The Architects: Reimagining The Financial Future

The Next Frontier: Agentic Finance & the Future of FinTech

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In this conversation, Nik Milanović co-hosts a panel with Sarah Morgenstern, Investment Partner, Flourish Venture, and featuring Ethan Bloch, Co-Founder and CEO, Hiro;  and Rodri Fernandez Touza, Co-Founder, Crossmint, to discuss the emerging trends in agentic commerce and payments. 


They explore the transformative potential of AI and stablecoins in financial services, the importance of consumer trust, and the evolving landscape of fintech. The discussion highlights the founders' unique journeys into the fintech space, the role of technology in enhancing financial planning, and the impact of these innovations on global financial access.


Flourish Ventures is an $850M global early-stage venture firm that backs entrepreneurs transforming financial systems for the better. Its portfolio spans more than 100 companies across the U.S. and emerging markets. The firm also supports innovators shaping policy, media, and research to accelerate lasting change in financial services.

This Week in Fintech (TWIF) is the largest fintech community in the world, presenting news, podcasts and newsletters from around the world. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest in news opinions, and all things financial technology.


Rodri Fernández Touza:

The most beautiful thing of all is just like seeing it play live and see how things are changing so quickly and so ready for the earth.

Ethan Bloch:

And I think finally now with LOMs and we're doing Hiro and Others, we, the consumer, will have something just as sophisticated on our side, helping us, you know. We're still gonna spend money, we're still gonna buy stuff, we're still gonna use credit. This is America. This is what we do. But how do we do it in a way that's forwarding where we want to go, wherever that is in life.

Nik Milanovic:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to this week in FinTech's special series with Flourish Ventures. I'm very excited today to be sitting down here with none other than Flourish Ventures Investment Partner Sarah Morgenstern, as well as CrossMint co-founder Rodri Fernandez Touza and Hiro Finance founder Ethan Bloch. Today we're going to be getting a little bit more into using artificial intelligence in financial services. But before we dive into that, I would love to explain a little bit about our partner, Flourish. Flourish Ventures is an $850 million global early stage venture firm that backs entrepreneurs, transforming financial systems for the better. They focus on fintech companies that solve foundational challenges, expanding access, improving products, and lowering costs. And their portfolio spans over 100 leading fintechs across the US and emerging markets. Their evergreen structure lets them back long-term trends with conviction, unconstrained by traditional fund timelines. They've been a great partner and a longtime partner to this weekend fintech. So appreciative of them and appreciative of my great guests who are here with me today. Let's dive into it. Sarah, it's good to see you.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Thanks for that great uh intro, Nick. We're so glad to be partnering with you all on this. I'm Sarah Morganstern. I'm a venture partner at Flourish. I've been doing early stage fintech investing in both consumer and infrastructure models for the past decade. Uh, stick to those with Flourish Ventures and previously at the Omidiar network, which is sort of long enough to be undeniably old. You just got to own that. Uh, but also to sort of have a sense when there's a special moment coming together and we're on the cusp of a transformative wave. And you could feel that, I think a decade ago with mobile and with time. Uh and you could feel it now. There's something happening here with a gentic commerce and agentic finance that's really sort of that next potential uh innovation. So excited to be chatting with you all and this great set of innovators that are leading the way.

Nik Milanovic:

Ethan, maybe you want to give a quick background and then we can go to Rodri.

Ethan Bloch:

Sure. Sounds great. Thanks for having me. Um I look forward to the conversation. I'm Ethan Block. I'm one of the founders of a company called Hiro Finance. I previously was the founder of a company called Digit that helped for uh around 4 million Americans save $9 billion. It was a consumer savings product. And I'm, for whatever reason, still working in consumer fintech because I like the pain.

Nik Milanovic:

Yeah. Speaking of pain, we have one person who is not in eating today and one person who has not slept in about two days on this call. So we are all feeling the builder's pain right now. Rodri, speaking of not sleeping, would you like to give a quick background on yourself?

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Yeah, hi everyone. I'm Rodri, uh, originally from Spain, as you can, you will probably guess by my thick accent. Uh, my background is in uh fintech, having working at McKinsey and startups and VC for a few years. Moved to the US six years ago for graduate school, dropped out to become a monk, started selling NFTs from the monastery, one thing led to another. Uh, we started a company about four years ago, uh, helping build stablecoin infrastructure for enterprises to adopt uh the technology into their flows. And very excited to be here with you all.

Nik Milanovic:

Well, we're excited to have you all. Um, Sarah, I know that you are the brains behind the great topic that we're picking today. So I was wondering if you want to preview for all of our listeners a little bit more about what we're gonna be talking about.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Thanks for that, Nick. So today we are gonna dive into the rise of AgenTech commerce and finance, right? Where agents are increasingly able to reason, to plan, to act on consumers' behalf. And that opens up huge possibilities for innovation. And we're also gonna explore the underlying technology that's driving that, sort of both agentic and stablecoins. So it should be a very timely and interesting conversation.

