Capitolis CEO 'Preparing For Overall Slowdown' In The Economy | Forbes

So if not, it should have been. So tell us what Capitolis does. So Capitolis operates within the world of wholesale banking capital markets. This is the institutional part of the finance industry, and we're working to make the system much safer for everyone. We're working very closely with the banks and with institutional investors to make sure that there is more capital available in the system, while the services that are very important like clearing and prime brokerage are going to be available to all. So if I would just say, on the back of the financial crisis, the good news is banks are safer. The bad news is services that only they can provide are...

Because we're serving the community, they wanted to find opportunities to offset positions in between them. We've done that immediately. Whom did they offset? Where did they go? They have trades. So they're looking for opportunity to just find when somebody is long and the other one is short, can we get together through the Capitolis platform and basically cancel this trade and reduce meaningfully? How much can you reduce the risk? Do you know? Hundreds of millions of dollars. Actually, by now it's probably billions of dollars. Now we're doing it twice a month. And within three days we've done the first run because we're working with everybody, we're trusted by everybody, and we have this community around us. So this again came from zero to...

We're definitely seeing Russia has highlighted how quickly things can shift from one place to another. So I would say in any world that's sort of in the emerging market world, we're now seeing more demand for risk management sort of in advance or to prepare the pipes and the platform. We're looking at now Turkey and reducing settlement for Turkey, the same thing for China related. So emerging markets risk...

Listen, they... we all see the time. I'm not a macro economist, but it's very clear we see what's happening in the financial markets. We're seeing inflation rises. We, from our perspective, when we see it across the industry, are definitely... overall, we are preparing for a slowdown in the economy. And that's how we're preparing our projections. We see what's happening in the private equity and venture capital world, but we also know that a crisis and a slowdown has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the second... beginning of the end, the end of the beginning... at the end of the beginning. Okay, we're definitely preparing for a pretty long winter. From our perspective, we don't expect anything spectacular for 2023 in terms of the overall market environment. We will continue growing throughout this time because...

From our perspective, no. I think that yeah, some transactions can get delayed... it's going to mean slower, albeit very fast growth throughout this. We're very well funded, as you mentioned. We just closed our Series D. And a lot of it was done in learning from the past. My first startup I went into crisis not always super well funded. So we feel very good about the secular trend, we feel good about where the company is, and in the end we're going to come out stronger.

Well, I think several things. First of all, the whole notion of fintech as replacing banks... I hope that we know regulators are moving slowly because they have to be very thoughtful and responsible, but they're doing that and we're looking into things. And we hope... like regulations are there to protect all of us. And the whole notion of 'oh, we're gonna move away from the banking environment and all of these startups are going to completely disrupt this world' is something that I think was way overhyped. Right? It doesn't work, thankfully. And we're going to go back to normal. I mean, you know, I'm at least old enough to have experienced the beginning of the internet. Yeah, the internet bubble. Oh no, I'm old enough for that. Yeah. Everyone was saying at the time, 'Now that there is the internet, there's going to be no banks.' I can tell you my... continue to have a role. Play regulation and regulators have a huge role to play. Integrating those is going to be very important. And that part is, I think now we're going to see a maturity and improvement in this. So the missing links, the connective tissue to sort of the new world essentially for banks, which is what? If you remember back then, people were talking about new economy and old economy. There's an economy, and the economy evolves. And bringing those together is where I think we're going to land.

The country potentially taking a step back and taking away women's rights to choose. And what about gun control? Guns is like... I look, I come from Israel. I went to the military service. For the life of me, I don't understand why anybody would need military grade... what other controversial stances have you taken? Well, I don't know if it's controversial, but we've been very outspoken around Ramadan and the US recognizing and dealing with Islamophobia. This is 25% of the population in the world and not being well treated, certainly not in America or elsewhere. We take a stance around that. And we're very... I don't know if it's controversial or not, but we're very big on sustainability. You come to our office, you wash your hands with vegan soap, and people will... we strongly believe that what we do is really important. We've seen how important the financial system is to all of us. We've seen that unfortunately we understand that only during the financial crisis. But this is about basically allowing economies to work. But also, we have a huge platform. We live in a funny and a little screwy world where people like me are listened to more than philosophers or poets or teachers or doctors. But in this world, we have, I think, both an opportunity but also an obligation to take a step and to lead. And I think that politics is way too important to be left to... you know, they don't agree with those stances or they don't want us to be active. That is perfectly fine. If we're going to lose business as a result of that, that is perfectly fine as well. By the way, we are inspired. You look at J.P. Morgan, you look at Citi, they've taken very strong stances around Roe v. Wade, which was fantastic. I think the world is changing. And I would tell you, conversely, we're gaining. Our employees, if you look at our values that are out there, this is not a job for us. If somebody wants a job... 150 employees all over the world with great investors, we have partners. They love it. We're June is our Capitolis Connects month. So we take 10% of our transactional revenues, give it away to charities. We're celebrating 10% of your transactional revenues. It's a lot. It is a lot, and certainly a lot for us... reposting than our Series D investment the way it should be. Because there is a real thirst. People know the truth. People want to hear the truth. And we have an obligation, an incredible opportunity to truly change the world and make it much better through what we're doing. So yes, we're in finance, but we're also parents and we're members of our communities and we're husbands or we're boyfriends. And we want to affect meaningfully our communities.

Reminds me of the post-com bubble. Get the Pets.com out of the way and go back. Absolutely. A lot of them, and it was back to just let's all come down. We call back to fundamental business that needs to be robust and needs to be built in a scalable way. The good news is there is much more capital. Companies are better financed, so there's going to be less companies. Good companies that were caught completely flat-footed, which happened back then. But I think it's back to basics. Is there still a role for digital currencies? Digital currencies and digital assets, for sure, 100% is going to happen. That has not started yet. You're talking about, are we? We're not at the beginning of the beginning yet.