Mountain Talks - The CfC St. Moritz Podcast

Chris Maurice: Stablecoins in Emerging Markets

Season 1 Finale: Building the Payment Infrastructure of the Emerging World with Yellowcard Dominating stablecoin transactions across 20 African nations, Yellowcard shut down its consumer app earlier this year. The future is B2B: an infrastructure play now scaling beyond Africa across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East alongside strategic integrations with partners like Visa and PayPal. Yellowcard is proving to be the underlying rails for financial transactions in emerging markets. In the Season 1 finale of the CfC St. Moritz Mountain Talks, Nicolo Stöhr sits down with Yellowcard CEO & Co-Founder Chris Maurice to discuss the hard reality of building high-trust financial rails. They address: * What drove the strategic decision to shut down the consumer app and pivot entirely to B2B? * What do most people get wrong about operating in emerging markets? * How do you navigate compliance across 30+ distinct regulatory frameworks where none previously existed? Stream the episode for Chris Maurice's strategic perspectives on what it actually takes to deploy financial services across the world's fastest-growing economies. 🎙️ Discover more about Yellowcard: https://yellowcard.io/ And CfC St. Moritz: https://cfc-stmoritz.com Chapters: 00:00 – The myth of "banking the unbanked" and defining true utility 04:53 – The decision to shut down a consumer app and pivot to B2B 08:43 – Why traditional giants like Visa and PayPal choose to partner rather than build 13:00 – Navigating M&A offers and the long-term vision of building toward an IPO 14:21 – Leveraging regulatory excellence and "on-the-ground" presence as a competitive advantage 19:26 – Predictions for 2026: Institutional adoption and stablecoins driving the industry's future 22:27 – Why emerging markets, not the West, are the true leaders in crypto adoption

J. Christopher Giancarlo: The Global Race for Digital Currency

J. Christopher Giancarlo is the former Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and an influential voice in the global dialogue between traditional finance and digital ecosystems. As a CfC St. Moritz Ambassador, he provides a high-trust bridge between policy frameworks and the technological frontier, focusing on the strategic long-term implications of digital assets. In this episode, Nicolo Stöhr and Chris Giancarlo examine the accelerating fragmentation of global financial technology. They explore the core intention of the U.S. GENIUS Act (May 2025) as a mechanism for dollar tokenization, contrasting it with the European Union’s pursuit of a bank-based Digital Euro, a move Giancarlo argues is rooted in a desire for political cohesion rather than private-sector innovation. The conversation addresses the "surveillance frontier," evaluating how the expansion of the Bank Secrecy Act to digital rails impacts individual liberty. Giancarlo offers a clear perspective on why the future of the internet of finance will be defined by the friction between free-market standards and sovereign technological blocks. Recorded at CfC St. Moritz, January 2026.

Carolyn Weinberg: Moving TradFi into DeFi

Carolyn Weinberg is Chief Product & Innovation Officer at BNY: The world's largest custodian bank managing $52 trillion in assets under custody and administration. Drawing on her experience leading tokenization at BlackRock, including the launch of the BUIDL fund, she joined the 241-year-old institution in early 2025 to build the infrastructure the digital asset industry needs to scale. In this episode, Nicolo Stöhr speaks with Carolyn about what that transition revealed about where the real gaps in digital asset infrastructure lie, how BNY is positioning itself as the neutral backbone for stablecoins and tokenized assets, and what the path from T+1 settlement to near-instant blockchain settlement actually looks like from the inside of a global systemically important bank. They also discuss BNY's November whitepaper "The Digital Revolution", and what Carolyn sees as the most important moves the industry needs to make in 2026. Recorded at CfC St. Moritz, January 2026. Access BNY's whitepaper "The Digital Revolution" [https://www.bny.com/corporate/global/en/insights/download-digital-revolution-financial-markets-report.html] Visit CfC St. Moritz Knowledge Center [https://cfc-stmoritz.com/knowledge-center]for more content and download the most recent CfC St. Moritz Report 2026 with insights from the top decision makers in the Digital Asset industry.