The Future of Digital Payments

AZEEM AZHAR: Hi there I’m Azeem Azhar and you are listening to Exponential View. Now, every week I come together with a brilliant mind to explore how exponential technologies are shaping our near future. Now, in today’s conversations, we talk about an issue that I spent quite a bit of time discussing in my forthcoming book. It’s called Exponential in the UK and most of the world and The Exponential Age in the US and Canada. What I explore is how companies behave during the exponential age. What is an exponential age company? How does it look different to a traditional industrial age company? Now, I go into some depth in that, in my forthcoming book, you’ll be able to pick it up from bookshops from September, but please do visit www.exponential-book.com. That’s www.exponential-book.com and pre-order it. So, onto today’s conversation, my guest is Charlotte Hogg. She’s the former Chief Operating Officer for the Bank of England. And since 2017, the Executive Vice President and the Chief Executive Officer for Visa’s European operations. Now, Visa is a familiar company whose services many of us take for granted. The ability to tap a credit card and instantly send a payment to pretty much anywhere in the globe. It’s now a basic consumer expectation. Now, despite its familiarity, I think of Visa as one of the first companies of the exponential age. It emerged in the late 1950s in California, as a decentralized nonprofit consortium of banks, driven by the market need to make payments easier. They were innovating in an environment of depression-era legislation, that amongst other things, forbade US banks to lend to out of state customers. So, Visa is a digital first technology company. It’s a platform powered by network effects that enabled the trusted exchange of financial information between four different entities, a merchant and their customer, along with the banks of each party, all to enable safe trade. Visa became a for profit company when it floated on the New York stock exchange in 2007 and nine years later, Visa acquired Visa Europe from its banking consortium for $23 billion. So, what is the company’s place in the evolving ecosystem of financial services? How are they thinking about innovation and regulation and how do they approach responsible artificial intelligence? Charlotte, welcome to Exponential View.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: Thank you very much for having me.

AZEEM AZHAR: Well, it’s been a bonus for me this week because we met in person earlier the week at the CogX Festival. And now we get a second chance to chat for the podcast. And I was really blown away with our conversation on Wednesday about how Visa is thinking through some of the really difficult questions of modern technologies. But I think it’s important for us to start with what really, Visa is. The numbers are staggering, there’s 200 billion plus transactions per year, $10, $12 trillion worth of value that flows across the network. And the weirdest number of all, when I was doing my research was 10 million miles of leased line communication cable, which I then divided by the circumference of the earth. And it’s 250,000 times around the earth, which again, is mind boggling for something that I think that most of us think of as a sort of three colors on credit card, but it didn’t start that way. What was the problem that people were trying to solve back in 1958 when this idea was hatched?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: The problem is how do you, confidently and securely as a consumer walk into any shop, literally or physically anywhere in the world and know that you can safely pay and that the money will end up in the merchant’s bank account and you will get the good that you want. And actually also when things go wrong that you know what happens and there’s a way to solve that problem. So, the rules around the protection of consumers very much go hand in hand with the trust you have in the resilience. So, there’s a set of rules that mean that all participants who abide by the rules and who know what the rules are, can join the system. It’s classic economics, a vote for the open networks, the more people who can join, the more benefits there should be for everybody. Both for the other members of the system, because if you create these common standards, these common rules, then everybody can innovate off the back, because they know what the rules are and they know what they’ve got to innovate to. And I’m a very strong believer that open networks where you create a level playing field for all participants and you welcome everyone who can abide by the rules, is more robust as a model, than really anything else-

AZEEM AZHAR: Right.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: … We could imagine.

AZEEM AZHAR: What you’ve described there is reminiscent of a word that we started to use perhaps 15 or 20 years after that opening up, which was the word protocol. That we have on the internet, a set of protocols and if you adhere to those protocols, your router is going to talk TCP/IP and your web server has to talk HTTP. You can join that network and you can exchange messages back and forward. So, to what extent, could one look at Visa and say, “Well, this is really a protocol-based organization.”

CHARLOTTE HOGG: I think that’s a really interesting analogy. I’d add to it though, to say in financial services, there’s some really important forms of protections that you get with those protocols. So, we all have to worry about fraud and also people are spending their money and they need to have confidence in what happens to it. If you buy a holiday, particularly over the last year or so, you really want to know what happens if your flight gets canceled and how you get your money back. So, those protocols are more than technical ones. They go to some of the sort of rules at the heart of financial services and they’re protected when transactions go right, but also when they, for whatever reason, go wrong.

