August 4, 2022

7. Carmelle Cadet, EMTECH - Modern Central Banking

Carmelle Cadet

,

Founder & CEO

at

EMTECH

Today's guest is Carmelle Cadet, Founder and CEO of EMTECH, an award winning central bank technology platform. EMTECH is bringing modern technology including fully digital regulatory sandboxes powered by APIs to central banks around the world. With initial clients in the Caribbean and Africa, the company's delivering on a vision that's as thoughtful about expanding financial inclusion as it is about helping central banks innovate. Please enjoy this conversation with Carmelle Cadet.

Jared Klee: Carmelle, I thought a good place to start this conversation. We think in the US about money, about central banks. If you go to Europe, central banks, money, it just kind of all works. And I think we take an enormous amount of that for granted. And yet for most of the rest of the world, that's not really the case.

You're working on solving frankly, money, solving central banks from a technology perspective. With all of the world's challenges, problems, anything we could be working on. Why is that an important one to go work on at a global scale?

Carmelle Cadet: Well, not everyone wakes up thinking about central banking. And I didn't for the former years of my life. but the idea of the role that it plays, every transaction that we engage in is because of a central banking infrastructure that every economy has.

So the cash that you use, whether you walk up to someone and pay cash, or the current that you swipe at the store it is enabled because a body, an institution was set up with the mandate to structure in a financial sector that provides efficient financial services that we all use today. So we might take it for granted, but it is something that requires a lot of upkeep.

And there are different financial mechanisms in how those players make money along the way and how those transactions are processed. You go from domestic and to cross border and you get into a very different world. So as we grow more digital, as we order more from different markets, there are pipes that need to connect to each other, not only to process payments locally, but for us to be able to pay and buy from anywhere around the world.

The infrastructure itself, people don't think of it that way, but it is central banking infrastructure.

Jared Klee: That's an interesting perspective. I mean, we're talking basically the foundation, the plumbing of everything.

Carmelle Cadet: Correct. Central banking was set up to make sure that people can build and access financial services. With regulated product, regulated concepts, and regulated services, and that protect consumers too, which is a big part of central banks as regulators.

Jared Klee: We're gonna come up a level. Like I wanna understand what EMTECH is and, and what you're building like the, the elevator pitch level. And I wanna come back down and go back into what is reality feed on the ground in, I know you announced work in Ghana and others, you have personal experience. I wanna come back into that and more deeply understand. I mean, certainly growing up in the US, I don't have that first person experience. I'm really interested in better understanding EMTECH. What is EMTECH doing? What is EMTECH solving?

Carmelle Cadet: We build modern central banking infrastructure to unlock the value of digital currency and digital regulation, because we believe that that's going to enable financial inclusion by design. When you think about using technology to do that in regulatory environments is the number one obstacle or difficulty in financial markets when it comes to innovation.

So we're solving those two problems at the very base level of a financial market.

Jared Klee: You grew up in Haiti, were there till I think 16, came to the US. Help me better understand, what is reality? You talk about the different environments, what it means to have money, the base level, the importance of that fair, inclusive, actually known regulatory environment. Certainty.

Help me understand what is life like in Haiti, in Ghana when it comes to engaging with the central bank, whether knowing or unknowing in, in day to day life.

Carmelle Cadet: It's a great question because that's actually at the core of what led me to launch EMTECH. Moving to the US, one of the things that amazed me was the access to financial services. The first thing that happened to my mom when she became to the US is like her best friend told her, they're going to give you credit cards, take them. That's how you build your credit, because you're going to need credit to survive in this country. That was probably one of the best financial advice that a friend can give to someone. And that was our introduction into the US financial system.

Coming from Haiti, comparing that to say, when you wake up every day, you're trying to figure out if you have money to put food on the table today. And you're trying to figure out how you're going to get it, if you don't have it. The second thing is you're thinking about the exchange rate because it's either someone is sending you money that you're going to try to exchange locally to spend, or you're, you've got US dollars from someone you're trying to get a best rate local currency, so you can have more buying power.

And then the third thing is whether you're going to have energy or power for the day. But that's the life and that's the concept of it. So very cash based. Very day to day. Very what you would call, not even paycheck to paycheck in Haiti, but day to day earning. And that is a big difference compared to the financial sector that you would have here.

Fast forward to today. What Africa has now has set a path and innovated on is to bypass those physical obstacles when it comes to leveraging mobile money infrastructure and telecommunication infrastructure. You know, might be dismissed because it is coming from emerging markets, but it is a transformational discovery or innovation and uses telecommunication infrastructure to transfer money.

