Request Finance Founder Christophe Lassuyt // Web3 Accountant Radio Ep6 Transcript
Christophe Lassuyt is the founder of Request Finance, a all-in-one finance platform for crypto and fiat operations. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Accounting. Plus Payments to 190+ countries. Multi-payee offramp. We got you covered. Join web3 finance club cfo brunch here: https://lu.ma/ka8lhean?tk=tkkq23
Join web3 finance club: https://www.web3financeclub.com/
In this conversation, we dive into:
1. What is Request Finance?
2. Which region is seeing the most activity?
3. Web3CFO club / Web3 Finance club story
4. What is happening in the next 6 to 12 months for Request Finance?
5. Why did Chris decide to enter the Web3 spaceļ¼
6. What is the most important lesson learned in the Web3 space?
7. What is Chris looking forward to in the Web3 space?
And more! __________________________________
Connect with Chris & Request Financeš Linkedin: / christophelassuyt/
Website: https://www.request.finance/
TG: @christophelass
Hi everyone, welcome to the Web3 Accounting Radio, the podcast where we dive into the fascinating world of the Web3 finance and compliance. I’m today’s host Diana and my partner is Wei Xiang. Hi Wei Xiang.
Hi Diana. Hi, today we have a special guest, Chris, come to our podcast and Chris has 10 years of experience as a CFO and in blockchain. He is the CEO and co-founder of Request Finance, the leading invoicing and payment solution for business operation in digital and fiat assets.
Request Finance enables corporations, companies and employees to compliantly pay and get paid in crypto and stablecoin, saving time, money and hassle. Hello Chris, nice to meet you today. Hi, hello, nice to meet you.
Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, and in today’s podcast, we would like to hear some insights and ideas about the professional field from you. And after that, we will explore with you your inspiration for entering the Web3 field and your outlook for the future in the Web3, in the free talk session.
Yeah, today we are very fortunate to have Chris here to join us today. And as you are watching this, if you are in Singapore for Token2049 and you are a finance leader or CFO or CEO, and you have not joined the Web3 CFO brunch, do check the link out, check the link below if you are in the club. If you are not in the club, please do join the club.
It’s a club of 900 plus finance professionals, specially curated in the finance fields. And I saw on the invite link itself that salesperson are not invited to the brunch, so we look forward to a cozy networking session. Yeah, so with that, maybe we can have Chris share a little bit about the crypto invoicing and payments.
So what issues is he trying to solve and what are some of the key issues that he has been solving recently? Yeah, as you said earlier, I have been a CFO before. I’ve been CFO in different countries, including Switzerland, the U.S. and China and Shanghai. And I could see how many people struggle with cross-border payments.
And I basically got into crypto in 2014. I started building on top of blockchain before investing in my first paper. So I’m in need for the technology and especially for the technology that has the power to solve what is going wrong with swift transfers, for example, like whatever is a cross-border payments.
And now fast forward to Request Finance, like with all my background experience and not only good experience, I want to help businesses all over the world to do cross-border payments properly. And there’s a good example of a company that’s helping businesses manage their payments, but not cross-border payments. It’s bill.com in the U.S. with their 5 billion market cap.
I think Request Finance is building an on-chain version of bill.com with cross-border payments as the biggest advantage in there because they are blockchain based. So cost effective, a few cents per transfer and it’s almost instant. And so basically in details, there’s four pillars for Request Finance.
The first one is accounts payable to basically do the spend management of your company. The second one is accounts receivable to issue invoices and to get paid for anyone like big companies, but also freelance people. Then we have payments.
So you can manage payments in crypto with 20 chains with hundreds of cryptos and also to 190 countries in fiat. And lastly, there’s accounting. So we also help with on-chain accounting, basically taking all on-chain transactions and removing the struggles of accountants who are not Web3 geeks.
So we also offer accounting. Yeah. So Chris, so through Request itself, we are able to pay for crypto payments with fiat accounts.
So for example, the day I received, because for example, my blockchain company require cybersecurity audit on my blockchain codes. And in this case, the people doing the cybersecurity audit require crypto as payment, like maybe USDC. So in such cases, we’re using Request Finance, we will be able to pay in USD for these USDC payments because many of those on-chain cybersecurity firms, they might prefer crypto compared to fiat.
Yeah. So, so many companies now prefer crypto. What is happening the most with our product at the moment is the company that want to spend crypto for people and vendors who want to receive fiat.
This is happening a lot. Huge volume, huge growth, double digit growth over the last 12 months. And total volume actually at Request Finance is above 800 million in payments for bills, for employees, for expenses for vendors and so on.
And yeah, there’s both cases on ramp and off ramp of crypto funds. It’s very promising because there’s been huge struggles to do that before. And now we’ve got interesting solutions.
