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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Mike Hudack, CEO & Co-Founder of Sling Money | Episode 399
As CEO & Co-Founder of Sling Money, Mike is transforming how we think about sending funds across borders by making international transfers as effortless as sending a text message.
During our conversation, Mike reveals how a personal experience moving USDC between the UK and San Francisco sparked his vision. The transfer itself was instant and free, but everything around it felt clunky – "like using a Unix command line from the 80s." This insight led him to create what he calls "the macOS or iPhone of stablecoins," abstracting away all of the complexity.
Sling's elegant approach allows users to add money through local payment methods in 75 countries, convert to stablecoins behind the scenes, and send funds globally in just seconds. Recipients can withdraw to their local currency almost instantly, never needing to understand the underlying technology. The use cases range from practical (managing finances across multiple countries) to spontaneous (buying someone a beer across continents) – transactions that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive.
Mike places this innovation in a fascinating historical context, comparing the evolution of international payments to what happened with telecommunications and streaming video. Just as we no longer think twice about "long-distance calls," he envisions a future where the concept of "international payments" disappears entirely.
Ready to experience the future of global money transfer? Download Sling Money today and join the community making international payments instant, free, and frictionless.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Greg Myers:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, mike Hudak, the CEO of Sling Money. So, mike, thank you for being here and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Really happy to be here, great. So, if you don't mind, let's start out having you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, just a few things like that.
Mike Hudack:Yeah for sure. I grew up in Connecticut, mostly kind of like in an orbit around New York City really. So I lived in kind of like Fairfield County, connecticut, for a little while Westchester, new Jersey. And then I dropped out of high school when I was 15, before I was legally allowed to do it, and I worked at a startup and then moved to New York City and lived in New York for a number of years working as like a programmer and sysadmin. And then I started an online video company in New York in like 2005. And then that merged with another company and Disney bought the combined thing.
Mike Hudack:I went out to California and went to work at Facebook where I did product for a long time. I kind of worked on profile and identity and then I led ads product for a while. I met Britt in New York. She grew up in London, she was living in New York. I dragged her to California she doesn't like it when I say that and then after a few years in San Francisco she was like I want to go back. I thought she meant New York, but we ended up moving to London. So I've been here 10 years now 10, 11 years. I live in a village outside of Cambridge in the UK now and my office is in London. After moving here, I stayed with Facebook for a while and then I worked at a company called Deliveroo, which is just getting bought by DoorDash now. It's basically like DoorDash in Europe and the Middle East and parts of Asia. And then I was chief product officer at Monzo, which is like a neobank in the UK, and then I started Sling a couple years ago after discovering stablecoins.
Greg Myers:Well, let's talk about Sling money, so tell the audience what Sling does.
Mike Hudack:Well, so we? I had this experience about three years ago of moving USDC from the UK to San Francisco, and the payment itself was instant and free. But everything else about the experience was not great. To be honest with you, it felt like using a Unix command line from the 80s. You're kind of like stitching everything together and you need to go through this whole crazy IDP process and copy and paste these addresses and all that stuff. The underlying transfer was instant and free, and I had this moment where I was like, oh, I know how to fix everything that is wrong with this, but the thing which is right with this is like world changing. The fact that I can move value you know, 3000 miles, 4000 miles, like this with the tap of a button and my friend gets it immediately is unbelievable.
Mike Hudack:And so, with Sling Money, what we're building is the macOS or the iPhone or stable cons, so they're really easy to use, really fast, great user experience, and we want to get to the point where anyone in the world can send money to anyone else in the world instantly, with a couple of taps, without having to worry about currency at all. It's all just abstracted away, you don't need to think about it. You don't need to think about the or know anything about the recipient's bank details. The transfer is basically instant and free, or as close to free as possible. So, just like sending a message, and I was talking to somebody the other day, went for a walk, actually, with one of the guys who founded Skype and we were talking about how.
Mike Hudack:You know, in the old days you had long distance phone calls, you had international phone calls. You thought about this all the time and money is still stuck in that world. You know you would never say, oh, I'm going to make a long distance phone call, don't stay on the phone. It's long distance. You know, I grew up with that. We're moving to a world where, like you know, nobody's going to start making an international payment anymore. You know, it should all just be the same thing. I'm sending money, it should be, it's in free and that's what we're doing. We're doing it with the Solana blockchain and stable coins and taking all the friction out of it.
