In This Episode
Luther Maday, CEO of Stablecoin Partners and Head of Partnerships at Notabene, joins host Rory Holland on Mighty Finsights for an exploration of aviation, digital assets, and leadership. Drawing parallels from his experience as a private pilot, including the heart-stopping moment when he induced a tailspin in flight training, Luther breaks down how meticulous preparation, checklist discipline, and managing risk translate directly to navigating financial technology. From growing up as an expat across the Middle East to drafting landmark stablecoin legislation in Georgia, Luther offers a candid look at the evolution of money movement. The conversation opens up real-world use cases like cross-border refugee aid, corporate treasury optimization, and travel rule compliance, while reflecting on the human side of leadership, empathy, and grace in business.
Key Takeaways
- Checklists over Instinct: Whether walking around an aircraft or preparing for a high stakes client call, routine verification prevents catastrophic oversights born from overconfidence or distraction.
- Perceived vs. Real Risk: Leaders often fixate on confirmation bias or imaginary worst case scenarios; effective decision making requires separating actual threats from what exists only in your head.
- Solving Cross Border Friction: Stablecoins pegged to the US dollar solve massive currency conversion overhead and physical security risks for displaced populations and international relief efforts.
- 24/7 Corporate Treasury: Digital assets flip global liquidity management on its head, enabling multi national enterprises to rebalance funds instantaneously across borders without waiting on banking hours.
- Regulatory Frameworks Accelerate Adoption: Collaborative drafting of state level legislation gives institutional issuers the governance structure necessary to safely establish roots and operate.
- Building Rapport Across Cultures: Growing up in expat communities cultivates an innate ability to enter unfamiliar environments, respect diverse perspectives, and build rapid, genuine human connections.
- Compliance as an Infrastructure Layer: As digital asset payments expand, automated travel rule mechanisms are essential for seamlessly exchanging sender receiver data without destroying user experience.
- Empathy as Leadership Practice: True leadership in business requires separating human error from intent, applying grace, and avoiding the trap of attributing circumstantial mistakes to character flaws.
Transcript
A Small Library with Every Military Aircraft
Rory Holland: Well, Luther, so good to have you here. Welcome to Mighty Finsights.
Luther Maday: It’s a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me.
Rory Holland: My gosh, yeah. So much good stuff to cover. You shared a few things with me prior to coming on the show, and I wanted to start there. Your background in finance and fintech and payments — and we’re going to dive into the really cool work you’re doing at Stablecoin Partners and definitely want to get into all that stuff. But before we do that, I want to talk about your passion for flying. You shared that you’ve got your pilot’s license. You listed flying and aviation as one of the most enjoyable things for you. Tell me a little bit about that. How did that come to be? Was that out of necessity, or was that just a passion?
Luther Maday: Yeah, I’ve always been enamored by flight in general, to the point where — just growing up, I actually grew up in Saudi Arabia. I’m from India, but I grew up in Saudi Arabia. When you grow up in Saudi Arabia and a lot of Middle East countries, you end up going to schools that are from your country. So I went to an Indian school in Saudi Arabia. There are American schools, there’s British schools, so there’s different schools across the Middle East.
So, a small school. But my point in saying all that is we had a really small library, and the one thing this library did have was a book — at that point probably twenty years old even — of every military aircraft for every country. And so I just sat down and memorized everything.
I was always a huge fan of just flying. I love flying. There’s something amazing about not just how aircraft work, but how the whole industry works. So I’ve been into it for a long time. And then finally, when I got to a point in my life where I could afford to get a pilot’s license, I told my wife, “This is something that I’ve always wanted to do,” and I went ahead and did it. Luckily I had good mentors, and lots of YouTube videos later, watching them, I ended up getting my private license.
Rory Holland: That’s great. Did you lease a plane at that point, or have you purchased a plane? Are you still leasing?
Luther Maday: Not at the purchasing phase yet. One easy way to solve for this — what I do is I’m part of basically a membership. You join the membership and there’s a bunch of pilots in there, and they actually have about six aircraft. So you just rent them as needed for being part of this group, and it actually works out really well. It’s like a flying club. And funny, the flying club was originally started by Lockheed. It’s no longer owned by Lockheed, but it’s still called the LGE Flying Club, which is a Lockheed group.
Rory Holland: Yeah, it makes the investment in a plane — I know this only because I’ve been up in some private planes. My brother got his pilot’s license maybe twenty-five years ago, really out of being tired of driving from southeastern Michigan, Detroit, where we grew up, to northern Michigan where they had a summer home. But their summer home turned into their permanent home over time, and his business was in the Detroit area. So every weekend driving up, he’s like, “This is ridiculous. I can’t do the four-and-a-half-hour drive and come back, Friday night, come back Sunday.” So he did it out of necessity, but he ended up buying a plane about fifteen years ago. Same idea. And I’m curious, what types of planes do you like to fly most?
Luther Maday: Yeah, so with what I’m rated for — right now I’m only rated for single-engine aircraft. So like the Cessna 172s, 182s. It’s really interesting. It’s not a profession per se, but it is definitely a hobby for me. Everybody — whether you take a pilot who’s flying Delta aircraft, or somebody who’s like myself — we all start in the same place, which is this private pilot thing. When you first start out and you get your private pilot license, all you’re really rated for initially is a single-engine aircraft. And then you add ratings to it. The thing that I added to that is I can fly what they call a complex aircraft, which is still single engine, but it can be a turboprop of some sorts, which means the propeller can move around, and it has landing gear — versus when you first learn, you’re learning on the simplest one where the wheels don’t move up and down. They’re fixed. Because they want you to not worry about that and make a mistake. So you start with the simplest one. It’s almost like you start with the unicycle and then maybe you put two tiny — it gets more complex from there. But yeah, I fly single-engine aircraft today.
Rory Holland: Yeah. So you’ve got your instrument rating, I assume?
