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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Miles Paschini, CEO of FV Bank | Episode 446
Money shouldn’t take days to arrive while business waits. We sit down with Miles Paschini, CEO and co-founder of FV Bank, to unpack how a licensed digital bank can make crypto feel like normal banking - without the wallet headaches, exchange hops, or private key anxiety. Miles traces his journey from prepaid telecom innovation to Wavecrest’s pioneering crypto cards, and explains why building FV Bank meant controlling the value chain: the bank license, the compliance stack, and the tech.
We dig into how FV Bank issues traditional accounts with ACH, wires, and cross-border payments, then layers in bank-native wallet addresses for USDC, USDT, and PYUSD. That lets a merchant accept a stablecoin payment that lands as USD deposits, or send a million dollars internationally in minutes with on-chain settlement and integrated sanctions screening. Inside the bank, FVNet provides instant client-to-client settlement, turning treasury into an always-on function and freeing working capital from the friction of multi-day delays.
Miles also explores the future: stablecoin growth accelerated by clearer regulation, peer-to-peer payment via X402 that removes chargebacks and middlemen, and how agentic and machine-to-machine commerce will quietly reshape e-commerce and everyday life. We touch on risk and compliance fundamentals - BSA/AML first, crypto-native forensics layered on top and why specialization in fintech and blockchain is a durable advantage. Looking ahead, FV Bank plans to expand Visa issuing, launch BIN sponsorship globally, and introduce Bitcoin-collateralized lending for long-term holders.
If you care about faster settlement, lower risk, and payments that work at internet speed, this conversation maps where banking is headed and how businesses can get there without becoming crypto experts.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Where we come to see the leaders that come to the payments and space. We will lead a space thing of products and services that include the payments 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 topic.
SPEAKER_01:Hello everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Miles Pacini, the CEO of FV Bank. So, Miles, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Much appreciated. So before we dive into your career and talk about the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, certainly. I grew up out in California and currently call home South Dakota. So quite a different setting. I've been in the payment space pretty much my whole career. Um I started out in the prepaid wireless space, and then I got into card issuing. I founded a company uh in Europe called Wavecrest, which was a very large card issuer, and we were the first company to ever introduce the um crypto-linked debit cards. That was back in around 2013. Now I'm the co-founder of FV Bank, and we're a digital bank based in Puerto Rico, and uh we're really focused on the conversion of traditional banking and digital assets.
SPEAKER_01:Well, if you don't mind, and you and you did a little bit there, but can you walk us through your professional journey and maybe how and why you co-founded the FV Bank?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, certainly. So, you know, as I I said, uh I started out in the prepaid space and I did some really interesting work there. I filed several patents on changing technology from if you're old enough, you'll remember prepaid cards when you had to scratch that film off the back of the cards in order to reveal a number to make like an international phone call. Those were very popular. We turned that into a digital business. So we we had filed and been issued a number of patents on real-time delivery of those codes. So if you wanted$50 worth of Verizon, it would be delivered to you in real time digitally, as opposed to having to manufacture a card and distribute a card and then have someone you know scratch the film off of that card to use it. We sold that business to Safeway Grocery Store, which was in a division called Blackhawk. Blackhawk is one of the world's largest prepaid providers today. That really got me into payments. Um, that's what lit the fire, if you say. And then I got involved into the card issuing space. I co-founded a company called Wavecrest. We thought we were going to be an institutional payments solutions company. We built products for large telecoms like Telefonica, um, Reliance Telecom in India. And that was a very interesting phase in my career where we were building innovative products for very large corporations. I can probably say I didn't like that phase of my career very much because it was just such a left-sided. We had a company of maybe 100 people and teeing off against organizations with you know tens of thousands of people. And that was a lot of learning. But then we got lucky one day, we we stumbled onto an idea. It was actually a joint venture with Visa. Really, when I say joint venture, that's that's probably not the best description. It's better to call it Skunkworks. We were developing some new technology for Visa. Um, that technology was going to allow someone like an airline company to enable a customer to use their points at the point of sale or using a Visa Plastic card. And that technology that we developed, which we called RHA, which stood for remote host authorization, it essentially allowed someone to use a Visa card at the point of sale and spend another store of value other than the fiat currency they had there. And so while the airlines selling airlines, you're using airline points at the point of sale didn't take off at the time, we connected that to a Bitcoin wallet in 20 late 2012, 2013. And that turned into a very interesting and fast-growing business where we were, for the first time, enabling the convergence of digital assets and traditional finance by enabling customers technically to spend their Bitcoin at the point of sale. That was a fascinating phase of my career, very fast growing. We had uh over a million customers in 70 countries. We learned a lot about crypto. We learned a lot about the lack of knowledge in the industry, especially from the banking side with regards to regulations related to crypto, you know, how the two industries would converge, how they would not converge. That business really led me to start FV Bank. What we realized was that in order to develop products and services that converge those two industries, you needed to control more of the value chain. So we thought we needed to own the bank, we needed to own the compliance function, primarily because the compliance function needed to specialize. And then we needed to own the tech stack. And so FV Bank stands for FinTech Ventures. The goal was there was to build a financial institution that was vertically integrated to support fintechs and blockchain companies.