Nik Milanovic:

Well, I'm always curious to get the personal backstory a little bit first before we dive into the products and the vision. Um, Ethan and Rodery, you both have very different paths that brought you into becoming fintech founders. And uh I always am very curious about kind of what that guiding motivation was that made you take an unconventional path. Ethan, I mean, in particular, you know, I paid a lot of attention to your past startup digit, which you ran for over 10 years. Um, I'm curious, like, how did you become a fintech founder to begin with to start digit? And what led you from digit to this next step uh at Hiro?

Ethan Bloch:

Yeah. So for whatever reason, you know, my first love in life was the computer, and that was around six or seven. And then my second love was finance. And bizarrely enough, one of the pieces of software I loved in 1995 at the age of 10 was Quicken on the computer. Like who likes Quicken? I would invite friends over and I would joke with them that were suing Beverly Cleary, which is like an author reading in class, and create a check and use the software and do double entry, you know, accounting. And I ended up going to school for finance. And I never thought it would be a career. It was always this like a passion. And I thought I would certainly work on the internet doing something beneficial for society, but it know it'd be finance. And it wasn't until I sold my first company, a company actually called Flowtown, where I had the space to think about what do I actually want to do with the rest of my life? And I gradually came to realize, wow, I have this competency in technology and this competent competency in finance. How do I use that to create something of value and to help people? That eventually led to digit. As I said, digit helped people save over $9 billion with the time I ran the company. I ended up selling that business for around $250 million in 2023. And then I thought I was done, right? But as we all know, LLMs really had their moment. And at that point, I'd always had this dream, even going to digit, to build this sort of really smart, really sophisticated uh helper for people when it comes to their money. People say assistant, agent. Um, and I said, okay, I don't know exactly if this will work, but let's go explore and see if now is the time this could happen. And so that's been the journey for Hiro and how we got here.

Nik Milanovic:

Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Brave. That is you unlocked a memory that I didn't even realize was getting back in there. Incredible. Um well, I'm glad that we can finally help you uh deliver on your vision of building a better QuickBooks and much, much, much more. Um, Rodri, uh I know you touched on it a little bit, man, but uh I'm very curious to hear also how you came to the idea that became CrossMent.

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Yeah, so always wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was a kid. Uh studied engineering in Spain at the time, 2014, there were not that many startups or tech opportunities. And so I ended up Johnny McKinsey working on financial services with some of the largest banks in the region. Some interesting experiences on you know, trying to save some of the Greek banks from collapsing and a few other uh cool stories for another time. Um and eventually ended up uh you know making it here uh to the US for the MBA. Uh was looking at ideas around space exploration and and so on. Uh ended up deciding that you know wanted to do something a bit different, uh dropped out of Stanford to become a monk, uh, joined a monastery, and then one day I wanted to meditate about work, talked to my co-founder now uh at the time, and uh we decided to start playing around with uh crypto, which was very, very hot, and uh started building a few tools, got into the thing the next day, uh, went back to meditating. I couldn't concentrate, I just wanted to build something, left the monastery, moved into a hacker house, and we started building uh what people wanted at a time, which was uh NFTs. This was Solana Summer, late 2021, and we realized that developer infrastructure for blockchain was so broken. Uh first building anything was incredibly complicated. And two, most of our friends and family couldn't interact with anything that we were doing. And so we decided to fix it and started CrossMint about three and a half, four years ago. Um, initially we were focusing on NFTs because that was what the market demanded at the time, and eventually expanded into stablecoins and a few other use cases, which is uh primarily what we do today. And very excited to dig deeper into it.

Nik Milanovic:

Well, uh two very different journeys, and we're excited to have you both here because it's kind of converged in a similar place.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Those have to be some of the best backstory.

Nik Milanovic:

Yeah. It's not boring. It's not the usual, like, you know, I I worked for an investment bank and now here I am. Exactly. Great pass. I love it. So um you know, the topic of the day and the topic that you're across all of FinTech is agentic commerce and agentic payments. Uh a lot of people have a lot of different interpretations. I'm curious, like in your own words, you know, what is agentic finance? What is agentic payments?

Rodri Fernández Touza:

So I think AI is transforming everyone's lives. I think everyone is starting to use it for everything from research to writing uh to coding. Um agents still are not economic actors. Uh, we may be using them for researching which products to buy, uh which stock, may make more sense or not, but they fail at the last mile of actually being able to move money and execute transactions. And so what we're seeing now is the birth of a set of standards that will allow agents to not only be good at information and writing code and so on, but actually be able to touch and move money and make transactions on behalf of users. Uh we're seeing two clusters of use cases. The first one is more around agent e-commerce. So that is procurement, basically making purchases on behalf of businesses or users. Say you're talking to an agent, you say, you know, I want to fly to Money 2020 for Vegas. I'm only willing to spend $100. Find me the fly and just buy it for me. And if there's none, continuously monitor it, and whenever you find it, just buy it. Um, that is the first set of use cases. The second set of use cases is more on like financial use cases. So that is more uh, you know, all the way from like financial advisors to to things like that. Um and our hypothesis and thesis is that in very soon most economic activity will be intermediated by agents and the industry is still obviously relatively mature. Uh, we're all together trying to define the set of standards that will power that new agentic economy. Uh, but like everything in AI, uh the speed of adoption once it clicks the that PM uh fit, uh it's extraordinary. And so we think that over the next six, twelve, eighteen months, things are about to get uh absolutely bananas in that uh the transformation is going to be like really radical and really quick.

