How Banks Can Make Stablecoin Payments Safe & Compliant with Peter Glyman, Founder & CEO at Coinbax | Episode 486

Final settlement sounds great until you’re the one holding the fraud and compliance risk. That tension sits at the heart of my conversation with Pete Glyman, Founder and CEO of Coinbax, where we explore what it will actually take for stablecoin payments to work for banks, credit unions, and serious fintech programs.

Pete shares his path from building and selling a fintech platform to leading digital asset strategy work, and why the regulatory climate and the rise of blockchain, tokenization, and stablecoins pushed him back into founder mode. We get concrete about the real blockers to adoption: not speed, but controls. We unpack how smart contracts can support payment workflows people already trust, including escrow, lockup periods, delays, and even reversibility, while layering in fraud mitigation, OFAC screening, and multi-party account verification. The goal is simple: make on-chain payments feel safe, compliant, and operationally usable inside existing bank compliance systems.

We also look forward. Pete explains why cross-border payments are an obvious early win, why domestic “wire-like” payments could be rebuilt with programmability, and why agentic payments could create an entirely new machine-to-machine economy. We close with a direct challenge to payments leaders: stop waiting, start tinkering, and learn the rails firsthand.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:14

We will also hear stories from our guests about their stories.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Twitter today's podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Pete Kleiman, the founder and CEO of Coinback. So, Peter, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Happy to be here, Greg. Appreciate you having me on.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Well, look forward to the discussion. But before we dive into your career and 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_02 0:41

Sure. I'm a New England, New England boy. I grew up in Massachusetts, Connecticut, a little bit of time in Rhode Island. Today I live in Little Town Essex, Connecticut, with my wife and kids. That's a little coastal community. Great place to uh build a fintech

From New England To Fintech

SPEAKER_02 0:55

crypto payments company.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Awesome. So if you don't mind, can you walk us through your professional journey and maybe tell us a little bit about why you started Coinbacks?

SPEAKER_02 1:03

So for the most part of my career, I've been in FinTech. So like probably the last 20 plus years. Started my first company back in 2007, Gizia, which was a personal financial management company, co-founded that. And we started off as direct consumer product, but ultimately

Building And Exiting A Fintech

SPEAKER_02 1:20

grew the company through partnerships where we ultimately white labeled the solution for banks and credit unions. So if you think, you know, at the time you had Quicken and Mint and Credit Karma and other kind of third-party fintech challengers that were even at that point, you know, starting to disintermediate the relationship that banks would have with their customers. We were the solution to that. So we would white label our product, integrate it into digital and mobile banking, worked with most of the digital banking companies, the cores, and then ultimately we were acquired in 2019 by Jack Henry. At the time, we had about 700 banks and credit unions on our platform, about 10 million users. And then uh from there, I joined, after the acquisition, I joined the Jack Henry Corp strategy team where I got to work on emerging tech, fintech partnerships, payments. And one of the areas that I got to spend some time was in digital assets. So I owned our digital asset strategy at Jack Henry for the last five years or so, which you can imagine lots of starts and stops with regulatory lack of clarity. But you know, had the opportunity to work with some really innovative companies, some banks and credit unions that were leaning in. Ultimately, a lot of it got put on the back burner for a while until last year with uh Genius Act. That really changed the climate. And for me, I I always knew I had another, another company in me, the startup. And the question was, what was it and when? And I think the the big signal for me was I I had already had a strong interest in what was going on in the DeFi space, the decentralized finance blockchain world. And being able to think about how that applies towards to traditional finance was really interesting to me. And so kind of seeing that, seeing what was happening last year, it was it was clear to me that what was happening with blockchain, stable coins, I'll even throw in a gen dick. You know, these are technologies that were going to be monumental shifts that would probably be the future foundation in terms of like a tech stack for financial services. So that was something I wanted to be part of. So brushed off the entrepreneurial hat and got back at it, started thinking about some ideas and ultimately led us to Coinbacks. And so yeah, so it's an exciting time to be an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Yeah. Well, tell us about Coinbacks. What does the company do?

