge. How do you take on that challenge and find solutions to the difficulties in global business.

Dwight Willis: Our industry, there’s a lot of fly by night guys that will say we can do it, right? Right. We find working either with license banks or licensed partners in those jurisdictions is absolutely crucial. And, you know, looking at the risk profile of the customers that you’re servicing in those industries just need to be very careful that it’s aligned to what’s going on from a regulatory perspective. Sure. You may know, we get approached all the time about high risk businesses into many jurists wanting to collect from many jurisdictions in Asia. But we just don’t you just can’t touch it. The regulation, the risk of things blowing up and blowing up very quickly and putting everyone in a very difficult situation is quite real at out in this part of the world. And you have to be very, very cognizant of local regulations and requirements. Yeah. Um. Mm.

Kevin Rosenquist: Wow. Yeah, that’s what I mean, I guess that’s true. Like it’s, there’s, there’s so many different you.

Dwight Willis: Know.

Kevin Rosenquist: So many different political regimes. There’s so many different cultures. It’s definitely more of a melting pot. I feel different from country to country,  you know, dealing with that, that’s really it’s, it’s kind of interesting what you said about not being able to or not wanting to go with certain things because you feel it’s too risky. How is it just a gut instinct? Do you do you look at it more from a data and analytics position, or how do you like,  I’m not going to touch that.

Dwight Willis: All of us in this industry spend a lot of time on risk and compliance, right? So, yeah, it’s very, you know, not the most exciting topic in the world, but kind of a very important topic. And, and just trying to find, find the balance and, and coming up with some clear direction, and sticking to that is, is really, really important. And making sure when things do go wrong that you corrected very quickly.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, it sounds like you’re kind of in the camp of at least trying to see the potential risk or the potential problems before you even get involved and maybe even having to leave a decent amount of money on the table in the process. Huh?

Dwight Willis: Yeah. Correct. In this, anyone in this industry that, you know,  I think I once heard a Ex-goldman CTO had gone into the crypto space. talk about us being payments companies being junior varsity. Right.  as against,  kind of full, I don’t know my US lingo, right, but against kind of full seniors being the, the banking industry from a regulation and compliance perspective. So we are seeing as more risky the drive to automate and the drive to put risk and compliance in place is kind of separating a lot of the pack out. I think over time. And if you can’t do it, you’re not going to get access to payment rails, to bank accounts, etc. and you need to be able to protect in many ways your banking partner, yet give them flow. So it’s that whole risk versus reward discussion that comes into play. Yeah. And different banks have different risk profiles. Right. So yeah. Out, out, out in Asia, it’s really  you’ve got a, you’ve got a lot of the large global banks are rolling back their retail banking presences out here.  they just can’t compete against the local players that have branches in every, you know, small little city. Right. And the online businesses and online banking is such a nascent thing out here, apart from, you know, Hong Kong or Singapore or China, it’s going to be quite interesting to see if that’s the way they can get access back to the retail markets.

Dwight Willis: But you’re making that point. It’s you’ve got a fairly small coterie of players out here, banking partners that you can work with that can give you the suite of API products you need as a payments company to be able to operate. And it’s a fairly small group, and they’re not in all the countries in Asia. So it becomes quite interesting to then operate. Yeah, you, you end up with a quite diverse portfolio of banking partners.  because you need strong in a way, you need the strongest local player who’s got the best API capability to give you access to the exciting payment opportunities that exist out here, out in the. It’s quite interesting. Look, look at the US, right. With the development of the payment space. You’ve got ACH wires and then you’ve got the new emerging fed now. But you don’t have a government mandate over that. And you have  what’s the other one called? Rtv. You know, I go, I go to the US and it’s dominated by tap and go with, visa Mastercard. Right. Or even I mean, yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Google Pay and Apple Pay and all that. Yeah.

Dwight Willis: Yeah yeah. No, I come back to Thailand or even I went to Lao, a very small country next to Thailand, last week, and I’m scanning QR codes, paying for everything through my mobile banking or my digital wallet here. Right. And,  yeah. Just that. Yeah. No one’s paying that 3% payment rails. Right. It’s a government supported initiative and probably a good, a good synergy into a discussion about CBDCs. Right. So yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a bigger discussion than what we have time for. Right. Yeah. I wanted to talk about the panel discussion you participated in during Money20 20 Asia this past May,  where you talked about things like open banking, embedded finance. You know, we talked about open banking a little bit. But what was that experience like for you being part of that panel?

Dwight Willis: It’s quite interesting being a speaker out in Asia. You need to be,  they I can’t remember what they called it, but they they had, everyone had to leave their mobile phones. No one could record anything.  I was a bit skeptical whether everyone left their mobile phones or not.  and it was supposed to be able to talk about anything kind of stage. Right. But you gotta understand where you are and the culture and what can be said and can’t be said. Right. So even that was quite interesting to make sure we were cognizant of where we were and what we were saying. So, yeah, it was an exciting thing to get up on a panel. And I met some great contacts from here that I didn’t know who were operating, you know, open banking, lending sort of businesses back into Europe and the US. It was quite interesting to meet those folks who built the network.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, embedded finance is a very interesting topic. we’re seeing it with more platforms now. What are you and what is the most common use case currently that you see.