Ethan Bloch:

And I think I would just add, I think you know, it's easy to gloss over it because you know, we will say agentic commerce or agentic payments, and we'll people will combine, you know, the fact that there is a LLM-powered agent working on your behalf with instruction, and it's operating on traditional rails, maybe like we saw Visa's ability, you know, whatever they just announced a few days ago, the sort of standard to do payments, and other people are doing it and supporting it. But there's a whole bunch of financial activity that's slow, that's actually hard to do. Domestically in the US, some things are easier. When you go US internationally, it gets harder. In other countries, it's just harder. In other countries, things are easier. Sending payments peer-to-peer is easier. And so at the same time, because of tokenization and specifically blockchain and crypto rails, like we have that part where today, in the hero case, if I want to help my customer stop paying a bill or pay some other biller in the US, it's very complicated to do that. Log into their bank on their behalf, like change their bill pay, um, try to integrate with this biller back end, which is 30 some years old in some cases. We did this at digit. But if that can get replaced with crypto rails, all of a sudden it unlocks a new paradigm of what a customer can do, even domestically, with their financial life. And I just wanted to underline that because it's these two things that combine that potentially open up a whole bunch of new experiences that are just better for customers by and large.

Nik Milanovic:

I mean, it's it's an area that I'm excited about, but I also express um initial skepticism about because um you know payments is it's it's payments is is the the kind of tip of the spear for a lot of different technological and social constructs. And so the payment transaction is dependent on identity, and um that is too you know uh in a two-sided way, the identity um question is dependent on trust. And so effectively a payment really requires bi-directional trust in order for it to go through and be successful. And I am curious about you know why consumers will trust an agent to make a purchase decision on their behalf or to move money on their behalf. I think that you know this is eventually gonna happen, but it's a really tough sell initially. You're selling a payments product that's effectively a trust product. Um, you know, when are consumers gonna be motivated to let an agent you know effectively have decision power over where their money goes and how it moves?

Ethan Bloch:

I think it's just when the experience is so good. It's like Shop Pay. Let's just look at that. Shop Pay has so much information about me and I go to checkout and I use it or Apple Pay. And yeah, I these are big companies, and so you can trust them, but there's some trust to it, but it's fundamentally just such a better experience that I'm not filling out three forms during checkout anymore, which is bananas that we ever had anyone do that. And I now I just tap a button.

Nik Milanovic:

Does there have to be a human in the loop for that?

Ethan Bloch:

I protect I want to give Roddy a chance to chime in because I'm going.

Rodri Fernández Touza:

But sure. Um I think the incentive, like Ethan was saying, to not have to go through an airline checkout uh flow is actually very strong. I think uh consumer trust is definitely going to be one of the hurdles for proper adoption. However, um uh together with you know a few other things around like standard definition and uh like how to do settlement, how to figure out all of the different components in the value chain of payment, get adapted, uh, you know, like charge back frameworks and things like that, that we can talk about in a in a second, and like how maybe stablecoins help some of those. However, my intuition is that we're gonna start with a small small cluster of uh commerce experiences that maybe resemble more like the traditional checkout flows or activities that you could do in another website, but instead of doing it through the um you know real estate or website of the eventual client, you're doing actually from an NLM. But those operations start to be more simple, and then over time, those things get more sophisticated, trust is builded, you start going more into autonomous use cases where a human is not needed in the loop. There's a few things about like stablecoins that are going back to that point where like you can set up programmable wire rails that ensure that the agent doesn't go into things that they shouldn't, and those things be cryptographically proven. Those guard rails basically are cryptographically enforced so that even if the AI hallucinates, uh the kind of the damage I guess that they can produce is actually pretty contained.

Nik Milanovic:

