How Compliance Shapes Crypto Payment Operations

Kathy: Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. This is the crypto edition, and we have a fun, exciting discussion here for you today. We’re so excited to bring all of these interesting people and interesting projects that are happening in the crypto space and how those relate to WooCommerce, payments and maybe even your storefront. I’m here with my co-host, Brad Williams. Brad, how are you doing today?

Brad: Doing great. Looking forward to another fun episode. I’ve been learning quite a bit on these shows.

Kathy: I know, seriously, and just the visionary projects that are coming to this space and what it means for WordPress and WooCommerce stores, it’s so exciting. I feel like we are at the start of a great new horizon. So exciting. And Dave, Dave from WooCommerce is here with us too. Your title is actually, you’re in charge of Web3 projects at WooCommerce. Is that what you’re up to?

Dave: Yeah. Hey, everyone. Yeah, my title’s Web3 lead, but don’t read too much into that because you get to choose your own job title when you join automatic, so I just thought that was a good one, but-

Kathy: That is a good one.

Dave: I’m basically trying to figure out what are all the ways that our two technologies combined, so the Crypto Web3 world and the, I guess the old school Web2, open source WordPress and WooCommerce Worlds, and how we maneuver to make the best of that intersection and avoid some of the potential risks and pitfalls that might catch the unwary by surprise.

Brad: That sounds like a pretty easy goal.

Dave: Then it must be…

Brad: Followed by a bunch of awkward silence.

Jonathans background and HAYVN

Kathy: Yeah. I think Web3 is trying to figure out what it is and we’re just following along, so I’m really glad that you’re here to help us guide us into this world as Web3 lets us know what it’s up to. And we have a great guest with us here today. Jonathan Wood, you are with HAYVN. Thanks first of all for joining us here on Do the Woo. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and HAYVN and just kind of kick it off of what you’re up to and we’ll dive in on how that relates to WooCommerce in a bit.

Jonathan: Sure. Kathy. Brad, thanks for having me. Dave, welcome. So guys, I’m going to try to keep it short. I’ve been told that I speak a hell of a lot, so I’ll try to keep it concise. In short, I’m chief commercial officer of HAYVN. I’ve been affiliated to the brand for close to three and a half years, officially employed approximately 14 months ago, post our series A arranged at the end of 2021. The business is packed with traditional finance people, ex investment bankers, ex charted accountants or current charted accountants, ex-bankers of multiple different thoroughbreds. Let’s call it that. We try and emulate the JP Morgan, Merrill Edge type model, and what I mean by that is we very private bank focused in terms of we lead with regulation, we lead with service.

We are regulated across four separate jurisdictions globally. Well, three and a half. We are about to close our offer for] regulation in Switzerland. But Cayman Islands regulated. We are also regulated in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates as well as AUSTRAC in Australia. What this means for our clients is that a lot of the discomfort people may feel in the crypto realm, we try and bring that comfort. So you can’t necessarily regulate a token per se or the entire token ecosystem of 20,000 plus, but you can definitely regulate the ecosystem that transacts with those tokens and how that transaction is executed.

HAYVN on the one side of the business runs an OTC trading desk. We trade large volumes of that Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT and USDC. We keep it simple. We will be adding additional coins of the course of this year, but we cover the top 75% of market cap. And for voluminous trades of the size that we execute on that side, there’s no real need to execute cross-border payments. So our regulation provides us with global banking infrastructure. We bank across America, the Bahamas, Europe, Australia, as well as the Middle East.

Next to our OTC business is a custody business. So we’re a regulated custodian of cryptocurrencies. Then we also have officially launched our HAYVN Asset Management business. It’s a very uncomplicated fund. We try and emulate what you would call… Probably the NASDAQ would be the closest affinity. So we’ve got 20 of the top coins by market cap. We’ve obviously excluded stablecoins due to the fact that they’re back one to one to a dollar for example. And then other coins that are highly illiquid and wouldn’t be good for our clients from an investment standpoint. So we’ve kept it simple and we are looking to take that business and use elements of it within our pay business.