SPEAKER_02 3:29

So one

Why Stablecoin Payments Need Controls

SPEAKER_02 3:30

of the things that you know I was I was coming up against quite a bit, you know, when I was at Jack Henry and, you know, I was talking with folks on the embedded payment side. I was the guy carrying the stable coin flag and working with whether it was RTP, FedNow, wires, faster payment rails, I'm the guy saying next best routing, all things lead to stable coin in payments as a as a rail. And a lot of my colleagues that were more experienced than me have been specifically in payments for a long time. You know, hey Pete, instant settlement's great, but there's a reason why only of those that adopted Fed now, 80% are receive only. There's still this kind of gap in faster payments and risk and fraud. And then they hear on-chain blockchain settlement is final, irreversible, and that creates areas of concern. So a lot of the questions I would get from folks would be, hey Pete, how do you address these particular challenges? And for me, being I think a little closer to the metal on it, I'm like, well, stable coins are actually designed to address these challenges in a programmatic way using what's called smart contracts, which are essentially software programs that exist on the blockchain to help orchestrate a payment to determine what it should do. And so, you know, while a lot of people were focusing on wallet infrastructure, custody, stable coin sandwich models where you have on and off ramps, I didn't see too many people focusing on compliance and controls at the transaction level. So that was the driver. A little bit of it stemmed from we were looking at e-commerce, or I was looking at e-commerce. You know, some of the questions were like things like chargebacks, reversibility, if we start to use stablecoin payments as an alternative to a card rail. So I wrote a white paper right around this time last year exploring how you could mirror some of the similar types of payment workflows that we see in traditional payments or card payments, but specifically for stablecoins. So focused on escrow, lockup periods, reversibility, liquidity to support instant settlement, and what it would take to make these payments look and feel like payment systems that people are familiar and comfortable with today. After I did that, I started thinking a little bit more about other use cases. And one of the areas that tend to gravitate to more is more on the institutional and B2B side. So while I initially focused on kind of that pay-by-bank e-commerce model or commerce play, I started thinking more about just like high-value B2B payments and how could we stand up next to like RTP and FedNow, a stablecoin rail that has the same kind of controls in place. So ultimately, long story longer, what Coinbacks is is a controls layer that sits basically within the payment orchestration of a stablecoin transaction that adds things like reversibility, delays and settlement, third-party compliance checks, fraud mitigation, OFAC screening, multi-party account verification. And all these controls exist within a smart contract that then report back to an existing compliance platform and effectively allow the compliance folks at a financial institution to get comfortable with the idea of moving money on-chain in a safe and compliant way. So it's kind of a unique take on the approach. I think today, most of that is still being solved. Compliance is being solved at the edges. I really believe that in the next few years, every bank account will have a wallet address, like a digital asset wallet address that could be used for moving digital assets and stable coins. But for now, most transactions are done in that stable coin sandwich model where you have a fiat to crypto stable, you have to fiat again in settlement, which is in many ways very much like a correspondent banking type workflow, and it looks and feels that way. And you still have a counterparty that you can trust or rely on if something goes wrong and you need to unwind it or back out of it. What happens when a transaction is going to not just another customer at another bank, but a customer at a fintech, or ultimately maybe a customer that has their own self-custody wallet and they're managing themselves? Well, you can no longer count on counterparties to handle the risk mitigation. So where does it sit? To me, it sits on-chain. It sits programmatically between the wallets when you do those transactions. And that is a scalable solution going forward, regardless of entity that's sending or receiving those payments.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Okay. Well, what's the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?