AZEEM AZHAR: It’s fascinating that fraud and trust keep coming up. Credit card companies in general, and the networks have done such a good job over the last 50 years that I never think about fraud or trust as a consumer. I just pull out the card and I use the card. So, it seems like there’s 50 years of work done both on the brand and the technology on ensuring that I have that degree of confidence. What do you need to do in order to provide the assurance to me as the consumer and the merchant and what are all the things that could go wrong that don’t?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: That’s a deep question, but our world continuously evolves. And so, one of the things I think we forget is how much innovation goes into just delivering on that trust and fraud prevention, be checking hundreds of variables and through patterns of data. It’s one of the first places we started to use AI and machine learning, is to be able to decision in real time with the best data that we can. And so, our teams are constantly innovating to think about how we can use all the technical tools that are emerging, because obviously you don’t want to block transactions that should go through, in the same way you do want to block the ones that shouldn’t go through. And we think at the moment we protect consumers from about 25 billion dollars of fraud every year. So, there’s constant innovation. You’ve never done in this space, either on resilience or on fraud prevention.

AZEEM AZHAR: So, when you have this business, which is an open network, you are asking many different banks to join and the banks help you get customers, because Visa doesn’t actually issue credit cards. British Airways issues a credit card, or Chase issues a credit card. And then you have to get merchants to join, to agree, to accept payments that come through the Visa network. And it’s a network built on a platform. So, you start to get network effects. It’s that network effect that makes me consider Visa to be an exponential age company. How does that make operating the business different to a company that doesn’t have network effect? What are the implications for the way in which you run the company, given that you have these pools of customers who add value to each other?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: One of the important things I think about operating an open network, is that you maintain a level playing field. You can think of different models around the world where people become different nodes, as well as the network in the center. And I think in the end, that’s not as powerful as a model. So, the there’s a very unique role, I think in terms of being the guardian of the set of standards and the level playing field. But you know, one of the ways the world is changing is that lots of different use cases for payments are emerging. Payments are getting embedded into the various kinds of experiences that we have. One of my favorite use cases is dependent cards. So, I’ve got two teenage children. I get to set the rules on where they spend that money. I know they’ve got a card. I can put more money on to it in an emergency. So, it’s not like they’ve only got the cash that’s in their pocket and I can control how much they spend every week. And I think in a society where we have both ends of the age spectrum, more dependents, those kinds of tools are going to be fantastic. You should be able to set the rules around on that and we can make that happen.

AZEEM AZHAR: One of the interesting questions there is, given the nature and the strength of the network effect and it creates what business school professors call a moat. That’s a moat for the competition. One of the consequences is that Visa is an incredibly profitable business, a sort of 65% operating margin business. How do you stop sitting on your laurels? Or how do you avoid the challenge or the criticism that this sort of big network looks a little bit like a monopoly.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: I mean, partly because we’re not, you take any market in an increasingly digital age, even take the UK where a number of people do have Visa cards, the payments market is getting ever more competitive. There are so many more digital players than there ever were. So, whether it’s faster payments or ACH or cash or backs, there’re a lot of different rails and there’s increasing number of opportunities to access those rails in many different ways. So, I actually think it’s becoming an ever more competitive market. And I think a competitive market is a healthy one, because it does push you to innovate. The second thing, of course, is that as we’ve seen in Europe, the number of different fintechs and neobanks emerging, who want to offer very different solutions for consumers and are demanding of us, the kinds of capabilities to enable them to deliver that to consumers. So, the other thing about an open network is you have to continue to make it better for those participants, and they do tell you what they want. That demand pull is very real. And you can’t sit in your laurels because you constantly see those demands.