It's such like an interesting accident of history. You know, I don't think it is really like there's purpose here, but it's an interesting accident of history that you have a relatively mature crypto ecosystem at the same time as you have LLMs becoming commercially available because um you know spoofing is so easy, fraud as a much lower lower barrier to entry now. And so you've never really needed strong, secure crypto cryptographic identification as much as you do now. And so when you think about being able to make a payment decision, the ability to impersonate or commit third-party fraud is so much higher now. And so it actually matters a lot more that you're able to have security that's offered through something like stable coins where you can have kind of verifiable wallet and you can have biometrics kind of backing that up. Um, and so it's really, you know, it's really beneficial that you have both these technologies uh that are gaining momentum at the same time. I can see, you know, the case where you know, you think about the core case of an online transaction. Today, you know, Ethan had Barr, your example, like Shop Pit makes it like relatively frictionless. You know, you can just do a quick two of a in order to pull in all of your personal information and your address information and make an e-commerce transaction. But the exceptions still create a lot of friction. You know, I'm just thinking about personal experiences, but like I bought a flight and I need to change it last minute, or um, I ordered something online and it doesn't look anything like what I ordered, and now I need to go through the entire return flow and get a you know discount on a future purchase or get a refund on this transaction. Like those are two things where I would love to have an agent just handle the process for me. Like I still probably want to be the person to hit send, but hitting send has never been the difficult part. It's just having somebody navigate, according to my preferences, these exception cases. And so, you know, arguing against myself here, I can see that being something that's like really sticky with users to the point where people forget that they ever had to, you know, make a return themselves or go negotiate the whole flow themselves without using an agent. Raj, you I thought what you said was really interesting. You know, you're gonna have fewer and fewer people that actually end up spending time on the real estate of the end provider. Um, and you'll really have the same way that kind of Google intermediated product search, you're gonna have LLMs intermediate a lot of different kinds of transactions. And so, like, let's say I want to buy a dining room table. Well, I go into an LLM to begin with, and I just say like dining room table, I upload a photo to the dining room, I want to match these specs, I want to match this color pattern. Then all of a sudden it doesn't really matter to me whether I'm on the you know website for Walmart or Pottery Barn or Creighton Barrel, like this is all kind of getting serviced to me in the same place. And that'll become just kind of my default flow for everything. And so I'm curious to hear from from either of you guys, like in an in a world where like people are kind of interacting in an LM first way and like the real estate of like distributed providers and point solutions isn't trafficked as much. What role do you see your technologies playing?

Ethan Bloch:

I'm just not sure that is the reality that happens, by the way, because like people like to window shop. People like to go, whether it's going to Pinterest or going to first dibs or going to your favorite retailer, you're not going to buy anything in that moment, but you're shopping to inform what you might want to buy. And then when you have the specific, not perfect, but you have really the intention to buy, maybe then you end up right in Chat GPT in this particular case and do some last-minute comparison checking, we're kind of getting the best price. But I just think that's important. People say, oh, it's gonna, there's gonna be no front door, no window for the retailer. I think that's BS. I mean, not in my lifetime. Maybe at some point it changes, but we're humans, we're visual. We want to, you know, we want to shop. So I just want to add that point.

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Uh yeah, I mean, I don't think by any means there's going to be like a binary world where suddenly, you know, e-commerce websites disappear and everything is LLM. Uh and same for like, let's say, I don't know, financial tools or any other type of uh economic activity. Um, there's going to be some activities which may go over to the LLMs and some which will stay in websites where you need more like personalized or you know, maybe like people just like to shop around. I don't know. Things keep evolving. You also may end up having LLMs that actually create like an interface that actually is like a combination and aggregates all of the data from all of the different sources and provides an experience that is actually in the end similar to what you would end up seeing in the website of the of the retailer. So we all don't know where the world is going to go, things change so quickly. And some of these questions depend so much on the time frame. Are we looking at it in like a three months, six months, two years, ten years? And I think when you get into like the five-year time frame, things are just like completely like absolutely impossible to predict, as it was like five years ago, to know where we're going to be in some of these flows. So we'll see. The most beautiful thing of all is just like seeing it play live and see how things are changing so quickly in so many different directions.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Hey, you think could I just a follow-up question? You know, you were a pioneer in the last wave of mobile fintech, both in terms of automating savings and behavioral finance. What are you most excited that you can do now that you couldn't do in that last go round because technology has taken a step forward?

Ethan Bloch:

Yeah, that's a great question. Consumer fintech has had, at least as long as I've worked in it, this aspiration to deliver sophisticated financial services to everyone that is usually only available to wealthy people. And, you know, we saw Robin Hood take some of that specific around trading and the experience and making it all mobile and making it free. And so they've done work in sort of that vector, but there's still all these other areas consumer fintech has totally failed in. Like if you need a financial plan today, it's like it was 10 or 15. It's it's it's you're gonna spend $3,000 and have to engage with a human being. I love human beings, but I also wanted to, you know, if you want to go through your tax plan and think strategically, it it's it's not if you want to look at your portfolio and think about what's the right portfolio for you based on your unique risk tolerance, is not, it doesn't. We think at hero, and this is you know what we've started to unlock, it's finally here because now you can have your completely personalized right uh uh agent helping you build your financial plan. Right here, the first product we built, um, I think when this episode comes out, it'll be in market, is an AI financial planner. Everyone should have a financial plan. It may be somewhat boring. I'm a finance nerd, but I've helped people achieve their savings goals for 15 years. And the number one reason people don't achieve their goals is because they don't have a plan. And so this is now possible, but you're gonna be able to do that not just in planning, but in your investments and in your tax. All of a sudden, everyone has someone incredible helping them with whatever little nuanced financial problem they have that's holding them back from from stepping forward in their life. I think the aspiration of fintech, we can finally start to deliver on. That's why I mean I that's why I got back into working. Like it's hard work. You know, I could be hyper, which I love to do, but it's it's it's that's what that's what gets me out of bed, you know, to borrow Warren Buffett and tap dance, you know, to work.