SPEAKER_02 8:12

I'd say risk and compliance. You know, there are use cases where the programmatic characteristics of a smart contract can do some interesting things that uh might be more akin to like uh a payment workflow integrating with the ERP system, trade finance, settlement, escrow, time or event-based payouts. Smart contracts are wonderful for those types of use cases. But I think the where we're seeing the the majority of the interest just from a very practical perspective is okay, we want to transact with stable coins. We understand that they have some superpowers that we don't get from traditional fast payment rails, albeit 24-7, no limitations on amounts. You know, there's some really interesting characteristics. So I think what we're finding is instant settlement or speed isn't the thing that most instant payment needs are about. It's not always about subsecond. I mean, maybe in in different use cases, capital markets, investing, where that atomic quick settlement is critical. You know, for most transactions, especially B2B, it's okay to have a little bit of a pause on those transactions. So for banks to truly adopt, or where I think for us to see adoption at scale, there has to be good compliance and risk procedures in place. So, how do they do that? How they how can they integrate that into the systems they have today? How can they make it look and feel like the models that they use? And so for us to be able to build these different essentially control templates based on what works for the financial institution is something that they need. So that's that's an unlock. And it's still early. So I think what we're finding is that many financial institutions haven't gotten to that step yet. So we're I think we're a little early, but we're helping educate a market, we're getting out there. We're working collaboratively with a lot of the wallet and custody infrastructure providers that recognize that this is a a piece of the puzzle that's important for delivering a total solution. So it seems to be very well received.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Sort of skating to where the puck's going, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Absolutely. Absolutely. I say like the wave's coming, I want to make sure I'm in the water, suited up with my board and yeah, ready to go, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Yeah, and it's definitely, definitely coming. So, what would you say differentiates you guys from your competitors, which you may not have direct competitors per se, maybe you do, but certainly there's a way that people have to do business. And today, obviously, you're different than what they're used to doing. So, so what's your differentiator?

SPEAKER_02 10:40

You're right. There isn't a lot of competition doing what we're doing. There are certainly pieces of it, right? I think one of the things that we do is we give the control to the financial institution. So compliance and risk is being addressed in many different ways. Sometimes at the protocol layer, you know, with the blockchain network. As I mentioned before, it's being done with the correspondents that are on and off ramping those assets and ensuring it. But at the end of the day, if you're a bank or credit union financial institution, compliance is ultimately your responsibility and mitigating risk is your responsibility. So there's an interest in having a solution that they own and that they can layer on top of some of these other products that are out there. And I think it it helps future-proof them as well. So as I mentioned, if if a lot of this compliance is being done at the on and off ramp, what happens when the transactions are no longer going through that on and off ramp? And to me, that's where it starts to exist more at the wallet and the transaction level. So to your you know, skate where the puck is going, I think that's a strong competitive advantage for us in terms of like future-proofing the technology, being ready for how we see this growing. Also, we work well with a lot of the companies that are in this space. And so, you know, we try to take a this isn't really a competitive product, this is complementary to so many of the solutions that are out there today. So we want to be part of an ecosystem that's growing as a whole and holstered up wherever we can.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

Okay. And I I assume that you integrate into the cores that are out there today. I mean, there's a handful of big ones, right? I'm I'm assuming that that's part of the strategy.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Absolutely. Uh with my you know, my first company, Gizio, 80% of our growth came through core and digital banking partnerships. So distribution was certainly part of our business strategy. And I'd say it is the same today with what we're building at Coinback. So, you know, larger financial institutions that own their own tech stack, they might have the luxury of being able to pick and choose who some of their partners are. And some of that is true also with the large cores and the long tail of the banks, credit unions in the U.S. But if you really want to reach that customer base, it has to go through the cores

Partnerships Through Cores And Vendors

SPEAKER_02 12:55

and the digital banking vendors and the payment service providers that are already working with those customers today. So we'll look to win direct relationships with banks and credit unions and other kind of other classes of financial institutions and fintechs, but for us to really reach that addressable market, you know, having alignment with the cores is really important.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Okay. Well, let's talk about the future a little bit. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunities in your segment of payments, if you want to call it that?