AZEEM AZHAR: So, many of the innovative fintechs, they end up using Visa for some key part of the transaction. But I suppose increasingly we’re starting to see competitors emerge who don’t do that. I think there’s a lot of new players in the pay for it later space, which is sort of brilliant conception. The thing that causes the most shopping cart abandonment in eCommerce is the point at which you have to pay. So, instead you could use a service like the Swedish company, Klarna, click a button and get billed later. Those types of competitors emerge, but they don’t look like they are as universal as a credit card network where you can use that for everything from airline tickets to car insurance, to a train fair. So, when you look at competition from new innovators, do you see them as snipping off little use cases that emerge on your network and trying to tackle you that way? Or do you think there are competitors who will come in and try to take the whole game as it were?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: So, I kind of ground the answer in what is it the consumers are going to really want to do? What is it that consumers, as best as we can tell, and would want from money and want from their financial life. And I think if you talk to them, they want security, they want choice and they want control. And there’s some very far reaching pieces of innovation, but also regulation that is enabling that in a very different way. For the very first time increasingly we will be able to aggregate and we are able to aggregate our financial life in one place and be able to make choices about where we spend, how frequently we spend, what the sources of funding are for how we spend. What you might want to pay on installment, what you might want to pay directly. It feels to me that a combination of a competitive market and constantly staying anchored in what is it that consumer’s trying to do. And then how do you enable that, is again, a bit of a North Star for how you continue to innovate. In the payment space, digital has been a really important enabler of more resilient economies. I passionate believe that to get an inclusive recovery where all businesses are included, we increasingly have to think of digital as our plan A, not our plan B or our plan C. And we see that as businesses digitize, they do have the potential to not be so swayed by the kinds of restrictions that we’ve seen over the past year and a half. I go back to our mission. We’re here to enable individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. Needs are changing, the potential for consumers to do very different things with their money is changing and like all good businesses you have to stay anchored in that and continue to work to respond to that and welcome a competitive environment, which I increasingly think exists.

AZEEM AZHAR: As a platform and a network, which doesn’t worry about acquiring consumers directly and doesn’t look to become a retailer, in a sense you are one level away from the customer experience where the innovation is actually felt. What do you therefore need to build in order to enable those partners, to be able to build innovative services on top of your network?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: So, we have a Visa developer platform where we make about 300 now APIs available that can be configured in multiple different ways, depending on what the use case is. So, one of the ones I talked about earlier is what we call transaction controls, but it’s the ability for someone who serves consumers or businesses to create a use case where you can turn off your credit card, or you can turn it on. You can set a limit to how much, what you want to spend. You can determine where you want to spend. So, that’s an example of one of 300 APIs that can be built in different ways to enable all these different use cases. My dog’s having a bad dream. So, if you’re hearing a kind of funny watery noise, that’s him. I apologize.

AZEEM AZHAR: Oh no, that’s lovely. We love dogs at Exponential View. I’m curious about how you go about understanding what those needs are. How do you choose which of those 300 APIs to build and how do you choose which ones to prioritize? Because you’re one step away from the customer experience, because there is an issuer in between you and the customer.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: Oh, the process operates at multiple levels. So, clearly, we do a ton of consumer research all the time, but also, I’m a huge believer in having colleagues in every country talking to the existing financial services, the new financial services, hearing what they want to do, talking to businesses. So, there’s a active engagement in every country. We’ve been investing a lot more heavily in that over the last couple of years in Europe. So, whenever one country really pushes towards a new API or a new solution, it then becomes available to the rest of the world and being able to talk to customers about, here’s what we see happening in Latin America, or in Asia Pacific. To help them co-create what they would do, we work with them that way. So, it is kind of very disciplined research, but it’s also people on the ground and then learning from colleagues around the world as to what they’re seeing.

AZEEM AZHAR: Right. So, if I play that back, the global presence of Visa allows you to sense emerging market needs anywhere in the world and figuring out which of those are going to be applicable elsewhere in the world. So, you actually shorten time to innovation because a novel idea that someone sees in Santiago can make its way into the product roadmap and be pitched to issuing banks in Europe in a matter of weeks or months, rather than years.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: That is the ideal. Take Token, for example, which is the encryption, when you use a smartphone payment, it effectively translates your 16 digit PAN into another number that can only be used in that use case. So, that was developed in one part of the world and we’re rolling it out globally because it’s clearly an even higher level of security that we can provide consumers.