Sarah Morgenstern:

It's a really, it's almost an expanded definition of agentic finance, Nick, going back to your initial sort of framing question of what are we talking about here and what's possible. At some level, it's where are there frictions that have stood between people's intent to do the right thing and actually taking the action. And sometimes that may involve a payment transaction. And we could keep talking about are we are we at that moment where you can take the human out or no? But in the meantime, there's all this other stuff, Ethan, that you're describing.

Ethan Bloch:

And we, yes, when we started building Hiro, we built a bunch of flows that would help you, like, you know, change your bill, pay a biller that were that were browser-based with an agent, and they kind of worked and the technology still is not great. But then we would talk to customers and they're like, making the credit card payment isn't the hard part. Knowing how much to pay is the hard part. Or selling this stock isn't the hard part. Knowing what my allocation should be and how much to sell is the hard part. We'll get like the action part is valuable, but even upstream, to your point, is still a lot of friction to even know what to do in those moments.

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Nik Milanovic:

Rodri, I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about uh Crossman itself here. Pivoting a little bit and thinking about Hiro and CrossMint's technology. You know, CrossMint builds itself as the default infrastructure layer for companies and AI agents to build on-chain. It feels like the big trend right now in this cycle of crypto is that we are actually getting kind of mass market tools and we're abstracting away the fact that crypto needs to sit behind a lot of these um user-facing tools. Uh how does CrossMint make that work for companies?

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Yeah, so basically, what we do is we give stablecoin infrastructure for companies and agents to integrate stablecoins on their flows. What that means is we serve primarily big financial institutions and fintech companies who uh want to number one, do embedded finance. So these are companies who perhaps usually have distribution and they want to embed wallets and other types of financial services with stablecoins there. And number two is like mostly around like money movement. So this is how you're able to use stable coins to move money more efficiently and faster around the world. And so uh the product itself is a suite of APIs that has everything companies need generally to integrate those tops. And so that means embedded wallets, it means on and off RAM, stablecoin orchestration, tokenization, and the ability to issue your own stablecoin, uh, and so on and so forth. And so our clients are companies like MoneyGram, for example. Uh, probably, you know, most people are familiar. MoneyGram is one of the largest remittance companies in the world. Um, they help people, mostly in developed economies, send money back to their families. And historically, their flow is you go into a store, you pay with cash, and then on the other side, after some feast, the user goes and picks up the cash at another physical location. And so, what stable coins are unlocking for them is the ability to uh be much more efficient in the way that that money moves cross-border, and then on the recipient side, uh create wallets for recipients, allow them to access dollars, access other types of financial services, um, and build uh get a bit closer to economic freedom. There's so many people in emerging markets who are they do not have access to a strong currency, they suffer a lot from inflation, they suffer a lot from currency depreciation, they cannot invest in any meaningful investment products, they don't get yielded under deposits, and now suddenly thanks to stablecoins number one. All these companies can build global. Financial products in days or weeks. Like Manigram built something from scratch in like two months, despite you know being like a pretty mature organization that generally one would consider to have to move slower. And uh number two, it allows all these people uh who before were unable to access financial services to be able to do so. And that's perhaps the most exciting thing, I think, of the technology is how it's democratizing access to financial services to everyone around the world.

Ethan Bloch:

Rodri, can I see a quick question? Uh this I don't know if you've all seen this. I haven't checked the data. This is from Artemis. Uh I just saw this this morning. It just shows stable coin payments by month. What happened? Is it like what happened that you know, if you look at B2B, it's giant all of a sudden. Like what's happened in the last year?

Rodri Fernández Touza:

So it is a mix of regulatory clarity, uh education, better.

Ethan Bloch:

It's like genius act. Yeah.

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Towards the end in the case of the US, but primarily, I think like two years ago, no one knew what a stablecoin was. Three people building in a room, trying to innovate with a few long-term startups in emerging markets, trying to figure things out. Uh, and suddenly the world has realized that stable coins are just better money. Uh, they allow you to be global from day one, they allow you to move money at the speed of data. Um, and they have a lot of intrinsic characteristics around yield generation and other factors that you just like more efficient. And so, as some of that uh those use cases started to get polished, there starts to be more clarity. People are less scared of touching a crypto, putting stable coins on their balance sheet, perhaps. Uh, suddenly now there's this explosion, and now the market is literally every single major financial institution in FinTech has or is finalizing their stablecoin strategy, and they're fear that if they do not move quick enough, they will be left behind with a competitive product. And so it's just like the tip of the spur. I think there's this new next generation of financial products that before were not possible, that are getting built now, and similar to how you had a generation of like the revolutes and chimes of the world that you know got started about a decade ago. There's a new generation of similar companies that are getting started now that are going to completely redefine uh the financial system. Plus, all of the big financial institutions who overnight making the blockchain invisible too, which is another factor that catalyzed partially that that chart growth, that you can enable these experiences, tap into all of these benefits without the user having to store a seed phrase, know what it's a zero X, whatever wallet address. For them, it's just like a normal fintech app. It's faster, it's cheaper, gives you money, better interest, give you access to financial services before you didn't have access to. And it works just as well. And so it's a really exciting time to be alive and building uh in the space.

