John MacIlwaine: Building a Card Platform on a General Ledger

Give us the elevator pitch. What is Highnote? What does your company do? Where do you play in the world?

Highnote is an end-to-end, full-stack, embedded finance platform in the card issuance space. We developed our platform from scratch. We developed it for purpose over three years ago. We own the entire stack. We don't sit on top of another gateway or a middle layer, which in today's world gives us tremendous advantages in time to market, in costs and capabilities.

Specifically, I think this allows us and our customers to launch programs quickly and still be differentiated. That's the key point here. It's the combination of both. We move quickly with customers, but they can also really be differentiated in embedded finance. There's a lot of things happening in embedded finance where customers want to be different. They want to compete in this world. Having a platform that was designed for purpose to allow them to do that is really where I think we've gained a lot of traction.

In addition, we're a full program management platform. We support our customers end-to-end to allow them to launch with a bank and get integrated and be compliant across several different verticals, ranging from fleet, fuel cards, corporate expense, invoice automation, credit. We offer full physical and virtual card creation. The full gamut of payment types and constructs are available on Highnote. That's what we do.

To unpack that, if somebody's used a card, they understand these card programs, they have a branded card or they have a corporate card. But when you talk about that end-to-end stack being fairly unique, maybe give us an example of that. What does a traditional stack look like? Who are the players? Whether that is going all the way from the acquiring to the issuing side or where you typically play, how does that compare to a typical stack?

It's a great question. On the issuance side, there's multiple players. There's the card issuance, there's the bank, there's the program manager, there's the networks, there's the settlement and money flow, none of which a lot of consumers that just have a card really see or maybe even care about. But a lot of businesses that are trying to leverage the relationship with their customer by creating embedded finance products, by issuing cards that can, as an example, leverage loyalty or rewards and a whole different set of constructs, there haven't been a lot of platforms that can help these businesses get into market.

There's a limited number of players that are more legacy in nature, so have been around for a long time, can really crank through transactions and support businesses. But I think what we've seen is in the past, a lot of innovation has been occurring on the front end, with consumer experiences, with integrating card products in non-traditional ways. That innovation has outpaced the support that these legacy providers were built for. Look, these providers were built for banks to crank through transactions, and they're really good at that. But with the pace of innovation occurring on the front end, there's been a gap there.

That's really where Highnote has stepped in by creating a platform end-to-end with the API, the experiences to be leveraged on the front end. We provide those, but all the way straight through the stack. That means, to your question, straight through the issuance of the card, whether virtual or physical. Then obviously, the processing. So when the card is used in the market, the authorization, all of the risk rules, and all the real-time collaborative authorization capabilities that are required. All the way through down into the settlement, which is the movement of money between banks on the back end.

Traditionally, a lot of those different pieces were handled by different players in the ecosystem. With a unified platform that handles all of that, it brings a lot of advantages to our subscribers who, again, want to move quickly, maybe not deal with four or five different legacy providers or have to really get engaged closely with banks. And really work with Highnote to allow them to do what they do best, which is drive revenue, innovate in their own vertical, excite their customers with card products, and know that a Highnote platform is behind them all the way with program management, with the processing side to allow them to grow their businesses.

It's a fairly unique model to be able to handle all of those different components, because let's face it, it's complicated. It's heavily regulated. There are legacy integration points that we've had to work through, and all along, keeping an eye on the customer who really just wants to innovate. So it's about creating a product platform. The word product is key here. It's not about creating a processor, an issuance platform. It's really about what enabling capabilities can be exposed to allow our customers to innovate and not have to continually come back to us with requests for features or for new things that they want to do. We want to provide the capability that allows them to innovate. That's really in the true nature of a product. I think that's pretty unique, and we're seeing a lot of traction as a result.

As people think about this category of building technology to enable fintech more capably, whether it's people building out card programs or extending more broadly with embedded finance, a lot of times I think people will potentially conflate card issuers with things like banking as a service. How do you think about the adjacencies around your business and other places that people are playing?

It's a great question. When I was starting up Highnote three years ago, I did look at banking as a service platforms and really trying to understand and unpack what are those platforms doing and who are they serving. The way I look at this now, coming three years forward, is we really think of banking as a service platforms or capabilities are really around asset aggregation and creating banking-type services like checking accounts and bill pay and remote deposit capture and facilitating experiences around core banking, which is what you've seen with a lot of the neobanks and innovation on the consumer experience.