The pay business came about approximately two years ago as a result of many of our clients executing large volume transactions, wanting to entertain their smaller retail clients. So we started a lot in the financial trading space and crypto was used as a mechanism for deposit or withdraw. However, the merchants still did not want to already touch crypto. They weren’t sure what it was and they wanted normal fiat to US dollars settled into their bank account. As a result, we pivoted as a business on the one side and we’ve now created what is termed HAYVN Pay. HAYVN Pay is a hugely simple crypto payment services provider that emulates very much existing service providers such as WorldPay for example. It’s an API plugin directly onto a platform, be it e-commerce, be it financial trading, et cetera. Alternatively, the product can be distributed via a live payment link. The end consumer simply plays with their cryptocurrency, but the merchant simply sees that as a foreign currency transaction, so they still receive normal money directly into their bank account.

As the year progresses and as we move into 2024, crypto is simply an alternative payment method and we are not here to reinvent the wheel. So we are going to look to start distributing our product more and more via our exclusive partnerships with high-level acquiring banks, large payment services providers out there in the industry as well as payment gateways. You’ve got gateways out there offering 600 different alternative payment methods, and we would be somewhat naive to think that the entire multi-trillion dollar payment industry is going to completely pivot to crypto. But the excitement that we’ve seen not only in the cross-border space but hugely within the e-commerce space and FX and CFD trading from a deposit mechanism, we lodge into the real estate industry, yacht charter, jet charter. Hugely exciting. We ‘ve seen an interest to higher net worth individuals being willing to pay with crypto, but I foresee 12 months down the line that we’ll be paying for our coffee at Starbucks with crypto on a daily basis.

Long introduction, but that’s the short of it.

Crypto and regulatory, opening doors

Brad: I think I would agree. That’s probably a future that at least the four of us on this show would certainly like to see. And I agree, I think it’s going to be more common certainly in the near future. I think that the one thing that stood out is you’re describing the business and the different services is just the idea of regulation. Regulatory and crypto are like two words you don’t normally hear together. I have a feeling, and I’d love to hear from you, that this is opening the doors to people that maybe would be a little more reluctant to deal with crypto, maybe aren’t as familiar with it, maybe not familiar at all, but the idea of crypto is that in a lot of people’s minds, it’s a little bit like the Wild West. With all these big headlines, just FTX and others and massive crashes that happen, having that kind of regulatory side to it and like you said, coming from a traditional banking world, it must be opening doors to people that wouldn’t touch crypto otherwise. Is that what you’re seeing?

Jonathan: I think Brad, to speak to probably what you’re alluding to, all the goings on of last year, the FTXs of the world, et cetera, that for us was somewhat exciting in the sense that it did 100% cement our business model. As I said, HAYVN’s been going for close and four years as a concept and close on three as a business. But trying to sell regulation into a space that very much was the Wild West, still is in portions, was quite tough upfront. But seeing what happened last year and seeing what the lack of regulation can do to an industry is making us, what I hope to see, as one of the beacons of regulation within crypto currently.

It’s hugely important for us to be able to sit in front of our clients and say, “We’re not only under the scrutiny of external regulators but external auditors at the same time.” Currently going through our year-end auditors, we’re using a company that is one of the top five so to speak. Which is weird because the top four audit firms out there that are well known globally still are apprehensive to touch it.

So I think as regulation comes to the fore a lot more, that traditional sense of my bank is audited by Deloitte to PwC and Ernst & Young also will come to the fore and they’ll have a lot more comfort in being able to audit our industry. But it’s nice to see that smaller, more agile firms already coming to the fore and further proving that. So it’s not just the regulation, it’s the audit side of things. Then also our systems are annually penetration tested, which means that there’s a further layer of tech trying to white hack your ecosystem. It’s a multi-layer comfort that we give people just by regulating our business. There’s so many boxes to tick with the regulator.

That being said, regulation can be used in multiple ways, so you’ve got to do your research as well. Much like the word organic from a food perspective sells you from a marketing standpoint. There are regulatory regions out there that are probably not as robust as others. So we’ve tried to make sure that we’ve chosen the best. We actually chose Abu Dhabi global markets funny enough. At the stage in 2017, they had come up with one of the most robust, probably top, if not top three crypto regulatory frameworks globally and are hugely impressed with the progress that they’ve made in the industry.

