![Lithic's 10-Year Anniversary Episode](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/637cc4f83fed1c7cbf48f8c8/6643933fb93fe06d31e819d7_Blog%20Cover.png)
Lithic's 10-Year Anniversary Episode
This episode of Fintech Layer Cake podcast features Lithic's co-founders for a celebration of Lithic's 10-year anniversary. Listen to the show on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and find the transcript, below.
Intro
Welcome back to Fintech Layer Cake, where we uncover secret recipes and practical insights with fintech leaders and experts. I'm your host, Reggie Young, Senior Product Lawyer at Lithic. Today, we have a very special episode. We're celebrating Lithic’s 10-year anniversary by having the company's co-founders on as guests. In this episode, I'm joined by Bo Jiang, CEO; Jason Kruse, CTO; and David Nichols, Chief Design Officer, to talk about their journey and all the lessons they've learned in the company's first decade.
Lithic is a developer-first payments infrastructure company that helps fintech software companies issue prepaid debit and credit cards. Lithic started 10 years ago in 2014 as Privacy or Privacy.com, which is a virtual card product that helps you stay safe when shopping online. For the initial launch, the company worked as the legacy card issuer processor. Quick side note, though, what is a card issuer processor? It's a great question, and it seems like a really dense term, so I want to cover it briefly in the intro here.
You may be familiar with how Square or Stripe provide infrastructure that enables businesses to accept payments. What about the other side of that transaction? What about the cardholders? Someone has to create those cardholders’ cards and manage all the transactions for the cardholder, right? That's where the issuer processors like Lithic come in. Where Square and Stripe help businesses acquire payments, Lithic helps issue and process the transactions for the cards that are actually used at those businesses. Packy McCormick did a great deep dive on Lithic in August 2021 that breaks down this ecosystem if you want more. You can find it online by searching for Lithic’s new customer.
Circling back, Privacy launched in 2014, but they used a legacy card issuer. The issuer sucked for a lot of reasons. The tech broke often. It behaved in unanticipated ways. Documentation was indecipherable. Customer support was well unsupportive. These legacy providers built their tech before the internet even existed, so it's not surprising they couldn’t support a modern 21st century card program. Lithic’s co-founders realized that they needed to build their own card issuing platform if they really wanted to deliver on their vision of an innovative cardholder-friendly virtual card experience. So they did just that. And long story short, in 2021, they publicly rebranded as Lithic after getting organic interest in the processing tech that they built and raising over $100 million. Since then, Lithic has grown support card programs for Mercury, Novo, Parker, and many, many others, and a steadily expanding money movement and related services to support those card programs.
I always enjoy chatting with Bo, Jason, and David. I hope you find this podcast as fun as it was to record. Nothing in this podcast can be construed as legal or financial advice.
Full Transcript
Reggie Young:
Bo, Jason, and David, thanks for finally coming on the podcast. I've been trying for years to get you on. Excited for this conversation. Obviously, been a big decade for you all, 10 years of building Privacy.com and Lithic. The place I'd love to start is which function at Lithic is your favorite, and why isn't the legal team? The actual place I'd like to start is looking back, you founded Privacy 10 years ago. You guys have known each other for much longer than that, right? High School? Am I remembering correctly? They've known each other since high school?
Bo Jiang:
That's right.
Reggie Young:
Crazy. So Privacy.com, founded 10 years ago. Listeners can find all the details of the origin online or in the podcast. I don't want to spend a ton of time on those details. Packy McCormick did a great deep dive on Lithic that covers that Privacy origin story, which listeners can find online by searching for Lithic’s new customer. In those early years of Privacy, what were some of the big unexpected lessons that you all learned about running a card program, other than that the legacy providers you had to work with at the time were exactly going to meet your needs? I I wanted to start here because I think one of the things I love seeing at Lithic is when our sales team is talking to prospective card programs and are like, hey, we want to do something XYZ way. And one of you is like, wait, no, let me talk to them because that's not a good way to do it, and that's not going to achieve what they want to do. You guys clearly have some sort of well-worn battle scars from running a card program yourself. So I love to start with that place. What surprised you the most or what was a lot harder or different than you expected when you started Privacy.com?
Bo Jiang:
This is a bit of a cop out answer, but it feels like almost everything was harder. Back in the day, when we started, we were like, oh, we're going to start with a card program, we're going to launch it. That's going to take us six months to build. We'll get to market, we'll scale it, and then we'll move on to building a whole suite of other tools to help people stay safe online. I think the thing that we didn't realize is how much customization, how much bespoke work you wind up having to do to build a really successful card program. I think a lot of that's actually influenced how we think about our Lithic offering and how we have constructed our technology stack so that you can kind of mix and match and swap out different partners as you scale. It was just like there's been way more complexity than I originally realized.