Dwight Willis: The most common use case out this way. And the one that I was blown away about, right? I’d not been back to mainland China for for quite a few years. And,  unfortunately, in this part of the world, every March and April, when it’s the dry hot season, they just burn everything. So you guys have wildfires in Colorado, right? Absolutely. We get it here and we get the worst air in the world for 2 or 3 months. And so I grabbed my kids and I’m out of here. Right. I don’t want to breathe it. I’m lucky I can escape. Right. And,  we we caught we went to Beijing, and we caught a train all the way from Beijing. All the way back to Thailand. Effectively. Oh, back to the Lao Lao border with Thailand. And spent about four weeks traveling around China. And it was really, really interesting to understand how I’m going to actually pay for things in China as a tourist. And Alipay, WeChat pay. Alipay was the one that I was able to get access to tie it to my debit credit card. And I went around scanning and paying for things in China. And where it became really interesting was, say, walking into a KFC or walking into a McDonald’s.

Dwight Willis: And hopefully you can find I don’t read or write Chinese, but hopefully you can find an English menu. And the embedded finance between, say, the interaction with the store to buy some KFC and then pay for it through. Everything was embedded into the Alipay app. And so it was like the payment engine was the aggregator of the service. And because they’re so dominant in those economies, the restaurants were like an API for a restaurant to then connect to their payment platform. That’s pretty cool, actually. Yeah, yeah. And it was an immediate payment. The challenge became when you could for some reason, I couldn’t execute the payment. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the Alipay version I was using, right? and then you had to revert to cash. And because it’s so prevalent, the use of digital wallets in China, paying of cash became difficult and especially getting change back. So you give over a large note and not get any change back. So yeah, there’s just been this huge adoption of digital money in China,  for a variety of different purposes. But the embedded finance aspect of it was just fascinating.

Kevin Rosenquist: That is fascinating. That’s an interesting use case for sure. The official name of the panel discussion was Open Banking and Embedded Finance in Asia, dream or Destiny. So where do you land? Dream or destiny?

Dwight Willis: I, I land on it’s a long road. it’ll get there. I had a friend say this to me. Oh, I mentioned names, but he meant he’d met someone fairly senior in Amazon. And their comment was, I hate bankers from the Amazon side, right? I don’t like bankers. We can move a parcel with Amazon Prime in hours, right? Physically move the parcel. But bankers can’t move money within minutes. Right. And it’s a digital product. And so I particularly, you know, aiming my criticisms at the large credit card debit card processors. Right. And this is where we see a particular opportunity for our company. Right. Is why does it take 3 to 7 days for the merchant to receive their funds? Sure. It opens up opportunities for other players in the lending space, etcetera, to lend based on invoicing. Right. But in say Thailand. Right. People are many people are living day to day running small businesses and if they accept point of sale visa, Mastercard payments, they’re not going to end up with the the proceeds of settlement for the 3 to 7 days, and they got a finance that they have to pay for the goods up front. Right. That’s tough on.

Kevin Rosenquist: Castro. Yeah.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a real, real cash flow problem out here, particularly to SMEs. And that that’s ultimately where we’re aimed as a company to provide alternative payment rail access to SMEs in this part of the world so that they can get their money on a at least T plus one, but eventually move them to a real time basis to receive their, their, their cash from their, their customers over electronic means. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s got to be the future, right? It’s gotta be. We gotta get there.

Dwight Willis: Yeah, we have to get there. I just find it amazing that we have it right. Yeah. And this. And, you know, I’m. I’m much more in the pragmatist camp, right? So I think we’ll get there.  it’ll be a long and hard journey in a way. I wasn’t, you know, I many people were saying crypto. You’re going to solve the cross border.  Well, we’ll get to a bigger crypto discussion, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: A lot of people still say that the blockchain is the key to all of this. The Web3 aspect is the key.

Dwight Willis: Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: You got to look at the king.

Dwight Willis: Who’s the king? Right? And the king wants to protect his economy, protect his currency. And so I think you have to look at that to understand what are the major drivers behind adoption or non-adoption of crypto? And you know, how long are we into the crypto journey now like nine, ten, 11 more years?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I would say like about a decade, right? Is kind of when I remember starting to hear about it.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. Yeah. I’m kind of struggling about beyond the speculative trading aspect, the use case for crypto and has it really stuck and I’m happy to be proved wrong, but,  yeah, I don’t see it. And for me peak um my little funny crypto story is peak crypto for me was when I was in 7-Eleven in upcountry Thailand. And,  there was an advert on the point of sale terminal saying buy crypto. And I thought they’re selling crypto to rice farmers in northern Thailand. That’s, that’s the peak market. So I’m selling. Wow.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh that’s crazy. Yeah. The crypto thing is so interesting because I talk, you know, I talk to a lot of different, different types of people on this podcast. And it’s so interesting to me how divided, really, really smart financial people are on crypto. There are people that know a ton about finance who absolutely think it’s the future. Absolutely love decentralization. Think it’s amazing. And then there’s a whole other camp, probably a larger camp of people who know a hell of a lot about finance, who are, if not skeptical, just flat out say, this is a bunch of bunch of bunch of bunk.