We're a payments business, so we really focus on facilitating money movement and transaction settlement, so it's all volume-based. It's not about helping our subscribers grow assets in checking accounts. That's the banking side. We actually don't play in that space. We're really about interesting and exciting ways to help businesses further engage their customers post-point-of-sale, post-transaction, and extend their brands with real payment methods, whether they be virtual or physical. That's how I differentiate the two industries, banking as a service and what we're in, which is embedded finance and payments, really.

That's a good segue into something else where you talk about the customer experience. I've seen in some interviews over the last few years the broader industry described as seeing brands that have gradually been disintermediated from the transactions online, whether that's marketplaces like Amazon or tech stacks that they don't really own, it's API to API businesses. How do you think about Highnote enabling those brands to better own that experience? The need for it makes sense, but how exactly do you go about that?

I think it needs to be made simpler. There needs to be a product view. A lot of the reasons why I think that disintermediation has happened is because it's complicated, it's expensive, there's a lot of friction. These businesses may not be super well set up to handle compliance and regulatory. As a result, they partner, they outsource, they go to the points of concentration, which are these marketplaces, not ultimately knowing that I think you're giving up a lot of control, a lot of relationship management with your customers.

What's been missing is a way to help these businesses directly launch their own embedded finance capabilities without high costs, without high friction, without having to go to a bank that can take a long time. Even if they will work with a subscriber, it'll take a long time to get them into market. I think you're absolutely right that that tailwind, if you will, of companies that are now realizing, hey, I really want to engage my customer directly and not be disintermediated for a number of reasons, can help grow revenue, can extend brand. By the way, these are not necessarily investments that go on the cost side of the balance sheet. They can be revenue generating products in addition to just the expansion of overall brand recognition and customer experience.

We touched a little bit on the thesis of Highnote, why you exist, what the value that you can create is. When you step into the pragmatic reality that you're faced with, for any ideal customers that are coming to Highnote, what are they coming from? What's the status quo that they have to deal with? And then how do you position yourself to be so much different?

At the size we're at now, our ideal customers are, call it mid-size and even now larger enterprises with either existing programs in market that they're dissatisfied with, or an existing customer base that they want to grow by extending into embedded finance. They have a customer base and they're trying to further support that customer base by offering payment methods or branded cards and different programs.

Some of those verticals for us include fleet, fuel cards. There's a lot of innovation happening in the fleet space where companies are able to provide the level of data transparency and the level of per account, per gallon discounting that allows these fleet and fuel companies to really innovate and support a growing number of businesses that can leverage capabilities that weren't really available to them prior with the exception of a couple of big legacy players.

Corporate expense programs, the ability to really pay invoices and manage your expenses in ways that are fully digital, that are fully supported by virtual card programs in a way that reduces risk, reduces fraud, increases efficiency. A lot of those programs are coming into market that are leveraging the capabilities that Highnote can provide. Commercial credit, charge cards, giving access to capital to small businesses that have very little choice outside of bank loans and other fairly expensive means. I think providing the data and the ability for small business to perhaps start with a secure charge card and then move over time into unsecured and then into full credit. Those glide paths, if you will, help businesses grow through their trajectory without having to navigate different providers and different banks. It's really a nice way to create services and provide benefit that didn't previously exist.

Then on the consumer side, things like earned wage access and being able to give consumers access to payroll. We have a couple of programs there. So I would say our ideal customer profile, because we're a horizontal platform, is really around a number of different industries. But in terms of the size and the market, it's really the mid and larger enterprises now, as we've really gotten a lot of traction in the last two years since launch.

You've seen a lot of these high transaction volume consumer businesses, Amazon, Apple, Uber, launch their own consumer-focused cards. It sounds like a lot of what you're describing, whether it's fuel cards and enabling this expense management or employee wages, is very much on the B2B side. Is that a specific function of these being totally different tech stacks, or we want to really focus on B2B? How do you think about what segments you're most focused on?

I think that there is a growing need in the commercial space for embedded finance. So that's one thing. I actually think, to be honest with you, it's quite difficult to grow and launch a consumer program. Obviously, it can be done, but it's a lot of work. There's a lot of investment in marketing and branding. You've seen some of the challenges that are happening with the Apple Card and with Goldman. I just think that entire ecosystem is somewhat difficult to navigate. As a result, the commercial side can benefit immediately from embedded finance. We think it's a recurring business that has the opportunity to expand.