Reggie Young:
Jason or David, anything that surprised you about starting a card program?
David Nichols:
I have this one feeling or thought, which kind of struck me, which was the sense of nobody really follows the rules. Maybe it's kind of naive going in. As we have come from a software engineering background, and you're sort of beat over the head with this idea of building something reliable and predictable, it was very eye opening to see how little structure it felt like there was, how few guardrails there were for us when we started, and things like transaction processing, and how much work has actually gone into, making sense of a raw string of data and then turning it into something actually usable for an end customer. This is sort of a wild west kind of feeling. Maybe it's very different for someone starting now.
Jason Kruse:
I think those are really good data points. I think maybe one specific thing that I found surprising early on was fraud and transaction losses, and that there’s just a cost of doing business. But also the ingenuity by which these fraudsters operated was exceptionally impressive and actually kind of fun to see in a weird way. Another was just the impunity in which those fraudsters operated was surprisingly, I guess, they weren't far away jurisdictions, committing these crimes in jurisdictions where it was not illegal for them to perpetrate these crimes against US companies. So there's nothing really to do other than combat it. But I have some fond memories just staying up very late, combating the fraudsters.
Always the day or the night before a long weekend seemed to be when the fraud would occur. I think through these learnings, I think we've developed what I would call an unbiased, of course, but probably best-in-class consumer fraud detection. And it's something that we help our portfolio companies with as the fintech infrastructure provider. And I won't say it's like crazy ML or AI. It's really basic classifiers, but I think our secret sauce is really the feature engineering that's fed into those heuristics and those classifiers.
Reggie Young:
Yeah, fraud is endlessly innovative, definitely a lesson that all the folks learn in fintech pretty quickly. Looking back at the past 10 years, if you were to build Privacy from scratch today, is there anything that you would invest in more or less than you did 10 years ago? Is there anything looking back you realize wasn't as important? It sounds like, Jason, fraud is one of those lessons that you realize like, oh, this is something we're going to spend more time on than you necessarily expected. But are there other other things that you now realize weren't as important as you thought or were more important than you thought back then?
Jason Kruse:
I have an answer that I'm curious if Bo will agree or disagree with. So let's find out. If I could go back in time, one area I would change is, I would probably think we should have engaged with the card network sooner. The network is a critical partner, and there's only a few major ones. As a card program, you're hitching your wagon to one of them. I think maybe it goes back to David's point a little bit, but if you're doing anything new or interesting, you're likely breaking at least one network rule. These are Byzantine rules that are thousands of pages long, so it's impossible to not sidestep all of them.
But if you work with a network and you find someone that's business minded and they see value in your innovation or your products, the network themselves can be a great partner to grow the program or grow the business. And I think we shied away from that for maybe too long. But Bo, I'm curious what you think.
Bo Jiang:
Yeah, I definitely agree. I think the broader point is, in my mind, one thing that, coming from just a pure software engineering background, sometimes folks under-appreciate is how much the industry is partnership oriented. So the networks are super important partners. Sponsor banks are super important partners. Processing platforms are really important partners as well in building and scaling a card program. I think that's something that we didn't fully appreciate back when we were starting out.
Something that folks don't know, that's not as widely known, is we started on a legacy card issuing processing platform. I had a ton of pain scaling, and then decided to make a move to another legacy processing platform. And I think, for us, a lot of that was like, hey, this platform isn't working for us. We're just going to find someone that's been around for longer, more subtler, has a broader feature set, and whereas we should have been really evaluating, like, hey, where do our ambitions extend as a business, and does that align with where this processing partners’ ambitions are. They weren't really aligned. I liken it to if you're considering working with a cloud provider like AWS 10 years ago or 15 years ago, maybe less feature set, but that partnership alignment is super valuable over a long time horizon. So we wound up having to switch off two legacy platforms, and I think that was something that would have saved us a lot of time if we'd figured out what we needed a little earlier.
Reggie Young:
Interesting. Yeah, I didn't know there were two legacy platforms. I always heard reference to at least one. Interesting. Partnerships is particularly an interesting function because I think in fintech, you see partnership functions develop at companies, formerly develop a lot earlier than in other industries for that exact reason that they're pretty key and crucial for what you want to accomplish.