And since that initial regulatory body was closed, we’ve now become what we term a global brand. Our chief technology officer sits in Melbourne, Australia, and we’ve got trade ops resources all the way through to Argentina with our CFO sitting in London. So it’s multiple elements that regulation gives your business, and we’ve tried to be as normal about it as possible. We don’t need to reinvent the way companies are structured, reinvent the way proper compliance is managed.These are all massive pillars of our business and we’ve almost taken what banking has done when they do it properly for decades and replicated that as well as possible to provide the comfort.

My last point is often people say, “How do I trust that you’ve got to pay me? How do I trust that you’ve got to confirm the deposit when it’s received?” That’s why we regulation led. We trying to go through the same ethos as your salary goes into X, Y, Z bank on a monthly basis, how are you still happy that that’s going to be there when you want your Starbucks coffee tomorrow or want to pay your rent? So the similar ethos.

Kathy: I definitely can’t appreciate the transparency in that regard because I think a lot of the things that have happened in the crypto space, we have these companies that pop up and everybody’s like, “Oh, that sounds like an exciting project,” and to know that you have pen testing, that security is a very important concept embraced by your organization and that you are working with all of these jurisdictions and really bringing forth regulation as a part of that. I think the fact that you’re bringing all of that to the crypto space is so important as we’ve seen with so many businesses having hacking happening successfully with so many businesses not having good accounting practices, not being transparent about what they’re doing with their funds. So that kind of transparency is something that I think is going to really help bring trust to organizations. And so I just wanted to highlight that because that’s so important in this particular space when trust has been shaken by some of the events. So that’s really exciting.

How WooCommerce plays into it

When you came to the Woo space, WooCommerce, what did you see there that was interesting for HAYVN and what exactly are you offering to WooCommerce storefronts?

Jonathan: Yeah, so Woo is the premier name in e-commerce globally, so it’s a huge attraction from that standpoint. When you’re partnering with the Nikon, Adidas, if I can use that comparison of e-commerce, it hugely elevates our brand. We knew that we were also focused on bringing on the right partners. By bringing on the right partners, we knew that when we came to the front door of Woo and knocked that, the regulation-led approach matched what they were wanted to do. I think somebody like Woo, a company like Woo launching and being a market leader from this standpoint, launching something new, something innovative, you don’t want to jump in the deep end. You want to be a little bit more cautious about it. So we knew that their approach also fitted our business model and our ethos. So there was a lot of like-mindedness there. The fact that Woo is also a global player as well as us and attracting some of the larger brands on earth.

I’m a massive rugby fan and I know that they’ve got the All Blacks for example, which really excited me. I’m also as South African, so I love to barbecue, Weber barbecues. They house a lot of brands that were close to my heart, which was the instant selling point before I even started selling my product. And then also knew that a lot of the merchants that they would be housing were still a little bit nervous about crypto, what is this? And our product essentially answers that question question by, it’s just a foreign currency transaction. There’s no need for anything more overcomplicated than that. It still settles in the same way that you would normally get settled. Yeah, it was the right timing, a great brand to partner with and [inaudible 00:15:06] for the ecosystem at the time.

Brad: Yeah. I’m curious if we look at crypto and just adoption and especially integrating it as a payment, I’m curious on your side in terms of data of your type of users. I would imagine at least from the people I’ve talked to and the research I’ve done, I’m Gen X, so I feel like crypto’s a little bit generational in terms of how it’s viewed and accepted where Gen X is really the last generation that was born when computers weren’t around and they developed as we were growing up. Where millennials were born with computers around, so it’s a little more acceptable with new technologies and things move a little bit quicker, whereas Gen X maybe and above boomers, something like crypto is a little bit foreign to them, I would imagine.