AZEEM AZHAR: Now, when we met earlier this week, we spent a lot of time talking about data and AI and responsible technology. I’m curious, if Visa has a global privacy office and a data council to think about some of these issues, what drove the company to establish those roles?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: Security has always been at the heart of what we do and who we are. It’s at the heart of the brand. And as a global company, we’ve always taken the approach that you build to the high-water mark of global requirements. So, as GDPR came into place in Europe, we rolled it out across the world because that’s how you have to operate really as a global company. But increasingly we could see that the debate was evolving from the data privacy levels and consent levels established by GDPR, particularly in Europe, actually around what are data ethics in this world. And again, if your brand is based on trust, you have to engage with this conversation. You have to think about what the next levels are. So, the sort of evolution we’ve been through, is to go beyond sort of the data privacy office and beyond the kind of technical or legal, to a place where we start to have a set of principles, which are more values-based on how we might use data. And to, through the data council, enable a real discussion about that from many different perspectives from around the world to debate whether we adopt new use cases, how we think about our models, how we ensure that we avoid bias. And that data council really plays a role in that. We also, as I mentioned, did consumer research around the world with 20,000 consumers to sort of boil up what we thought they were really telling us in terms of what our expectations were for global companies around data ethics. So, the data council is part of the process. The principles are a very important part of the process and then the discussion we have amongst the teams about what’s okay and not okay, is also part of this.

AZEEM AZHAR: How are those decisions made internally? It sounds like you are making many decisions about principles and ethics that might best be handed to you as guidelines from governments, and that your teams are having to fill a gap that’s emerged between what the potentials of the technology are and what the regulators and legislators have laid out for you. Is that what you think you’re experiencing?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: So, I think AI isn’t like anything we’ve seen before in corporations. The level of detail in the mathematics and the level of technicality of what it is, I think is a new level of challenge for an organization where not everybody is that technical. Governments also are moving into this space, but still figuring it out. And there’s a fair bit of white space where they haven’t moved into. So, you don’t have, as you do in many other areas, these very clear standards that you can build to. And then of course, the thing about data ethics is that our view of what’s okay or not okay, differs around the world. It’s culturally determined as well. And things that might work in one country don’t in another. And the existing law base is also different country by country. So, you’ve got to try and build in that complexity as well. And then corporations, I think increasingly in this sort of new world, are leaning into principles of how you operate and sort of set of ethics and values. That is an evolution for many corporations where you’ve had a very clear set of guidelines about how you operate in the past. And this is a little more ambiguous is a bit more fuzzy. It requires more judgment. So, there’s a lot of factors that go into why this is a complex issue, but also why it’s one that corporations have to move into. And ideally you wouldn’t want to wait for governments. You’d want to be more hand in hand because you’ve already thought about some of the issues.

AZEEM AZHAR: Can you give us an example of where you feel you and your colleagues have had to step in because there was an important issue that hasn’t been yet well articulated by legislatures or regulators.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: I think the distinction between data ethics and data privacy. So, GDPR does a really good job, I think on data privacy. Where governments are moving towards is what are the ethics and values. So, if you look at our principles, they’re around value, fairness, choice, accountability, those are areas that aren’t fully fleshed out around the world. There’s some interesting, really interesting government work in Asia. I think the Singaporeans kind of got there first with FEAT, which is a fair set of principles, but they don’t universally exist and they’re judgment-based rather than hard rules. And it is hard for governments to operate more in a principles-based model.

AZEEM AZHAR: And that leads a question that you’ll probably no doubt have thought about and will need to tackle. Visa is a global network and when we look at trust and fraud and security, there are some uncontroversial standards and expectations about that. But when we look at questions of fairness, ethics, accountability, and trust, that’s the FEAT of the monetary authority of Singapore’s FEAT principles. There are going to be different conceptions in different part countries, in which you operate. Will you be able to simply look at the highest standard as you did with GDPR and apply it globally, or will you have to make localized decisions that say, “Well, we’re not able to apply this particular principle here, because the rules of the road in that country say something different.”

CHARLOTTE HOGG: I mean, the first thing is we’re all on a journey here. So, I’m not arrogant enough to think I have an answer to that particular question. That said, I go back to, we’re a global infrastructure. The majority of where we’re using AI and machine learning today is around fraud for the protection of the whole network. So, as we think about the use cases, particularly around fraud and AI, we are thinking about it globally for the whole network. And as you say, because consumers expect us to be protecting them against fraud, those use cases probably are less complex judgements than other areas you could think of us going into, but we would do very, very cautiously.