Okay, so Privacy was incorporated in 2014. We had to look up the incorporation date to base this 10-year podcast on. Privacy was incorporated in 2014. You all worked hard with the lean team to get the Privacy.com program up and running. Then the pains of working with legacy issuer processors just becomes too much, so you wind up start building your own core processing tech. Fast forward three years, 2021, Lithic publicly announced as its brand, raises over $100 million to grow and scale this new issuer processor business. So you have this pivot point. It's not pivoting away from Privacy. Privacy is still a team that runs within the company, but it is like an inflection point and shift.
I'd love to chat about what that shift practically entailed. Because I have to imagine there were certain mindset shifts, either newer folks around you. Did you notice key differences, or did you explicitly try and institute key differences in how the company thought about product or sales or hiring, engineering, compliance, anything like that comes to mind?
Bo Jiang:
I’m curious to get your guys’ take on this. For me, it felt like a lot more organic. It was one of these things where our biggest customers, or these B2B customers that needed an API, and then one thing led to another and there was more complexity, and so we wound up having to spin out the processing business separately. And we've always been a pretty product-led organization. I would say it was like a very gradual shift, more like we just got pulled by our customers than anything. I wish I could say we were super thoughtful top down around planning the org structure, but we just follow our customers is my point of view.
Reggie Young:
How about after that organic shift happens? Were there things that you realized afterwards that are like, oh, our approach to product or other functions needed to change slightly?
Bo Jiang:
Yeah. I think the biggest shift was really around supporting our customers. You go from basically supporting consumers where it's a really important part of their lives. But it is, in some ways, acceptable to make mistakes occasionally as long as you remediate quickly and you're responsive to servicing businesses who are built on top of the platform, who have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of cardholders that are impacted if you go down for a few minutes. I'd say in terms of the support model and our interactions with customers, that was the biggest thing that drove a lot of change across the org, including how we think about product development and scaling the business.
Jason Kruse:
Yeah, that's exactly where my mind went to, Bo, is just going from a direct-to-consumer business where you can move fast and break things, or the product doesn't work, you give the customer a $10 credit, everyone's happy. To be mission-critical vendor enterprise software, you're going from easy to hard mode. I think we had to grow really, really fast and had to make a lot of investments on the engineering side. Maybe back in 2021, it didn't look like our product velocity was moving very quickly, but we were spending tremendous amounts of resources on stability and reliability to be that enterprise-grade solution.
Reggie Young:
Makes sense. David, I'm curious from the design angle, you faced this interesting situation of having to design brands to juggle. One is cardholder facing, one is infrastructure card program facing. Are there differences in how you think about Privacy's design compared to Lithic?
David Nichols:
Yeah, definitely. And with two brands comes twice the fun. There's definitely analogs between the brands, and there's design concepts that are applicable across both products. As an adage, good design is invisible, which comes to mind. In the same way, a provider has to power everything, touch every part of a business, but also create as little friction as possible and remain invisible in that same way.
It all sounds really interesting to see two sides of the same coin. Privacy started out as a very singular experience, and you spend all your time with customers, trying to educate them on this particular use case and walk them down a predefined path. And with Lithic, we’re trying to power all these different use cases. It's pretty much the opposite. You have to create a universal product that's flexible enough to support these different use cases. But yeah, I don't know, I feel like there's differences, but you end up using the same design rationale, design process across both. It's really just more variety in a sense.
We're taking a quick break from this episode to give a thank you to Privacy.com, which supports the podcast. Privacy.com offers convenient virtual cards that protect you from credit card theft and fraud online. Ever had your card info stolen? I have, and it sucks. But now that here's Privacy.com, I don't have to worry about the stress of fighting fraud charges, replacing my card, reentering my new card info at every business I use online.
With Privacy.com, you can instantly create privacy cards that mask your real card info so you can pay with cards that are unique to each place you shop. You can also set custom spending limits for privacy cards and pause or close cards at any time to prevent overcharging and hidden fees, and help you stay on top of your subscription payments. So if you want to better control your spending and protect yourself online, head to Privacy.com. It can take less than three minutes to sign up, and you can create up to 12 virtual cards per month for free. Now back to our episode of Fintech Layer Cake.
Reggie Young:
What are smooth things that you all learned firsthand from running your own? I hinted at this earlier. I think we have this interesting angle of you all have run a card program, and so on the Lithic side, you have that firsthand experience of knowing the pain points and things that matter. What are some of those firsthand lessons you've learned from Privacy that you want to make sure are continuing key value props on the Lithic side?
