The Future of FX Trading with Adam Katz

Episode Overview

​Adam Katz is the founder and CEO of Kooltra, a company dedicated to modernizing foreign exchange (FX) trading through innovative financial technology. With a background in computer programming and financial services, Adam recognized the inefficiencies plaguing the FX market, a sector that sees daily transactions exceeding $7.2 trillion. His vision with Kooltra is to address these challenges by developing advanced technological solutions that streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance transparency in FX trading.

Before establishing Kooltra, Adam amassed extensive experience in the fintech industry, holding key positions at various organizations where he focused on integrating technology with financial operations. His expertise lies in identifying and rectifying the shortcomings of legacy banking systems, which often lead to high fees and sluggish transactions. Adam’s commitment to innovation has positioned him as a thought leader in the realm of financial technology, particularly in the context of FX trading.

In addition to his professional endeavors, Adam is actively involved in initiatives aimed at fostering transparency and efficiency within the financial services sector. He collaborates with a team of industry and technology experts at Kooltra, all united by a mission to tackle the industry’s most complex challenges. Through his leadership, Kooltra has become a trusted partner for financial institutions seeking to revamp their FX operations and embrace the future of banking.

Episode Transcript

 Adam Katz: The interesting thing is looking at it from the other perspective of, you know, I look back to blockchain as a very early Bitcoin guy, but I look back and it hasn’t all achieved all the things. Sure, the price has gone up a lot. It has.

 Adam Katz: Gained mainstream trading adoption. But it hasn’t had the real world impacts that I was hoping for blockchain to have. You go back to 2010 to 2015, the amount of money that banks sunk into blockchain projects where they were trying to be ahead of the curve because it’s so obviously transformative technology. And most of those projects went nowhere.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist, and thanks for listening. Foreign exchange is a cornerstone of global finance, yet the operations behind it often remain in the shadows. My guest today is Adam Katz, founder and CEO of Kooltra, a company dedicated to modernizing how financial institutions approach FX trading. We chat about why so many financial institutions continue to rely on legacy systems, how they can modernize, and I get his take on how technology and recent and upcoming geopolitical shifts will affect FX trading as a whole. It’s a fascinating conversation and I’m excited for you to hear it. So please welcome Adam Katz. So before we hit record, we were talking about how cold it is here in Colorado. And you were like, yeah, whatever. That’s you’re live in Toronto. You told me that you moved from South Africa to Toronto about 25 years ago. What what prompted the move?

 Adam Katz: Uh, so my dad had a software company in South Africa, um, an accounting software that he built kind of from scratch in his basement, and he sold it and decided, let’s go on a family adventure and for some reason picked Canada. He he rarely, as I was saying in the before the interview started, he hated the heat. He hated living in South Africa just because he hates. And so he only leaves his house when it’s minus ten. That’s his entry point to outside.

Speaker2: That’s his. That’s his sweet spot.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Nice. So you kind of come by finance. You come by it honestly. From from your from your dad. Did he, did he sort of get you into this world.

 Adam Katz: Oh yeah I mean I, he well he started me really in computer programing. So when I was eight years old, my birthday gift was Visual Basic and a computer, and I was coding video games by the age of ten. I thought I was going to be the next big video game producer. Um, and I actually got really into the idea of like having different dashboards when I produced these games. Like, I liked setting up the area where you’d see your score and see your stats. And then when I started working in finance, foreign exchange, when I left school, and that was the part I loved most, is just organizing the data and showing how, showing all your metrics. And so that’s really where it all came from.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Wow, wow. That’s really cool. And. Yeah. Speaking of cool, your company is, cool.

 Adam Katz: Cool, cool. Yes.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Cool. All right. I want to make sure I said it right. I wanted to make sure I said it right. So. So tell me a little bit about what it is that that culture does.

 Adam Katz: So culture provides infrastructure in foreign exchange. You know, if you if you look around, most financial services companies either have some foreign exchange going on within the company or they specifically service foreign exchange needs of their customers. And so they need infrastructure to run those processes internally. It’s generally a pretty niche space. It fits in in finance. It fits in a weird spot because it’s not quite banking, it’s not quite capital markets. If you’re trading foreign equities, you need to trade FX or bonds. You need to trade FX. But if you’re sending a payment to your family in South Africa from Canada, you also need to trade FX. That really kind of sits in the middle in between the two divisions and as a result, generally doesn’t get much prioritization. And so it’s kind of fallen behind the times, which has left a lot of room for crypto to come and try and improve on a lot of the gaps that have been left there.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Good point. Good point on that for sure. So can you kind of give us a sense of how critical FX is to the global economy and why it’s such a unique space?