SPEAKER_01:So let's talk about the bank that you founded, the one you're talking about. So tell us what FV Bank really does and kind of give us the products, the solutions, the markets you serve, a few things like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. So there's a it I always like to explain it as a Venn diagram. You have traditional banking, which is deposit accounts, you know, payments, ACH, domestic wires, international wires, cross-border payments, all the things that you would do in a traditional digital bank. We have those functions. We also have a digital asset custody business where we can custody digital assets inside the bank. And we've focused on a number of integrations to converge the two industries. To be able to custody digital assets in and of itself is novel in a bank. But to create products and services around that is really where we differentiate ourselves. And I'll give you an example of that that's you know really got a lot of traction and probably would resonate with the audience today is that stable coins are the craze today in the marketplace. We can all see the data being published about the value of transactions and how they're you know on a purely on a value basis, competing with the likes of Visa and MasterCard. Three years ago, FE Bank integrated wallet addresses directly into your bank account. So what that means is that if you have a bank account at FE Bank, we would give you a wallet address for USDC, which is a US stablecoin USDT, and PYUSD, which is PayPal stablecoin. And those wallet addresses enable our customers to directly receive stablecoins as US dollar deposits. So if you're a merchant and you bank at FE Bank and you have an invoice you send to a customer, the customer could pay you by traditional methods like sending you a wire or an ACH, but they can also pay you with a stablecoin payment. And as a user, you don't have any of the technical challenges. You don't need a wallet. Um it's provided directly integrated to your bank account. You don't need to convert the stable coins to dollars, like having an exchange account at something like Coinbase. You know, you don't need to control the private keys of your wallet. And we've just made it really simple. So user creates an invoice, the invoice can be paid by stablecoin. And it, you know, we think that that's one of the hurdles. Like if you're gonna get small to medium businesses to start to accept stable coins, you need to make it easy for them. And that's what we've focused on is make it easy, make it seamless. Likewise, if you we also support payment. So a customer at FE Bank who has US dollars in their account, let's say they want to send a million dollars to China because they're buying goods and services. They could send a wire. That wire is going to take you know one to three days to settle, depending on the route. Or they could send stable coin. So from their US dollar balance, they don't need to do anything, they just instruct us who's the beneficiary, who's the beneficiary's wallet address. We do all the sanctioned screening of those wallet addresses on the back end. We mint the stable coins and send them in real time. That payment will arrive to the beneficiary in a maximum 20 minutes. So we've created an environment where banking customers can interact with and seamlessly leverage the benefits of the blockchain without having to necessarily adopt the technology.
SPEAKER_01:Are there certain verticals within the small to medium-sized businesses that this is more designed for, or is it really across the board?
SPEAKER_00:There will be a spectrum of adoption that will take place over time. Um the early adopters are the digitally native companies, so companies who are born out of or accustomed to dealing with digital assets. And that can range all the way from the crypto exchanges themselves to what we call OTC desks, which is a trading desk, funds and family offices that are dealing in digital assets. So this is very natural extension for them, and that's the largest part of our business today. But now we're starting to see like the import-export industry, especially when you have like an east-west trade, um, they're looking for faster ways to settle payments, more secure ways to settle payments. And so if you think about it, if you're buying, you know, if you're buying a thousand widgets from uh from overseas and you send a bank wire, it's gonna be, you know, let's say three days until that transaction settles. So that means your product's not gonna ship for at least four days probably. If you send them a stablecoin transaction, they receive it in let's say 20 minutes and they can ship today. So for people who are in the import-export business, they're starting to adopt these types of services. But you know, I think over time, if we do a good job of making it seamless, it'll move to any business and then ultimately to consumers. People ask me all the time, when will consumer adoption happen? Consumer adoption will happen when the consumers don't know that they've adopted it. When we've done such a good job of integrating the technologies that they don't even know they're using the technology.
SPEAKER_01:I love that answer. So when you look at your customers today, what's the biggest challenge that you're solving for them right now?
SPEAKER_00:If you start at the very basic level, you know, that the digital asset crypto industry effectively got debanked under the prior administration. And so at the very core was just providing banking services to those customers who otherwise could not obtain banking services. And that really had to do with one is you know, there was a an environment in the U.S. where digital assets weren't being supported from a government point of view. And that resulted in a lot of regulatory pressure. And also banks who got involved were ill-equipped to be involved in the space. And so just basic access was the beginning for us. Then we started getting ahead of the other institutions in the space by integrating technologies that set us apart. So, for example, the stablecoin example I gave you, I don't know of another bank in the United States that you can seamlessly receive and send stable coins. I hope that that changes. I don't want us to be the only one. I want it to be the norm in the future. But not only addressing the basic needs of the customer, but then getting ahead of the curve by developing products and services that directly resonate to them. So, for example, at FV Bank we have a product called FVNet. FVNet is a product that's widely used by our customers. It's a peer-to-peer interbank settlement system. So because we have a lot of digitally native companies on our platform, they do a lot of trading with each other. So you have a buyer and a seller at the institutional level for digital assets. With FVNet, our clients can settle to each other interbank in real time. So this is a feature that really appeals to that group. And we're solving a problem from there, which is the speedment of the movement of money. So with stablecoins, you have speed of movement of money outside of the bank. With FVNet, you have the speed and move of moving money inside the bank. And so we're solving problems by giving them basic access and creating features which appeal to their needs. Um and also those features are leading to more generalized adoption.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, what would you say differentiate you guys from your competitors out there, which you know you may not have direct competitors in some segments, but certainly your competitors might be, you know, real-time payments and the FedNow and you know other ways people move money. So what differentiates you guys?
SPEAKER_00:You know, I think it's uh focus and expertise. Of course, you know, the our products differentiated, and we can keep talking about that, but really it's focus and expertise. You know, there's a lot of banks that specialize in certain areas of industry. You know, there's banks that are really good at writing mortgages, and there's banks that are really good at agricultural lending, and and on and on. And so typically you'll find outside of just the average community bank on the corner, banks that are trying to grow and be innovative, they specialize in something. And we specialize in fintech and blockchain. And so we've built our culture, our processes, our products and features, um our risk management, everything is built around supporting fintech and blockchain companies. And so that's really the main thing that differentiates us because that means that we spend our time and our energy, we listen to the customers, we look at features and you know, potential features that customers would need, and we build and support around that. So I think that's the main differentiator is that FV Bank, which stands for FinTech Ventures, is really an institution focused around supporting that vertical and making sure that we're good at it.
SPEAKER_01:And you've mentioned compliance and and you just said the word risk, which you know has to be a huge challenge. So how do you address that? How do you stay on top of, like you said, ever-changing regulatory environment? One administration thinks one way, another comes in, thinks differently. How do you make that kind of a core competency of your company?
SPEAKER_00:I think the first phase is that you know there are there are a lot of existing regulations that are generally applicable to our business. And I think that you know, some institutions have forgotten that. If you look at banks who've been involved in particular industries where they will end up getting consent orders, for example, and it doesn't matter if it's crypto and blockchain, could be banks who decided to support the cannabis industry or other high-risk industries. You've got to pay attention to the basics, right? The BSA AML regulations broadly apply, it doesn't matter what vertical you work in. And so making sure that you have a robust BSA AML program is the foundation that every bank needs to think about. Then you get into what are the specific risks in the vertical that you're participating in. In our case, our specific risks are related to digital asset transactions. And so we've adopted the best-in-class technology for detecting uh anti-money laundering, sanctions screening, fraud, and risk signals related to digital asset transactions. So we use technology that allows us to look at a uh a sender of a transaction or look at a beneficiary of a transaction, look at the history of their wallet, look at the history related to that particular user and determine whether or not that transaction is one that we would permit inside of the bank. And so integrating those technologies directly into our core, into our monitoring systems is key. We do everything that you would do under traditional BSA email, and then we layer on top of that specialized monitoring related to those digital asset transactions.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about the future now. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunities in your segment of payments?