Jason Kruse:
I think, for me, it's really about empathy. As infrastructure providers, we’re at the infrastructure level, we’re two layers removed from the end cardholder that we're providing value for. Lithic, we can be a card processor, we can be a program manager, or we can be a bank corp. But we're two layers removed from that account holder or cardholder. And I think it's really easy for those infrastructure providers to get divorced from that consumer. They lose sight of it. And so having operated Privacy for so many years, we have that empathy, we have that understanding for our client programs, and I think that really goes a long way to help enable their success.
Bo Jiang:
Yeah. When you look at our business on the issuing processing side with Lithic, you have a typical program management and a processing business. The vast majority of our business is on the processing side. A lot of that's because we never want to be like a bottleneck or a gating factor for our customers. What we find a lot of times is with program management, there winds up being a lot of friction that introduces a platform that the end fintech company cares a lot about. So the empathy around like, hey, it's really important that customers have a smooth onboarding, it's really important that we can manage the end-to-end experience, that's something that we really felt when we were running the consumer business. I think we've definitely tried to carry that over and just to never be the bottleneck for fintech companies that we work with.
David Nichols:
Yeah, I would say we definitely felt very much at the mercy of all these much larger entities starting out, networks, banks, governing bodies and providers. Reliability has talked about a lot in terms of a platform, but also it's so important to have reliable people that you just work with in these providers at these different places like banks, and have a plan. But I feel like we definitely didn't feel like we were building on a strong foundation when we started.
Reggie Young:
Yeah, that all fits with my experience here. I feel like customer experience, not just Lithic customer but Lithic customer and their cardholders, definitely has been a Northstar for a lot of what I've experienced in our culture. You guys have hinted or alluded to stability and reliability being pretty important. This is obviously generally important for card programs, like when you’re Privacy.com, you don't want to deal with downtime, you don't want to deal with excessive latency. But there's a shift from a functioning card program that, Jason, you were saying, you can just get a $10 credit, and everything's good with a user, to now your deeper infrastructure layer that supports card programs that can range from large ones that process hundreds of millions of dollars a month, to we have other innovative start-ups that are just getting off the ground. So that need for stability and scalability becomes a bit more complex and mission critical.
How do you think about ensuring that as the Lithic side grew, how did you think about ensuring that tech and Lithic as a whole stays as stable as it has? Jason, I don't know, maybe this is a good more tech-oriented question for you. But welcome any thoughts from any of you.
Jason Kruse:
Yeah, I think this is the million-dollar question, how do you create software systems that rarely go down, ideally never, and are performing enough to make approval and risk decisions in real time? And oh, by the way, these systems need to be correct because if our ledger says $10 move from counterparty, it better happen.
I think these are really meaty engineering challenges in which, by the way, it's like, this is why I find this domain so incredibly fascinating facility to work in. It's probably threefold the way that we think about it here at Lithic. One is to just be very clear about the product requirements. That probably sounds like a weird first answer. For instance, I think we'd all agree if we say it's super important for a processor to have great uptime and reliability, right? We all agree with that. But if you decompose processing into its subcomponents, you have the critical path of authorization, and then you have clearing. And the critical path of authorization is the most important systems that must stay up at all times under all circumstances that you can design for. And this is where if those systems are down with the cardholders getting declined at the point of sale, they can't complete the checkout, and it's really an awful cardholder experience.
And then you'd have clearing. And so in a typical dual-message payment card transaction, that authorization is followed by a clearing. And that's when the transaction goes from pending to settled. These clearings typically occur in batch at scheduled intervals, like the end of the day. Technically, these systems could be down for minutes or hours, and there's almost no cardholder impact. And so the cardholder might be present at the authorization, but they don't care if it's settled at 9pm or 9am the next morning. And so my point here about knowing the product requirements intimately is knowing that, okay, there's a small scope that must stay up and cannot go down under any circumstance allows our team to obsess over that small scope to squeeze as much uptime as humanly possible. I think that's important, key number one.
I think a key number two about how we think about uptime, reliability, and stability is just knowing that failures will happen, and so we must engineer systems that handle these component failures gracefully and continue operating. I think it's common for engineers to always consider the happy path. The network will be reliable, the power will never go out, my cloud provider is not going to go down, which makes sense, right? That's how it works most of the time. And maybe the engineers are busy with product deadlines. They can't really think about these exigent circumstances that could happen. And so here, I guess, at Lithic, our engineering ethos is we try to enumerate these edge cases, and we spend quite a bit of our focus thinking about these failures and how to create contingencies for them.