 Adam Katz: Yeah, sure. So I mean, there’s 7.2 trillion I think is the last number traded a day. So it’s one of the most traded markets. I mean, you think of any you know we live in a globalized world. Any trade that’s going back and forth, everything is foreign exchange. And it’s not only it’s not only just like the day to day converting. If you think of any business as doing business cross-border, if I look at the US CAD exchange rate, I mean, we’ve moved from 132 to 145 in a matter of a couple of months. I mean, that’s that 13% is your is your company’s net profit margin. So if you’re an importer exporter, if you’re and I mean that extends to individuals as well, right? If you’re people live all over the world now, they’re sending money back home to their families. It’s actually quite crazy to see in some payment corridors how expensive foreign exchange still is. Actually a story recently my my dad’s sister had to send him some money to send a couple thousand dollars and the bank in South Africa quoted 22%.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Holy cow.

 Adam Katz: To send a wire to Canada to convert the money and send the wire. And you know that if you think about the impact that that has on reducing business prospects.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yes.

 Adam Katz: Reducing the flow of people, it’s it’s got a huge impact globally. I mean, in general payments. Let’s be realistic. You know, our biggest companies are post about this the other day, our biggest companies in the world that we all celebrate, all these big fintechs are still charging three, 4% to accept a payment. And to me, I think we should all be working towards getting down the cost of payments as much as possible. And and a big part of that is foreign exchange. You can use your credit card anywhere in the world, but you’re still going to get hit with a 3% fee in most cases. And it’s almost like a tax on every transaction that happens that’s not in your home country.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And is it? Is it greed? Does it have to be that high? Is it operating expense? Is it just the the status quo? So we’ve never changed. Like why is it so high.

 Adam Katz: It’s a combination. There’s obviously. So ethics is very complicated. When you’re moving money across borders. You’ve got two regulators to deal with. You’ve got two sets of compliance requirements. I think we all want to stop money laundering as much as possible and have a fair playing field. And so that you’re battling fraud on both sides. So that gets very expensive operationally. You’ve got to sit on a lot of money if you want. We get used to our payments going very quickly from point A to point B, and a lot of our customers do that real time cross-border in these difficult jurisdictions. But in order to do that, you’ve got to hold money on both sides. All cash on hand. Ready to. As you receive the one side, send out the other side. So there’s a big cost of capital as well. And then especially on the B2B side, there’s a lot of credit involved. Because what will happen is you’ll send your funds over, you’ll have an invoice that you need to get paid out, and you’ll expect the payments company to release out the other side. Those funds may not have cleared yet. And so they’re ultimately using they’re using credits and they’re having interest costs. A big chunk of it though is operating inefficiencies. It’s really a big focus of what we do is, you know, if you’ve got many, many people, many chains, some of the things I’ve seen over the years where you’ve got, you know, five people have to sign off on a cross-border payment in order to get this thing released. And then, you know, it takes, you know, people really bash the Swift system a lot, but really sending a payment on Swift cross-border cost $0.10. It’s not that’s not where the big expense is. It’s from receiving the order to make the payment until you actually release the payment. Out on the other side, there is a lot of inefficiency, a lot of people involved, a lot of manual processes.

 Kevin Rosenquist: So, wait, you’re saying businesses don’t operate with pure efficiency?

 Adam Katz: Especially big banks.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Especially banks. Yeah. What, what? I mean, that’s a good segue into my next question. What do businesses get wrong when it comes to managing their operations? What mistakes do they make that that you think could be could be fixed?

 Adam Katz: So it’s an interesting one because of where it sits within. And are you talking about like non FX businesses or businesses that provide services.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Businesses that provide FX services. Yeah.

 Adam Katz: Yeah. So so the general thing is, is FX hasn’t really changed all that much over the last 30 years. So it always becomes every every single place I know uses very legacy old systems. There are probably some of the oldest systems in these financial institutions in the you know, even you take Western Union, who bought up like eight different players. They ended up with eight different systems and they.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Never combined it into one. Kind of.