Crypto and the demographics

Going back to my initial question earlier around just overall acceptance and having regulatory and things that people are familiar with in a more traditional banking, is that what you’re seeing too, where this is… Obviously younger crowd I feel like are quick and loose with technology or they’re quick to try anything and see if it works or not. Where older generation, there has to be more of that trust factor built into it and they look at things and can compare them traditionally to how we’ve always done it, which obviously crypto is very different from how we’ve always done it and it opens a lot of doors, especially globally in an e-commerce world. I’m curious if you’ve seen any trends like that or not in terms of adoption and working with your services?

Jonathan: A hundred percent. If we can liken the launch of Web3 and cryptocurrency and blockchain to the launch of the internet and websites. With the launch of websites in the mid-nineties, you couldn’t force anybody to have a website. Now you can’t not have one. So that adoption also took a bit of time, it took a bit of convincing, it took a lot of maturity, but it was nowhere near as complex as what Web3 is. I think if you have the audacity to become an expert in Web3 in its entirety, you’re deleting everyone, including yourself, and I do see that a lot.

To answer your question, Brad, which is why we have our own in-house research department? We try and educate people not on all of it, but on some of it, and we try to speak in normal sensical terms and demystify it to a large extent and explain it in terms of correlations to other financial products and other financial assets. Because cryptocurrency in its own right is just another financial asset. Currently it’s being treated as quite taboo. With our business model, our initial target market was the older, more uneducated, more high net worth individual. I know there are a lot of crypto millionaires and billionaires out there of the younger generation, but a large portion of global wealth is stored in the older generation. And I can just say the fact that our business model took a little bit longer to gain traction than we would’ve liked to depict exactly what you’ve said.

That being said, it’s only a 13-year-old industry, still extremely immature, but Instagram is also probably less than 13 years old and has made more millionaires in its own right than most other social media platforms, I think. So yes, I do see in short that there is a slowness and less of a willingness to adopt, but that’s also one of the big reasons why we’ve tried to simplify that private banking side of our business. HAYVN 20, it’s very index focused. It’s hugely uncomplicated. You can explain it to a layman, anybody who’s got their own retirement annuity or pension fund. It’s very closely mirrored to that in terms of risk level associated. Yeah, crypto’s high risk, but it’s a very low risk crypto product. Our OTC very, very simple. You’re allocated a private banker. We’re on the phone, we’re not generally via chat. So it’s a lot more old school, so we are taking that extra step to try and pivot that older generation that are slower to adopt and more cautious. In short, yeah, definitely see that trend.

Brad: I’m sure with obviously the past three years and with lockdowns and pandemic and obviously seeing how important you mentioned that online presence is and having your store online, especially for local small businesses, given what happened, that was the only way many of them stayed open, is because of getting something online to be able to take orders and then local community wanted to help the local businesses and in many places they helped keep them afloat. So I’d imagine that thrusts a lot more businesses online that otherwise maybe wouldn’t have. I know it did where I live. In a lot of the areas, a lot of my favorite places were not online. I couldn’t order, I had to… And not just food places either, but just local business in general.

I would imagine that’s also helped accelerate too. You’re online, now you’re start thinking, “All right, of course I want to accept a credit card, but what else is there?” People start asking, “Do you take Bitcoin? Do you take Ethereum?” And I like to ask in my local community too, sometimes when I’m out and so far I have not found one business that’ll locally accept it, but they certainly can’t online a little bit. I’m sure just the size… That I haven’t seen any stats. I don’t know if anyone on this show has in terms of just e-commerce’s growth in the past two or three years, but I got to believe it’s grown significantly paired to pre-2020.

Dave: It definitely had a big jump over the years of lockdown, but I think the view is that it’s going to return to the mean growth trajectory. A lot of people started businesses in lockdown. They were either temporary or they were experimental or whatever. And a lot of that has closed down as people’s behavior returns to normal. But the trend for eCommerce is obviously still up up and to the right, and so there’s plenty left in terms of e-commerce growth compared to total retail. There’s always going to be variations here and there. I think overall, the most important trend is the sustainable one, and that is increasing adoption globally.

Jonathan, if I may, I just wanted to pick up on a couple of terms that you talked about because not everyone might be familiar with them. It’s easy for us being in crypto land every day to jargonize. So the first one is you mentioned HAYVN, and let’s just spell HAYVN as well, just so folks can find you. It’s H-A-Y-V-N and HAYVNglobal.com. So H-A-Y-V-N-G-L-O-B-A-L.com.