Greg Myers:So your customers are more on the consumer side. It's all consumer. Yeah, yeah, totally. And how are you acquiring those consumers? It's a great question.
Mike Hudack:So we think about this a lot like WhatsApp. Like you start with the highest friction thing initially. So like WhatsApp grew in Spain because, like Telefonica was very, they charged a lot of money for international texting, they charged a lot of money for sending an MMS or whatever, and that was a huge opportunity. And then WhatsApp texting is ultimately a social activity. And so if you get a couple people, if you solve a big problem for a couple people doing that, they start sharing it with other people and you start growing geometrically. So that's the way that we think about it. You know, get one person inviting another person. You obviously have to bootstrap your network initially. So you know, we have some marketing tactics for just like getting lots of people onto the platform very quickly. And then from there you kind of evolve from getting lots of people on to, you know, just kind of like that rolling barrage of friends inviting friends After you work at Facebook. Everything looks like social software, every acquisition strategy looks the same, you know.
Greg Myers:Right, right, right. So the consumer just downloads an app, so maybe walk through, kind of what that.
Mike Hudack:So you download the app, you sign up using your like Google account or your Apple account, depending on what kind of phone you're on. Verify your phone number. You go through a very easy identity verification flow. So in the US that's like a database check with name, social security number, address, selfie. In Africa it's a selfie and a photo of your ID. It varies depending on where you are.
Mike Hudack:We do that IDV check in about 10 countries or something like that, which is pretty wild. Seems like that's a heavy lift For sure. So you get through that IDV check and then you generate a self-custodial Solana wallet which is stored on your device and backed up seamlessly with a third-party partner of ours. We can never access your wallet. It's very important. And then you're dropped into the app and now you have a Solana wallet that can take stablecoins and you can add money to it using a local payment method wherever you are in the world.
Mike Hudack:We have 75 countries worth of local payment methods where you can add money. So in the US or Europe that's predominantly debit card or like a bank transfer. In other countries, like in Kenya, it's M-Peso, which is mobile money. In Brazil it's PIX, and so on and so forth, it's just whatever local payment method. And what happens is you transfer your fiat in and then you get a stable coin in your wallet and, depending on where you transfer your fiat in and then you get a stable coin in your wallet, and, depending on where you are, that might be a US dollar stable coin or a euro stable coin. You can then send that stable coin to whoever you want.
Mike Hudack:If they're on Sling, you can do it. You can just find them in the directory and you can search the directory, find them. We show that they've been ID verified, all that kind of thing and you just send the money to them. It takes three seconds, literally just three seconds, and then they can off-ramp that money, they can get it in their bank account or whatever super quickly. Again, we support local payment methods in 75 countries where you can get Indian shillings or Brazilian Rai or euros or Polish zloty or pounds or whatever you want, and 99% of those transfers are like a minute or less. You know we integrate with the fastest mechanism. So the end to end like I can move money between my own accounts in Europe and the US in about 45 seconds and it's just, it's super smooth, like butter, you know, and just like, really, really easy to use. You never have to Think about stable coins or blockchains or wallet addresses or anything like that. It's just easy.
Greg Myers:So what is the typical use case? Why would someone in the US be sending money to someone in Africa or even Europe? Why do they typically do that? What kind of gets that started?
Mike Hudack:So there's a range of use cases. I mean, this is one of the biggest markets in the world and it ranges from on one end of the spectrum, kind of like a self-transfer. So like I live a little bit between the UK and the US and I go to New York a lot. I grew up in the US, you know, my family is here, my immediate family is here in the UK, and so I very, very regularly move money between the US and the UK in order to pay bills, pay credit cards, pay rent, whatever. All the time. There are around the world millions and millions and millions of people like me who straddle multiple economies, multiple currencies and need to move money between the two. That's a big use case. Then there are people who send money to friends and family abroad. That is a lot of activity. Obviously that is a huge market and you might have somebody. You can imagine that I would send money to my dad back in Connecticut to help out with something or for a gift or whatever. So that again is just like a huge use case. And then I really believe that there's a new wave of like.