As an example, in the fleet and fuel card space, our subscribers will enter into providing fuel cards to their businesses, but then it quickly expanded to corporate expense. All these businesses are buying maintenance or have different supply channels that they need to optimize. They want to pay out their drivers, as an example, with earned wage access. So the ability to leverage a single platform that can do multiple program types, even though it started on the commercial side, is really how we think about being the one-stop, the de facto go-to platform for businesses in certain verticals that really want to expand and grow.

It's all about growing revenue and being more competitive and being more nimble and addressing evolving needs with our platforms. Nobody wants to sign with a provider and then be stuck with them because that's all they do. They can't really break out of that. They can't really extend and grow. Our platform was specifically designed not to do that and do quite the reverse. We love edge cases. We love the innovation that can occur by our customers to drive revenue.

I want to get into the product surface area, because you're touching on a lot of really interesting things with where your platform plays. But before we move on to that, you've had a really impressive career where you've spent time at Green Dot and Visa and Braintree, which is part of PayPal. You've seen a lot of these things. Your comment about some of the consumer stuff, Apple Card's problems with Goldman Sachs. I would love to unpack that a little bit, your perspective on why are those programs so difficult? Do you think that those consumer programs can find success over time? What are some of the dynamics there?

I'm not an expert in consumer credit, but I see the challenges not only in the changing credit environment, which is constantly changing. I was at LendingClub for four and a half years, and we went through, I think, a couple of cycles. While you can navigate those cycles, I think it does take a lot of work. It does take a lot of expertise in understanding different vintages and different elements of a credit policy that can get to the right underwriting box that can ultimately be profitable.

I think that the economics of a card program are much different on the consumer side than other commercial programs. I think these are long-term businesses. They start off, obviously, not being profitable, and they need to get to scale to be profitable given the economics. So it takes a longer-term investment, but I think it's not a straightforward, automatic business unless you have the expertise, the data. You can really dive in deeply into making changes to the credit policies over time to be successful. That's a heavy investment. You're taking a loss for several years if you can turn it, and so it requires really engaging pretty deeply.

On the other hand, it is a large addressable market. Credit in the U.S. on the consumer side, what is it? I don't know, a trillion-dollar market. So I think that lots of businesses will continue to try. I do think what's missing, aside from what the banks can provide, are platforms that can fully support all aspects of a consumer-revolving credit program, such as loan management, loan servicing, facilitating collaborative underwriting. Those platform capabilities, outside of the funding and the receivables purchasing and the investor, are still, in many cases, either cobbled together with different point solutions or just being leveraged by a single entity like a large bank.

So I think there's an opportunity. We just announced at Highnote our consumer-revolving platform capability at Money20/20 in October. We're very excited to be that platform that can facilitate consumer credit programs that are looking for a better platform, a more nimble platform, and are focused on the things I mentioned earlier, which are understanding the proper box, the proper credit, and underwriting data elements required to better service consumers. I do think it's a big market. We are excited about the credit side.

I want to put a pin in the consumer side, because I think coming back to your announcement last October is super interesting to unpack. Before we do that, to make sure we get a really solid lay of the land on the product surface area, obviously, when you have this end-to-end product suite, there's a lot of moving parts. I think that can be one of the intimidating things for people that are not financial service and fintech experts, understanding how all these pieces flow together. So I'm curious to understand your mental model for exactly where your product operates. Maybe the first question is, is there a foundational product for you, that then it's like, hey, we can expand and do a lot of other things for you, but the core of what most of our customers are getting is this thing? What's the mental model you use to think about your product?

I'll start with initially the mental model, and this is probably something you haven't heard before, for us was built around a general ledger. That was the very first component that we built. We didn't necessarily build it as a product to sell to customers, but really to serve as the underpinning of our entire operation. A general ledger cannot be underestimated in terms of how important it is for payments businesses who need to manage payment flows, funds flows, money coming in, money going out, sub-ledgering accounts, customers that have various levels of aggregation that they need to manage themselves.

Myself and our co-founder have been in businesses, you mentioned Braintree and LendingClub and others, that weren't necessarily built around a core centralized general ledger. As a result, there's a lot of investment that has to happen to make sure that operations and reconciliation and settlement happens seamlessly and smoothly at scale. So we started off with the general ledger and then built the processing and the program management on top of that.

Directly to your question, our core DNA or mental model around customers and our product set, I think, lies a lot in what's behind the customer drive. What are the customers trying to accomplish? Is it a flyer, like, let's just see if we can create a card? That would not be a customer of ours. It would be really around customers who are committed to driving revenue growth through embedded finance, customers who are dissatisfied with the current status quo or existing provider that they have who just can't move fast enough or who can't support their edge cases for growth or other initiatives.