Thanks to our Pod Friends

Clarifying custodians and OTC

Dave: You mentioned two terms that I’d love you to define. So the first is that you said that you were custodians and the other that you have an OTC desk. Imagining I’ve never heard of crypto or those terms before.

Jonathan: A custodian is simply a regulated bulk. In old-school terms, that you had to go to the bank with your bag of gold, they would store it in a big steel vault. Essentially, we provide a regulated one of those for cryptocurrency. If you have your crypto stored on a platform, nothing more secure than that. I would say probably 30% plus of crypto stolen off platforms or hacked off platforms is due to inefficiencies and internal controls and mismanagement of management. Therefore, if you’re a regulated storer of digital assets, you add not only the security layers from a tech standpoint, but also the regulatory and external scrutiny of regulators and external auditors to make sure that there’s not just one approver of a withdrawal or anyone individual is able to take that crypto off. It’s generally a three-person process minimum. It’s much more secure, more robust. There’s also certain nuances around how you store your keys within that crypto space. So it can’t all be with one person, it can’t all be in one place. So if we melted down to the very core of it, it’s a big steel vault inside a mountain in Switzerland housed, in old school terms.

Dave: With lots of monkey pictures in it.

Jonathan: Exactly. Lots of monkey pictures in it.

Dave: So in contrast, so if I was just a regular Joe merchant, I might keep a balance in a crypto exchange. For example, if I’m receiving crypto and some of that I want to cash out or I want to make payments with, I might keep that there. But if I decide that actually I want to build up a little crypto treasury and it becomes an amount that I’m not comfortable leaving on even a reputable quality crypto exchange, then essentially I have two options. I can take the crypto off and keep it in my own wallet so I can control the keys myself or I can use the services of a custodian. And both have pros and cons, but a lot of large organizations simply aren’t set up to have a hardware wallet locked in a safe somewhere and for that to be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. So you are providing that sort of that service.

It’s totally different security paradigm from just leaving cash.It provides a more institutional way to secure the crypto than just sticking a ledger under your mattress or something like that, which individuals might choose to do.

Jonathan: Yeah, sorry, just one of the biggest things to mention is that many regulated organizations are mandated by their regulators to hold traditional financial assets outside of their organization, which is just an added element of safety.

Dave: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And OTC, unpack that TLA for us.

Jonathan: It simply means over the counter, it mirrors an exchange quite closely. We’re a third party, we are not actually invested in any way, shape or form in the fiat or cryptocurrency within our ecosystem. So there’s always a willing buyer and willing sheller on our platform. We are not making the markets, et cetera. We’re also an over-the-counter trading, you’re dealing in much larger volumes. On our OTC desk, we generally have a minimum of between 10 and 20,000 US dollars per trade. So it’s a higher net worth individual. It’s a more of a white glove service, it’s more of a hands-on trade. Those are the simple elements that execute OTC.

Why use OTC vs an exchange

Dave: Why would I come to you to use OTC? Why would I not just log into an exchange? What are the advantages?

Jonathan: First of all, most exchanges and many exchanges out there aren’t wholly regulated. We saw what happened with the FTX last year, so there’s a lot more security around trading with us. In terms of our service model, we’ve got a four-tiered service model. We’ve got tier level execs on top. I’m the chief commercial officer and underneath, such a group of regional directors, underneath that is a group of private bankers, and underneath that is a team of associates. There is massive fallback and constant conversation to the entire organization. At no stage will ask a CEO ever at getting on a client call when expressly needed. So that direct contact to actual people. I feel like cryptocurrency came in with this massive wave of technological advancement and all of a sudden took people almost out of the equation. So on an exchange, I’ve traded on many exchanges and it’s hard to sometimes get your questions answered and it’s hard to get it done quickly and easily and efficiently. It’s very much a service and regulation led model.