Mike Hudack:Sending money internationally has been so difficult for so long and so expensive that it really restricts the reasons why people do it, the frequency with which people do it. So if you talk to people who send money back to family on a regular basis or whatever, they do it once per month because it's just a pain. It's like paying your bills at the end of the month. You sit down at your desk and you open up your computer and you're like, okay, I'm going to do it. It takes a while because it's just a pain. It's like paying your bills at the end of the month. You sit down at your desk and you open up your computer and you're like, okay, I'm going to do it. It takes a while and it's expensive, it's a chore. I really strongly believe that if you make it really easy and you make it really fast, people will do it more and for more things.
Mike Hudack:We had a thing happen on Twitter a little while ago which was hilarious, which is like a user of ours in the Netherlands tweeted that Sling was amazing because you could buy somebody a beer from thousands of miles away, and a user of ours in Kenya saw the tweet and replied to it and said buy me a beer. The guy did. He sent him $2, which is, like you know, translates to however many shillings, it is to buy a beer in Nairobi and it arrived about three seconds later and the guy replied to the Twitter thread saying hey, I bought the beer. And the guy in the Netherlands says send me proof of beer. And he did. He sent a photo of the beer and it's just like you just couldn't do that a few years ago.
Greg Myers:It's incredible. It really should be that easy, though, right. It should be that easy, right, right. So I don't know if you have competition, but maybe if you do what makes it different and unique. Or another way of answering is what did people do before this kind of solution came on?
Mike Hudack:Yeah, so there's the traditional I think about this in terms of generations. So there's like the old school way of moving money internationally which a lot of banks still use, which is, you know, swift, the Swift network, or correspondent banking and you know all of that kind of stuff, and it takes a while and people charge fees along the way, and that's kind of like your first generation of international payment. So that's what JP Morgan Chase or HSBC or all these people do basically. Then there's like a second generation really cool fintechs that have built great consumer experiences around international money transfer, which is like smoother and easier than that.
Mike Hudack:So Wise Revolut, those kind of guys, and they're less expensive than the traditional banks and what they've done is they've built up these kind of incredible kind of like fiat networks around the world. So they'll have somebody who can settle Brazilian real for them and somebody who can settle pounds or euros or whatever, and they kind of move around with a good UI there. And then now there's kind of like a set of people who are building this on stable coins, where I think it's better, faster and cheaper, easier, the infrastructure is easier, all this stuff is easier, and there there's probably, you know, there's Phantom. There are a bunch of kind of like crypto wallety kind of people and there are a couple of people building like regional neobanks on top of these rails, so like a Revolut for Mexico or something like that. I think we're the only people crazy enough to try to build like WhatsApp for money in like a hundred something countries at the same time, like you really have to be insane Right.
Greg Myers:Well, where do you see sort of if you step back and look at payments as a whole, or kind of a fintech space? Where do you see that headed in the next, say, three to five years?
Mike Hudack:Look, I grew up with technology in a world where once something becomes fast and once it becomes cheap, there's no going back becomes fast and once it becomes cheap, there's no going back. So I really believe that fast, high-quality blockchains and stablecoins are here to stay in a really meaningful way. I just think that most financial technology in the future is going to be based most experiences are going to be based on this technology, are going to be based on this technology, and Bill Gates has this saying I'm going to paraphrase poorly that people overestimate the speed of change and they underestimate its size, the size of the change. I think that, like in however many years it takes I don't know if it's five or 10 or 15, pretty much everything is going to be blockchain-based and the products and the experiences is going to be blockchain-based, and the products and the experiences are going to look dramatically different than the products and the experiences today. They're going to look a lot more like a digital product experience and a lot less like a banking product experience, and that'll be a result of the technology. It's going to be a result of everybody being on the same database. Everybody's money is going to be on the same database. It's one shared ledger, not all these separate ledgers and ledger movements between people, between countries, between currencies are as simple as a couple lines of code and just happen instantly and cost a tenth of a penny. That is fundamental, and it also is more accessible, which means that more people can build great user experiences. On top of this, and I think that means the products are going to look more like WhatsApp and Gmail and Slack and whatever than they look like HSBC or by JPMorgan Chase app, it'll be unrecognizable.