Luther Maday: I’m not. I’m actually working on that. Yeah, that’s something I’m working on.
Rory Holland: Not yet. Good. Good. I’m curious — my brother bought a Cirrus SR22 turboprop, and I remember getting into it with him, and there’s three computer screens. My brother’s very type A, very meticulous. So we spent 30 minutes taking notes and getting ready. And when he said, “Okay, here’s where you pull the chute. If anything happens to me, you have to pull it, but you have to be very careful, because if you pull it at the wrong time, it’ll rip the plane apart” — I remember getting that instruction, and I’m like, “Okay, I appreciate you letting me know what could happen. I don’t really want to think about that.”
Don’t Wing It: Why Pilots Still Walk Around
Rory Holland: But I’m curious: when you think about your experience learning to fly, and then all the instrumentation, and the things that you’re going to go through next, and the system checks and the preparation — how does that show up for you when you think about business? Is there any correlation in your mind when you think about running a company and all the multiple facets that come with that?
Luther Maday: I love that transition. There’s two things that flying should do and does for you, for anybody. One, it teaches you that regardless of how many times you’ve flown, the checks are important. Every pilot — even when you pull up to an airport and you’re just waiting to get on an aircraft, if you ever look outside, you still see the pilot doing a walk-around. And that’s an aircraft that he just flew in like 10 minutes ago, but they still do a walk-around just to make sure that everything looks good. And then they still have all their checklists that they go through. What that tells you is that regardless of how many times you think you’ve done something, it’s always good to have some touchstone things that you should probably check and verify exist.
That’s something that flying teaches you. And it’s good if you think about it from a business perspective: if you’re walking into a client call, for example, you should probably prep. Don’t wing it. Winging it sounds good, and I went through a phase in my life where I said, “I’m just going to wing it. It’s not a big deal.” But I started to realize that I could tell the difference. And if I could tell the difference, the other party could tell the difference — when I came prepared, and when I was just winging it. So that’s something that does transpose really well from just being a pilot to when you’re actually in a client situation in business. That’s number one.
And number two, flying is one of those things where most accidents happen because of pilot error. And a lot of the pilot error is just oversight. You were distracted, you were doing something else, you’re paying attention to the wrong thing. Or worse yet, you got fixated on the wrong thing. This happens a lot of times — if you ever listen to reports, this one person will be fixated on the fact that one instrument, which is not acting correct, is telling them that they’re descending, for example, when every other instrument is telling them they’re flying fine. And they fixate on that one thing, and then once they get fixated, their brain starts to confirm. So confirmation bias kicks in, and then they’re like, “I am definitely descending. I can feel it. I can feel it.” Even though there’s no other proof. And you get fixated on the wrong thing. So I think that’s something that you have to be aware of in business as well, where either you are distracted by the wrong thing or you’re fixated on the wrong thing.
Rory Holland: Yeah, there’s dramatic impact to making the wrong decision when you’re flying, particularly if you think you’re going down but you’re not, and you make that choice.
Luther Maday: Yeah. There’s a lot of instances where you see that.
Rory Holland: Yeah, and I could see that in business too, where depending on what metrics you’re looking at from a marketing perspective — we look at data all the time. And from a business perspective, we do it too, whether it’s finance or sales pipeline or whatever it may be. And if you’re getting wrong indications, or you’ve got some kind of a bias that you’re leaning into, you can really make some bad choices. You’re probably not going to die, but you might kill the business if you follow those threads, pull those threads too much.
Pointing The Propeller Straight at the Lake
Rory Holland: I wanted to stay on the topic of airplanes and flying, and then we can transition to some other things. You mentioned inducing a tailspin. That sounds terrifying. You mentioned skydiving, which is one thing, but then you talked about inducing a tailspin. That second one really caught me. Can you take me back to that moment? Who was with you? What does it feel like when a plane goes into a tailspin? And then how do you deal with that?
Luther Maday: Yeah. Luckily I did not do it alone, and it’s actually recommended that you never practice it alone. You practice it with an instructor next to you. So there was an instructor next to me. And the whole point is that there’s two things. An aircraft can enter into a tailspin, and it’s almost always because you’ve given it too much input from one side or the other. That’s usually why they enter a tailspin.
Now, when we practiced it, they make sure there’s clear guidelines — you have to be high enough that when you induce the spin, you have enough vertical distance to drop and then you still have at least twelve hundred feet of clearance from the ground, et cetera. There are all these rules in place, and you do that. I think we actually went up to like four thousand and then we dropped. So we had plenty of room below us.
I think the reason why that stuck in my mind is, it’s one of those things where you practice off the field for things that you hopefully don’t incur on the field, when you’re flying by yourself especially, or you’re flying with family or something. But the thing that makes it so vivid in my mind was that when we induced a tailspin — which is for practice purposes, by the way — and by the way, aviation, this is another thing that you learn, is it’s all acronyms. So you learn, because your brain needs to switch to that acronym while everything is going crazy. And so in the case of aviation it’s called PARE, which basically means you pull the power back, ailerons neutral, rudder in the opposite direction of the spin, and then you basically do nothing except push it in the opposite direction of the spin. That’s basically what they’re telling you to do.
But the reason why — when the spin happened, I mean, we knew it was going to happen. We were inducing it ourselves. So it’s not a surprise. But I can never forget the image in my mind, because the only image that was there was, there was a lake underneath us and we’re pointing straight down, and the spinner — the propeller, the outline of the propeller — is against the lake. And I’m like, “That’s an image I never want to see ever again in my life.” That’s the part where I was like, this is so interesting.