Frankly, customers who respect the regulatory environment and are capable of operating in it with our help and assistance and are not trying to operate around it or to cut corners. We found that we do much better and customers do much better if they at least understand that this is a regulated environment. They take our lead if they don't know. Many customers do know. Being able to operate in that environment is something that I think is a requirement for customers to be successful and to scale.

Customers who are well-suited for Highnote are really ones that want to move fast, want to innovate, don't want to look like every other program out there. You can move pretty fast if you board on a platform and you look like everybody else. So it's that combination of, yes, we want to move fast, but we want to be innovative and differentiated. Going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, it's really that combination where customers feel that they're empowered to do that without being encumbered by, hey, Highnote, can you build this feature for me? It's really about we have the platform, you build the feature.

I always think that customers are going to build better products than we are because they know their vertical. They know who they're competing with. They know what the economics need to be. We learn from that and make sure that we're supporting that every step of the way. It's really about the enablement of our customers and their ability to innovate and grow to be successful. Those are the customers that do really well with us.

What does the interface look like for that when I think about a core user of your product? How are they engaging with that, and how flexible can they be in creating different products or features on top of that within their program?

The answer is extremely, extremely flexible. We're all GraphQL API based, end-to-end, all the way through to the core processing. So the data that's exposed is coming directly from the ISO 8583 message if that's what they want. We don't dictate that. GraphQL lets the client decide what the payload is, so they don't have to come back to us and say, hey, can you add this element to your API? It's already there, so they can decide it. Consequently, they don't have to say, why are you giving me 300 data elements in this API message? I don't need that. I only need five. It's a very, very nice way to interface on the technical side.

Then we have, as you can imagine, dashboards and templates and everything on the compliance and regulatory side to help customers get on board and through the onboarding process with the banks in a way that they can understand. There's visibility, transparency, there's tracking, there's hand-holding, there's education. It's not just a technical platform. It's really about the things that are required to make our customers' operations and compliance teams happy or knowledgeable or understanding what's happening, as well as to make for a seamless launch throughout the banking process. So it's really an end-to-end technical and non-technical interface in terms of working with Highnote.

When you think about the broader stack that they'll need, are there aspects of that that you have partners of choice with that people are plugging into? We've touched on a lot of the areas that you do play in. What are some of the areas, whether it's externally, like banking partners, or maybe other vendors that a customer would also have as part of their system that you're integrating with?

A couple of good examples there. For part of the onboarding flow, we partner with a company for KYC, or Know Your Customer, or KYB, Know Your Business. So it's data elements that are tracked through a third party that help us score and effectively assess risk on a new customer coming in. We didn't build it ourselves. We partner with a company that does that.

Another example would be some customers have proprietary rewards that they want to provide. Our general ledger facilitates all of the different accounting and all of the different conversion requirements for a rewards program. But we allow our customers, if they want to partner with a rewards program to do different things with points or different promotional programs, they can do that themselves. We interface seamlessly through our APIs that are connected to the general ledger.

So that's another example of how we don't have to own everything. I think a lot of it is about openness, and that's the API model. But there are a lot of things that our subscribers would like us to do. That's really what we handle. So it's really the choice of our customers, depending on what vertical they're in.

Talk to me now about the expansion into powering consumer credit. What did that mean for your business? How did you come to that decision? And how does that change the needs of the product, if at all?

Credit has always been on the roadmap. But through our experience, I think primarily at LendingClub, we had an appreciation for the complexity. It's just not an easy thing to go build. So we started off launching into the market at Highnote in prepaid, debit, commercial credit, commercial charge, knowing that consumer credit was on the roadmap. We had designed things like, once you get into secure charge and unsecure charge, while it's not exactly revolving, a lot of the same concepts are there in terms of what's come due and the receivables purchase agreements and the construct around credit. We tiptoed into that from the commercial side.

But it really came from our customers who said, look, I'm launching a debit program. What I really want is to now move into credit. A lot of the data that's collected by offering consumer debit cards can be leveraged into creating trade lines and getting better risk profiles for maybe thin file customers that can get better interest or get a better loan with evidence of, they've been paying back the debit program or here's the transactional volume. So that glide path into debit into credit was really coming from our existing subscribers that said, hey, Highnote, we'd love to extend the program into credit.