Yeah. Nice. So if it’s possible to share a little, which country or region are you seeing the most kind of activity for Request itself? Because I know that you guys are international company.
Yeah. Singapore, United States, UK and Europe. Those are the big places.
But we’ve got clients in more than 50 different countries on all continents. So basically almost all countries are welcome as long as they use the product properly. I need to emphasize the fact that using Request Finance means that you are usually a CFO or an accountant and you want to have clean and compliant data.
And as long as you want that, then we likely are the best fit out there. Yes. Yeah.
Because I think the key issue is that with a bank itself in a traditional way, we could do payments or receive funds via fiat easily and open a bank account. But there are many banks out there who, once you mentioned you’re in the blockchain world, then I’m sorry, you are not getting a bank account. But with Request Finance, you are able to do such processing and it might solve the initial hurdles where your company might face, where you need to pay certain suppliers.
So I think this is something very important. You know, it’s no news that banks are slowing down innovation in payments. It started when the FinTech wave started to take place at the end of the 2000s.
And then in 2010 and 2011, basically there’s interesting stories where companies like Wise, for example, did not manage to open a bank account anywhere. I know of a very special story to me, a bank in Netherlands, for example, that refused to open them an account strategically, like despite the potential of business, because strategically they don’t have a bank account, they cannot do their operation. Therefore, the bank still can keep doing those high margins, low value business model.
And now what’s happening is FinTechs are okay at the moment, but whatever you’re doing in crypto, it’s usually not okay. There’s often struggles. I think it’s unfair, but at the same time, it’s easy to understand.
They want to preserve their business. And for the businesses who want to do stuff in crypto, they have the right to do that stuff compliantly and we are helping them do that. Yeah.
And I think many, many times it might be just your salaried workers, your bookkeepers, your software engineers. And it’s not a case where something we both agree so far is the compliant. We don’t deal with sanctioned countries.
We don’t do the non-compliant stuff. And that is where a Request actually fits the gap where banks were previously not willing to fill. But with companies like yours around, they are getting more and more open to the idea and we see institutional adoption and more banks slowly coming aboard, especially this year.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s happening a lot with a few new banks starting to be more open with crypto and even with crypto transactions potentially.
So there’s a very interesting thing that are being built. But I must admit that whatever is going to happen in November in the US will probably have a huge impact on worldwide adoption, whether we are going to get mainstream adoption faster or at the same pace as today. Are you referring to the election? Yes, I am.
Yeah, I think it is obvious that if the Democrat Party stays in power, the growth will remain at a decent rate like it is today. And if another party gets the power, then this might become faster. Yes.
Thanks. Thanks for sharing this. Trump made a very good speech at a recent Bitcoin conference and he’s pushing a lot of trying to get the votes of a lot of Bitcoin players.
And I think he has successfully got your vote if you are a US citizen. No, I am not. But yeah, I think people are looking towards that side.
So maybe the other thing that we can learn from you today, other than for crypto invoicing, where we share about what Requests can do. The other one is the Web3 Finance Club, previously known as the Web3 CFO Club. Would you be able to share a little from the starting itself to where it is today? It’s an interesting story because in 2018, I felt quite lonely doing finance in a crypto company and trying to do it right.
I must admit that in 2014, I felt quite lonely doing the crypto finance of the company and did not find a way to do them right. And so basically, my understanding of how things are evolving is that, wow, there’s going to be so many legit and compliant companies that need to touch crypto. How can we help? How can I help myself to do things properly? And I actually started to meet people who were in finance jobs in crypto companies in 2020.
And that’s when we launched Request Finance. What is interesting there is that they also felt lonely. They also lacked resources.
They also lacked proper tooling. They also faced struggles with banks. It’s a struggle and more than that, it’s like a lot of anxiousness.
I think we are solving this. So on the emotional level, we are solving this feeling of being afraid of what we are doing when we want to do things compliantly and it’s challenging. We are basically creating resources and the safest ones.
We are teaching, educating, and basically, people are helping each other. It’s a group that started as a telegram group with just a few CFOs of CFOs at Aave, the Sandbox, a few companies. They started to, with just like 15 or 20 members, they started to have so much engagement that we thought, okay, perhaps we need to organize things better.
At the time, telegram was not great to organize things better. Anyway, we moved to Slack and the online forum. And those are quite active.
I think we’ve got one of the most active finance community, community of finance people, mostly corporate finance, with close to 30% in engagement rates, while the benchmark is 12%. And you said it earlier, we try to accept only people with finance backgrounds, with Web3 experience, ideally C-levels, CEOs, CEOs, CFOs, also accountants, treasurers, people who know what they are talking about. They face the challenges and they can share lots of interesting resources.