And there was one other thing that happened that I never forget. We were — I think we were at like four thousand, or three thousand five hundred or something. And the instructor goes, “Hey, there’s an aircraft roughly at the same altitude that we are.” And we could see that there was an aircraft, we couldn’t see anything else about the aircraft, which means that it was a military aircraft. And we’re looking, looking, and then there’s a C-130 that literally goes from underneath us. And compared to a 172, a C-130 is massive. And I was thinking to myself — he went under us, and I thought to myself, he’s probably thinking, “Look at these jokers in this tiny little aircraft playing around.” And for him to go from under us, I was like — if we had decided to descend or something… because there’s no communication. We’re on a completely different frequency of radio and he’s on a completely different frequency of radio. So it’s not like he would be like, “Hey, I’m going to be going from underneath you.” So I remember — these are some amazing things that just stick with you for the rest of your life when you fly and you’re learning to fly.
Risk-Averse People Practice Risky Things
Rory Holland: Yeah. Well, there’s a certain k of person, I think, that looks for risk and to challenge themselves. And I wonder, what would you say it says about you and approaching risk, whether it’s in the cockpit or in your business?
Luther Maday: Yeah, I would actually argue that pilots are probably some of the most risk-averse people, only because you’re trying to avoid most risk by practicing for it. You’re trying to avoid a bad situation by practicing for it. You’re practicing the spin so that if you ever find yourself even close to that situation, you can fix it. You’re doing checklists because you know, even though you’ve done the same thing a million times — and checklists, you actually verbally call them out. You see this in any movie about pilots, they actually will say, “Ailerons check,” this check, this check. So I think that actually shows how risk averse they are.
In fact, when you’re going through pilot instruction, they actually teach you about the personality types, or the personality flaws, that will result in an accident guaranteed. And one of them is overconfidence — you get in one day and you say, “I’ve done this so many times.” So I don’t think pilots in general — and I’m a hobby pilot, I’m not a professional pilot by any stretch of the imagination, to be very clear — but I would say almost all pilots are indoctrinated to be risk averse. But in order to be risk averse, you have to practice something risky, is how I would put it. So I want to adjust the lens there a little bit.
And then if you look from a business perspective, it’s interesting. I would fall back again to where it’s less about “we’ve done this so many times, let’s just go with it,” and more about preparation is key for any kind of interaction that you’re going to have from a business perspective. Number one. And then, of course, like just anything else — the longer the trip, the bigger the client, the more preparation it takes. The more complex your flight’s going to be, the more preparation you should take.
Always Land With an Extra Hour of Fuel
Luther Maday: And also you should build in a lot of buffers. Using another flying analogy — and we’ll get off the subject for listeners, where “all these guys talked about is flying” — but when they ask you to calculate your fuel requirements, you always calculate with at least 30 minutes of flying time left, or one hour of flying. So you always build in those buffers. And that’s very similar to how business is. If you’re running a business and you’re like, “Hey, this is what my budget is,” you should account for a bad day. Because if you haven’t accounted for it, it’s not a question of if it shows up. It’s just a question of when it shows up.
Rory Holland: Yeah, that’s a great point. Well, I think probably many of the listeners can relate to that when weather occurs, or delays coming into airports, and you’re like, “We circled for an hour and a half and at some point the plane is going to run out of fuel.”
Luther Maday: Right. But they did account for that extra hour of flying around. They knew. And if they didn’t, if they were just like, “We’re just going to put enough fuel to get from point A to point B,” it just isn’t going to work out from that perspective.
Rory Holland: Yeah, really glad we have good licensed experienced pilots that fly the jets that we have to get on. They don’t glide as well as the smaller planes, from what I understand.
Luther Maday: The larger ones, they do glide pretty well. That’s the crazy part. For me, helicopters are always the ones I’m like, “I can’t get into that one.” Because once that thing stops spinning above you — I mean, they also have ways to glide down using a helicopter, because I’ve seen this thing. But I don’t know, I would much rather have two giant wings supporting me than four rotor blades that are like mini tiny wings above me.
Rory Holland: Yeah, me too. Me too.
Where Everyone Around You Is an Expat
Rory Holland: All right. So that’s awesome. Thank you for that backdrop. I could see a lot of things that are going to carry into our conversation here today based on your passion for flying. But I wanted to back up. So you grew up, you mentioned, in India and Saudi Arabia. From what I read about your background, small coastal town, southern India, is that right? I’d just like to hear — take me back a little bit. What was it like growing up back there, in two different countries? And maybe how was your journey into the financial space from all that?
Luther Maday: Yeah, that’s right. Growing up in the Middle East is a very interesting experience today, but I would say even more different — I’m forty-six now, so we’re talking about almost thirty-five years ago. What made it very different — and what makes it different in general from a Middle East perspective, and I think most kids that grew up in the Middle East can relate to this — is that 90% of the populations in all those countries are expats. If you take Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, any of those countries, the local population is south of 15% in any one of those countries. And in some of those countries, it’s even south of 10%. So everybody around you is an expat.
I was actually talking to a friend of mine who grew up as an army brat, and he related to that. He was like, “That’s kind of like growing up like an army brat.” Why that’s interesting is, when you grow up — my kids grew up here in Woodstock, Georgia — for them, friendships and everything is something that stays permanent. They’re like, “My friend’s from Woodstock, Georgia, his parents are from Woodstock, Georgia, and everybody’s here, so we’ll grow up together,” blah, blah. When everybody’s an expat, you actually don’t know when that other person’s going to leave, or why they leave, et cetera. And so there’s always this transient nature of the relationship and the friendship and everything. Because you’re always like, “We’re friends, but maybe we won’t be friends in a little while.” Especially when you’re thinking about pre-internet. When that person leaves, that’s it. It’s over. Maybe we’ll write each other some letters once a year and that’s it. So that part is always very interesting when you’re a bunch of expats living in a country, or in a town.
And back then, Saudi — Saudi’s very different now — but back then it was actually even stricter religiously. There was only one church, and we would have to get into church by calling somebody. There was no church where we actually lived. So that was very interesting. Growing up Christian in a non-Christian country was always interesting as well. Those parts will stay with me forever.