That, coupled with my view, we've heard continually from the market that the existing credit solutions are suboptimal and there's opportunity to really go in and innovate in that space. That's very similar to why we started Highnote earlier, which was, yeah, there's some good platforms, but there aren't a lot and there's a lot of demand. Whenever you have a market that has a ton of demand, not a lot of providers, I think that's a good one to enter. Credit was very similar to that, or it felt very similar in terms of you have a lot of legacy providers, which are the banks, not a lot of embedded finance or modern platforms that can facilitate credit programs, and heavy demand from not only our existing customers, but prospective customers that are saying that they would like a consumer credit revolving. So that's what drove the innovation.

Look, it took us a year and a half to build it. It is a natural extension of our general ledger. So we're using the GL to facilitate payback and help us with APR calculations and waterfall and all the things that you need to put in place. It wasn't like a build from scratch. It's not a bolt on. It was always part of the platform strategy. I think that's important because as soon as you start bolting on or acquiring businesses, it's fine to go to market. But the ability to modify those platforms, the tax it takes in terms of integrating into an existing infrastructure manifests itself into slower time to market and less nimbleness. We want to avoid that. We want to own it enough to be able to move quickly, to pivot, to respond to providing enabling capabilities for customers that want to do innovative things.

Believe it or not, and this is something I learned along the way, there's still a lot of innovation going on within consumer credit. There's a lot of programs that are coming out that will illustrate that we're excited to partner with. So we'll see how it goes. But that was the journey for us on the credit side.

As soon as you start talking about credit, I'm sure anybody's mind immediately starts to ask questions around things like balance sheet risk and underwriting. I know you've talked about a framework that you have, collaborative underwriting. Talk to me a little bit about the capital stack. Where does the risk lie? Who's doing the underwriting? What does the decision making look like for your customers? How much of that is entirely on Highnote versus maybe distributed to other systems?

I think it's very timely. As we're entering the market, since the October launch, we've had lots of discussions with different players in the market. Some have balance sheet, some want us to provide it, some want us only to facilitate a connection to a balance sheet provider. There's a number of them.

I think where we're landing on this one, Kyle, is that we are a platform that will facilitate not only collaborative underwriting, but also the integration with balance sheet providers, whether it be our own subscriber or a third party. But Highnote at this point is not taking balance sheet risk. I think that's a model that we're going to stick with for the time being, because I do think there's demand for programs that have balance sheet that are legitimate programs that are running. However, these programs want to do something different. They want to be more innovative. They want to launch a different type of construct. It's that migration of programs for companies that have balance sheet set up that we will address with a better platform. And then there's the, if you facilitate the underwriting and the balance sheet, make it easy for me, then I'm happy to take first loss or provide my own balance sheet. Those are the subscribers. That's the market that we're going after right now.

To explain in layman's terms, when you talk about clients with balance sheet or third party providers, walk me through maybe a specific example or types of examples of the kinds of companies that would want to do that themselves versus who somebody would typically partner with for that.

There's a number of investors in consumer revolving credit. There's a half a dozen that are common names. Those providers typically partner on a program by program basis with subscribers that are, again, either in market or want to launch a program. These are companies that have APIs to be integrated with. They have funds flow. They understand the economics, the dynamics, the servicing requirements. Those are companies that we work with. We can get you a list of who they are, but companies that we work with that are able to assess from an underwriting perspective the box that they want to participate in.

Back to what I was saying earlier, I think to get really good and have a sustainable and growing consumer credit business, you need to invest in underwriting and analytics and risk and data and have people that are focused on that for their entire day. I think there's a lot of companies out there that do that. A lot of subscribers have that already. I'm not sure Highnote investing in all that to be the best underwriting provider for credit risk is where we are. We are a technology product, innovative platform that facilitates all of those things to occur in ways that haven't happened before. That's really where I think we want to play.

That's generally how it works. Companies that have underwriting are already in market now with their own programs, are large enough where they're doing their own balance sheet. They may have their own provider as well. We think that those businesses that we're already talking to are looking to grow, are looking to expand, and they're feeling a bit encumbered by their existing infrastructure. Those are ones where our platform fits in quite naturally. Like, look, we can sit beside the program. It doesn't have to be a complete migration. It can sit beside and then grow and demonstrate the value.

On the other side, it's platforms that are in market with maybe front ends of providing to an airline co-brand that doesn't want anything to do with underwriting, doesn't want to build their own technology, right? We'll partner with the platform that can do that, but we'll provide all of the underlying capabilities, the bank partnership, stay on top of the compliance, but facilitate the receivables purchase and basically all of the financial money movement activities, based on our general ledger capabilities, to help these things move along fairly quickly.