Mike Hudack:To be honest with you, and we've seen this with video I worked in online video back in 2005 and I actually did my first work on online video in like 2000. I worked at a company called pseudo which was doing live broadcasting of like 10 channels from new york city on the internet in 50s, you know, in real video, when nobody even had 56k modems yet Everybody had 28a modems at home. So the pixels when you watched this thing were this big, you couldn't see anything, and there was a channel called 88HipHop and all this stuff and it failed. But the guy who started it, this guy, josh Harris, knew that all television was going to work this way in the future and he was 100% right. And the cable people and the satellite people were like, oh, I don't know. They had all the reasons for why this might not be true.
Mike Hudack:And now you look at today, it's 25 years later. I mean, we're recording this thing, it's going to go on YouTube, it's going to go on Apple Podcasts, it's going to go on Spotify. All those things have come true. My home TV is all streaming now. You know, the whole thing is just streaming. So that happened over the course of like 20 years. You know, youtube launched in 2005,. Like all this stuff kind of happened. And I can't tell you exactly the moment where everything flipped. I'm not sure if anybody can, but it flipped. And that is the same thing that's going to happen across all financial services, I think, domestic and international.
Greg Myers:Do you think so? We talk a lot about even on this show, is like removing the friction from transactions or even from just the whole experience, not just transactions, just the consumer experience, shopping, buying from merchants, the friction, I mean it becomes the Uber experience, right, you don't even know the payment happens. I mean, do you see kind of what you're doing, making that frictionless, moving from consumer to B2B to where any B2B and I don't mean business to business necessarily transaction, but consumer to business as opposed to consumer to consumer.
Mike Hudack:For sure, I think that the real efficiency comes, the real efficiency from this technology comes when you don't have to transition between you know, like fiat in a separate database and like a stable coin on a blockchain, and everything just stays in network.
Mike Hudack:You know, the on-ramp and the off-ramp are the kind of expensive and complicated pieces. Everything on is cheap and easy. So for sure, like it's going to be important for us and for others to facilitate not just peer-to-peer payments but consumer-to-business, business-to-business, business-to-consumer. It's really just a matter of sequencing, but I imagine that a very large percentage again over some period of time it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's going to happen, but a very large percentage of online purchases are going to be entirely on-chain and never taken out At some point. Why would you take it out? And for sure, as we get to scale and as we get to the critical mass in different markets in different ways, those features, I think, become incredibly important. They're important for the business model, they're important for consumer value and they're just kind of like an inevitable part of where this technology goes.
Greg Myers:Well, you talked a little bit about why this was a problem that you saw kind of a way to solve it. What did you do? Why did you do this? Why did you take the leap of faith to start this company and do what you're doing?
Mike Hudack:I've been really incredibly lucky to work on a bunch of really interesting problems over my career. So I worked on online video and online media. I worked on computer security, social media. I did advertising and brought a lot of advertising dollars online at Facebook back in the day. I worked on food delivery and I worked on banking, and there are a couple of different things here.
Mike Hudack:One one is that in my career I haven't seen very many opportunities this big or this amazing, that like have this kind of potential to change the world, and I think that connecting everyone in the world to an instant financial system has the potential to do so much good for if you think about all the people in the world who don't have access to the financial system right now in a meaningful way, or it's very expensive. It holds a lot of people back. There's just a tremendous amount of social good that can come out of building a thing like this and that's very appealing. It's a huge technology-driven paradigm shift and that's the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning. That's the stuff that I find fascinating, and I feel like all the best things I've ever built have been at that kind of like the edge of this sort of thing and I feel like the combination of experience that I have of building like social media and like social networks and working at a regulated financial company and building consumer technology, but also having experience building the back end for these things, you know it's like my whole career and set of experiences like builds up to the to this thing. Then when you have that experience, you're like you look around and you, you know I had that experience moving the money from, like, the uk to california or whatever, and it, you know, it's instant and free, and I was like I know how to solve all these problems.
Mike Hudack:I asked like like why is anyone else doing this? And I couldn't really figure it out. Now a lot of people are trying to do it, but you know, we saw it early and started building early and I imagined myself kind of like five or 10 years in the future and I imagined how I would feel under a bunch of different scenarios. So if I didn't do this and somebody else tried, how would I feel? How would I feel if they succeeded or they failed?