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Sure. So the natural place that everything seems to kind of lean towards is on cross-border payments right now. That's that's where the the clear use case is for many as it relates to stable coin infrastructure. The number of steps, if you can take a transaction from six steps to four, that's that's a win, right? You can take it from seven to three. So there's a there's enough, I'd say, friction in that transaction that can be reduced through a stablecoin payment, even with a stablecoin sandwich model where you have a domestic on-ramp token to a particular corridor where you're settling in. So that's where I think we see a lot of the short-term growth. But there are some really interesting domestic use cases as well. Some of the banks we're talking to, if you look at you know the workflows around a wire today, fairly laborious still, some strong limitations on you know when and how these transactions could be sent. Fraud's a concern. So to me, there's opportunities to really kind of combine some of the best of different payment rails to create a new, better instant payment that's similar to like a wire, if you want to call it that. But think of like ACH to a tokenized asset that can then be programmed to do certain things or have to meet certain requirements before it settles on RTP. Right. So all that could be a domestic payment workflow that could look and feel like a wire, but with all the benefits of 24-7 and programmability and perhaps reducing some of the operational inefficiencies that you might see

Where Stablecoins Win Next

SPEAKER_02 15:00

with the wire today. So I think we'll see some opportunities domestically around new payment models where stable coins are a little more front and center, in part because of the programmability characteristics of them. We're already seeing it with card companies adopting stablecoin infrastructure for improving efficiencies, liquidity, and settlement. So I think a lot of it, if you look at what we're seeing with blockchain, stablecoin tokenization, this tech is really a modernization of what we're seeing, what we've had for the last 50, 60, 70 years. And so it's in large and part, it's a technology investment, improving financial institution as a whole. So I think we'll see a lot of the growth just in terms of general tech investment and being something that would future-proof most of these financial services companies. For us, cross-border, we have domestic use cases. There are the programmatic pieces, you know, like uh escrow-related opportunities, you know, that are more around event-driven payouts. We focus primarily on the payment space, but we've had some interesting conversations around mortgage settlement, escrow agreements, insurance payouts. Like some of these things make sense for being on-chain and being programmatic. But I think our wheelhouse is really more on the um the payment workflows and and ensuring that a payment is safe, reversible, and compliant.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Okay. Well, what does success look like for uh your company over, say, the next three to five years?

SPEAKER_02 16:25

I would love for Coinbacks to be the company that pretty much anybody that's operating with digital payments thinks of from a smart contract, safe and sound service provider that that can ensure that they've got a good compliant workflow for their payments. So I'd love to have the kind of brand recognition where if you're a wallet provider, a custody service provider, custodian or wallet provider, or a compliance company, a core, and you're building a payment system that involves stable coins, that Coinbacks is always the vendor that or always the company that people are thinking about as to help them with that control layer

Agentic Payments And What To Do

SPEAKER_02 17:05

to ensure that they've got the right infrastructure in place to reduce risk.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Okay. Well, when you step back and look at the payments industry as a whole, what are some of the biggest trends that you think are reshaping the industry? And I know we're talking about one of them, stable coins, obviously. But what else beyond that are some of the biggest trends that you think are reshaping the industry?