Because at the end of the day, and that's something that we'll talk about, it's really about data. It's really about data that shares and creates and documents value from one owner to the other. So when you really take a step back and think about how that can be. It becomes very interesting and opens to innovation. But that's different in the US, but that doesn't mean that the us does not have room for improvement as well, which is a conversation that now we're having as well. And to provide and continue to achieve this efficiency in the system is something that the central banks are on the hook for.

Jared Klee: We're talking money. You mentioned credit cards. I wanna come back to mobile money in Africa, M-Pesa and what's going on there. Cause that absolutely fascinating. First, what is access to credit beyond just cash? Let's assume that in Africa and Haiti, I mean, take your pick the environment. What's access to credit?

If you don't have cash on hand to go do something, can you even get access to capital to go do stuff?

Carmelle Cadet: I'll tell you how it's done on the ground. Just a number to give you a reference point. In Haiti banking penetration is about 27%. That's banking that's before you get to lending, right?

Jared Klee: Got it.

Carmelle Cadet: The lending, the lending sector from a small business perspective and from individual is very minimal when it comes to emerging markets.

And part of that, you're, you're seeing an opportunity. Now, a lot of fintechs are going into this space to start thinking about reimagining what credit scores could look like, credit profiles could look like that would work in those environments. I think it's such an important thing to do, to understand the local infrastructure and local environment that might not have what the US has or more developed markets.

But the idea is the networks come up with their own systems. If you think about a product like Esusu, or if you think about certain mechanisms that allow communities to save and pull money together it's a very interesting and popular concept among emerging markets. And my mom has saved enough money in those community based systems to buy a house. It's really what behind a scene sustains a lot of economies and groups around the world. But the formal sense of lending and credit is not broadly accessible.

And if you are in the US, you have an appreciation for how important that is. When you think about how you finance your, your education, whether it's right or wrong, on how much, student debt, we all have left. But the concept of access,

Jared Klee: Right.

Carmelle Cadet: accessing the funds, and having certain structures that allow you to advance your standard of living is something that should be at least accessible to others as well.

Jared Klee: When you talk about community based finance, really what you're talking about is outside of the formal financial and central bank system, that's broken. So we've gone created something outside of that to get access to similar levels of services.

Is that right?

Carmelle Cadet: Yeah - defi before defi!

Jared Klee: I love it.

Carmelle Cadet: We've been doing this. We're not new to this.

Jared Klee: I love it.

Carmelle Cadet: It is absolutely very ingrained in some cultures, very ingrained. And not only emerging markets. I mean, I think there are all, a lot of developed markets that have that in different shapes and forms as far as having family structures and business structures that really reinforce that. But in the concept of emerging markets, more because of the lack of access.

Jared Klee: You talk about like mobile money's a big thing in Africa. The scale the I impact of M-Pesa. Let's start, like what is M-Pesa, what does it mean from a day to day basis?

Carmelle Cadet: A telecommunication company, a telephone company like Safaricom was helping people get mobile phones and get mobile minutes. And at the time you would top up and buy and buy air time to talk. And some employees who work in Nairobi had to travel long hours to go back, to see their families outside of the city to bring money back home. And that was causing a lot of productivity issues.

And therefore Safaricom had agents outside of the city and came up with the concept of how about we give you minutes and we convert your minutes back into cash. We allow the agents locally to disperse with the local cash that they have to our family member. So they came up with a network definition of mobile wallet concept to allow people to convert their air time into money and that money being accessible throughout their network.

So every agent for Safaricom, a bank for, for Safaricom, essentially, and having users from wherever they were being able to walk up to a little booth and get money out. So that was the basic, very raw version of the innovation that came to life.

And as of, I think last year Safaricom had about 76% market share, I believe of Kenya. And if you ever go to Kenya, you see why. It is just a feature phone innovation, by the way. Feature phone. This is not, iPhone, an app solution we're talking about here.

This is pound, hash the numbers and the codes for you to actually execute transactions. And it works in every restaurant that you go to. Either it's a restaurant, a very high end restaurant or a mom and pop selling food by the side of the road, they all have their M-Pesa wallet number. As long as you have your wallet, you literally walk by, you type it in, you get what you need, you negotiate the price, and you're on your way. Imagine that. You can't even do that in Whole Foods. I can't do that in Whole Foods that.