But I think the parts that really helped me out from there was I learned a culture that is still not as well understood, and even less understood back then, which is Arab culture in general. And it’s a beautiful culture. Growing up with a lot of Muslim friends, their religion is beautiful, getting to know them from that perspective. And these are — I’m talking about all Indian friends, because I went to Indian school, so everybody around me was Indian. That part was really interesting, understanding their culture, learning that. And then I actually learned Arabic in school until I was eighth grade. So I can read and write Arabic. That’s another part of that that I really enjoyed — not only did I get exposure, but I actually got a little bit deeper than just being a tourist in a country.
I actually went back to India after that for my college, and I came here for my master’s, to the US. That’s actually how I ended up here. And the thing that I always found really helpful is that because of the moving around and the traveling, I feel — at least I feel — that I can relate to somebody very quickly and try to build rapport, hopefully as quickly as possible. Because rapport building for me has always been something that I lean heavily on, because I want two things. I want to know who that person is, but I also want that other person to know that I’m sensitive to who they are.
Rory Holland: I appreciate that. Growing up as a minority in those countries as a Christian, and I think a majority Muslim, Hindu I think in India, and in Saudi — I think that’s a great way to approach life in general, because we’re all people at the end of the day. And I think we all have common desires and goals in life, for family, for business, for friends, to serve, to support one another. And so regardless of religion, I think there’s a lot of — maybe we focus too much on that label versus the person. So I can really respect that.
Luther Maday: One hundred percent.
Learning How to Fit In Fast
Rory Holland: I’m curious how that experience growing up — and I’m sure the resilience you had to develop, having transient friends, and then from India to Saudi to the US and moving back and forth — how did that lead you into becoming the SVP at Bank of America? You started at a major financial institution, and now you’re in the startup kind of world, the fintech world. Tell me a little bit about what that experience was. Was it a pretty significant part of your career? Did it set the stage for all these other things?
Luther Maday: I think one thing that moving around teaches you is the ability to fit in fast. It also teaches you how to be flexible depending on the environment you’re in. And I want to be careful with that — it’s not like you’re a chameleon going in, but you’re certainly able to identify, “I get it. This is what the lingua franca is. This is how this place operates. This is what the culture is in a given place.” And I think it certainly helps, because when you move around, you do have to assimilate into new friend groups every time.
And even when I went back to India, I had moved around, because I did my eleventh and twelfth grade in one place — that’s the norm in India. In India, what we call is it junior and senior? It’s weird — most Indian states actually have something called a junior college, where you just do junior and senior year of high school and then you move on to college. So it’s a little different structure from here in the US, and a different structure from other places as well. But my point in saying that is I went through three different — I went to a junior college, and then I went to actual college, and then I came here for a master’s. So you kind of just realize that different places just have different operating methods. And you may not call it that, because it’s a friend group, and you may not call it that because it’s a bunch of people that you meet in the classroom, but that’s what they are. There’s just SOPs at the end of the day, the way that they operate. And so you learn how to identify that.
But my start was actually with a company called NCR, when I first entered the workspace here in the US. It taught me a lot. We actually — I started with a company called Radiant Systems, which got acquired by NCR. And it was also a small company that had twelve hundred people, based out of a place here called Alpharetta, Georgia. I’ve always reflected back to my time there, primarily because I was in my twenties, still figuring life out, trying to understand, and I had some great mentors. And they were one of those companies that gave people great responsibility based on what they did and what potential they had, and it didn’t have anything to do with age or experience. They said, “This is a smart person, they’re doing great, let’s give them even more responsibility.” And then make sure that they feel like they’re supported. And that’s what they really did. And I appreciate what they did for me. Because I was a twenty-somewhat kid, literally, that had a fifteen-million quota that I had to hit with some of the largest names in convenience stores. I had Shell, the oil company, and all these different — Wawa and Sheetz, for people from up north that are familiar with those brands — and just interacting with them, I was like, “This is pretty amazing.” And for them to entrust me with that kind of responsibility. So I learned a lot. I learned everything from selling to managing accounts to — then we would have to do our own statements of work, so drafting them from scratch sometimes, and pricing, and selling. And we were selling service, so hardware, software and services. So you covered the full gamut from a sales perspective. So that really set me up for success in a lot of different places.
Because that was my first job — it’s a point of sale company. So that led me from there to going to Worldpay. Worldpay is all about financial services, merchant services. That then led me to Bank of America. From Bank of America to MoneyGram, and then MoneyGram and onward. So that first job and that first role kind of set me on this path of financial services.
Rory Holland: Yeah, you’ve done a lot of different things between those companies. What was — once you landed at Bank of America, then on to MoneyGram — MoneyGram was a completely different experience, I assume, in working. I think you were head of fintech and strategy. Was that five or six years ago, is that right?
Luther Maday: I exited there October of twenty-four, so two years ago.
Paid for a Year to Learn Blockchain
Rory Holland: Okay. So tell me a little bit about the themes, those backdrops, to then leading into stablecoin. Crypto has been around for a long time, but going from those more traditional businesses — from MoneyGram in money movement, all those different things — then crypto’s introduced, then you got involved with stablecoin. What was that transition like, and what appealed to you with stablecoin that made you want to jump in?
Luther Maday: When I was with Bank of America, I was originally brought in to help with the transition of their existing merchant services partnership that they had with a company called Fiserv. Originally it was a joint venture, and then they separated, and so as part of the separation they had to separate the clients out and then separate the operations out. And my position was — I was responsible for the Europe and UK side of the transition of that business.
Once that was done, I started looking around the bank for other things to do, still while in this payments motion, and I was lucky enough to get a position on the bank’s innovation team. And this was led by a gentleman who I have nothing but nice things to say about, and he’s a mentor of mine. He was actually like, “Hey, what do you want to do?” And I said, “There’s this thing called blockchain. I’m really interested in it. I’ve watched a bunch of videos.” He was like, “Do that. Do that and educate the bank on what’s going on in this thing called blockchain.”