Dave: That makes a lot of sense. I think one of the themes that’s interesting going into 2023 is that people can see more clearly what’s a decentralized protocol or network and what’s a centralized player within the ecosystem. We can suddenly understand the value of having… We need centralized parties suddenly like if you are going to go super all in on crypto, you’re going to need to convert fiat money to crypto and back again. Like most people are. So if you’re going to do that, then, A, we understand that’s always going to be a centralized party because you’ve got to have a bank account, you’ve got to be regulated, but B, you’ve also got to have trust in those organizations.

I can see how last year played out well in terms of your market position of coming from that sort of more traditional financial background. Whereas I think it’s fair to say all of our other crypto payment processing partners come from crypto specifically. So they’re coming from crypto and reaching back into traditional finance and you are coming the other way. You’re coming from traditional finance and you’re reaching into the crypto world. So I just thought that was a really interesting contrast and that it would attract a different subset of folks who are crypto curious.

Jonathan: Yeah. And thanks for clarifying that point, Dave. The fear of conversion, we had one of the large exchanges announced today that was stopping in withdrawals under a hundred thousand. Now, like I mentioned, we can execute withdrawals probably 10 to 20,000 US dollars. That’s our mandate. It always has been. And all of a sudden when Europe [inaudible 00:28:54] or you’ve got a few thousand US dollars or a few hundred US dollars that couldn’t… Very dear to you. All of a sudden you have your withdrawals stopped as a result of the banks being overly cautious or certain crypto players doing something potentially nefarious or perceived to be, then people do crack down.

Funny enough, we actually sat a neobank affiliated and wholly owned by one of the local banks here in the UAE today, that are looking to take cautious first step into offering cryptocurrency to their clients, but once again, buy to hold them, its ring-fenced in a certain environment. It’s a risk-off approach that the traditional banks are taking. So with our regulation and with our model, we do score one foot in that fiat banking role and one foot in the crypto realm. Sorry, access to fiat is a big one. But when I talk about fiat, we don’t talk about cars. Just to clarify that jargon. Fiat means traditional paper money. Ticked that off the box as it confused the daylight out of me the first day I heard it.

The freedom and flexibility of WooCommerce

Dave: Yeah, no worries. And I think if I may, Brad, Kathy, you just cut me off if I’m going on, but something that I find particularly compelling about WooCommerce is the freedom and the flexibility that it gives people. That comes not only through the technical and licensing nature of the platform, that it’s open source, that you can bend and shape it, that you can create whatever your imagination and budget can reach, but also the licensing and the freedom to do that. And so there are obviously advantages to centralized e-commerce platforms. They can do a lot more stuff because they’ve got all your data and they can move faster because they don’t have a massive community that they need to care about. And so there are definitely advantages to those players in those situations.

But I think it’s also undeniable that for WooCommerce, the opportunity is that we can give freedom to everyone to transact the way that they want to. And so a lot of people when they’re thinking e-commerce hats and t-shirts, and then they started thinking about buying food online. But actually we see a lot of professional services starting to move to an e-commerce model to online payments. And I can imagine that a partner like HAYVN Pay, it’s going to be really attractive perhaps to professional services firms. So lawyers, accountants, even medical who might not be able to use other platforms due to terms of use.

They might not be able to use other platforms because they can’t create the experiences that they need to for their customers. They want to accept crypto. Perhaps they’re in a market where crypto’s actually a pretty high percentage of total payments. Maybe they work internationally, it just makes things easier and cheaper for them. Whatever the reason. I can see those sorts of Woo merchants, they’re still part of our broad Woo merchant church being really interested in the philosophy and background that HAYVN Pay has. I thought it was worth reflecting on that because everyone has their own different view of WooCommerce much like they do of crypto. I think it’s just healthy to remember that people use WordPress and WooCommerce for an awful lot of things out there and it’s always good to make sure that different users can have their requirements met with quality code, but also quality partners in the space.

Jonathan: Perfect, thanks Dave. And yes, speak to your point, we already do have considered the lawyers, digital marketing agencies and the like across the consulting industry, et cetera, utilizing not only our platform but our live payment links as well. It definitely does mirror the wearing a suit image when you are onboarding the lawyers and consultants of the world.

Dave: Speak their language.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Dave: We’re audio only. So for the listers out there, Jonathan by far looks the non-developer among us.