I mean, and I'm, I'm creating the, the, the contrast for you, right. You live in New York City. I live in New York City. Just those two worlds. And how you compare them, you would say: well, of course, you know, there's merchant on the street in Kenya could not have a faster payment system a swipe in go system that we don't even have in, in Harlem here on Upper West Side and Whole Foods. That's the reality.

Jared Klee: This is absolutely awesome innovation, but this is all happening basically because of central bank failure. Failure might be too strong a word here, but we don't have a well developed financial system that allows easy money movement through regulated institutions. We don't have the ability to say deposit here, move there. We don't have your money transmitters, the Venmos of the world that allow you to move. So we've got people building similar services, cuz it's very much needed, but outside of the traditional financial system.

Carmelle Cadet: Well, I think we have to be careful because you know, the conversation around defi today, I think and Bitcoin was born out of a frustration of central banking doing too much. Those are very difficult decisions, I'll tell you that, but they have a job to do. And I think when you look at the two tiered system that is now in place that have been in place for a while, having a sense of where the line of demarcation is, I think it's very important.

There's a concern on the retail side that central banks want to do CBDC to get information on people. No central bank I've talked to would tell you that they want to go track people. There's a reputational risk. There' a cyber risk. There is an information risk. There's reputational risk that they can't take on and that they would, by having access to private information.

What they have traditionally done is ask the private sector, the second tier layer to figure it out. And one of the problems that we see in that you figure it out is that over time, there are still gaps that are left. And the innovation part of it, and the motivation to be competitive, goes out the window a bit if you don't continue to create an environment for a competition.

So that's why you've seen the fintechs enter the market to fill the gap of what consumers want and are not getting from the traditional sources. I think that's really the way to look at it. And that central banks, you know, to say that they failed because an M-Pesa was created would've mean that at least in my mind, that you would expect them to create a mobile app for a user.

I don't think we would want them to do that. We would want them to put a regulatory framework in place to make sure that more than just M-Pesa, the environment is competitive, but providing those services with private sectors.

Jared Klee: So what is that engagement like today? What's your engagement with the central bank? What is that relationship? The mechanics of, how do you exchange information? 101 of how you build and engage.

Carmelle Cadet: When I started EMTECH I was coming from the perspective that central banks have an opportunity to change, an opportunity to do something different because of what Central bank of Bahamas was doing. I've seen it up close in being able to get a sense of what is important to a central bank in order for them to understand the value that the technology can bring.

I was coming from a technology perspective to say, look, this is a new world. There are major risk, but there are major opportunities on creating FinTech that are going to go out and onboard people who are not well savvy into a, a super smartphone. There are solution that can provide insurance for people who live in Haiti that go through a hurricane every single year and for some reason does not have an insurance policy.

But you need the last mile to be closer to the consumer. The central banks don't do that. That's not their mandate to do that, but they can create the regulatory environment for that to happen. And the big conversation is that you can use technology to do what you say that you want to do in the first place, which is maintain financial stability. Making sure that financial inclusion is at its highest, is that anybody who wants access, that they can get access to a digital finance and a financial inclusion is priority.

But also the concept of cross border payment infrastructure. That is a pain for everybody. Everybody hates it and everybody wants to do something about it. But one thing that you realize in Africa, for example, the fact that you have such a big continent, there are companies like, you know, Flutterwave or Chipper Cash and those major pan Africa cross border payment solutions, it's not that the technology is not there, it's the regulatory framework doesn't allow for corridor to open. It's not a technology problem. It's really a regulation problem. And who holds the key to that regulation in every market is the central bank or the SEC in those markets.

That's where we saw an opportunity to have a conversation to say you want financial inclusion, you want better cross border payment. And you as a regulator, here are the tools that I think will be a way to the future and a good add to your toolkit on how you can enable regulatory environments that work for everyone. So with data, with APIs, with scalability, but connecting with FinTechs with the ecosystem, with the banks and leveraging that to look to the future.

Jared Klee: A central bank that wants to attempt this, but doesn't have modern technology. What can they do? How can they attempt this today? Or rather, how are they trying to go about it and perhaps not succeeding in the ways they'd like to?

Carmelle Cadet: Well, they can definitely call us for a demo. We'll be happy to do that. EMTECH.com.

Jared Klee: Is this, is this just emails? Is this just emails and PDFs and a bunch of whiteboards with lawyers around?

