Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov, the payments infrastructure company that brings every US payment rail together under a single contract and API. Last month Moov launched Moov Money, a real-time P2P product built with Visa and Mastercard that lets anyone with a debit card receive money, and a week earlier it announced a Coinbase partnership for stablecoin acceptance and settlement. We talk about why Wade sees a big opening for P2P outside the existing networks, how Moov tackles scams at the network level, and why he thinks the most important payments changes will be the ones consumers never notice.

What We Covered

• From Macromedia and Adobe to Banno and Jack Henry
• How an open source ACH library became a payments company
• Moov as a network of networks payment processor
• Why P2P in the US has been limited to "pay me back"
• Moov Money as a complement to Zelle
• How a Moov Money payment flows, step by step
• Solving the two-sided network problem with Visa and Mastercard
• Fighting scams at the network level with 55 scam pattern agents
• Using the existing text message relationship as a trust channel
• The economics for community banks
• The Coinbase partnership and stablecoin settlement for small businesses
• Why Moov runs Fintech DevCon, and its move to Boulder
• Cross-border payments and the plumbing changes ahead

Key Takeaways

• Ubiquity comes from the card, not the app. Nine out of ten Americans already carry a Visa or Mastercard debit credential. By building on those networks, and embedding the sending experience in the bank's own app, Moov Money avoids the usual chicken and egg problem of getting both sides to download and fund a new app.
• There is a large market Zelle does not serve. Around 6,000 financial institutions are not on Zelle, and neobanks, brokerages and reloadable prepaid cards cannot buy it. Wade positions Moov Money as a lower cost alternative for those institutions, starting at $500 a month and 75 cents a transaction with fraud included, and says Moov still has to prove its fraud performance before anyone would switch.
• Fraud is better fought at the network level. Rather than leaving each institution to catch scams on its own, Moov watches for money from many institutions concentrating in a single recipient. Add in on-device prompts, existing debit dispute tools and end of day settlement, and there are several chances to stop a scam before the money is gone.
• Stablecoins are about liquidity, not crypto. For a small business, the value is getting paid over the weekend and being able to restock without a line of credit. As Wade puts it, the plumbing will change underneath consumers without them ever knowing.

About Wade Arnold

Wade Arnold is the CEO and co-founder of Moov. He describes himself as a computer scientist at heart, and he started his career at Macromedia, staying on through its acquisition by Adobe, where he did his first fintech work on account opening and loan origination. He then founded Banno, a digital banking platform for community banks and credit unions that was acquired by Jack Henry in 2014.

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