 Adam Katz: They tried.

 Kevin Rosenquist: They ended up. Yeah.

 Adam Katz: Looking at their business solutions into a company called Convera who built their own stuff internally for the most part. And there’s such a huge delta in technology between, you know, your innovative new players who can do these things so much more efficiently than these older financial institutions that you can just never because it’s not changing enough. You can never justify the big investment to move out of that legacy system and move in the modern system. It’s a struggle we come across every day. Yep. Um, and so things like crypto obviously challenge that where like, can you old systems really do what they need to do. But the biggest issue is, is that most of these old systems are built on on programing languages like cobalt, and you just can’t find a cobalt engineer.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And I took a cobalt class in, in college. I mean, come on. That was a long time ago.

 Adam Katz: And so now you and no good engineers want to keep maintaining that. So? So you’ve got to pay them a lot of money to, to, to kind of keep those systems up and running. And so they haven’t really benefited from the advancements in technology. On the on the other side, you’ve got the fintechs, the large hyperscale fintechs who have really benefited from the technology, but unfortunately then they end up charging a high percentage because the competitors are so inefficient. Right? Um, so we’re not really improving the problem. We just kind of shifting. So you do, you know, some payments at 1.5% instead of 3% and kind of market share shifts around. But we don’t really have that solution, which is which is what culture’s trying to do to make it that everyone can have low cost, modern software to solve the problem. And because my view is, and my view has been for the last 15 years, is that if you’re a financial institution and you don’t support multi-currency for your customers, if you can’t convert between assets and then make payments out for them, you’re not going to be able to survive as a financial institution in the future. In the US, it’s obviously very different. Everything is US dollar denominated and many, many American trading partners also try and denominate in US dollars as much as possible. But every other country has local currency and US dollars, and they don’t have the leverage to go. When Canada and Mexico trade with each other, they don’t trade in US dollars. Then there’s a Canada Mexico trade that has to be done. And so there’s more complexity around foreign exchange really outside of the US.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s I’ve taught a lot of times I talk to people on this show who talk about the unwillingness or inability of, of companies to modernize their tech stacks, to modernize their systems. You know, what is it? Is it is it does it come down to money or is it does it come down to the the the hassle, if you will, of having to update your systems, train your people, change all of that stuff. Like what? What is stopping people from from banks and from really embracing huge shifts in technology that we’ve had over the past decade?

 Adam Katz: I think you touched on a number of the reasons there. There are so many reasons that hold them back. I mean, for one, you’re going to take the hit in some quarter or another. Sure. And no one wants to do that. So there’s some interesting like human biases happening there.

 Kevin Rosenquist: But still like I mean forest for the trees. Right? I mean, you got to look at the long term.

 Adam Katz: Oh no, I totally agree. I mean, there’s an immediate cost. One of the biggest issues is, is the state of their existing data. You would think just in terms of the cost of fixing that data problem in one quarter or two quarters versus every quarter, needing to maintain investing fortunes of money because you’ve got data siloed in different systems that don’t speak to each other and humans moving that data across. And so I think, I think it’s really kind of a burying your head in the sand, focusing on growth. You know, shareholders reward growth. They don’t reward cost optimization the same way. At least they haven’t in the last ten years. You know, it kind of felt over the last couple of years that we are shifting to to focus a little bit more on cost optimization. And I think I, to be honest, is going to be the real trigger here because financial institutions aren’t going to be able to get all of the benefits of AI if their data is not sitting on a modern platform with proper APIs that I could actually leverage in real time and do its thing. So there’ll be I say that, but they’ll end up being a whole lot of bolt on solutions that let you keep all of your legacy systems, replicate your data into another layer, and then do an AI on that layer, which will make things just more expensive. You know, I will say one of the things that happens over time, if technology has been in place in an institution for 20 years. You’ve built a lot of connections on the back of it, and you’ve solved a lot of problems over the years. So the migration is not just a matter of moving to a new system and replacing that system. You’ve got to replicate all of those integrations, and these are integrations that stable your customers depend on it, your regulators depend on it, your auditors depend on it. And so it’s I think it’s risk aversion at the end of the day. But it is a big lift. I’m not going to say it’s not a big lift to move these systems out.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, totally. And I’m not I’m not trying to make it sound like I’m just like, just do it. You know? Like I get that it’s a big thing, but it also seems like you’re falling behind if you’re if the longer you wait, the more behind you’re going to get. But you mentioned I do you think do you see AI and automation figuring out a way to make that transition easier so that more people are willing to do it? Is that kind of what you were saying?