Carmelle Cadet: Absolutely that. The whole concept of consuming services, there are services that central banks provide today and that financial institutions, banks, and now more and more fintechs are connecting to central banks and regulators to consume. Whether it's regulatory compliance, whether it's licensing requests, licensing reviews, access to fed account or reserve wallet at the central bank. Those concepts are all via email and paper base and PDF and Excel spreadsheets. Regulatory compliance is being done via Excel spreadsheets.

So that's for one central bank. So I imagine you're doing that for 10 countries that you're in. They each have their own individual regulatory requirements, different languages, different currencies, different this. And you're managing that. It's Google Docs, right? This is Google Docs that's doing this. And that's the opportunity. We kind of stepped into it and realized how much of a mess it was also for the financial service providers. And being able to solve that, that's the sweet spot.

Jared Klee: I want to keep going deeper and deeper on what EMTECH does and the challenge. I wanna come to regulatory sandboxes as well in a sec. Cause it's a word that gets thrown around that, that I'm, I'm I'm gonna own up to. I don't even think I fully understand.

Carmelle Cadet: Yeah.

Jared Klee: What are the economics of engaging with central banks cause there's only what a hundred, 150 globally. In theory, yeah, you could charge each one a lot, but that's probably, that seems like a challenging way to go build a business.

Carmelle Cadet: You can just print it.

So we spend a lot of time thinking about what are the pain points in, in engaging with the central bank. What are the pain points for the central banks as far as given their mandates, right? So you already have an anchor and talking to them is the fact that they're still in web one and then web three is happening outside.

And they're trying to figure out and they need the right glasses to read it because web three is different. And that's what we're building. Those are the capabilities that we're building for central banks because something that we made a bet on is that central banking will still exist even in web three.

The concept of defi, yes, started from wanting to move away from that, but people still want protection. When it comes to their money, no one wants an unregulated market because we now realize what that means is that there's a fine line somewhere that says, like, you know, you're a deposit into this thing was actually not insured by the FDIC.

We won't mention names, Jared. We won't mention names.

But the idea is, you know, you need a regulatory environment that protects consumers. And that itself is what we are thinking about. APIs, the microservices, the capabilities around software as a service. It's never been done before at the central banking level, but the same benefit that the commercial banks and the fintechs are deriving from SaaS, software as a service model, that's what makes them nimble. That's what makes scale. And we think there's a lot of value in bringing that to the central banking level, given how fundamental and structural it is actually to enable broad usage for the second tier system.

Jared Klee: Let's go a level deeper. If I'm a central bank, i Know you've publicly announced central bank of Ghana. I know there are others in the works that you're engaging with that we can't talk about. I'm looking forward to the announcements.

What is the nature, like a central bank with EMTECH, powered by EMTECH? How are they now able to engage the financial services companies that they regulate or new ones that are coming in?

Carmelle Cadet: The problem that we set out to solve was a regulator that said, "I woke up one day and 200 million in Bitcoin, left the country. We can't afford that for our economy. We're going to crash if that happens. And we have no idea how it happened. Can you help us get eyes on what is happening in the market."

A central bank or a regulator, if they don't have a regulatory framework in place for a particular service, the only answer that they have is a no to an innovator. However, what we saw in Africa is that the solutions are going to market anyway, and they're becoming a potential wild, wild west while consumers are losing money and there's no regulatory oversight over them. So there was a dynamic where you can't stop innovation, but you also need to regulate it.

What we saw across Africa and many central bank is that they introduced a policy, a regulatory sandbox policy, just like the CFTC did, the CFPB did as well, MAS and Singapore introduced theirs, FCA and UK introduced theirs. And you saw that kind of like making its way through central banks over the past five years.

But those are policies that are in a PDF format on a website. And the concept of really working with a central bank when it comes to innovation, it was not effective for the financial service provider. It was a policy. They had to send an email to apply for the sandbox and the idea that they would take six months to come back to them and say, "no, we don't have a regulatory framework for your service," was really killing the innovation site.

Jared Klee: We keep using this term regulatory framework. What is like in the case of what we're talking about, a FinTech coming in. If they want to do a central bank digital currency, if they want to do something else, what is a regulatory framework?

Carmelle Cadet: A regulatory framework would describe a financial service type that would be offered by an intermediary or financial service provider to an end user. Given the type of service it is, it would be regulated and licensed a certain way. It would need to meet certain compliance requirement if it were to get licensed. And in order for you to get licensed, you need to have an institution, you need to have tested, you need to have a team, you need to have enough capital. You need to have the location, you need to have your deposit. All the boxes that you need to check that the regulator is going to review before they grant you a license.