And that’s why we do now a non-binding call with everyone, very close, very, very short call, to verify that they are humans. That’s also why we reject 85% of applicants. It’s because if someone is not an accountant or not a finance person, then basically we cannot let them in.
So it’s a very precious community. It’s very important to me. I think it’s very important to the members as well.
And I encourage people who want to learn and share there to apply and join. Thank you. May I know the vision or the mission of this club and whether it keeps the same during the club’s development? The club’s goal, the club’s vision is mainstream Web3 adoption.
And how it is taking place is, so there’s many ways to make Web3 mainstream adoption happen. One of them is individually. Another one is via businesses.
I bet on the businesses to make it happen. I think if all companies in the world decide to adopt Web3, then we have this transition tomorrow morning. And basically, that’s what the club is for.
It delivers people with real jobs at companies in accounting, in treasury, in finance, who are making sure that we get proper tooling, proper compliance, proper regulations, and basically making sure that we can adopt more of this great technology. Now we have close to 1,000 members. It’s funny because over the last four years, there’s been maybe five or six times when we thought, shit, it is a fail.
We’re never going to make it grow. We’re never going to make it be a good community. And it would be tempting to have more people, to have like 10,000 people tomorrow and accept everyone, but that would kill the community.
So we remain very, very strict. It’s cool because we have a good engagement. We try to bring specialists as well, so people who can bring their knowledge.
It’s super, super important. Yeah. Thank you.
So nowadays, when I speak to relevant Web3 finance professionals like yourself, previously when you were a CFO, you were alone in a club because they will reach out to me also to talk about this. And I would say, get into the club. You can look for services over there.
And the other one is, I tell all of them, because I’ve seen some of your members do it and it looks very nice, is they will say, I am a chartered accountant or ACCA. And at the same time, I’m also a Web3 finance member. So I’m telling those people, if you are looking for your next job, and you want to, in a very one sentence way, say you have been in this industry, Web3 finance member is an easy way to tell people that.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s an easy way to learn and get a job.
There’s lots of exclusive job offers just for the club. This is true. Yeah.
And very, very interesting ones. Yeah. So, okay.
So before we go into the free talk session, just to ask one more thing. So Requests, you have done the AP, the AR, and I mean, after that you have been doing accounting, helping with the back office to understand that after AP, AP AR, you are doing accounting. So what is next for Requests? So in the next six months or one year for Requests itself, what can we look out for? Any new features or? So there’s lots of improvements that we are launching.
Our team is fabulous and launching lots of new ways for higher safety, for example. So we recently got insurance. So that makes transactions in Web3 with Request funds safer than any other transactions out there.
Like it is safer than doing a transaction via safe or via ledger wallet because it’s a transaction that should do together with and safe and a ledger wallet and an insurance. So we added an insurance and it’s something that will be even extended over the next few months. And there’s something that is also very, very promising that we are working on.
It’s corporate credit cards. Of course, this is a big need. Interestingly, this is also a challenge.
There’s a few solutions, like local solutions and nothing right yet. We’re trying to build something rush. This will be for next year.
And other than that, I think we have a product that is ready to scale. So our mission, so the Request funds mission, the same as the cloud mission, actually, is Web3 mainstream adoption. And our mission is to make it happen even more.
That’s why we are so proud when we onboard Web2 companies, like companies that have nothing to do with crypto. We onboard them for their crypto operations. They now do crypto operation, but we onboard them for the cross-border payments.
And that is something that we want to do more. And doing this means that the product is being more and more professional. So we have enhanced compliance, enhanced security.
We are improving approval workflows. They are incredibly, they are blockchain-based. So basically, you have the approver, it’s encrypted, and it’s on the blockchain.
If the bill is being rejected, it’s also encrypted and on the blockchain. And so the invoices are immutable. So it’s the best version of what you have as what we call today e-invoicing.
It’s basically like e-invoicing, but better because it’s on-chain and immutable. Yeah. For the insurance, is the Request paying for it? Is the client paying for it? The Request is paying for it.
We are doing everything that we can to make things safe for the clients. And we cover the cost of the insurance. Yes.
Wow. That is something very new, but there is something that shows that the company is all for safety and for customer assurance to know that if you do things properly, there is a higher chance that your funds will be safer. Yeah.
Yes. We also have partnerships with courses. We also share a lot of security tips.
Where basically, I mean, I can talk about the results, but our goal is really to make things safe and safer. I’m aware that we need to reach 100% safety and it’s almost impossible even with the bank. But we already reached that kind of level because there’s been stuff going on like FTX, like UST.
Those things did not affect members of the club as far as I know. I’ve never heard of any member of the club who have been affected by FTX or UST. And there’s two reasons.
