Prime Trust Leaders Talk Disruptive Innovation At Money20/20: 'There's So Much To Do'

Earlier this week, Money20/20’s latest in-person conference was held October 24-27, 2021 at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Amidst all the recognition and networking, Benzinga had the opportunity to speak with Prime Trust CFO Rodrigo Vicuna and CEO Tom Pageler.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Benzinga: What Does Prime Trust provide customers?

Vicuna: We’re a one-stop-shop for fintech infrastructure.

Our why is that we want to allow fintech entrepreneurs to innovate without limits. Whether it’s equity crowdfunding, neo-banking on-ramps and off-ramps, lending platforms, crypto exchanges, BaaS.

You name it, we can be the infrastructure for it.

What does one-stop-shop really mean?

Vicuna: We provide support along with the entire onboarding, monetization, and off-boarding journey.

If you’re familiar with our clients like Binance.US, Bittrex, StartEngine, Republic, tZERO, Securitize, we do all the AML, KYC, BSA when you bring your funds on the platform.

ACH, wires, debit and credit cards, indemnification for credit cards, crypto wallets; once they come on the platform, we then do the full monetization. We can do trading, liquidity aggregation, yielding, and prime brokerage lending, also.

We have structured products like RIAs and IRAs and then, on the off-boarding side, we do settlement where we have the largest retail settlement network within the fintech and the digital asset space.

We also do debit card issuance where we help break down the walls and gardens of any one player to really help accumulate assets and generate more utility for their end uses.

How was the pandemic?

Vicuna: It forced players to either digitize today or die tomorrow. We 10x’d our headcount in the past year. From a revenue perspective, we almost 10x’d in the past two years.

With the increased adoption we’re seeing in digital assets, coming out of the pandemic, what’s your focus?

Vicuna: I would say institutions are here and they’re not here to test, they’re here to stay.

It’s our job of helping them get comfortable, be it from their first proof of concept to a full commercial launch. I see us as that critical back-end to you name the financial institutions that our grandmothers can name.

NFTs to DeFi, crypto, or secondary shares, or equity crowdfunding. Those are all pieces that are out there in the market that are being innovated, today.

I really see us as being like the core backend in every single one of those markets and beyond.

What excites you the most about disruptive innovation at Prime Trust?

Pageler: The most exciting thing is the validation. We were early into digital assets and to see that now the established financial institutions are coming to us and saying: “We’re in. How do we continue to expand?”

That’s the most exciting thing. All of these things that we wanted to see come to fruition are coming to fruition and, … the whole crypto community is rooting for each other.

Vicuna: I’m really excited about one, being that core player, and two, seeing other players all kind of mature and grow into their own point within the market as well.

We’re launching a new white-labeled debit card program and … 5x-ing our liquidity pool, expanding our trading pairs, and really enabling a much better version of best execution, within the market.

Big fears. Do you have any?

Pageler: We have to make sure that we’re actually hitting the things that move the needle and grow the market because there’s so much to do.

It’s very easy to get distracted. If you can find something growing. Keep doing that and letting it grow.

Vicuna: The thing that makes me worried is not regulation. It’s the potential that people optimize for short-sighted – ”let’s keep our business today” – versus advancing what I think is inevitably the best thing for all of us. Digitalization.