 Adam Katz: Yeah. I mean, I’m hearing of quite a few tools, you know, that will go into your cobalt databases and reorganize your data and pull it out for you. It helped with every step of that process to improve things. Ultimately, you’ll benefit from AI is going to come from day to day optimizations, reducing workflow loads and getting that automation in place. Ultimately, I hope I’m always looking at it from a lens of ultimately lowering costs for customers and making things more, more competitive. Hopefully that’s the trigger. Hopefully I can really be the desire to get to AI and to get to the level of efficiency. You know, you look at guys like Nubank. You look at companies like Revolut. You know, these companies are able to move so fast now compared to a legacy institution. And the threat of them moving into your space and, and risking your business is probably about the only thing that’s really going to get financial institutions moving if they think that they can keep doing what they’ve been doing and keep going. And what’s worked has worked, I think. I could also see them continuing to kick the can down the road. Right. I guess the real question for them is in ten, 15 years, how will the early movers who made who made the move over and adopted early and learned the technology and got things moving forward? How will they compound growth over those ten years or 1015 years? Be different to the laggards who, you know, only adopt down the road because they absolutely have to.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And you can’t, you know, conventional wisdom tells you it’s not going to go well for them. You know, because if you think about especially when I mean, it’s not exactly a hot take to say technology is moving at an insane pace these days. And again, I just I look at it and I go, if you fall too far behind trying to catch up five years from now at the pace we’re going, it could be like so daunting that it could really affect some some business, some companies, some some financial institutions.

 Adam Katz: Totally. And I mean, look, we have those those big examples through history. Right. Like canon owning the photography market and like, you know, completely changing on them over the next 20 years. I think we will definitely see that across all different industries. Sure. And the interesting thing is looking at it from the other perspective of, you know, I look back to blockchain as a very early Bitcoin guy. And but I look back and it hasn’t all achieved all the things. Sure. The price has gone up a lot, especially lately in mainstream trading adoption. But like it hasn’t had the real world impacts that I was hoping for blockchain to have. Yeah. And if you go back to 2010 to 2015, the amount of money that banks sunk into blockchain projects where they’re trying to be ahead of the curve because it’s so obviously transformative technology and most of those projects went nowhere. You know, most banks had ten projects going on simultaneously trying to find find a good use case for blockchain. But it hasn’t all. It hasn’t all manifested. So that would be an argument to wait for some early adopters to to really figure it out before you jump in. Good point. It’s all a game of risk and reward. I think every institution is different. You know, I love how my CTO talks about it. This isn’t a matter of finding a great technology and then finding a use case for it. What’s the business problem? And then figure out what technology you use to go and solve this. That makes the most sense. And in some areas, you know, local payments for example, are very different to FX. But I mean, local payments in most countries are pretty much free nowadays, right? Um, so like when I see blockchain, I’m like, I don’t know what it’s going to do locally. That’s going to be a game changer for us. Good point. And you get the added protection of government insurance on your account and, and, and fraud protection and a lot of other pieces that you don’t get if you’re just using crypto.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a good point. I, I’ve, talked to different people about that, about, you know, why? Why blockchain technology has has not come into the into the forefront and into the into the everyday use. And some people say, well, people don’t understand what it is. So that’s the problem. And I’ve had other people say people don’t need to understand what it is. It works in the background. And is it just a messaging thing? Is it a or is it truly like like it’s cool and it’s awesome technology, but we haven’t found the best use case yet for it.

 Adam Katz: It’s interesting on on the payments side, you really need scale. So if you’re thinking about like how many transactions a visa is processing a second, I think Bitcoin does like five transactions a second at scale. And so obviously there’s many other blockchains, uh, many other blockchains out there. Sure. Um, but the real question is the value of having the ledger distributed. Once you if there for use cases where you don’t want to have it distributed, where like a bank issues their own stablecoin, for example. They can really build that on any database. I always find it so interesting when I chat with my engineers, like every day there’s like, oh, we should use this database for that. Because of this reason, it optimizes for throughput or memory or capacity or processing power or the read or writes expensive versus storing the data. There’s just so many different cases. And I think what we’ve tried to do with blockchain is put it as this, like one size fits all, it’s going to be our savior. And I think along the way, there’s been so many other great databases that have been developed. It’s definitely very unique attributes to, to to crypto, to blockchain and particularly to Bitcoin. Um, uh, but it really is about that distribution. So there’ve been many use cases we’ve spoken about over the years that seemed like they made a lot of sense to go distributed. Um, off the top of my head, I can’t think of one that is like, yeah, that was a game changer. Moving from this legacy system to to the blockchain.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, it becomes such a buzzword and and and stuff that. But yeah, the practical use cases in the real world examples are not there.