AZEEM AZHAR: It’s entirely possible that given that you’ve got a view of all of this data. You are doing millions of machine learning predictions every day, you’re getting the operational expertise and you are contending with the real life problems, not the theory. And you have a team sitting around figuring out the ethics questions and where the principles and parameters are. It may well be that you are establishing more knowhow in these areas than many of the governments in the countries in which you operate. What is the role then of the private sector as it establishes this capacity, potentially ahead of states, in helping states come up with principles and benefiting from the experiences that you’ve had.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: We have to engage. And we are, whether it’s through WAF or other government agencies, we actually bring in lots of technical experts and we try and keep educating ourselves, but we want to engage. I think where private and public sector engage effectively, one with the practical and the experiential and the other with the conceptual, and obviously with mandate that they’re given by the people, then I think you end up with actually quite good results. What you don’t want is either of these models in the end being developed in a vacuum. So, the engagement is recognizing we’re all on the journey is so important on both sides.

AZEEM AZHAR: Let’s just talk a little bit now about future technology. So, there are a couple of numbers I thought I’d share. So, one of them is 65,000 and the other is five. The first is the sort of mooted transaction capacity per second on the Visa network. And the second is roughly the transaction capacity on the Bitcoin network per second. So, we’re really at the foothills. We haven’t reached base camp with cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance. When you look at that sector, it can’t be something that Visa is ignoring, but as you look at it, what are the primary priorities or opportunities you think might exist there for your business?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: My sense is it’s quite helpful to break the whole crypto asset thing apart into its component pieces. There’s a category which I would call crypto assets, which are the Bitcoins of this world. They’re not a fiat currency. They can be quite volatile in terms of their pricing and they’re more of an asset, an investment potential, than they are a true currency in the definition of currencies, store value, unit of exchange, means of account. Then there are the category of stable coins, which are based on existing fiat currencies. And then there are sort of the retail central bank, digital currency evolutions, which are fiat currencies and how one participates varies a lot between those. So, on the crypto asset side, we’ve been supporting consumers using their cards to buy and sell as appropriate crypto assets. And we’re quite well positioned in that space and have been active in supporting some of the companies that enable consumers to do those things. The second category, which is related to that is, if you have a wallet with a crypto asset, how do you cash that out? And then how do you spend it in the fiat world? And we are enabling that as well through some of these providers we have agreements with, and we’re probably amongst the most active in enabling that. Then there is the stable coin space, which I think is still just emerging and the use cases are emerging, but we are offering the ability in a couple of cases to settle on those stable coins. Typically, we only settle in fiat currencies, but the three stable coins are based on fiat currencies. We’re enabling that. And then lastly is the category of a partnership with central banks. And, I think we really welcome the approach, particularly the ECB and the Bank of England, which I know best, are taking in that they are reaching out again to the private sector to understand the issues involved with that. There’s a Digital Euro piece that was written by the ECB, that it was clear that in order to deliver the kinds of things that are expected with a central bank retail digital currency, you’ve got to do things which central banks haven’t normally done from customer service to enabling acceptance. And my view is that we will continue to engage in that space and share the experiences that we have in terms of how enabling acceptance, enabling security, allowing people to translate their money in and out. Building the kind of infrastructure that can evolve. So, that is a moving space as well.

AZEEM AZHAR: You now support, I think the USDC stablecoin on the network. What does it mean to say you can settle with it.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: So, the final bit of the transaction where money is moved from my account to your account is typically in a fiat currency. Because, if you try to do it in say gold, the value of that move so much, and it’s not backed by the governments behind it. So, typically we’ve never settled in anything but a fiat currency. With stablecoins and with the supporting custody to ensure that it operates like a fiat currency, we’re now starting to enable settlement.

AZEEM AZHAR: I could be a merchant, and rather than receiving dollars, I might receive USDC, which is the stablecoin. We saw a couple of weeks ago that El Salvador said, which is a dollarized economy, so it doesn’t have its own currency. Said it would start to take Bitcoin as legal tender, and been talking to some of the institutional players in the blockchain space that a few other countries, smaller countries are suggesting this might be useful for them. And there were some noises coming out of Tanzania as well. So, it seems like the shape of the world’s monetary systems is evolving. And one wouldn’t expect this to start at the United States, right? Or start in Germany, in a sort of large established economy, where lots of things work and frankly payments costs across Europe are not very high, but you sit in a really unique position in the sense that you’ve come out of a central bank.