Nik Milanovic:

Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the early days of the consumer internet where you know you had to early on, if you wanted to be online, you needed to buy and host your own server. It was a physical server that lived, you know, at your house. Um, and there were not uh DNS providers that you could just easily sign up and do site with, and there were not website builders, you know, needless to say, not the uh AI-enabled website builders that we're seeing grow now. And so it was very, very difficult to actually have an online presence early on, and it was pretty resource-intensive. But you abstract away all the complexity and you use a simple UI and you lower the costs, and all of a sudden, you know, you're not making it more uh difficult for the businesses that provided a way to get online to survive. You're enabling more and more people and more and more uh businesses to get online and it's expanding the size of the consumer internet. And I feel like we're in a similar situation here with stablecoins where you're not cannibalizing existing market shares and payment systems, you're expanding the pie for global payment systems and you're letting so many more people actually sign up to manage their finances and to take payments. Um what I love about that, and this really ties back to Flourish's uh the like mission is to not just um be a fantastically financially successful venture capital firm, but also to create positive social outcomes. And financial services is a great place where you can actually have products that are financially viable and also create a positive social benefit. And you know, Ethan, what I like about what you're doing at Euro is that you are making investing decisions and you're making financial management um easier for people who you know may otherwise find it really daunting. I'm curious, like, how do you think about this end goal of creating a fairer and and you know more efficient financial ecosystem for your users?

Ethan Bloch:

Well, this is a hard, I mean, this is a very hard problem. I mean, it depends again, if we're focusing just on the US, this is you know, a very hard problem when we talk about, you know, economic uh equality or not equality um and and ladder up to just literacy around finance. And hero isn't gonna solve this problem, like headline um, because it's too big and it's too nuanced and it's too complex. What hero will do is lift everyone's financial IQ. You know, this is what LLMs are doing. So you have X IQ, now you have X plus 40. And so wherever you started, you're smarter. Uh we'll do that, Hiro. And so everyone will be financially smarter. I believe this is true. I see it with the product today, I see it with the early users. Um, there's a lot of work to get this really done in these different facets of someone's financial life. But I think that's ultimately what happens. And what does that mean? Um, if you think about modern society, especially in America today, you have some of the smartest people in the world working at some of the most powerful companies in the world focused on separating you from your money. And I think finally now with LLMs and what we're doing at Hiro and others, we, the consumer, will have something just as sophisticated on our side, helping us, you know, we're still gonna spend money, we're still gonna buy stuff, we're still gonna use credit. This is America. This is what we do. But how do we do it in a way that's forwarding where we want to go, wherever that is in life? Just knowing am I in the right career? Am I going to the right school? Do I really need this student loan? Should I pay this back or should I pay that back? Should I take this car financing? Yeah, I want to get, I want the nice car. Get the nice car. Like you'll only live once, but let's make you sure you do it in the right way. And so that I think that's what's going to start to happen. And so people will be better off financially. They'll have more savings later in life. They'll be in jobs and careers they get more fulfillment from. I think this is, and here is this one small part of this, but I think that's where we're headed.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Hey, Ethan, can you peel the onion a little bit more on the technology that's making that possible? So take, for example, the financial planning features you described before. How are you leveraging LLMs in order to make those personalized recommendations? Just bring that to life.

Ethan Bloch:

Yeah. So from the experience perspective, you know, with Hiro Today, you sign up for the product very quickly, you're dropped right into what we call your financial planner. And it asks you some basic questions, like, how old are you and where do you live? And then it asks you about your income and it asks you about some of your expenses. But at the same time, it's doing that on the side. And I wish I could I could show a screenshot or demo, but I won't do that right now. It's mapping it. You can actually see your financial plan. And that's all it's an agent, right? Built to be incredible at building a financial plan, but then also very good at understanding how to help you understand what you're putting in the plan and how it affects you. It just wasn't, this wasn't possible before. You know, you you you and the important thing here, I think, is um it's not just the LLM, right? If you just take an LM, go to ChatGPT, throw in some financial information, you'll get some help. But it's not grounded in any financial truth, right? Like, is it actually projecting your investment and tax rate properly? Is it, you know, it's not because it's just doing it sort of in inference and in the model. And so by combining, you know, best practice sort of grounded in truth, like a financial plan in this case, with an agent built to build and interact with the plan and help you fill it out. All of a sudden, instead of spending $3,000 in five hours building a financial plan, you can do it in 20 minutes for free. Like that, and maybe even shorter, depending how much you're aware of the concepts. And so that's, and I'm it's hard to describe without showing it, but that's sort of what it looks like for the user or the consumer.

Sarah Morgenstern:

That's pretty dramatic in terms of shift forward and and who these kinds of features could be available for. So very neat. Thanks.

Nik Milanovic:

If we're you know, forecasting down the road, I would love to get your vision of a day in the life in the future. Um in either circumstance. Like what I love about uh having both Hiro and Crossman on is that we're talking about two very different financial use cases. We're talking about, you know, payments and transaction authorization, and um, we're talking about financial management. But um, you know, in the bull case for both of your products, what does it look like for a user or a consumer or a merchant to just go through a day in a very different way than they do today using Crossman and using Hiro?

