Podcast

 

Ready to navigate volatility with Monex USA?

 

DISCOVER HOW WE CAN HELP YOU                 SEND or RECEIVE PAYMENTS

 

Full Transcript:

David Johnson, Host of CEO Spotlight:

You know, when you have a global economy, which we do, it means moving lots of money very swiftly across an awful lot of borders. Monex USA is part of the big Monex Financial Group, and based on my research, their volume was something like $274 billion last year, 9 million transactions.

John Doyle, the CEO of Monex USA joins us right now. It’s good to have you with us. So, correct my math–am I in the ballpark $274 billion moving around the the world?

John Doyle, CEO of Monex USA:

Thank you, David. It’s a pleasure to meet you and a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, that’s about right.

As you mentioned, we’re part of Banco Monex Group based in Mexico, but I’m in charge of of Monex USA here in the States. We also have sister companies around the world from Singapore to London to Madrid.

Host:

This is a business that’s been around for a long time. I mean Western Union you to sort of dominate moving wiring money around and MoneyGram, which is based here is active in this, but this is an arena that’s really grown over the last decade or so.

John Doyle:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s it, you know, actually the genesis of a company like Monex USA is it goes back a little farther than that actually.

Back when if you were, you know Ford Motor Company or Apple, you’d have a whole room of traders moving payments around the world, or you were getting great service from a JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs.

And then you had these smaller to mid-sized companies who still had great volume that needed to move, and are you know important businesses in our economy, but weren’t getting the service or the rates of exchange that they would get if they were much larger. MSBs like ourselves kind of fill that gap to provide that same service.

Host:

We know we’ve seen a lot of individual movement. We’ve seen it here in Texas for years. Workers would come across the border to work here, then every Saturday after paychecks are paid out, they would wire money back home for them. And that happens all over the world. Turkish workers in Saudi Arabia, for example. Is that still a big part of the business?

John Doyle:

So, it’s a big part of the overall foreign exchange market, but it’s not something that we focus on. We work more with corporates and or institutional clients, but in terms of the amount of overall transactions that go across any border, repatriation is still a big part of it.

The speed with which money can be moved around now is just astounding, and that’s part of the breakthrough. But I guess the next big thing may be some sort of an international currency.

Host:

So we’ve been hearing about this for a long time. And one of the promises of Bitcoin was, well, it’s going to be, you know, a borderless currency and everybody will be paid in Bitcoin. Now nobody, you know, wants to hold it overnight, pay for the risk, but they’re talking about maybe stable coins. Is this a challenge in your business?

John Doyle:

So, I mean, I think we had to stay abreast of everything that could change. We don’t see any crypto or stable coins replacing the US dollar or the euro. If you back up a little bit farther, you talked about maybe like a national or international currency.

You know, the euro was an experiment. That’s gone pretty well for the last 2 1/2 decades or so, maybe 3 decades, which takes a lot of coordination from a lot of different countries. And there are plenty of upsides to it, obviously. The whole idea is to hopefully never have another world war in Europe, that’s a great noble thing to aim for. But, of course it has had some downsides, which we saw in the European debt crisis, trying to get a lot of different opinions on the same page… But overall it’s an accomplishment that the euro is still something that is well accepted and probably the second strongest currency or most used currency in the world.

But you know evolution happens, things change. Crypto is something that’s relatively new in the grand scheme of international currency markets, and right now we don’t see it as a threat to the US dollar or to the euro in terms of how global trade is executed.

However, there’s some innovations that come with it that can help improve the way that we do our business, right. And you mentioned, Stablecoin is one that is something that a lot of our competitors are looking at, and we are too, with the banks looking to see how we can use that technology to increase not only the speed of those transactions but also the transparency.

Host:

Does your business go cyclical with the other cycles in the world economy?

John Doyle:

So it I would say our clients needs are cyclical. I’m actually always really impressed with how many different industries are even in the world. So we have some clients in produce who are more cyclical and we have others who are doing payroll, which is very consistent. Our clients needs can change and we just need to be flexible. But overall, yeah, we’re busy all the time, which is great.