SPEAKER_00:I I don't think we can deny that the stablecoin boom is gonna be here with the passing of the Genius Act, which I think is a brilliant move by the U.S. government to set down regulation for stablecoin payments and to allow money to move more freely over the internet. I think that that's going to be a huge boom for many industries. It's gonna enable more frictionless banking, it's gonna enable more frictionless peer-to-peer payment settlement. And as part of that, there's emerging technologies. For example, there's a technology called X402, it's a pretty hot topic these last few weeks. X402 is not actually new. It was a protocol built into the original um HTTP protocol for the you know, for basic internet connectivity. But what X402 is going to allow is for a stable coin payment to be made from one person to another or machine to machine without intervention. I'll spend one minute going into it if you don't mind, and then you can maybe grasp the power of it. But essentially what X402 is going to allow is um let's say you have an internet resource like content. You you pr let's say you produce a weekly piece of content, and people would normally pay for that content. In today's world, the customer has to go to your website, they have to sign up, they have to enter their Visa, MasterCard, whatever payments, PayPal, whatever you accept. And then you as the content provider, you have to go out to Visa or MasterCard or PayPal, and you have to get an authorization for that transaction. And then you have to settle that transaction with the network that you've processed that payment for. So you effectively have a man in the middle that is deciding does this person have credit limit, do they have balance? Is there are we going to approve the transaction, deny the transaction, etc.? And then you have to collect from that party. With X402, it truly is peer-to-peer. And so if you're a content provider and you want to sell your piece of content for a dollar, instead of accepting payment cards or similar bank transactions with a man in the middle, x402 will allow you to pay directly in the transaction with a stablecoin. So if I'm the buyer, I connect to your website, your website responds with a 402 that tells me that it's$1 to access the content. I have a wallet, my wallet tells me, hey, it's$1 to access this content. I approve it. Transactions done. Peer-to-peer direct settlement, no man in the middle, and there's no chargebacks. Period, it's done. That type of technology is going to completely change the way that commerce works. Um, the ability for the buyer and the seller to directly settle payment over the internet without intermediary is going to be a huge driver of the industry. And that's just one example of how stable coins will grow.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we could probably talk for hours about the opportunities with stable coins. It's it seems to be all the buzz. And well, we're recording this year actually at Money2020, so I'm sure that that's been what the buzz in the hallways in all the conversations. I know that the conversations that I have, it always is. So for your company, though, what does success look like, say, in the next three to five years?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I feel very fortunate that we've spent the last four years building foundation. We are quite unique in that we are a licensed auditory institution with a lot of digital asset capability. And so, you know, the first thing is just build on what we've already built. We have a great foundation to grow the business from. Um, we don't need shiny new toys, as I like to say, to grow the business. And so as adoption increases, we are well positioned to grow the core business. With that said, we are a Visa issuer. Um we plan to grow that business. In 26, we're launching our BIN sponsorship program. We can issue cards with Visa in about a hundred countries. We historically in FEBank have not supported third-party programs. And we've now started to sign clients into third-party prepaid programs. Um we think that with the capability that we have mixing traditional finance, digital assets, and our card issuing, that some really interesting programs will come out of um FE Bank in 26. And we're gonna work some of the you know with some of the largest multinational partners to support those programs. We're also planning on launching Bitcoin securitized lending in 26, which we think that the market for individuals and companies and uh large institutions holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet, they're gonna be long-term holders of those assets. They're not gonna be uh the I'm not talking about the people trading, I'm talking about people who are holding Bitcoin like they would hold gold for long term. Um, those companies are going to leverage the equity that they have in those assets, and so we'll be launching a Bitcoin securitized lending program where clients will provide Bitcoin as collateral for loans. This will allow them to leverage the equity that they have in their Bitcoin and maybe buy more Bitcoin, maybe finance their business. It'll be interesting to see what all the use cases come out of that. But we'll be launching that business subject to regulatory approval. But we think that there's a clear map when you see that you know large Tier 1 institutions just yesterday were announcing their Bitcoin lending programs. But we're very excited about that. We've been setting up some strategic partnerships to help us grow that business. And we think that'll be very consistent with our strategy of being a financial institution that not only provides traditional products like loans, but tying those into our digital asset capability.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, we've talked about one of the biggest trends in the industry, of course, stable coins. But beyond that, what are the other biggest trends that you see that's that are really reshaping the payments industry?