AZEEM AZHAR: You were the chief operating officer at the Bank of England at a time when there was lots of interesting work being done in the early days around digital currencies. And you are also now sitting across Visa. So, could you try to paint a picture of what the pathways of evolution might be? I mean, what should we read from El Salvador? What are the things that we ought to be looking out for if there really is a fundamental transition in the world’s monetary system going on?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: I would probably start with the other end of the spectrum, the central bank digital currencies. There is an interesting question that as the use of cash begins to diminish, it’s not universal around the world. Central banks are rightly asking themselves the question, what does that mean? And what does it mean for our connection to the citizens of the country that we operate in? What does that mean for monetary policy? What does that mean for financial stability and how do we navigate through to what is becoming more of a digital world than it ever was? And the debate continues, right? That the things you can do with monetary policy in central bank digital currencies, is quite interesting. There are some real concerns about financial stability. What’s the implication for the banking system. There’s some very important theoretical issues that are being worked through. I personally think there’s some pretty important operational issues as well, because it’s one thing to say, you’ve got a perfect theoretical answer. It would be another thing to give 60 million people in the UK an account at the Bank of England. And that has a whole bunch of questions related to it too. But that is-

AZEEM AZHAR: My case.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: … It’s a really important set of issues that central banks are rightly, I think, thinking about and engaging with. And as I say, rightly wanting to talk to private sector as well as public sector about. On the other end of spectrum on the crypto asset spectrum and I think it’s very important that we use that word, asset, because it does imply investment. And it does imply that the value goes up and down, which as we know it does. And I think, again, that the regulators are really mindful of the risks and opportunities that consumers might be facing into as they invest in those spaces in the same way they invest in any other commodity. And I think it’s obviously a really important issue that they are engaging on there. You’re right to say, of course, that across more developed countries, currencies are more stable. Not only are transactions very efficient, but the underlying currency itself is stable and universally accepted. And so, no doubt we will see very different use cases around the world, depending on and they vary a bit with the nature of the fiat currency that exists in those countries.

AZEEM AZHAR: I mean, it brings me to my last question. And I’m thinking back to Dee Hock, who was the founder and the first CEO of Visa, as it became a credit card institution and 1993, he gave a talk at the Santa Fe Institute and he coined the term chaordic, which was a cross between chaos and order to describe an organization like Visa. And I have his book, of course, I’m one of the fan boys that could inhabit the benefits of both chaos and order without letting either becoming dominant. Now, we live at a time with this rate of technological changes, accelerating, and there are so many external threats to, from financial stability and financial crises to pandemics. And of course, climate change. What do you think is your role as a leader to help us balance between that chaos and that order, and ultimately to allow us to thrive?

CHARLOTTE HOGG: Well, if I may quote a book back at you, I really love Viscount Slim’s Defeat Into Victory, because he describes what it is that helps organizations and individuals go fulfill their mission. So, he talks about having three layers. There’s the spiritual, where you believe that what you are doing has a very strong purpose and that you can commit to. You believe what you’re being asked to do is possible. And you believe you’re be given the materials to do it. And I think as a leader, that first point about, it’s old-fashioned language, but the spiritual of believing in the purpose of what you do and staying anchored on that. If the world changes around you it’s very easy to jump around. But if you have some kind of North Star in terms of your mission, which is what I started with, I think that helps a lot. We’re here to create the most secure, resilient, innovative network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive. Stay there. And then around that listen to as many different points of view as you can possibly get. Learn, because we need to learn faster and as we get older, it’s harder and adapt, because we’re going to need to. But don’t ever lose sight of what it is you’re here to do, what the institution expects of you.

AZEEM AZHAR: CHARLOTTE HOGG, thank you so much for sharing that wisdom with us. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you today.

CHARLOTTE HOGG: Thank you.

AZEEM AZHAR: If you found this discussion valuable check out our podcast feed, where you can find my previous conversations with leading figures in tech and finance, including episodes with the CEO of NASDAQ, Adena Friedman, Chainlinks, Sergey Nazarov on decentralized finance, Citibank’s Ronit Ghose and the founder of Lemonade, the insurtech startup, Daniel Schreiber. To become a premium subscriber of my weekly newsletter go to exponentialview@www.exponentialview.co. To stay in touch you can follow me on Twitter, I’m @azeem. This podcast was produced by Marija Gavrilov and Fred Casella. Ilan Goodman is the assistant producer and Bojoan Sabioncelo is our sound editor. Exponential View is a production of EPIIPLUS1 Ltd.