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Yeah, I think if we want to look ahead that are will but that will have huge impact, I think, in terms of reshaping agentic payments is a biggie. You know, it's not there yet, but already the tech is, I think, seeing a lot of investment, a lot of interest, much like AI, the amount of capital going into investments in companies and research on AI, there's this parallel track with AI agentic payments. You know, how are machines going to transact with each other? How are we gonna do more high-volume, low-dollar transactions at scale that have efficiencies built into them from a cost perspective? That makes sense. So I think uh we'll see some really interesting development come out of agentic payments. You know, I think the folks that have been in the industry a long time will probably hear that and go, well, you know, I'm not gonna let an AI product have my credit card, which is fair, right? I mean, that's that's kind of a natural reaction. But what happens when you have software that's talking with other software and it's paying for API calls at the transaction level, right? These are very different use cases than I think a lot of what we're kind of accustomed with. And that that's gonna create an entirely new ecosystem of payments that we're gonna see. These true, these true internet payments, machine-to-machine type payments is gonna be pretty fascinating. And if I bring it back to stuff, you know, things that we're working on right now, just global global payments as a whole. Like it's uh the friction associated with moving money across borders or from me to a friend or family member in another country, those barriers are gonna come down. And I really believe that stablecoin and blockchain architecture is democratizing that and changing that entire landscape. I'm sure you've heard the analogy before, but I love it. It's you know, sending money should be as simple as sending an email. And we have the tech, we have the underlying infrastructure to support that. So I think if we think about just you know the speed and convenience in which money can be moved globally, and then you think about what we're seeing with agentic, these are some pretty exciting developments in the world of payments that will have an effect on a lot of the companies and banks and you know institutions that we work with.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Okay. Well, Pete, a couple final questions. So if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that advice be?

SPEAKER_02 19:41

You know, I had this conversation with myself, right, as I'm starting, you know, a new venture. Like, what would I do different? What could I do better? But I it's it's interesting because you're a different person if you go back to who you were, you know, maybe like in my early 30s when I started started my first venture. But the things that immediately come to mind are you don't know everything, right? There's a lot of people that know more than you that are worth listening to and spending time listening to. So I think that's an important lesson for a lot of you know early startups is uh lean on some of the folks that have have put in some reps before. I think that's important. But there's also like there's a little bit of a power in that naiveness of being a young founder, starting up and just making decisions and not feeling like everything has to be perfect all the time. And that's something I remind myself today because I'm a different person and how I analyze things and I might want it to be perfect before it goes out, right? And so there's finding that balance, I think, is uh and that's more of like a founder methodology. I think what I've learned, which I've been able to use as a result, is understanding distribution for a business, finding ways to work with folks early, you know, that can help help you level up. Like those are really important things that sometimes take time to learn.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Okay. Well, what's the one thing that payment listeners that are maybe listening to the show today, what what's the one thing that they should really be thinking about right now?

SPEAKER_02 21:10

So I think you know a couple things. So I I've done a a fair number of panels and sessions with bankers and technology providers that that work in the banking space in payments and other areas that are adjacent. And I think I would say that this is happening, right? This is technology that is that is happening. It's already being adopted by large financial institutions, fintechs, core, small banks. So it's it's it's coming. I would lean in and tinker. One of the things that um I found is that like senior executives within financial institutions and even technology companies aren't empowering or encouraging their teams to tinker and test these new technologies and try them. And so my advice would be to if you're a CEO at a bank listening to this or you're a CEO of a company's in payments, make sure your team Is exploring the technology and getting to understand it. I've asked the question with 50, 60 people in a room, how many have used a decentralized wallet to try to move stable coins? One hand, two hands, right? So I think you really can't understand the tech unless you start to use it. So much like you probably hear people, you know, in the AI conversation, right? It's like you gotta use these tools to understand them and get an appreciation for how they work. So my big recommendation to folks that are in the space is to try the tools, try the experiment with them, put ten dollars on a self-custody wallet and see how easy it is to send money to a friend in another country to test these technologies out. And then I would say that blockchain, stablecoin, tokenization, these technologies are happening. So the sooner you start leaning in and understanding where they fit into your organization, the better position you're gonna have. Because it's gonna be, it is gonna be this wave, right? It's gonna be it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, and it's like, oh, it's here.

Closing And How To Subscribe

SPEAKER_02 23:05

And you wanna be ready for that.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Right. Well, Pete, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So thank you so much for being here. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Greg, thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate the opportunity to share a story with your listeners.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Absolutely. And to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersandpayments.com, 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.