When you talk about collaborative underwriting, it seems like it fits into this theme of, somebody wants to have this type of program, if it expands into credit, we can give you access to frameworks, processes, program management and capital providers to do everything you need. But ultimately you're taking the tools and doing it yourself.

I think that's right. That's where we've seen initial traction. Look, we're early into this, to be honest with you, but I believe that's where we can add the most value in the shortest period of time. I do think there's a need for that. We have all of the data elements on the credit pull, and we can surface all that through GraphQL. We do surface that. We have collaborative underwriting where we do the pull and we send it. Do you want this to be approved or not? Is it in the box? We can facilitate all the things that generally take a long time or some company has to go build. We have all of that on the platform, and it comes down to the decisioning and the underwriting.

I think that as long as we can make that smooth, there'll be a lot of traction for businesses that want to get off the ground and know how to do this and know how to compete. That's what we want to be part of. We want to be the go-to platform for all credit processing and program management services that are out there. We think we can do it better than anybody else.

I think you put it pretty well. I believe it was the press release when you expanded into consumer credit. You had this great line: "We're stepping into a new era where credit is not just a service, but a transformative experience." It seems like that transformative experience is this ability to have a lot of solutions rather than a hodgepodge of siloed random advisors or providers. Is that the right way to think about it?

Yeah, I think it really is. You nailed it. I think that the desire is there. The demand is there. But that platform until Highnote hasn't really existed. Lots of companies are trying. So I think there is going to be a lot of innovation in this area. But I think it starts with the core platform and enabling companies who want to get moving in the space to do it without the burden, the task of managing all these different partners, because it is messy, if that's the approach.

As you think about the future for the company, one of the things that's really interesting is we're at a moment in time where you look at fintech more broadly, and many companies that have gone public have been punished in the public markets. Often you try to understand the cause of that. In many cases, it is this function of tech companies that have been valued as tech companies, but have taken on non-tech components, whether that is balance sheet risk or what have you. It sounds like, if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, you've been very deliberate about, we are this technology platform that enables you to do lots of things in financial services more broadly, but we're very focused on being this tech layer. So it's not necessarily a balance sheet risk problem for you. But when you think about the obstacles that you're going to have to face, what are some of those things that you think you'll run into as you continue to expand as a business?

Look, I think compliance and regulatory landscapes continue to change and evolve. We don't want to be behind the eight ball on that. We want to continually stay in front of where things are headed and make sure that our subscribers are also staying in front of that. That manifests itself into, we have very, very close relationships with our banks. We feel like we're an extension of our banks in terms of, while we're not regulated, we feel like we are by extension. That climate continues to change, certainly in consumer credit, which is challenging.

So I think that's one thing. It's not maybe the most exciting thing to talk about, but it is important because if you don't stay in front of that, then things can slow down. We've seen that in the last year or two with programs and some banks that have struggled a little bit, frankly. So we want to make sure that we stay in front of that.

I think on the technology side, there are exciting opportunities even beyond credit. As it pertains to acquiring business models, as you know, I came from Braintree, which is PayPal's acquiring business. So we have a lot of in-house expertise in acquiring. I think that there are some interesting things for businesses that can support multiple capabilities for large enterprises, whether that be both issuing and acquiring or, as we talked about, credit and issuing. I think there's just a lot of different areas that having a unique platform that's modern, that allows for the innovation to occur and is compliant and is focused on ensuring growth happens at the right pace and with the right safety mechanisms and right risk mechanisms. I think there's a lot of massive opportunity within payments, within global expansion, things like that, that just get me, the company, really excited about where we're headed.

We're trying to stay focused. We had a great, amazing 2023 coming into '24 with a lot of tailwinds on the business. It's growing tremendously well. We have a lot of large opportunities in front of us just in issuance. So for us, it's about continuing that innovation, but staying true to the platform. Again, your point about, we have thought about the balance sheet side of things. Do we really want to be a balance sheet provider? Do we really want to be valued as a bank or a balance sheet, essentially? Is that our sweet spot? So I think that we're trying to be very prescriptive about where we're headed.

But the pace of innovation at Highnote is unlike any other, I would say, any other platform out there. Our customers are responding as a result with excitement about where we're headed. We'll, in one sense, follow where they're pushing us. But in our sense, we're looking ahead and out and beyond on what things we can do that are pretty exciting. We're glad to be in the space that we're in. Things are rocking and rolling here.