Dwight Willis: Yeah, I’m more in that camp. Yeah, I think you try to. It’s a solution. Looking for a problem? Yeah, it’s a well designed solution. Right? You know, when early on, people were saying, oh, cross border, you know, we’re going to get rid of Swift. I’m like, oh,  you know, central banks want to protect their local banking industries, to protect their local economies, to protect the populace.  Tim Swift, how long did it take to build that network? To build 44,000 banks into that network? And then,  I remember developing, you know, installing one of a green Unisys Swift machine in a bank in Australia. Right. The pain that it took to build it, to integrate that with the bank and the secure Swift network was just extremely painful and slow. And I’m thinking, wow, how are you going to move everybody on to a more crypto network and keep it safe and secure and meet the needs of the regulators who ultimately are going to have the final say in what you can and can’t do.  they will get organized eventually at a global level.  so that was. Yeah. I, I don’t know. I see more challenges to the crypto industry to get acceptance, particularly from the regulatory point of view. Yeah, that’s a long way from that.

Kevin Rosenquist: That if you can’t I think everybody agrees with that. No matter what side of the coin you’re on with crypto, because I feel like, yeah, that’s the whole thing. I mean, the decentralized nature of it. And then you throw regulation on there and everything else, you’re kind of like, I don’t know, I feel like you’re going to have this, like butting of heads between, you know, traditional banking the way we, we know it and then trying to get sort of a blockchain crypto mentality going across the board. I mean, I’ve, I’ve interviewed people who are coming up with payment solutions to actually accept crypto, you know, as in a store, and you’re just in there, you’re buying something. You can pay for it with crypto. So there are people out there really trying to push it. But yeah, I mean the global, the regulation especially at a global level is going to be really, really, really far away or is really far away.

Dwight Willis: Oh, really, really far away. I’d wish them good luck. I hope they enjoy paying. It’s going to be difficult for us. That’s right. So I wish.

Kevin Rosenquist: You good luck. And I hope you enjoy the pain. That’s good.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. Yeah. I should, you know, out in this part of the world, the really exciting development for me is the real time local payment networks. Yeah. And when they’re done really well and they’re sponsored at a government level and they’re mandated, you get some really huge benefits, particularly from financial inclusion point of view. I went back through my notes from that conference and I, you know, other panelists were talking about financial inclusion. Financial inclusion. Right. Double edged sword. It’s also financial exclusion. Right. So as much as you can get some fantastic benefits from having real time payment systems people. small merchants like, you know, will buy sticky rice and,  and barbecue pork. That’s kind of the staple morning dish for my son. You’re on the way to school, and you pay the seller, and immediately they get their phones, right. They get their 40 baht. What’s that? One? One and a bit. Us dollars, and immediately they got their money, and, uh. And it’ll be a guy selling this product off the back of a motorcycle with a QR code, and you just scan the QR code and pay him, right. Fantastic. Great product. Solves huge problems of financial inclusion in this part of the world. But then I look across some. I’ll use the example of Myanmar, look across to Myanmar right. And real time payment networks. centralization of customer data is being used as a tool to exclude money being sent to people that don’t agree with the government’s opinion. So you end up with financial exclusion. And I know talking to a few of the Lodge digital law players over there that you know there are the official UN and US and etc. sanctions lists on who not to send money to. But there’s also local lists that are developed by the local authoritarian government on who not to send money to. So it can be used as a tool for financial exclusion as well as inclusion. So depending on the government system that’s in place. Right. so it’s kind of an interesting development I hadn’t really thought of until you talk to people in this space.

Kevin Rosenquist: So wow. That’s it. Yeah. That’s not that, yeah. That’s funny because like yeah financial inclusion is such a talking point and rightfully so. And then yeah you see it, you see another side of it that’s that’s really fascinating. And yeah I’m not.

Dwight Willis: I’m not fully in the financial inclusion space. Right. Of course.

Kevin Rosenquist: Of course.

Dwight Willis: Yeah 

Kevin Rosenquist: But you show you’re showcasing how it can be, how real time payments can be used in other ways, or how things like this can, can lead to financial exclusion. I think that’s very interesting.

Dwight Willis: Yeah. Unfortunately it does happen in this world. But the benefits definitely of real time payment networks,  developing digital wallets, embedded finance, they’re there. Right? Yeah. Unmistakably. In my mind, I see it on the ground, see it day to day, and we’re firmly in that space. Right? I just worry about it being used for nefarious purposes. Right. So now bad actors.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s like everything, right? Everything’s got a bad, bad side to it that that we’re all nervous about. But all we can do is hope that the good guys win. All right, well Dwight Willis withDSGPay. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate you being here.

Dwight Willis: No thank you. Great to talk today.