And my role at that point was pretty amazing. For a year, my job was I would watch YouTube videos and every blog and everything about blockchain and crypto and Bitcoin and Ethereum and what’s this thing called smart contracts and yield and all this. And then I would literally put a deck together and then educate the bank, or folks in the bank, about what I just learned. That was my job. So it was basically on-the-job training that I got, to just basically scour the whole internet for what information I could gather together and then put into a very succinct deck that a banker could understand.
And I think that did several things for me, mainly two things. One was it gave me the freedom to go learn at my own pace. But secondarily, it forced me to convert my learnings into that conversion point of taking something that’s digital asset crypto to a banker. And that’s a very different language that you’ve got to use. And you’re actually now transposing concepts from — “You know how we do this at the bank? Well, the same thing happens like this in crypto.” And then again, this gentleman who’s a mentor of mine, he was great about, “Luther, I don’t think anybody’s going to understand what you just said there. So let’s refine that slide.”
And so that was how I actually got into not just being interested in blockchain and crypto and digital assets, but being paid to actually learn more about it. Which then led me to understand — I see the value of what digital assets have. And it’s less from “hey, just buy some Bitcoin and hold on to it,” but more the underlying technology and then the different kinds of assets, the actual stablecoins, et cetera, that aren’t variable, that don’t go up and down in value. I think that changed my view on that, and perspective.
And then luckily, I was actually sought after by MoneyGram to start and manage their partnership with Stellar for USDC cash on- and off-ramping. So I would say that training ground that Bank of America gave me helped me launch full-force into this digital asset side of it at MoneyGram. So even though MoneyGram is a traditional — it’s still a traditional remittance company — the CEO at that time, Alex, he was so wonderful about accepting new technology and being able to digest the risk around it.
What a Stablecoin Actually Is
Rory Holland: Yeah, I’m curious. I’d like to back up maybe just a sec while we’re talking about stablecoin. For our listeners, and for those that are maybe still trying to figure it out — what is a stablecoin, and what is the technology that makes it all possible?
Luther Maday: Yeah. A good place to start, generally for folks that are new to this, is — everybody hears about blockchains, and the most common thing that they hear is Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it’s mostly Bitcoin. Most people that ever hear about crypto, they hear about Bitcoin. Blockchain is the underlying technology that Bitcoin and every digital asset that you ever hear about operates on. That’s like saying every website out there operates on the internet. Maybe that’s a good analogy. But there’s all sorts of different websites. And the same way that there’s all kinds of different websites, there’s all sorts of different kinds of assets out there.
Bitcoin specifically is an asset that goes up and down in value. Its value is not fixed. Which means that if I buy Bitcoin today, it could be worth, say, ten dollars, and tomorrow it’ll be worth a hundred dollars. It’s more than that right now. But what quickly happened was that people who operated mainly within the blockchain world started to understand that these assets that go up and down in value are kind of hard to exchange between two parties. So if you walked into a coffee shop and the guy said, “Hey, just pay me in gold” — well, how much gold should I pay you? Because if I paid now, maybe I give you a gram of gold. But if I paid you for this coffee in a day, maybe I need to give you less gold.
That becomes an issue for people. This is the whole reason why we have a dollar here in the States and a rupee in India, et cetera — which is because people need to have a fixed value that they can exchange for goods and services. And so the same problem presented itself in blockchain. And so then smarter people than me said, “We need to have an asset that holds the same stable value.” And they said, “Okay, let’s come up with an asset type that is stable and we’ll call it a stablecoin.” And so that’s the whole concept of having a stable asset on a blockchain. So when people talk about things like USDC from Circle or USDT from Tether, these are stablecoins. Okay, so that’s one type of asset.
So then the thing to understand about stablecoins is, how do they stay stable? It’s one thing to say these are stable, but two people deciding it’s stable doesn’t really make sense, because the third person could be like, “That’s not stable.” So then in order to make it stable, they said it has to have a reserve mechanism. As in, when you issue one stablecoin, one USDC, there has to be something that somebody knows is held somewhere that makes it stable. And that reserve could be one US dollar, or it could be one US Treasury bill. So that’s the reserve. The reserve component actually makes it stable, so that when somebody audits it and says, “Hey, there’s a million USDC here. How do we know this is stable?” — somebody could be like, “Here you go. There’s actually a BNY Mellon account where there’s a million dollars sitting there,” or a million US Treasury bills sitting there. And this is the whole concept of stablecoins. And feel free to ask me more questions if that’s not clear.
Aid That Can’t Be Robbed at the Border
Rory Holland: Yeah. Well, I was just thinking of a real-world example of how it’s utilized, and I wanted to go back to the work at MoneyGram — around Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees, and the earthquake — where I think aid was actually delivered using stablecoin. Is that right? Can you describe that for the audience, and what did that actually look like on the ground? They could have done wire transfers, I guess, but maybe that didn’t work.
Luther Maday: One of the most common use cases that’s out there today for stablecoins, this type of crypto, is cross-border money movement. And part of the reason for that is — this is how cross-border money movement works in general — a lot of movement is still paid using US dollars. They call it the petrodollar, because to this day most oil trades, even if neither of those two parties are the US, they still use the US dollar to exchange value for shipments and oil, et cetera.
The reason I give you that is because most stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar. Like 90% of the stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar. Okay, so that’s one thing. Why does that actually have so many different advantages? Well, it has advantages in cross-border money movement. When it comes to things like paying people in the case of an emergency — like the Ukrainian war when that broke out, or paying people when a hurricane hits, or paying people that maybe are content creators, like YouTube content creators, et cetera — a lot of these folks live in countries where it is more advantageous for them to hold US dollars. And so from that perspective, USDC made sense. So that’s one layer of logic around why Circle’s USDC made sense for the Ukrainian refugees that were escaping out of Ukraine at that time.