 Adam Katz: I and there’s definitely some in the background I like to think about this. I don’t know if you remember back in the day, back in like the 90s, I think it was there was a product called The Magic Jack that was I.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Don’t remember magic Jack.

 Adam Katz: Calls you would you would plug it into your computer, and then it was a phone and then it would make an internet call. And this was hailed.

 Kevin Rosenquist: As sound familiar?

 Adam Katz: Yeah. And he mentioned the magic jack to they eventually come back and say, yeah, I remember the magic Jack.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. The idea come, uh, rings a bell, but the name doesn’t ring a bell for me.

 Adam Katz: So it’s interesting. Everyone was like, oh, because especially living in South Africa, it’s so expensive to call internationally. Sure. Like, okay, now you know you’re not going to need your telco anymore. It’s very similar to blockchain. You’re not going to need your bank anymore, right? And I think the reality if you look over time is telcos incorporated voice over IP technology. Our international calls with our telcos and our local calls got cheaper and cheaper as they improved the technology. You had less reason to go use a third party tool. And then on top of that layer we got, you know, originally it was Skype, we got WhatsApp. Now we can make free video calls internationally. Our telcos are still there, by the way, selling us phone plans with just more data because we are whatsapping on our phones. The telco fees never went to zero as they promised. Um, but so essentially the technology gets incorporated. I say that I’m sure some of your listeners are going to comment that, oh, this is a great blockchain application. That’s a great blockchain application. And there definitely are many out there. I think the question is more is, is could it have been achieved with other Technology. I’ve definitely met companies over the years who built on blockchain so they could say they were built on blockchain, even though the technologists didn’t think it was the best decision as far as infrastructure went.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I it’s funny you when you said the thing about magic Jack, it made me remember over the holidays, my wife and I were watching something on YouTube, like Christmas commercials from when we were kids or something like that. And we were blown away by how many long distance company commercials there were, whether it was, you know, one 800 something or other or sprint or AT&T or whatever it was, it was very funny. It was funny to see that. So yeah. Magic Jack, great reference. I love that, I love that. What do you you know, there’s a lot obviously we talked about digital currencies I there’s a lot you know there’s a lot of geopolitical shifts these days obviously in this country there’s a big shift that happened yesterday. Um, I think you’re going to become a state of ours at some point. I heard or something I don’t know, I don’t know.

 Adam Katz: I’ll be tariff to death.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Or be tariff to death. Yeah. Which whichever happens first. Um, but what do you think will have the biggest impact on FX over the next 5 to 10 years? Of all the things that could shift it, whether it’s digital currencies, geopolitical shifts, etc.?

 Adam Katz: I think one of the biggest impacts right now is the thing that’s driving a lot of the true believers to digital currencies, specifically non non non fiat digital currencies is just the state of the debt of of pretty much every developed country. Yeah. Um, you know, we have been living in a time where governments have been spending a fortune of money. All of our lives, for the most part, feel pretty good. Standard of living keeps increasing. But anyone who’s run up a credit card to 20 K over a couple of months having a good time, and then at some point has to pay that off, knows that the after part of eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches and.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Noodles at one.

 Adam Katz: So, so. And I think the impact that has on the effects is the volatility is, uh, you know, as countries, uh, the, the soundness of their money gets called into question. You then have a lot of volatility in the exchange rates. And that makes it very difficult for businesses to plan it. You know, if I look at dollar CAD, we go back 15 years. The Canadian dollar was stronger than the US dollar. Um like $0.95 US to one, uh, to $0.95 CAD to 1 USD. And now it’s 145 CAD to 1 USD. I mean, that’s a big shift for how businesses and governments bond to pricing and, and many aspects, um, you know, even even wages. Right. Uh, Canada, a lot of people in Canada work for US companies. There’s just such an arbitrage there. But then that arbitrage goes and you lose your job. And so there’s it’s just so disruptive. So I think, uh, I like to see the, the government efficiency stuff coming in the US. I hope Canada starts to see a little bit of that as well. Uh, because if you’re just trying to be efficient and you’re just trying to not overspend, it will at least stabilize things. And that’s a place you can actually make business decisions from. I saw a stat yesterday that, uh, in Canada our, our, our CRA, uh, equivalent of your IRS, we have six times more agents per capita.