Sarah Morgenstern:

Raji, I wonder if you could talk even a little bit more. There's such a diversity of use cases that the enterprises you're working with are focused on, from sort of wallets to loyalty. Say a little bit more about where you're getting the most market pull right now.

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Yeah. So I think that the main clusters of activity are coming from. Number one is cross-border payments. So think of remittance companies who are moving now a lot of that cross-border flow into stablecoins to optimize their treasury, to optimize the cost of moving that money, but also from building a relationship with the end consumer that before was in markets where perhaps they couldn't offer too many financial services. Now they can create a wallet, now they can build like a neo-bank for that recipient of the funds, and they can back them and offer them all these sort of financial services. So that is one is remittances. Generally, I would say like anyone who has distribution, anyone who has customers, now they can bank them in one way or another. And so it becomes like a very interesting way of uh adding, uh increasing the monetization opportunity uh that companies have without having to go through the same level of compliance and regulatory overhead and um localization that otherwise would be required with traditional financial markets. Number two, in addition to remittances and cross-border payments, you see a lot around like payroll. So uh companies who have employees in emerging markets or contractors, being able to find ways to pay them um cheaper, faster, more efficiently as well, is another uh part of the market where there's a lot of market pool. Then there is a lot of uh there's that generation of like neobanks that are getting started natively on crypto rails all around the world. And so you have the neo banks of the Caribbean, the new bank of Colombia, of South America, of Africa that are building more personalized experiences for those types of consumers. And again, like you can spin out now one of these neo banks in like a week, like an MVP. And so there's this uh flourishing of uh innovation happening all over emerging markets that it's fascinating to see. Telecommunication companies too, they traditionally had a lot of mobile wallets, and they are now able to turn those into digital stablecoin wallets. You see a lot around like marketplaces and e-commerce. Um generally, this still a little bit early, but the improvement in cost structure of accepting payments uh is absolutely dramatical. So historically, you have businesses in the US paying, say, 3% every time someone swipes a credit card. And for international payments, it's even more uh it's even worse. That now suddenly you can pretty much completely obliterate that entire interchange fee that otherwise would be paid by having these sort of like peer-to-peer payments. And for businesses who are historically very low margins, suddenly you may find that just by accepting crypto payments, you can like double your profits overnight without having to do any meaningful change into your business just by optimizing the cost structure of payments. So the incentive structure there that appears is one where like now merchants want to accept crypto payments. They may be able to pass some of these benefits to consumers that creates a more incentive for consumers to adopt stable coins and pay. And it's still obviously early, right? Like there's not that many consumers now who have stable coins and are looking for websites where to spend them. It's still early, to be fully clear. But there's a lot of market demand from these companies that are starting to think about that. We're using more like short-term is more the marketplaces and e-commerce sites who accept perhaps payments in uh fiat, but then they want to settle with merchants on that marketplace who are in a different jurisdiction and they want to do that cheaper and faster. Those, I think, are like the main clusters. So cross-border payments and remittances, payroll, telecommunication companies, neobanks, and marketplaces and e-commerce. And then Agentic Finance is an emerging category, starting to have much more pool. The market's still obviously a little bit early and immature, and we're all trying to figure it out. But you know, a lot of teams at the tip of the spare are building really cool stuff. And so I think like you will see many of those products come to market over the next six months that are going to be really cool to watch.

Ethan Bloch:

And I think for for Hiro, you know, depending what survey and data set you look at, roughly 30% of Americans have some have a financial advisor or some form of financial professional that's helping them. And that typically skews older and richer. And I think what Hiro is doing and others, 100% of Americans will have a financial advisor or professional, sophisticated professional, helping them financially. So that's one thing. It's like, okay, cool, what does that mean? That means more people feeling in control of their finances and more secure. And again, today, depending what data you look at, 80% of Americans feel financially insecure. 77, I think, is what it was. And again, these surveys, plus or minus, some air bars here. That's not going to go to zero because we live in a complex society. But how do we get that significantly lower with these tools? That is that is the hope. And I think that's where we're that's where we're headed.

Rodri Fernández Touza:

I think Ethan, I have a question for you. Your product has so much potential for touching the life of people. I was curious if there's like any specific case of like an individual that used you for financial planning. And maybe you can share a bit more about like that story and the impact you had on the Yeah.