Kathy: Pretty much.

Brad: As the rest of us are wearing hoodies.

Kathy: It’s probably a lot warmer in Dubai than it is where we are too. So we’ve got that advantage where we’re all snuggled up.

Jonathan: The middle of winter here and I think it’s still… We’ve just gone close than 7:00 PM and it’s probably still 23 degrees Celsius outside. So you can imagine what the middle of summer feels like, Kathy. It’s a great place to live in winter. It’s a very indoorsy place to live in summer, but I love it.

The eCommerce explosion and global currency

And talking about the e-commerce explosion and revolution that Brad was alluding to earlier, especially during COVID. And I think slowly but surely we also are moving to the stage where more of those e-commerce players are looking at crypto. We’re actually chatting to one of the largest golden jewelry distributors here. They’ve got their own e-commerce store, so one of the largest apparel distributors. The excitement is definitely here in the region, extremely crypto-friendly and very, very progressive from that standpoint. It’s an interesting space to watch. We’ve done the-

Dave: And very international as well, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, I’ve met people from every single corner of the world.

Dave: That’s where crypto is a sort of global currency, is a global standard, I think just has advances. How many prices do you display on your site or in your physical shop. I think there’s some magnetism around that. Not in every environment, not for every use, but where you’ve got somewhere that is purposefully global and heterogeneous, then I expect UAE and Dubai and that area are rife with folks who have crypto and would just find it easier to know what the price is in that.

Brad: Honestly, the more often you see it in Dubai and just other areas, the more accepted it’s going to be. It’s just seeing that more people using crypto, even if they’re not using crypto, if they start to see that as an option throughout sites they use, it starts to go into their head a little bit and say, “Huh, maybe I do need to look into this a little bit more. Maybe I could use this for my own store,” whatever it might be. So just it’s like the WooCommerce adoption and prior to that was WordPress adoption. It was like as bigger players started using it, it validated it for everybody else and said, “Okay, this is a great option, let’s start using it.” And now it’s taken over the web. So I expect nothing different with crypto as more people see it out there and get comfortable seeing it and with great services like HAYVN that give them that peace of mind through your regulatory items and the security as well.

Anti-money laundering and security

Kathy: I was just looking at HAYVN Pay and the WooCommerce products, just looking at the plugin and there’s so much here that I just wanted to underscore and ask a question about. So this is really interesting because of all of the things that we’ve talked about, how you are trusted, regulated, secured. I wanted to just bring up one thing that I saw here about AML or anti-money laundering software that you use. I wanted to highlight that because of just the audience that I think your product specifically addresses. So I wanted you to just have some space to talk about what that means and then also just highlight some of the security aspects of HAYVN Pay. Because obviously someone’s going to be setting up an account with HAYVN Pay in order to take payments through the plugin that they have on their WooCommerce store. So I wanted you to just give an overview of what this all entails and the security aspects.

Jonathan: In terms of anti-money laundering, the anti-money laundering element of cryptocurrency is hugely superior to that of traditional finance and traditional fiat. The blockchain is 100% auditable and it’s a public ledger so everybody can view it. There’re products out there. Chainalysis, Merkle Science, there are a few others that when a coin of cryptocurrency or the payments of cryptocurrency comes into our ecosystem, we can check that literally all the way back to when it originally minted. Now that gives us a huge amount of security and anytime that a coin is used for purchasers on a black market or for any sort of nefarious activity or hacked of an exchange or embezzled by senior management of an exchange that’s gone under, this software can place a tag or a marker on this currency. If it comes into your ecosystem, it’s automatically flagged. Once it’s flagged, a manual check is done.

We find that the vast majority of cryptocurrency coming into our ecosystem is clean because not the type of clientele we generally attract and number of the industries that we marry to are not hugely nefarious in the sense of the word, but when it does come in in that obscure case, we then do a manual check by our compliance team. So we’ve got an in-house compliance team and we run it again through the AML software form additional checks and more in depth analysis. As per regulation, you’ve got to check that coin six hops back. So we don’t always have to check it all the way back to its industry. It can get a little bit cumbersome. But that’s essentially what anti-money laundering gives you and that auditability of cryptocurrency and the use cases of blockchain just rarely come to the fore with that type of AML product. It’s a hugely exciting product.