I think maybe one salient example that permeates our infrastructure design is we operate a hybrid cloud, which is in Amazon, but also to on-prem locations. That's in Northern California and Portland, Oregon. We chose these locations explicitly and guided by the goal of stability, uptime, and low latency. We chose these locations because they're sufficiently close, around 20 milliseconds of round trip latency, so very quick replication. But they're not too close or on the same fault line. You have the Cascadia fault line and you have the San Andreas fault line. We're even thinking about natural disastes and contingencies by which maybe the big one could strike and we'll still have systems that are operating. So that's number two.
And then I think, finally, it's really a culture thing. Lithic doesn't have separate QA teams or production support teams. Instead, the engineers are both responsible for the quality and correctness of the software that they're producing, but they're also responsible for their software in production environments. That means that the application software engineers are on the 24/7 on-call rotation. And I think this creates two benefits. One is if you're responsible for the correctness of your code, you're just incentivized as a human to create better working code, and you don't want to get paged at 3am. So I think you get better outcomes that way.
And then second, if you're on the on-call rotation as a software engineer, maybe you'll get paged at 3am, and that just totally sucks. It sucks, but it's a really powerful feedback mechanism. And when you feel that acute pain of being paged overnight, you're going to learn from it, and I think you're going to create better quality software going forward. That's how we think about uptime, reliability, and how we engineer for it.
Reggie Young:
I love all those. I've definitely experienced the engineers here being good at putting on the not-happy-path hat, which I appreciate because that's what law school just beats into you is like, let's think about the non-happy path where everybody's suing each other. It's not a natural inclination for a lot of folks, so it gives me peace of mind that most of the engineers I've ever interacted with at Lithic have that intuition. Bo, David, anything else to add to that answer?
Bo Jiang:
No, I mean, I think that was pretty comprehensive.
Reggie Young:
One of the things I've always been impressed with in the two and a half years I've been here is the quality of decision thoughtfulness I see. There's an easy draw towards making impulsive, rash decisions at a start-up under stress or fast-moving deadlines, whatever. But I consistently see you all not fall into that trap, and I think it trickles down to a lot of the company. A lot of the company also tends to be pretty thoughtful in decision-making. I'd love to dig into how your decision-making process or approach to problem solving has changed as the company's grown. Because I imagine that when there were 10 of you at Privacy.com, problem solving and decision-making probably required a different skill set than now that we're well over 10x that size. How's your decision-making, problem solving approach changed as the company has grown?
Bo Jiang:
It’s a good question. When I think about it collectively, the thousands of decisions that we're going to make, big and small, over the next couple of years are really what defines our company. I think quality of decision-making, speed of decision-making, all that really matters is one of our differentiators. And I think it's a really good point, how that has changed. When you're 10 people, everyone has contacts, everyone has agency. As an individual, you're making 10% of the decisions on the team, whereas now, as we've grown, we're making way, way, way smaller percentage of the decisions at the company just by virtue of the team has grown and we can't be in the room all the time.
And so a lot of the thinking is around how do you create an environment, a culture that values clear decision-making and fast decision-making. I think there's a couple of things that, looking backwards, connecting the dots a little bit, we've done that I think has set us as a company up to be able to, on the whole, make good decisions or higher-quality decisions, I should say. One of them is we're a fairly distributed company. And by virtue of that, we've just developed a more documentation and writing-centric culture. I think one of the benefits there is it forces you to have more clarity of thought if you're committing something down on paper and you're putting it in front of a broader audience.
I think another thing that we really prize is visibility. A lot of companies talk about transparency. And it's one of these things that gets a little cargo-culty, where people are like, oh, we want transparency, we want to open up Google Drive so everyone can see everything. In reality, I think that's half of the equation of providing transparency and visibility to the underlying data. And so we talk about financials regularly. We talk about our metrics and whatnot. But I think the thing that gets missed or actually the harder part of the transparency of context, like why is this an important customer for us to close? Is our investment in engineering, or is our burn rate appropriate for where we are as a company? In the absence of that transparency of context, a lot of times, you just default to like, well, XYZ, other company does it this way, hence, we should do it this way because they're successful. And I think that you miss the context of the business that you're trying to build, and you’re in a unique situation. One thing we really try to do is if we share information, contextualize it and talk about it. Having a writing-centric culture definitely helps with that.