The second thing is that if you send a wire to somebody — if I were to send you a wire, Rory, and you were in Mexico, you’re going to receive that in Mexican pesos. So if the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose main goal is to help refugees from every part of the world — if they just sent a wire to the folks there. One, banking infrastructure was definitely decimated at that point. So you didn’t know where you’re going to go, how you’re going to pick up these funds. But let’s say that’s not the issue. What’ll happen is they receive it, they go to their bank, and there’s Ukrainian — I think it’s called hryvnia — that’s their local currency. So they get the money in hryvnia. Fantastic. Well, these are refugees. These people are going to leave their home country, go through maybe two countries, three countries, four countries before they finally settle somewhere. Well, every time they move, what are they going to do? They have to convert from hryvnia to Romanian, from Romanian to maybe francs, from whatever to euros. And maybe they end up in the US, then they’ve got to convert all that back to US dollars. It creates a huge issue of money conversion. That’s the second layer of logic.
The third layer of logic is actually the worst one, which is it is a known fact that anytime you have these issues with refugees traveling borders, et cetera, people take advantage of them. People will literally wait for them to cross the border and they’ll rob whatever little that they have. And so that right there is even worse than the first two reasons that I gave. And the beauty of having something like a digital asset is that it sits on your phone. It actually doesn’t sit on your phone — your phone is your access to it. So there’s nothing physical that this person can just come and take from you. So that was another reason why the UN and a lot of aid organizations are switching to using digital assets now.
The Treasurer’s Problem
Rory Holland: Yeah, that’s fascinating. All these use cases for cross-border remittance and serving the greater good in the case of the refugees and earthquake victims — I think that’s great. All right, I want to talk a little bit about Stablecoin Partners. So you left corporate roles, pretty well recognized. You decided to jump in, and you really jumped in and started Stablecoin Partners. Pretty significant move. I’m curious — maybe describe in a sentence or so what Stablecoin Partners does, and then I wanted to talk a little bit about the cool work you did around drafting some bills around it, to help accelerate the growth of stablecoin.
Luther Maday: Yeah. And one thing — I do work for Notabene now, so I actually have a day job as well. But okay, so we’ll just talk about Stablecoin Partners.
As I worked through MoneyGram, I started to notice that there’s a lot of institutions — existing financial institutions — that want to start adopting stablecoins, for a bunch of reasons. Cross-border money movement: they want to pay their vendors, they want to receive payments. Or in a lot of instances, they could just be a company like a Coca-Cola that has offices and subsidiaries across the globe. And the treasury in a company like that, that has offices or subsidiaries in like four or five countries, they spend a lot of time trying to figure out, “Do I hold the funds here to pay local, or do I…” Ultimately they want that money moved back to their headquarters. So let’s use Coca-Cola as an example: regardless of where transactions actually happen for them, they ultimately want it to land in their bank account here in the US, where they’re headquartered out of.
And so what happens is treasurers and finance folks in these companies spend a lot of time saying, “Hey, I know we’ve got something going on here in India, we’ve got inflows of X, outflows of X. But we need to have a buffer for if something happens. How much do we hold there? How little can we hold and continue operations, but then bring the rest back to the US?” And then they have to figure this out for every country that they operate in. Sometimes they have to say, “India is working fine. Something happened in the Philippines. I need to move funds. It’s going to be easier if I move funds from India to the Philippines versus sending funds from the US to the Philippines.” And then they’re like, “Do I go long on rupee? Do I go short on the dollar? Do I go long on the peso, Filipino peso?” So this is this massive thing that the companies are always dealing with. That could be an issue as well.
And so it’s not just payments from party A to party B. Sometimes it’s just payments from party A to party A, which is them themselves managing their own funds, especially across various borders. And that’s really where stablecoins have taken the issue and put it on its head. Because now you have an asset that does a bunch of things. One, it moves 24/7. So it’s not like you’ve got to call up a banker and say, “Hey, I know I need to move money from the US to the Philippines, but the Philippines is already closed because it’s six in the morning on a Saturday there, even though it’s only 6 p.m. here.” You don’t have these issues. You can actually move this 24/7, which means that you can actually meet the need of a particular vendor or third party, or your own needs, much faster, at the drop of a hat, within seconds, with instant settlement today.
Now, there are some limitations to this. As much as I’m the biggest fan of stablecoins, et cetera, we’re still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to usage, which means that liquidity is still something that’s moving around. So it’s fine when you’re moving a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand dollars. But if I were to send somebody ten million right now, that person’s going to be like, “Where do I go convert this back to normal money again? I’m not getting the same amount. Luther, are you going to cover the losses?” So those are some conversations that still happen, because liquidity is not as high in these markets as it is in traditional markets.
Travel Rule, in a Nutshell
Rory Holland: Yeah. Okay, let’s talk about Notabene. So you made the move over there, leading go-to-market, I think, for them. Tell us a little bit about Notabene and the work that you’re doing, and what attracted you to go to work for them?
Luther Maday: Yeah, so Notabene today is a company known for travel rule compliance. And that’s a whole new concept that we’re just talking about. Travel rule, in a nutshell, basically means that if there’s two parties that have exchanged funds, depending on the rules of which country each party is in, you’ve got to exchange the information: who sent the money and who received the money. That’s basically what travel rule means. And this is something that is put in place — every country in the world that has banking has some variation. In Europe, you’ve got to know this information for every — even if it’s like one penny that you send cross border, you’ve got to exchange that information. In the US, for more than 3,000 — under 3,000 you don’t have to exchange information, more than 3,000 you have to. So there’s different rules. But in a nutshell, to oversimplify travel rule, that’s basically what it means. Somebody sends money from one point of the world to another point of the world, those two people should be registered somewhere — as in, somebody should know who sent it and who received it. That’s really what Notabene…
Rory Holland: And what are you doing at Notabene? What are you doing for them?