They’re adding something on there, Kathy, called the Travel Rule. Now, from a regulatory standpoint, we will have to start complying with the Travel Rule and essentially cryptocurrency wallets are numbers and letters as we speak, but as you… The KYC will give your documents across to the exchange or OTC desk that you’re trading with when you’re onboarding, that’s a regulated entity would have to share your documents with the regulator, much like banking. Therefore, my numbers and zeros from a wallet standpoint gets attached to Jonathan Wood as opposed to ones and zeros. And as you link more accounts or open more accounts with more regulated entities, your wallets have more tags.

Now then if you’ve got a MetaMask wallet or a Ledger wallet that’s not on any exchange, the software can start creating algorithms. Let’s see where I’m constantly sending my money to what I’m doing with it. It’s a lot more traceable than one would think, and it’s going to only get more traceable and more secure and more robust. From a blockchain standpoint. But that type of anti-money launderings in technology, the additional banking system it’s only a matter of years before the big machines start pivoting and moving a little bit more.
And then in terms of registration and onboarding, it’s a simple process with us, much like you would onboard with any PSP out there or payment services provider out there or any bank, rarely. We do require certain documents from company owners, corporation docs, and just lists of directors and shareholders. This is standard when onboarding with the financial institution and as we are a financial institution and we settle normal money with you into a bank account, these things are required from us. And unfortunately are non-negotiable, it is the fact that there’s a very credible team and a fairly easy register button on our website where people can go and log their credentials and engage with us.

Kathy: Yeah, definitely. And I think it’s a huge differentiator for HAYVN to be able to offer that as a service, especially for businesses where that’s incredibly important. So I think that just struck my eye as something we should talk about. So if somebody wanted to learn more about HAYVN, get started with getting this on their WooCommerce storefront, where should they go?

Jonathan: Directly onto the WooCommerce, but we also like people to come directly onto our website, HAYVNglobal.com. Our main social media is LinkedIn’s very business-focused and we are moving into the realm of Instagram. HAYVN and HAYVN Research on LinkedIn. HAYVNglobal.com for the website and HAYVN, H-A-Y-V-N on Instagram. Looking forward to engaging with the wider Woo community.

Dave: And I’d also recommend that you sign up for HAYVN’s newsletter that you all do a great job of putting our webinars and research. So if you are not convinced yet by this whole crypto payments, you’ve got the chance to educate yourself and hopefully coming at this from that institutional financial background. So if that’s the kind of language that you’re comfortable in, then that’s a great way to just keep an eye on what’s going on. And when the time comes to push the button, then you’ll be well-placed, you’ll know what’s going on a lot better. You won’t be coming into it brand new. It can be a series of small steps to go from no crypto to crypto. We’re not saying it’s the right thing for everyone to do overnight, but there’s some really interesting stuff that happens in this space and HAYVN’s a great place to keep it on.

Kathy: I just signed up.

Jonathan: Perfect. Thank you Dave.

Kathy: I’m excited. I’m really excited about what HAYVN is bringing to the table with crypto payments and just the way all of the T’s are crossed and the I’s are all dotted. I am so glad that you took the time today, Jonathan, to come and share all of this incredible knowledge with the WooCommerce community and I can’t wait to see some stores. Hey you guys, if you’re listening, go check this out and ping me personally. I want to see your store using HAYVN Pay because that would be really interesting, I think, for Brad and Dave. And we’re just going to have a party and celebrate everybody using HAYVN Pay because this sounds really cool.

We’re going to wrap it up. Thanks Brad, Jonathan, Dave, for joining us today on Do the Woo. We’ll have probably some more. I’m going to bother Bob to make sure that he has way more crypto episodes because I’m learning something every day that we get together. Thank you guys so much for being here.

Dave: Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks everyone.

Jonathan: Thank you. Thanks, Kathy. Thanks Brad. Thanks Dave.

Brad: Yeah, thanks Jonathan. This was great.