SPEAKER_00:I hate to jump back to it, it's and it's very fresh, but I think XO X402 is going to have a massive impact on the industry. You're going to see the Giants. Uh, I think there was a press release yesterday. I'm here at Money2020, as you know, there's hundreds of press releases, but there was a press release yesterday that caught my eye, which was PayPal and Google to support agentic shopping. You know, I think the combination of digital assets, AI, and existing e-commerce, we're going to see mega transformations. I mean, the idea that you could have an agentic shopping agent, um, I think it's gonna be very real. I think it won't be long until you just program an agent and say, every Monday buy me a dozen eggs and a and a gallon of milk, and it goes out and buys it, and it shows up on your porch, and you don't break out your credit card, you don't go to Amazon.com, it all just happens for you. I I I don't think that's science fiction anymore. And part of that will happen because of partnerships like PayPal and Google with existing commerce sites, and part of it will happen because pr completely new startups that we haven't heard of are gonna figure out how to make our lives easier. You know, I think things like machine to machine, we really haven't, you know, touched on that, but I think as a payment method, you know, pulling your if you I'm a Tesla owner, you pull your Tesla in, you know, you plug in, it charges. I think now that when you pull in, the machine's gonna talk to the machine and it's gonna negotiate payment on your behalf without a credit card, um without a bank behind it, and it's all gonna be done on chain. So I think machine to machine payment, agentic payments, I don't think it's science fiction. I think the technology is here now. And you know, I'm looking forward to seeing the companies who implement those technologies. And the role that FB Bank wants to play is we want to, you know, we want to be the selling the picks and the axes to the innovators, the fintech companies who develop those products, and we give them the underlying support that they need.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. A couple final questions. So if you could go back and give yourself some advice at the start of your career, what would that advice be?
SPEAKER_00:Oh wow. That's a great that's a great question. I think that when you're a young entrepreneur, you know, sometimes you get blinders on. You get so caught up in the widget that you're trying to invent that you lose sight of the big picture sometimes. So I think that stepping back when you're building something, looking at the broader market, understanding how you know your product or service that you're building is going to impact the broader market. Um, I see a lot of times where, and because we deal with a lot of entrepreneurs at FE Bank as well, they'll build something that's too narrowly focused. It becomes not a product but a feature of something else in the future. And so trying to have that broader vision. And you know, I it doesn't apply to me, but general entrepreneurial advice is that I I work tirelessly, I love what I do, I've always uh you know, I've always loved what I do, and that's what makes doing what I do so easy. It's enjoyable. So find something that you really are interested in, you know, that you can read about, study, learn. If you find something you really like, it's not work. And that's probably been I would say it's the opposite of your question. The biggest blessing of my career is that I've always worked in an area that endlessly interested me. And so it doesn't feel so much like work.
SPEAKER_01:No, I I love that. Uh all that advice and and that final part is very important. And, you know, people listen to that, you know, everyone would be a little happier, I think, if they could find those things they're passionate about and enjoy doing. But one final question. So, what would you want people listening today, what would you want them to take away from this conversation?
SPEAKER_00:That digital assets and crypto are not just a science experiment anymore. It's getting woven into reality for us. I like to, you know, go back to early email days. I remember setting up my pop three account and getting a hundred errors because it wouldn't work, and then we had IMAP. And what's the difference between Pop3 and IMAP? And how do you configure your you know your browser to get your email and just all of those um inconveniences of this new technology called email? And now today, you know, we send email, hundreds of them a day, around the world seamlessly. You can just go to Gmail and get a free account. And you know, it's just basic need of life now. And so crypto's getting to that same inflection point where yes, it's clunky, yes, it's misunderstood, but the real acceleration and the adoption is going to come uh pretty quickly, I think. And it's gonna benefit a lot of people. It'll make things that we think are difficult today easy and seamless tomorrow, just like you know, the internet has changed our lives so much, social media has changed our lives so much. We all take the underpinning technology for granted. And I think the same thing's gonna happen with digital assets. The ability for money to move over the internet, the ability for just the ability for people to more freely send money. If you want to send money overseas today, it's at least a one-day event through a banking transaction. The ability to send money overseas in seconds or minutes, it is going to change the way that commerce happens. And so I I think we're at that point where real change is gonna happen. I'm looking forward to the current administration passing the Clarity Act. I think that will be very helpful to accelerating growth. It'll help regulated businesses understand the guidelines under which we can, you know, we can enter that inflection point of the industry. And so that's very exciting.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, Miles, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So thank you so much for being here today. I know your time's very valuable, so I really do appreciate you being on the show. Thank you very much for having me. And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.