Luther Maday: So that’s what Notabene does. And at Notabene, I’m their head of partnerships. So they actually expanded from just being travel rule and compliance focused to payments. So they’re adding a huge payments component and orchestration layer. And so I lead partnerships specifically around this payments, and then partnerships in general for them.
Rory Holland: Exciting. Well, congratulations on that.
Drafting Georgia’s Stablecoin Bill
Rory Holland: I read in your background that you had drafted a stablecoin bill in Georgia. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Luther Maday: Yeah, that was one of the most exciting things that I’ve done in this space. Because December of last year, a group of folks that are now close friends approached me and said, “Hey, you’ve done a lot in the space. We’ve been asked by the banking commissioner of Georgia to look into a stablecoin bill. Is that something that you’re interested in?” And I said, “Man, I have zero knowledge about writing bills, drafting bills, let alone anything around it.” And they were like, “No, no, no, you just work with the commissioner.” And then it ended up being a buddy of mine called Tony Irwin, with a group called the Fintech Accord, who is an advocacy group based out of here in Georgia. We ended up working with the banking commissioner to draft a bill.
There’s two things that stick out to me. One was how well-versed the banking commissioner of Georgia is in digital assets. He understood stablecoins, he understood smart contracts, audits, et cetera. And so it was great to work with them on a one-on-one basis in drafting the bill. And the second thing was how accepting the House and the Senate were in Georgia to get that done. But it was — then at the end we got it passed. So we drafted it in December and we got it passed completely and signed by the governor here in the state of Georgia. And it’s a bill that basically allows for stablecoin issuers to come establish an office here in the state of Georgia and issue stablecoins, but underneath the governance of the state banking and the banking commissioner.
Rory Holland: Exciting. Congratulations.
Luther Maday: It was great. Thank you.
What Is Real, and What Do You Think Is Real?
Rory Holland: I want to ask a question. We had heard from you beforehand about receiving feedback. As a leader in a company, a business person in general, it’s always great to get feedback from the folks you work with. And you shared something that I thought was really interesting. It was more of a question in it. It was, “What is real and what do you think is real?” Unpack that for me. That’s interesting. How did you receive that feedback? Who gave it to you? What was it all about?
Luther Maday: Yeah. And this is something that I think we all face, whether it’s business or personal. There’s always fear of something happening. There’s a perceived fear, and there’s something that’s real that you should be afraid of. And I remember I was having this conversation with, I believe, a manager of mine, a boss of mine, and I was like, “You know, I think this is going to happen, this is going to…” And he said, “Hey man, I know what you’re trying to solve, and I know you’re trying to solve for something here, but what is the real part, and what do you think is actually real? Because what do you think is real is actually not what I know is real. So you may be just churning yourself out of control for something that you think is real.”
And there’s a quote by — the author escapes me — but I think the quote is, “I’ve seen many terrible things in my life, only some of which are real.” And most everything was in his head. So I think we all live in some form or fashion of that, where even in my personal life I quite often find myself where I’m like, “What if this happens?” And my wife is like, “You don’t even know if that’s going to happen. You’re actually working yourself up for something that may or may not even happen.” Actually there’s probably no chance of it happening, but you’re just on this what-if chain.
Rory Holland: Oh goodness. Yeah, I could totally relate to that. We often as humans live in what happened before, the past, but then we project that into the future. If something negative happened in the past, maybe it happens in the future. There’s a pretty good likelihood, I’d say ninety percent plus, that it won’t happen, but it’s easy to obsess on it. So that’s actually a really, really great advice and piece of feedback.
Luther Maday: I think we’re built for pattern recognition. If you think about — and this is maybe an animal thing — whatever you call instinct, instinct is pattern recognition to the max. Where you say, “Okay, the last time we were here as a group, this person got bit by a snake, and right before they got bit by a snake, the leaves moved this way.” So from then on, every time you step in the forest, if the leaves move a certain kind of way, you’re like, “There’s probably a snake there.” Even though there isn’t one. And it was good when you were being chased by animals and all that stuff, but it’s terrible in this world where there’s no real animals, but you’re just trying to pattern-recognize everything so that you’re trying to predict the future to some extent.
Rory Holland: Yeah. I do my best to live in the present and try not to be too much in the past or the future. I find a lot more peace and fulfillment in that. Not easy. Not easy.
Luther Maday: Not easy.
Steve Jobs, Bourdain, and Reading the Room
Rory Holland: But another thing you shared I thought was really cool. We love to ask the fantasy headhunting question, and you picked Steve Jobs, which I think is a really good one, but it’s also kind of a complicated one. He was brilliant, he was ruthless, mercurial. When you say Steve Jobs, what is it about Steve Jobs that you would want to have on your team?
Luther Maday: He was ruthless and mercurial, but there’s something to be learned from how he was able to see the signal, or separate the signal from the noise. I think this kind of goes back to the “what is real and what do you think is real,” maybe from that perspective. Quite often, when we’re starting a company, managing a team, chasing something or a person, whatever — you’re trying to build a picture in your head of “I need to do this so that this happens, and I did this and this happens, and if this happens, then this happens.” But then if you look at the way that for him to be able to be visionary — but then not just visionary and be like, “It’d be amazing to have an iPhone” — he was like, “No, no, this is exactly how we get to something. And I don’t care how many people tell me that this is not a thing, this is a thing.” And not only is this a thing, but if we’re going the wrong direction, I’m going to say we’re going the wrong direction. I think the delivery is maybe not the best of delivery of that, but being able to see that signal from the noise, that’s pretty powerful.
Rory Holland: Yeah, he would be quite a product person to have on your team for sure.
Luther Maday: Yeah. I may not have any other product people left, but he will be there.
Rory Holland: Yeah, for sure. The other question we asked you is if you could clone your career. You mentioned Anthony Bourdain — but of course the alive version.