However, what we are seeing now is that you have innovators that are younger and not having enough capital to check all the boxes.

Jared Klee: They need to do the work, to get to the proof points that they can raise capital so that they can meet the requirement.

Carmelle Cadet: And the current licensing models say, it's either you meet all the boxes or you don't.

Jared Klee: That's a nice inclusive environment. If you don't already have money, you can't do the work to go get money.

Carmelle Cadet: Correct. Of course it's cutting out innovation and that's why people say, you know, regulators kill innovation. But the central banks that do want and do understand the opportunity. Now we see central banks saying, "we're trying to solve financial inclusion. The banks are not particularly the most effective at doing it. You have a bunch of startups that are building great products that can go solve. You have Affirm, you have Venmo, you have this, you have those companies that are bringing solutions to market that can really solve a problem."

That's the marriage that came to life to say, okay, can we create another product? That would say this is a regulatory sandbox. That means that we don't have a regulatory framework for the service, but we can grant you a sandbox clearance. You can go to market. And you plug it into a set of APIs. So this is our model of a digital regulatory sandbox. You go through your process, you submit an application that is much less complicated than a full licensing. And does not have as high capital requirements and so on, but you are given some parameters for you to go to market and test.

So instead of doing that via email, it's all a platform based approach. It' a very two way platform between the central bank regulator and the regulated entity. And that's the concept of the sandbox. We don't know the rule, but we are going to let you go to market for us to understand what the service is and then inform the new rules.

Jared Klee: Today world, pre EMTECH world. I'm a startup who doesn't have capital yet, but I've got a good idea and I wanna try something out and I'm just getting like a hundred page PDF that says, like, here's the box you gotta fit in. And these are the things he can do. And this is who has to approve you. And you need a lot of money upfront in order to get approved and all that kind of fun stuff. And I read that I somehow get a hold of lawyers and I just kind of throw it over the fence via email, and then just kind of sit there, hold fingers crossed and pray that somebody responds my email, which inevitably is gonna come back six months later and just like, "no, sorry. We, we don't know what you are. We don't understand it. Go away."

Carmelle Cadet: Correct. I I've heard 18 months for that same response, by the way.

Jared Klee: Great. That's it's, it's exactly how I wanna spend my 18 months.

What we're saying with the regulatory sandbox, it's like the regulator, instead, again, pre EMTECH, comes back as like, we don't know what this thing is, but we'll give you kind of a baby version. We'll allow you to do live stuff, but maybe not at huge scale, maybe not with all of the clients, with the restricted, like just a smaller version. So if you royally screw things up, it's not too damaging. But we're gonna allow you to try out and basically get the proof points both the startup and the central bank need to say, "hey, we wanna let this thing get big." Or, "you know what turns out was a bad idea and we're gonna shut it down."

Carmelle Cadet: Correct.

Jared Klee: In the absence of EMTECH. That's just more PDFs and like, okay, go show me the results in Excel sheet and I don't know, email it to me once a month, and then we're gonna take forever to get back to Most of this stuff, the rules are data. What we're submitting is basically electronic forms that somebody could fill out as opposed to 90 page PDFs. All of all of what we should be measuring monitoring is probably just data we can spit off and consume digitally via an API.

As opposed to like throw it over the fence and blind, and then come back. We can have this live continual interaction, which should allow both parties to kind of grow up together with that much shortened feedback loop. Not only can we afford to do more of these at once, but we can actually get better feedback loops going during them so we can move through them faster and get to a better place together.

Carmelle Cadet: Exactly right. And we took it a step further. We built the APIs at a service type level, because then you get to say, one regulation does not need to apply to multiple service types. And then people are trying to figure out how to comply because this does not apply to them. And so on. If you are a remittance provider versus a payment service provider versus an exchange provider, whether you have crypto or non crypto, being able to have that nuanced view and that risk based regulation and targeted regulation is something that, it's implicit in what we're building. And that's unlocking a lot of value.

Jared Klee: Where are we on this journey? Bank of Ghana was an enormous announcement.

Carmelle Cadet: EMTECH is now an award-winning central bank tech provider. We won that for the regulatory sandbox when we launched a pilot, our beta, for the Bank of Ghana, because it was a groundbreaking innovation. There's no other firm right now building what we're building. And we're pretty excited about that.