 Adam Katz: Really six times more agents per capita. And like, that’s a lot of that’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of spending. So I just think I mean, same as same in any business, same in our personal lives. If you let spending get away, it feels great in the short term, but in the long term it’s not sustainable. It has an intended consequences. And I think that’s going to be very impactful on ethics in particular. And so we’ve seen gold spike up in prices. Um, because you know I think Canada I think sold most of their gold, don’t quote me on that. But I believe they sold most of their gold. Um, we kind of moved away from, uh, real hard assets to whatever could just be printed and distributed as quick as possible. And so it makes sense that Bitcoin sitting at $100,000, anyone’s just looking for any hard asset, real asset that they could put their money into. And I think if you’re, you know, coming from South Africa, where I saw when I was younger, the exchange rate go from like 4 to 1 to 15 to 1 in two years. If you’re in an emerging market and you have constant devaluation of your currency, the You’ve lived through 25% interest rates and 22% inflation. Okay. If you put your money in Bitcoin, if it goes down 30%, you’re kind of even, right?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. Yeah. When? Yeah. So crypto is the least risky option. That’s not going to be good. If that’s the case. How do you see what you’re talking about here with the debt and all that stuff? How do you see that playing out? Like what’s going to happen to our our what’s going to happen. What do you see that impacting.

 Adam Katz: I don’t know I’m fully qualified to comment on that. I was a great talk by Javier Milei, the Argentinian president.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

 Adam Katz: He was on Lex Fridman.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I you know, I have it that’s on my I haven’t listened to that yet. I’m a little behind on my Lex, but I love Lex Fridman so I’ll definitely check that out.

 Adam Katz: It’s highly recommended. He essentially laid out right because they were coming from even further than the US’s from a spending perspective. And, you know, he lays out in the interview that, you know, he had to make sure he showed wins for people before he was thrown out because it was going to be painful at first. And he found some innovative ways to juggle that. The interesting thing is, is through a lot of these programs, what he highlighted is there’s a big layer in the middle of giving out money. And like when we think of cutting spending, we just think, oh, you’re taking away from, you know, from people who need help. He essentially highlighted the industry that gets built distributing that help. And if society can just make that industry smaller, there’s more to distribute. I mean, the goal here really is to have as high a standard of living for everyone in the country as possible. I think a lot of this gets lost in the political discourse around this stuff. At the end of the day, I think everyone’s pretty aligned that, you know, the more successful the country is per capita, not wealth. Maybe that’s a divisive word to use, but you know, the better the country is at generating enough income to meet everyone’s standard of living and give them an opportunity to pursue their hopes and dreams, the better it is for everyone.

 Adam Katz: So if where I think where I think it gets, when you just look at it on the surface level, I’ll give you a great example. Canada’s got, uh, got free healthcare and something that, you know, it’s always a topic of debate. But when you look at our government’s budget, it’s now like 15% of the whole budget. And it’s all everyone talks about is this massive expenditure. But half of our budget now is is half of the government’s budget is a black box. I don’t actually know where it’s going. And if you look at even the hiring numbers, most of the jobs added on government jobs now. And so this is it’s not a good cycle to be in. I think we in general, I think most people listening would agree that for you as an individual, if you’re in a cycle of being responsible, you know, going to the gym, uh, saving a few extra bucks, putting away for your child’s education. Like it feels good. It’s not as fun, but it feels good, and it feels right and responsible.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Very responsible.

 Adam Katz: Exactly. I feel like that’s what we should be doing as a society. So I’m optimistic of what we’ll see over the next couple of years. Tariffs aside, I hope that that doesn’t become a reality. But, uh, yeah, cutting some spending here and there I think is a good thing.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, Adam, it was great to talk to you. Adam Katz is with Kooltra pH. Company. Thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

 Adam Katz: Thanks so much, Kevin.