Ethan Bloch:

I mean, just last week, again, we're we've been in a private beta since April. I think when this podcast comes out, we'll be live. It's it's coming very soon. Um we're gonna launch around November 5th or 6th. So please keep that between us for now. Um, but even in the beta, like last week we had a user email us that she left her job because she got confident that she had enough money to take some time off and make sure, you know, enjoy that time off, but then also make sure um is on the right path career-wise. And before interacting with hero is in her head and wants to do it, but how do you spend 10 minutes, 20 minutes and get that clarity that, you know, changes the course of your life potentially? And so that's that's one example, you know, we have other people that are um potentially separating in some way with their spouse and they're trying to figure out what that looks like. It's complicated. And how do you get clarity on that? That was another one that we heard um recently. Someone's family is getting, you know, family's expanding, having another kid. Should I stay here in the Bay Area or should I go to where my family is a lower cost of living? What does that look like? And quickly get clarity on a pretty big, you know, life decision. So I think it's just it's that. I mean, we all have these, not every day, but through the course of our life, we have these things that come up. Um, and most of us don't have someone to really rely on to help us think through it. These are some of the biggest financial decisions you ever make in your life. And we're just like Googling and maybe, maybe throwing some janky spreadsheet together. And Chat GPT. That's difficult.

Nik Milanovic:

Yeah, it's really like the qualitative questions more than the quantitative questions that you need a good LLM tool for. It's not how much is my mortgage gonna cost every month, but can I afford this? Can I afford to have a can I afford to have a baby? Can I afford to have two babies if I'm paying this mortgage right now?

Ethan Bloch:

And just what it what does it do? Like, I not me personally, but someone's like, I want to be financially independent by the time I'm 50. What is buying a $2 million house versus a million dollar house may not do for that? Then things like this.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Yeah. And even what does this gobbledygook mean on my mortgage statement, right? Part of what's always made finance intimidating is the language is almost intentionally opaque and difficult to digest.

Ethan Bloch:

And so that's another way in which I'm gonna forward that thing to hero. Forward all that mortgage paperwork to hero, never, you know, and it just like truly tells you what the CFPP hoped the disclosures would look like. Right. You know, that someone would actually read.

Nik Milanovic:

Well, I know we only have a couple minutes left here, but we normally like to torture our guests with a couple of rapid fire questions. So I'm looking at the ones that we have here. Sarah, do you have any favorite rapid fire question of those lists that you want to start with?

Sarah Morgenstern:

I can't wait for the answers to this based on what we got up front was sort of the life journeys. Like this could be stellar. Let's start with a classic. If you could have a dinner party guest, anyone, past or present, who would it be?

Rodri Fernández Touza:

Uh me, it's uh Jiro Krishnamurti. It's uh Indian philosopher from the 20th century. I recommend everyone to read his books. He's the most incredible thinker that I've ever seen in my life. Um lot of folks, any any of them is going to be fascinating I've ever seen in my life. Um any of them is going to be fascinating.

Ethan Bloch:

That's awesome. This is a hard one for me. I think I'd probably pick Ben Franklin. He's just been a huge inspiration for most of my life, which I know is weird because he's been dead for a long time. But he's a G. And you study him, it's like, man, if we just had more people like him in the world, it would be better.

Nik Milanovic:

What was either of your personal highlights from 2025 so far? When you look back at this year in your life saga, you know, what's the thing that you're gonna remember more than anything else?

Rodri Fernández Touza:

So for me, I would say when we started the company, the type of use cases that people were using crypto for weren't necessarily the most inspiring all the time. But we talk about like crypto having these two buckets, you have like the degenerate casino on the one hand, and you have like the real-time use cases. And I think there were like so many moments this year where you step back and you look at like how much the industry has evolved into seeing some of the use cases and seeing like Ethan was sharing before, you know, some of the six like very concrete examples of individuals using your product that you're like, this is so cool. And so there's been a few times for me this year where like after now like four years with the company, you step back and you're like, damn, we've come a long way, both as a team, and you look at like something members growing so much. Uh it's just the company maturing to a level that is really inspiring to see from day one sitting in the floor, uh, you know, eating noodles. And then two, like seeing some of these use cases, seeing the stories of the customers, and and be like, wow, the like the type of impact that we're having on people's lives in emerging markets, oftentimes is just really cool and really inspiring and pulls you out of bed every morning. And that was a very long answer for a fire chat uh fire side question. So I'm sorry.

Ethan Bloch:

I think the challenge I have is I have to actually separate professional and personal because I have a lot of personal and so professionally there's lots, but I think when we got a first version of this uh financial planner working and it was ugly and and it was far from being ready, but it like worked, and it's like holy shit, you know, like this is gonna be so useful. And so that will that will stick with me. And again, long-winded, but personally, I turned 40 this year and I took a group of close friends and family to Iceland for a few days, uh longer trip, but a few days with them. And I was dancing on top of a volcano on my 40th birthday when the sun never sets in the most beautiful setting, and I'm I'm a nature boy. And so that was that will stick with me. The whole thing will stick with me, but that was definitely that's sick.

Nik Milanovic:

That's a good place to end because dancing on top of a volcano is a very appropriate allegory for building a fintech company.

Ethan Bloch:

Awesome.

Nik Milanovic:

Well, uh, maybe you continue dancing on top of volcanoes for the rest of this journey, but uh I appreciate you taking a little bit of time out of that uh saga to spend with us. Thanks so much for being here today.

Ethan Bloch:

Yeah, thank you both. Thanks for having us.

Sarah Morgenstern:

Thank you guys, terrific how you have another bit of minute.