Mike Hudack:How would I feel if I didn't do this and nobody did it? How would I feel if I did it and I failed? How would I feel if I did it and I failed and somebody else succeeded? How would I feel if I did it and I succeeded? And the answer was really clear that I would feel pretty bad in pretty much every scenario in which I didn't try to do this. In some of the scenarios where I try to do this, I would also feel bad, but no worse than if I didn't try, and in some of those scenarios I was very happy. So you do that and you're like well, I have just no choice. I have to build this thing.
Greg Myers:Yeah, absolutely. So what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
Mike Hudack:Well, I love building stuff Like this is part of my work. I just love building new things. I love building things that people use. I love building things that people get value out of In some way. I don't really care if it's like food delivery or it's like, you know, advertisements that help small businesses sell their product, or if it's, you know, instant transfers that help people you know live their life and move money faster and cheaper and everything. But it has to be something that makes a difference for a person and it has to be something like new and novel, which is like hard to figure out how to do, and I just like that. I love that. I love that. I love the detail of it. I love the intricacy of it. I love the puzzle Fantastic, sometimes very hard, but beautiful.
Mike Hudack:Then, personally, I've got three kids. I've got a nine-year-old, a five-year-old and a 15-month-old. They're great. We do Lego. The nine five-year-old and I. We have a table in my office when they get home from school, if I'm not on a call or something, we do Lego for a few minutes and then we do it again before they go to bed and it's great, it's just absolutely wonderful. And we like you know we also like we live in the UK but we kind of like throw a baseball around play catch and you know all that stuff and I mean that is also just like the best thing in the world.
Greg Myers:You know, it's amazing. So maybe someone comes to you, they're right out of college and they're looking at payments or fintech as an industry to go into and obviously you have a very wide background of different you know verticals or industries. But if they came to you and said, hey, I want to build a career in fintech because of the way it is today and the technology and the money and everything, what would you tell them they need to do to be successful? I think there are multiple pieces here.
Mike Hudack:So the first thing, I think, is to go and work at the best company you can find. You want to go and play for the Yankees. You want to go and work at a place which is just at the top of their game so that you can learn how they do everything. Top of their game, so that you can learn how they do everything, and those habits will serve you well for the rest of your career. You know you will learn a set of like good habits, right, and not just like in doing the work, but how to think, how to interact with other people, how to break down problems and solve them and all that kind of stuff. So that's, I think, really important. Like pick that place really really well. In a lot of ways it doesn't matter if it's big or small, it's just somewhere that they're good and you really truly respect them. And that's more important than title, it's more important than compensation, it's more important than the else wants to do. Find the problems which are everybody else avoids but that, if you get them done, bring in a tremendous amount of value and people will respect you deeply for finding that, going through the pain and solving it and seeing that opportunity. You know, know I'll give you an example.
Mike Hudack:Like one of the things that I worked on at facebook was, um, some of our logging was incorrect across a bunch of different things and it was like it was insane.
Mike Hudack:You had to record like each event for like, clicking like or commenting or sharing, or you know, every impression across like 17 different clients, like all these different IOS. I had to get 10 people into a war room with a giant spreadsheet for a month literally just going through every event recorded across all of Facebook. It was the most boring, tedious, terrible work, but at the end we could say, oh, we got this right and it was wrong before and that was unbelievably valuable for driving trust within the organization, outside of the organization, with our customers, with everybody else. It was something nobody else wanted to do but the things that then put your career on a great trajectory and people trust you and they want to do stuff with you. I feel like if you do those two things and then you chase the things that create value and you enjoy, you know I mean obviously you have to do those things that are boring too, but, like you know, work on problems that matter and you'll do great.
Greg Myers:I think that's great advice. So, Mike, we've covered a lot of ground about the company, the industry, what fascinating things you guys are doing. Is there anything else you'd like to cover before we wrap up the show?
Mike Hudack:No, I think. I mean your question has been great and I've really enjoyed this.
Mike Hudack:I mean, I think if I were to like leave people with one takeaway, it's probably that I think that international payments are going the way of the long-distance phone call. They're going to be ubiquitous, they're going to be fast, they're going to be the same as making a local payment. Everything is going instant and free. And a couple taps and that's a huge paradigm shift that I think people haven't totally adjusted to yet. But that's the fun part and I'm just really grateful. Thank you for having me on the show.
Greg Myers:Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I know you're very busy, so thanks again for being on the show my pleasure. Thank you, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.