The first reason is because Request Finance clients are in the club and Request Finance did not approve UST on the platform. So we did not get UST funds. And there’s another reason is because we are so into security and safety that we share about this topic and we are helping people to make the right choices.
Sounds good. So, I mean, when you network with people in the club, you do have firsthand information of some of the safety compliance and finance issues that is happening behind the scene that we don’t see publicly, even though certain new payment channels or certain new coins might be more popular. Nowadays, as finance personnel, we are usually more conservative and not do risk taking.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It’s very important. And it’s very important to do your own research, especially when it is not your funds. It’s your funds, your problem, right? It’s your company’s.
It’s like your problem, your career is at stake as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Thank you for sharing. I think and I think the happy time flies very quickly. So maybe can we move to the free talk session? Yeah.
And in this session, I have a lot of questions about your inspiration for entering the Web3 field and your outlook for the future. The first question is why did you decide to enter the Web3 space? Yeah, I actually I entered the Web3 space before it was called Web3. That was in 2014.
And in 2014, I did it because as an international CFO, I had experience with transfers in between Switzerland, China, Middle East, Japan, Singapore, like many, many different countries. And it’s basically it surprised me how inefficient treasury and especially cross-border transfers can be even for companies. So when I arrived in the international group where I was at, I would never have imagined how big the how many struggles there is in doing a cross-border transfer for business.
I thought there were solutions, right? Imagine, yes, for an individual, it’s like maybe it’s one percent. It takes seven days. But for business, it’s likely much more efficient.
No, it is not. And even today, it’s still not. A good solution is is crypto.
Crypto is going to replace SWIFT and all other cross-border solutions. I think there’s no more doubt SWIFT is even getting ready with blockchain technology, trying to. Now, we just want to make the transition happen and faster is better.
And so, as I said, and to sum it up, the reason why I entered in Web3 is for the technology, especially for cross-border payments. Yeah, as you mentioned, and you entered this space in 2014, and now it’s 2024. So in this nearly 10 years, I think you created a very professional fan club for the CFOs and you have set up a new solution for the payment.
And can you share one experience or lesson that you have learned in the Web3 journey? And maybe this experience and lesson will be very valuable for the other finance professionals. Yeah, there is one that struck me out and that is incredible. It’s when you know about blockchain crypto, you think that the CFOs in Web3 will want decentralization and we want privacy and we want all the things that feel important to you.
But actually, no, I was surprised and it’s a very important lesson. At first, all they want is to solve their short-term problem. All they want is to make a payment from an end to another end, from a country to another country, whatever it takes.
They just wanted to reach the recipient. And basically, you go back to the basic principles, what they want first, the most important, and privacy and decentralization is second. I think with Request Finance, what we are proving is that CFOs want decentralization, but not per se.
Yeah. Okay. Basically, people do not want decentralization per se.
What they want are the advantages of decentralization. So there is no one who is really thinking, I want decentralization. There is no decentralization maximalist, but there are people who want safety.
And if they want safety, then they might want decentralization because decentralization makes insurance possible, on-chain insurance possible. Or they want a faster transfer. And then maybe they want decentralization after all, because to make a fast transfer from Pakistan to New Zealand, you need a blockchain.
Yeah. I think it’s an important lesson. For blockchain, there was no alternative to SWIFT that I know of.
I think maybe PayPal, but it’s still slightly more complicated. With blockchain, it’s a lot faster. Yeah.
And there was no efficient and cost-effective solution that was a good alternative to SWIFT. Yeah. And this solution, I think, raised the speed for the payment from the crypto to the fiat and the fiat to the crypto.
So what are you looking forward to in the WebSuite finance and compliance area? Sorry, can you repeat the question, please? What are you looking forward to in the WebSuite finance and compliance? I’m looking forward to more regulations. Ideally, more regulations that are easy to follow and that are smoothing the onboarding experience, because I think that’s through regulation that we’re going to get mainstream adoption. Yeah.
So now, I think many countries are setting the regulations about the crypto and the payment now. Yeah, it is happening. Yeah.
Sometimes those new regulations sound complex, but they are complex for us, definitely. I mean, for people who already are in the Web3 world. But they are not that complex for people who are not there, like big corporations, listed companies.
What they need is they need to be reassured. If they know that there is a regulatory failure, then they can do it. If they donāt fill like there is a clear regulatory framework, they will not do it. So ya, it is important.
For mass adoption. Yup
Thank you so much for sharing your insight and experience for us today. For our listeners, thank you for tuning in to the Web3 Accountant Radio and if you enjoy the radio, please subscribe and leave a review. So do you have anything else to add for our listeners? Chris and Wei Xiang
Not for me.
All good. Just in case you want to reach out, you can reach me at LinkedIN or twitter.
We will put it in the description as well.
Perfect
Thank You.