But that's because we also see a genuine opportunity in modernizing and reimagine what we think of central banking and the role that it plays. We've been able to bootstrap ourself and put our heads down to prove out this market, that we could actually not only find central banks that are looking for this, but also that are just ready to take a journey further than what people would think that they would take. The journey into modernization, and transformation and digitization.

We raised a seed round for 3.5 last year. Got more investors joining us after that, which was pretty exciting. We have a pipeline of 11 central banks. It's an amazing time for us to be smart, generate revenue, and then raise capital for us to win.

Jared Klee: I think we need to flip that around though. It's not 11 central banks. It's like 10% of the central bank market is in the pipeline.

Carmelle Cadet: I like that. That's right. It's a journey, but it's so exciting. I think one of the highlights for me in this job are the testimonials from central banks. And in addition to that is seeing the team when you onboard. There's something magical that happens when the central bank team onboards the product and then you're watching them do a demo and clicking through and getting the application and approving that. And then them loving it.

Jared Klee: I love that. Let's go six months out, 12 months out. I know central banks work at central bank pace. What is success for you to say call 12 months, something in the, the short to medium-term.

Carmelle Cadet: We have six countries in Africa that are live on our regulatory sandbox, regulatory platforms that are using API first model and leading the world on using open banking standards to digitize their regulatory environment. I think that'd be sick. The FinTech growth that you see and that every investor is actually looking to right now, Africa is the frontier market that everyone is trying to get to.

The regulatory environment is the biggest obstacle to investment going into Africa. There's a need for capital. You have great ideas. You have great startups that are looking for capital. That would have a major impact.

Jared Klee: You're working the central banks and the joy that they get from working with it. But if you flip it around the impact that that has just because you're working all the way down at the base, you're unlocking the ability to go innovate, the ability to go build something new for everybody in those environments. The leverage you have by helping the central bank get better is just

Carmelle Cadet: We call it the bridge internally. And we have this little M logo that we're designing, which is kind of like how innovation and regulation comes together and it's pretty cool. And we don't compete with anyone in the ecosystem, which is the beauty of it. We're really the infrastructure provider. You won't see an EMTECH app.

Jared Klee: What you're talking about is fundamentally a different model of how central banks engage with their constituents. What does that 5, 10, 20, whatever the timeframe is, what does success look like on that stage? Not just for EMTECH, but for your clients, for the central banks and for the innovators.

Carmelle Cadet: Our success would essentially unlock trillions of dollars and economies around the world and the impact that the capital can have on improving lives, giving people access to credit to get out of poverty and modernizing the pipes and how this capital can flow in certain markets for me is my KPI, if you will, my goal. And the ease of which money can flow. And if I can send my aunt money, sitting on my couch and Haiti, because she got robbed, you know, when she went to the bank and got cash out and instead, and now she fears going out the door to go to a Western union and get it.

That's a little use case for me in my mind that I will always keep in mind in what success is supposed to look like at the end. I'm very fortunate that there are a lot of people going into central banking right now that are aligned with that. And I like to remind them how powerful they are. You don't realize you're powerful until someone tells you you're powerful. I try to work with central banks that are aligned with that.

Jared Klee: I love that. It's a vision. The team can rally around. It's a vision your clients can rally on. It's powerful. It's enormously powerful.

Carmelle Cadet: Thank you. Thank you. It gets me in up in the morning.

Jared Klee: It's a great segue to the closing question as well. So we talked big future, what does it get to, but I want to bring it all the way back to present. Carmelle, it's the same closing question for everybody. What's the biggest win that you've had? It could be personal. It could be professional wherever you want to take it.

Carmelle Cadet: So I have my husband, my mom, my son, and then EMTECH. And the biggest win for me, I would say it's being a black woman founder, the odds are against me and me being able to raise capital, let alone for me to walk into the space that I'm walking into and say, "you know, I have something to say and that you guys should listen." Being able to find a path forward that led us to actually go from engagement all the way through an adoption of our product into production.

And you know, how difficult that is. From R&D, from ideation and an onboarding, a major financial institution, one of the best as well with a reputation, you know, around the world is for me something that I probably will hang on the wall. Being able to do that, that win was our own.

Jared Klee: I love that. And Carmelle on a personal level. I'm very glad they're listening.

Carmelle Cadet: Thank you. More to do. I hope we get to put more on the board. We're well positioned. We know the space, we like it a lot. We have competition in the market and that's fine, but we think we have a good game plan.

Jared Klee: Carmelle, thank you so much for coming on.

Carmelle Cadet: Thanks. A lot. Of course. I'll do it again. Let me know. This was fun!

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