Jason Kruse:
I think I gotta give a shout out to the people team on this one a little bit. I think we've been fortunate to assemble an insanely talented team with deep domain knowledge that I'm continually humbled by. We have folks that have spent their years at Visa. We have folks that have [inaudible]. And so we have incredibly great, I guess, counsel. I think the way that we make decisions is we encourage maybe a bit of discourse or like to pressure test ideas, and that's welcomed. And I think that results in giving people that voice, and I think Bo mentioned the agency, I think helps us get to better outcomes.
David Nichols:
Took the words out of my mouth, Jason.
Reggie Young:
I've definitely experienced all that, both of what Bo and Jason said. Zooming out more to the fintech and card program industry as a whole, how has it changed in the last decade? We hinted at this, the very first answer, it's probably harder to launch a card program now than it was maybe 10 years ago. But I'd be curious if there's any kind of key differences or changes that you all have seen in the past 10 years?
Bo Jiang:
I think it's about as hard, or it's hard for different reasons now to launch a card program successfully. I think there was a period of time where it was really easy to launch card programs for a bunch of reasons, capital, different compliance industry, industry posture towards compliance. I think it got really easy for a while. And now it's easier in some ways, and you have modern providers like us that make it easier in some ways. But in other ways, it's harder to drive adoption. If you're an early-stage company, it's harder to find a bank partner that will be willing to work with you. Net-net, I think it's comparable, actually. It’s been easier.
Reggie Young:
Looking more ahead, what sorts of card programs do you think are going to win in the next two to five years? We’ve seen there was a spate of, oh, neobank that's doing a similar consumer card to Chime and trying to eat away at them and then peters out. I'd be curious what you think, the next two to five years, what are the sorts of card programs we're going to see really start to win?
Jason Kruse:
We're going to say I left my crystal ball at home, so let’s allow Bo to answer this one.
Bo Jiang:
Yeah, I'm happy to take another crack at this one. Similarly, if you can compare and contrast the past couple of years, there's a period of time where it's like, hey, if you're XYZ software company and you just bolt on a fintech component onto your business, it would just work and it's incremental gravy. I think what you're seeing now is you have to be a lot more thoughtful about constructing the end customer experience. Yes, you may have massive distribution, but why does your distribution, your customer base, actually use this fintech product? It's not just launching and getting distribution. It's differentiated experiences that drive that adoption. And so a lot of how we think about is how do we enable more and more differentiation that's tailored to your specific customer base if you're launching a card program.
Reggie Young:
Makes sense. Specific to Privacy and Lithic itself, in the next year or two, what are you most excited about for the company?
Bo Jiang:
We've focused on building a horizontal best-in-class platform. I think one of the really exciting things now is starting to look at emerging verticals and segments where we can really build deeper vertical specialization to unlock net new use cases in industries like fleet, healthcare, and a bunch of others where you're seeing merchants pass that through to the network, enhance data types.
Reggie Young:
Cool. My last wrap-up question is, is there anything you've been thinking about a lot lately that you think folks in fintech aren't talking about enough?
Jason Kruse:
Maybe one for me is FedNow. A lot of people are talking about that now. That's just the Federal Reserve's implementation of ISO 222. FedNow is interesting in its own right, but it's slowly being adopted since we've been slow going. But as it's implemented today, it's essentially just fed wire on the seven-day accounting schedule instead of five. But ISO 222, as an international standards, is very powerful and incredibly expressive. It goes well beyond just gross settlement, which is what the Dow is today. And the ISO standard has provisions and messages for things like account management, account opening and verification, multilateral settlement, ForEx, and all sorts of interesting types of things that go beyond just transactions. Depending on what the Federal Reserve's rollout plan is for FedNow and ISO 222, I think there's some really interesting possibilities for bank interoperability or potentially new and interesting financial products that we could bring to market.
Reggie Young:
Yeah, love it. Awesome. Well, if listeners want to find out more about Lithic, they can check out Lithic.com or get in touch with us by visiting lithic.com/contact. If folks want to hear more about where Lithic is in 2024, too, Bo was a guest on a research radio podcast last December. It's a great episode. It breaks down or focused on stage growth we've seen and much, much more. Bo, Jason, David, thanks for coming on and jamming on the 10-year anniversary of the company.
Bo Jiang:
Thanks for having us, Reggie.
David Nichols:
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for listening to today's episode of Fintech Layer Cake. If you like listening to the podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to help other folks in fintech find the show. The podcast is powered by Lithic, the modern card issuer. If you're hungry for more content with hard-to-find fintech insights, check out our other episodes as well as the blogs and other information we have at Lithic.com Thanks for listening.