Luther Maday: The alive version, yeah.
Rory Holland: Really, really revealing choice, I think. He was such an interesting guy as a traveler and a writer, and he seemed to find humanity in so many unfamiliar places through food, of course, and conversation with real people. What attracts you to that, and how does that spirit show up for you?
Luther Maday: It has something to do with something that we talked about earlier, which is walking into an unfamiliar environment and being able to build rapport quickly. I think that’s why I relate to Anthony. Because — again, we don’t know what happens or happened off camera — but something that I always picked up from every episode was how quickly he got somebody talking about sometimes really sensitive topics, or topics that they would get put in jail for, with him. And he had a very — nonchalant is the wrong word — but a very easy way of getting them to talk about topics. And I was like, “That is amazing.”
I actually have a friend who is a videographer, and his expertise is doing interviews. And I would watch these interviews of people that he’s done, and I’m like, “I know this person, they’re not this eloquent.” But when he would do an interview with them, they just sounded so relaxed, like they were just talking to a friend. And there’s something about that I find quite fascinating.
Rory Holland: Yeah, I love that about him too, and what he was capable of. And I would say in some ways, from my first conversation with you — we talked about some pretty deep topics. We talked about faith. Pretty sure we talked — yes, we talked about religion, which a lot of people don’t want to do. I think we talked about politics. And we managed to do it and still really care about each other. So it’s funny how that works, right? I think about the heart posture of an Anthony Bourdain — he wanted to get to know people, he wanted to connect with them, and he wanted to know them in a real, genuine way. And that’s what I really value about you, honestly, Luther. I think you exude a lot of those characteristics and those values.
Luther Maday: I appreciate that, man. Thank you so much.
The Hardest Instruction in the Book
Rory Holland: I’m curious — I’m really drawn by your faith, and because my faith guides me. It’s not something we talk a lot about in business, but we think about money and particularly digital currency and these ethereal things, and the emotional impacts of it, and how we operate as leaders of companies in the space. How does your faith guide you in your decisions day to day and the actions you take?
Luther Maday: Yeah. That’s a really deep question, Rory.
My parents were always very — I would say orthodox. Orthodox makes it sound like they’re old school, but they’re very staunch Christians. They’re very staunch in their faith from day one. And so I grew up in a very Christian household.
I would say that there is — one thing that I wish I could say is that I meet this to the letter of the law, or I meet it completely. I would love to say that, and I definitely fall short of it many, many days. But if you look at the final commandment, which is “love one another as I have loved you” — I find there’s so much power to that statement if you look at it by itself. And I’ve said this before to friends of mine that are also of faith: it’s one of the simplest things to read in any text. You can read any text and, “love one another as I have loved you” — but it’s the hardest thing to do by far.
And I say that because if somebody tells you, “Here’s ten things you need to do. You need to wake up in the morning, you need to do these two things, and then you do these three things,” it’s a lot easier, because it’s a checkbox, checkbox, checkbox. But to say “love one another” — how do you define, what do you — when do you know you’ve done enough? Or when do you know you’re not… You definitely know when you haven’t done enough, but how do you know when it’s enough? And so it’s a really tough question to answer.
But my point in saying that — I would love to say that I love everybody the way that Christ has loved us, but there are lots of days that I fall short of it myself on several occasions. But I think that is one thing that, when I do take the time to think about it, I try to put myself in that other person’s shoes. It’s — they call it the halo effect, I think — which is, if I were late to a meeting, I have my excuses, valid. But if you’re late to a meeting, instead of thinking “Rory’s just a terrible person,” I try to be like, “I’m sure something must have happened. Something happened, which is why he’s late. It’s not because he’s a bad person.” I think that’s how I think about it from a business perspective: when something goes wrong, don’t attribute it to the person. Give them some grace as much as possible, knowing that they’re just a human just like you, trying to make their way through life.
Rory Holland: One hundred percent. I think it’s a high aim, and it has to be intentional every day, and it’s so hard. And yes, I too fall short all the time. But grace and mercy, for sure. I appreciate you sharing that.
Luther Maday: Absolutely, man. Thank you for asking.
Five Years Out: The Friction Disappears
Rory Holland: So I want to ask a couple more questions. Payments, money movement, payments motions — this has been your career. We talked about stablecoin and the regulatory environment that we’re in now. The GENIUS Act finally passed. We talked about the Georgia framework that you put together. Where does this go? What do you think — if we could magic-ball it, what does five years from now look like?
Luther Maday: Yeah, the easiest answer is adoption would be more. But I think there’s more to it than that. So the reason why everybody has a credit card or a debit card or something in their pocket is because it’s so easy to use. You just walk into any store, tap it, you can log on anywhere and just Apple Pay or whatever. I think that’s the biggest change that we’ll see over the next five years: how seamless digital assets become into everyday financial operations. Because today, even today, if two parties had to exchange something on a blockchain, somebody has to say, “Hey, what’s your wallet address? Okay, I’m going to send it. Okay, make sure you don’t get it wrong, because once you send that…” There’s so much friction still in the system, which is going down day by day. But I think five years out, that won’t exist. It’s the same or maybe even simpler than a traditional transaction. But the beauty of it is that you’re getting the funds immediately, and it’s not a promise or an IOU that you’re going to get funds two days from now. I think it’s the simplicity and the friction that we’ll see a huge difference in over the next five years.
Rory Holland: Definitely going to be interesting times. That’s for sure.
Luther Maday: Absolutely.
Where to Find Luther
Rory Holland: Well, for the fintech operators, financial leaders out there listening to this, how do they get in touch with you?
Luther Maday: Yeah, I’m always active on LinkedIn, Luther Maday. And I’m luther@stablecoinpartners.com.
Rory Holland: It’s been a real pleasure. So good to have you on the show.
Luther Maday: Same here. Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.