Host:

You must have people sniffing at you all the time too. $274 billion in transactions in 130 countries. You must have 130 countries scrutinizing you for money laundering and illicit money moving across borders.

John Doyle:

Yeah, it’s actually more countries than that. We do 130 currencies, but some of those currencies like the euro touch more than one that one that one country. So yeah, regulation is something that is very important and huge in any financial industry, right. So we have a lot of eyes looking at us.

Being in the United States, of course, we have the federal government, but then also each individual state. So we have to make sure that we’re complying with all of them. And then, yeah, making sure that there’s not any bad actors. So the controls from a compliance standpoint and a regulatory standpoint are at the utmost in a business like ours.

Host:

So tell me about your tenure. You’ve been there and you were a trader. I mean all the trading floor. You’ve been there 20 years. You’ve been CEO for a year. How do you make that transition? Because you’ve got, you’ve got all these people surrounding you that, you know, you used to be in football pools with or grilling in their backyard and all of a sudden you’re the boss. That’s tough. That’s one reason companies sometimes will go outside to recruit a CEO.

John Doyle:

Yeah, it is. It was a, it was a change. As you mentioned, I was kind of a salesperson right out of college here and then moved on to the trading desk. So I do have some relationships that are long-term. My boss has been my boss for I think 14 years. And then I’ve been the boss of a couple of people, including Juan, who’s sitting next to me, for a decade plus. Finding that balance between having a real good human connection and a history together, but then also being the boss is a tough one to make sure you’re straddling and doing both things.

One of the great things about Monex in general is that we have a lot of employees who have been here for a long time and have some tenure with each other, and that comes with some trust. Even if an end result isn’t exactly what we were looking for, there’s a trust in that other person that they’re working as hard as they can to get the best outcome and and then we live to fight another day.

Host:

So all the world financial markets are watching the Federal Open Market Committee, which is going to make a decision about what they think of the economy and interest rates. And then the president’s going to meet with Xi from China on Friday and there are all sorts of geopolitical concerns, it seemed to be moving. You know, I watched the euro go back to the highest level since April. Do you all have to pay attention to these things?

John Doyle:

So now you’re now you’re talking to what really gets me up in the morning, which is the market stuff and talking to clients about markets, especially with my with my trading background. So we absolutely do need to pay attention to that, Monex in general. I’m still part of the trading desk here, and we’re often number one in the world for Bloomberg’s currency rankings in terms of forecasting.

So it you know it’s a guess, but it’s an educated guess. If I really knew where the euro was going to be in a month or two, I would not have to work, right, I’d be on my mega yacht somewhere, but we are paying close attention to it.

Currently the stock market’s doing, you know, fantastic, and that’s getting all the headlines. But underneath it, there is a lot of worry in the market. On the geopolitical side, there are a couple wars that are seemingly never ending now, and we have inflation still ticking up with the labor market softening.

And then we now we have the Federal Reserve as you said tomorrow coming through with their decision. It’s widely expected that they’re going to cut rates by 25 basis points. There’s some noise around a 50 basis point cut that won’t happen. But below that or kind of underneath that, which we have to watch, is the politics. Entering into the Federal Reserve with the current administration putting some pressure on Jerome Powell and the rest of them.

Is the feds independence still there, or is it becoming a little more murky? And what does that mean for the dollar? There’s a lot of moving parts.

Host:

I guess a monetary trading desk was never sort of a nine to five job, but it really is 24/7, 365 now.

John Doyle:

Oh, absolutely. I mean the the world doesn’t stop spinning, right? So anything that happens here in the US, we are seeing still obviously. We’re the biggest economy in the world and what we do matters. You know, they always say if the US sneezes, the world catches a cold. But right with the time zones, it’ll move, it’ll move to Asia and then back around to Europe. And of course the president’s Twitter account or or social media is firing off at all hours of the day. So currency markets do not close like the stock market does—during the week anyway. So we are on call all the time.

Host:

John Doyle is the CEO of Monex USA. Thank you very much for the time, sir.

 

LISTEN ON WEBSITE

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC