Building a Closed-Loop Wallet

The Square Developer podcast explores the intersection of technology and innovation in the world of payments and beyond. Your host and Square Head of Developer Relations Richard Moot sits down with a series of guests this season walking you through the latest news, updates, and innovations in the Square developer ecosystem.

On today’s episode, we are joined by Ansa co-founder and CEO Sophia Goldberg. We sit down and discuss the transformative potential of close-loop wallets. Goldberg, who is also the author of “The Field Guide to Global Payments” brings her insights on the mechanics of closed-loop wallets, benefits for businesses with high-frequency, low-ticket transactions, and the unexpected advantages they offer, such as enhanced data insights and customer loyalty.

Guests

• Richard Moot, Square Head of Developer Relations
• Sophia Goldberg, Ansa co-founder and CEO

About Ansa

Full transcript

Richard Moot: Welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I’m your host, Richard Moot, head of developer relations at Square, and today I’m joined by Sophia Goldberg, who is the co-founder and CEO of Ansa. Sophia, would you be so kind as to give us a little intro about yourself and Ansa to let all of our listeners learn a little bit more about what it is that Ansa is and about you?

Sophia Goldberg: Happy to, and thanks for having me, Richard. So I’m the, like Richard said, the co-founder CEO of Ansa. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade building in payments. So I was at a company called Adyen across commercial and product roles. I also wrote the book, the Field Guide to Global Payments to help anyone learn payments a bit better. And here at Ansa we’re a stored value wallet as a service or closed loop payments infrastructure platform to let any brand or platform launch customer balances. So that can look like the Starbucks in app payment experience that can also look like the backend of transportation systems, micro transactions for gaming and everything and the like, but especially we’ve been building the last few years in the food and beverage and retail space.

Richard Moot: Very cool. And so you’ve built a lot of your integrations on Square and built a lot of this stuff for square sellers, but one thing I want to dig into with that is maybe tell us more about what is a closed loop wallet?

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, it’s a niche part of payments infrastructure and the payments ecosystem, but a really important one. And so closed loop really just means where funds can be spent and so a wallet like the Starbucks wallet say, or for some of our brands that are on Square that we’ve built for closed loop means the customer adds prepaid funds. The brand can fund that wallet with incentives and those funds in that balance can only be spent with that brand. And so in turn, that helps drive retention frequency, really stickiness, but also on the brand side reduces cost of payments, drives cash flow, and can kind of become this really virtuous cycle of retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

Richard Moot: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean one of the things that I know for particularly say coffee shops is you have these low ticket receipts and so it’s actually in terms of percentage of fees that you’re incurring on each sale is a little bit higher when looking at it marginally. So I’m guessing this helps mitigate that in many ways because you can then preload with these things and you’re not incurring this on every single sale that coffee shops making.

Sophia Goldberg:  Exactly. And so for brands that have high frequency and lower average tickets, we call them HULT merchants (habitual use low transaction value), which coffee shops or bakeries are. A great example – if you have a $4 latte, which unfortunately in San Francisco I can’t find a $4 latte anymore, that brand might effectively be paying up to 10% in fees because the fixed fees of every payment really add up. You’re paying probably 20 to 50 cents no matter how large of a brand you are. And so by having a customer prepay into a balance and say, add $25 to spend over five coffees over the course of a month, that means you’re only hitting those fees on that first time. You have the benefit of that float in the meantime. And you’re also guaranteeing that I’m going to come back four more times, enjoy my coffee, and you’re going to be saving about a dollar just on that one customer that month.

Richard Moot:  And so I’m curious, you’ve been in the payments space for a while now. What kind of really sparked that motivation towards building onset and building the solution?

Sophia Goldberg: It started to come up earlier in the pandemic when I was seeing more and more different types of commerce trying to catch up and meet us where we were all stuck inside our homes and apartments and it kind of tapped into an observation I’d been having that commerce and payments have continued to diverge, especially in the US there’s so many more different types of brands, merchants, customer experiences, we’re using our phones even more, even in-store payments have an e-commerce experience or element whether you’re maybe at say a kiosk or on your mobile phone. So all of the lines are blurring and I saw time and time again merchants not being able to actually support the customer experience they wanted because payments was often kind of the stick in the mud for them of what they could innovate and build and launch. And I’m a bit of a purist.

I really love payments and I really love that our role is commerce enablement and that just didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. And so actually in the early days we thought this was going to be a creator economy payment platform use case to enable online micro transactions, so think busking in the subway, but how you do that digitally, which is growing and happening all over the place and we couldn’t find an infrastructure platform to really easily build that on. And so started pulling its strings and realized there’s a big there there and for many types of brands, but especially in the restaurant area, cost of payments is often their second highest cost as a business. And so any way that we can help realign unit economics but have technology that really works inside their ecosystem was kind of the gap we found and where we started to build and grow.

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Richard Moot: So I’m curious even digging more granularly to day one, week one, month one, whatever it is, when you have this idea and you were first trying to test this out, give us a sense for how you got that zero to one moment and how did you start to grow from there?

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, so we knew from early on our technology was going to be very API focused. And we also knew that we starting out, my co-founder JT and I were two people at a WeWork in San Francisco. And so the companies that implement APIs don’t typically buy from companies that are two people. And so we started thinking about the very famous adage do things that don’t scale. How can we help brands that our product can be useful for but maybe don’t have the resources or infrastructure today to otherwise work with us? And so actually our first customer that went live is a Square customer out of the East Bay who I mean phenomenal coffee, really awesome team, really great brand and really forward thinkers on experimenting. They care a lot about brand and their customers and their customer experience. And so we did the thing that didn’t scale and we thought, okay, well if they would like to use our product and we would love to work with this team locally, what if we just do something crazy and build them and order a head app, which was not and isn’t really our core business, but thanks to actually the Square docs, we were able to build and order a head app that existed fully on top of their Square stack.

And I don’t even think we had to talk to your team until quite a ways into the project and the build and we were able to build it in a way that they didn’t have additional lift or process because it lived alongside their entire ecosystem, which for them obviously is Square. And for us it meant we had this piece of software and this really great early design partner to be able to test and iterate with.

Richard Moot: That’s great. And so I’m curious on the part, what part of that felt the most not scalable? Was it just that you’re building this sort of bespoke app for one customer and then trying to figure out what you learned along the way?

Sophia Goldberg: It definitely was. The initial impetus was, or the concern was we don’t want to be this turn into a dev shop, which I think every or at stage software company, there’s a fine line between building custom for your design partners because you need them to have a reason to take a risk and the fine line of what are we building that’s scalable and can be used by a dozen, a hundred other brands like them. And so that was kind of a constant push me, pull you, but what we ended up learning I think was so valuable because if we had had a first customer who owned their entire app and use our APIs and docs and just ask some questions, we wouldn’t have the same understanding of what that stack looks like for a brand. 

Those considerations are sometimes we call it, we can say it’s really easy to integrate us, but we only know the iceberg above the water. We got such a great insight into what’s below the water for a brand or a coffee brand. I didn’t know the acronym KDS (kitchen display system) and how all of those data elements flow and all of those learnings have compounded to help us grow with both other square brands or brands on Square, but also throughout the ecosystem and larger brands with more patch worked stacks.

Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I mean it makes so much sense. I can definitely vouch for, I mean granted, I know that I probably have a different perspective doing developer relations here. I spent the first year not knowing what QSR meant and I thought this was just some sort of FinTech term that I’m familiar with. It’s in digging into a real business and sort of getting your hands dirty with them, you really start to see the things that they’re actually concerned with. I know here at Square we’re very much about trying to get out of a business’s way. They don’t want the payments to be slowing them down or being front and center for the customer interactions. They should fade into the background and allow them to just run their business and save them time. But one of the things that I think because you say order ahead and the most eyeopening thing that I’ve even found with people who are having an Order ahead farm when they’re trying to manage Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates, and seeing the tablet farms that they used to have in the back where somebody’s just sitting there pressing buttons and trying to feed tickets and be like, oh yeah, accept orders everywhere.

And that’s when we saw a solution around order manager, but you’re never going to understand that until you actually see, well, what is it that you’re using and how do we help augment that and enhance that?

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, I think one mean for that, what always comes to mind is that scene in the recent season of the Bear where they accidentally turned pre-orders on for.

Richard Moot: Yeah, that felt way too real. Way too real.

Sophia Goldberg: I think the other really interesting learning as someone who’s always been on the tech software side and not often even dealing with customers that had physical operations was how to deal with the food items and how to have up-to-date inventory. And I think it’s a problem even Starbucks hasn’t been able to solve and we had so many roundabout conversations being like, well surely this is something software can solve. And then being like, it’s really hard for software to solve that because the bakery says they sent you 20 croissants, there’s actually 19 in the box. One falls, another one, someone hands to a great customer. And so your system says 20 but the box actually has 17. Someone orders it ahead but someone else in line gets it before them. All of those things we wouldn’t have understanding or empathy of if we hadn’t had to actually go bare metal (programming) to launch with them.

Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree with you more. The amount of times that I’ve actually talked to various Square sellers or friends who are running businesses, doing inventory counts is one of those things where I think everyone thinks that there’s got to be some sort of awesome solution to this. It’s, I mean the human element is a huge factor here of like, Hey, you messed up on this order or oh, actually we accidentally spilled something on all these cups so we had to throw ’em away. So yeah, there’s all of these wonderful little things that you can learn about and then you can start to find, hey, this is actually something where we can actually build a solution and help. And so I’m going from the coffee shop to a closed loop wallet, where was that sort of light bulb moment in there that kind of went like, oh, this is actually where we think they can actually really benefit from this.

Sophia Goldberg: So we always knew at the start it was a payment solution that we were building and where people, I’m a giant payments nerd. I think what we learned along the way was that, and I think another great Square customer was another early customer Compass Coffee out of the DC area. And I remember getting this Gchat message from their CMO basically saying, and this was maybe over a year ago now, Sophia, you’re the only one that cares about payments. We care about retention and I need to frame it because it was such an aha, like what you said a few minutes ago of it’s a payment tool, but really it’s a retention solution. And so a lot of what we’ve ended up building in the past year is what we call our incentive engine. And so it’s all of the, or we sometimes call it loyalty with a little L, but all of the tools that a brand needs to help drive adoption of the wallet to make it a no-brainer also for the customers to adopt. And so I think we knew it was never going to be the type of tender type that’s set and forget offering Apple Pay and Google Pays is a lower bar to drive adoption than a closed loop branded wallet might be. And so we started building more and more into what tools can every brand that we work with use regardless of say loyalty platform, but we do use the Square loyalty APIs for our square merchants as well.

Richard Moot: And so as you got through those first few customers, where did you start seeing the ability to really start scaling this to more and more types of businesses? It sounds like you initially sort of figured it out with the quick service smaller coffee shop type thing, and then how has that changed as you’ve gone into different verticals?

Sophia Goldberg: So we’re still pretty heavily focused on food and bev moving up market a lot more to hundreds of location franchised brands.

They have more resources in terms of people to focus on individual niche aspects like core loyalty program can have a whole team, but the day-to-day and the pains of that kind of brand is the same whether you have six or 6,000 locations and you just have different resources to deal with it or to scale it. I think that other use case we saw and started coming up for us that was a bit more unexpected was platforms and marketplaces, which hadn’t been one that we initially I think had a list of 14 verticals. We could serve everything from toll and parking through to micro transactions online and fuel, but that was interesting inbound we started getting and have launched with and that’s pretty interesting for how can a platform and as you guys know spectacularly with Cash App Pay, which is both closed loop and open loop and maybe more of  a 201 payments topic. Then this podcast is for there’s real value in a platform like say Square, having their own wallet for funds to be used across the platform. And so we’re seeing use cases like that come up and then marketplaces like a seller is also a buyer on a lot of marketplaces because there are a lot of niche interest group marketplaces like trading cards or knitting musical instruments and how can they build that flywheel and keep funds on the platform drive that retention and repeat usage.

Richard Moot: Yeah, no, definitely. And so I’m curious what the things, what would you say is the lesser known benefit of adopting a closed loop wallet for a brand? What would be the unexpected benefit that they might get and not really initially be thinking about?

Sophia Goldberg: I think the data, honestly, we haven’t figured out the perfect way to talk about it, but it’s another lens through which to view data and your customer’s behavior and that is really powerful when combined with all of the other data a customer has or a brand has with a customer, sorry. And so what that means in reality is you have a new tool for your marketing team to engage with a customer to drive spend and usage. And so for us, the way we’ve kind of productized that a little bit is we call it the ons a portal, but that’s where our customers log in and manage everything from reconciliation, reporting, triaging customer complaints and say refunds to also creating incentive campaigns. We have a data platform that we call custom user segmentation and they’re able to go in and say, I want to look at all customers with a balance over $20 who haven’t spent in 30 days.

So that’s high intent. They have funds, it’s basically from consumer psychology, whether we call it girl math or sunco fallacy, it’s free for them to come order again, but soft churn risk if they haven’t visited in 30 days. And so being able to create that segment and push that out, so for example, we update segments into square segments every night, so we’ve used your APIs for that so they can create wallet based segments in our platform, push that into their square marketing stack and specifically target those customers with incentives, reminders they can know based on the data they know in your platform. Hey, Sophia really loves the, I really love the rose mocha in February. You didn’t see her in January. Reminder, it’s coming back and she’s balanced to spend. I think that data piece is so much a powerhouse part of it that is pretty delightful when we get to start showing our customers how to use it and how to utilize it.

Richard Moot: Yeah, I mean that’s just so powerful because I imagine that you have a much more direct connection on tracking your ROI on your marketing campaigns because you’re like, Hey, we know what their total balance is. We know they’re totally able to purchase these things, so it’s there and we just need to give them that little nudge. And so it’s so much more powerful to be able to draw that direct connection.

Sophia Goldberg: Exactly. And on that ROI point, another tool within our system is expiring bonus dollars and so everything we do in our system is dollar or currency based rather than points-based. We live alongside points-based systems really well. And so what that can look like is, Hey, Richard, haven’t seen you in a while. We threw five bucks in your balance for Patreon us next time you visit, it’s good for the next week. And that means it drives FOMO (fear of missing out), it drives some urgency for you to go spend it, but if you don’t, that can flow back into the marketing budget. And so from an accounting side, you don’t have ballooning liabilities of outstanding balance that you’ve spent, but also that means they can try that five bucks elsewhere and see if maybe someone else is more likely to reengage.

Richard Moot: Yeah, that just sounds so powerful. Changing gears a little bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about your tech stack. So how did that first start? What were the technologies that you were initially building with?

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, so both my co-founder and I had done a lot of covid thinking solo before we linked up, and so we kind of like to say day one we hit the ground running with a lot of intention. He had had an indie hacking project on the side while he was at Google before we started on so full-time together. And so he had a lot of experimentation with stack, so we knew what we wanted from Day Zero, which was awesome on the business side to have someone that was really high conviction and knew why. And so our database is we built our core ledger from the ground up and have a Postgres database and backend is fully in Go and we really picked that because it’s highly performant, easy to learn and maintain and has built in typing, which is really helpful for building financial products. And so we were high conviction in building our backend and go and then our front end is TypeScript and next JS and deployed using Versal because they’re really technologies that are recent enable a lot of fast prototyping and shipping, which at an early stage startup you have an idea, you want to experiment, you want to get it out, you want other people on the team to be able to go in and know what’s happening.

But we did that. We chose kind of that front end stack from an experimentation lens and then the app we built is built in Swift.

Richard Moot: So it’s like a native Swift iOS app and then you’re using a NextGen sort of React web frontend.

Sophia Goldberg: Also from our perspective, the frontend stack isn’t just for the mobile app we built, it’s also for the ONA portal. And so we knew it’s something that would have to scale for various size brands, whether you’re six or 6,000 location coffee brand able to add stuff like SSO access controls, really easily be able to do reporting and linking out and walk to run in terms of what that front end looks like and really being able to care about the speed and flexibility as we built out the portal.

Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I mean it’s so important and I think one thing that makes total sense to me here at Square we use Go Java, Ruby, we are using a lot of React and Ember and other places. I know that for Go as a backend when you have a financial product, I mean you’re going to find a lot of people within the FinTech space are going to be familiar with Go. So as you scale up, you’re not going to have as much difficulty in recruiting people and get them up to speed on your tech stack. So I imagine that’s just another nice benefit of choosing that from the beginning.

Great. So in terms of features that you built and added over time, what’s the newest thing that you have that you’re working on with Ansa?

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, so a lot of new things, I’ll talk about two really. So one is our SDKs, so for brands that already have say a mobile app and maybe don’t have the resources to build a direct PI integration, we have both a core SDK if they want to own front end and our full SDK that they’re able to brand and color but has the full front end experience built out for them. So if you’re a mid-size brand, you can get live in minutes. We had someone implemented in 10 minutes, which is super exciting. And so that’s one piece that we’re really proud of on the developer experience side of making sure no matter the size or scale of a brand, they have a way to benefit from closed loop wallets in our product. The other side we’re really proud of and announced maybe a bit over a month ago is what we call Onset Anywhere, and that’s how you’re able to accept a customer’s digital wallet in store for a tap to pay payment at the point of sale.

Richard Moot: Very cool.

Sophia Goldberg: And so what we’ve built there is it looks like a virtual card in Google Pay and Apple Pay and is fully point of sale agnostic. And so obviously it works seamlessly with the square ecosystem and that means a customer rather than having to pull up a QR code that may or may not load and front of house staff having to buy scanners and remember to plug them in correctly and deal with barcodes and QR codes and everything there, it means you’re able to line bust, have a really slick and easy customer experience and just walk up and pay with your balance. And so we’re really proud about that because we care a lot about when you’re trying to change anything about customer experience like adopting a wallet, we want to change nothing and so tap to pay with onto Anywhere is a really exciting development for us.

Richard Moot: I mean it sounds awesome and it makes so much sense from a, sorry, not developer experience, but from a buyer experience because I think we’ve even learned that and we’ve had our own fractionalization between different point of sale apps that we have that there’s a confusion. We should definitely dig into it because I think we even learned that trying to scan a QR code or a barcode, we didn’t even have that consistent between different point of sales and that creates this level of confusion that the employee might not understand why this isn’t working. The buyer for sure is just they assume that it’s the business itself refusing to accept this thing that they have. And so being able to just have it very simply in a wallet, you’re just using Apple Pay like you normally would and it just deducting creates the exact kind of experience that you want to curate for a buyer. Yeah, I’d love to touch on the experience that you ran into with the fractionalization that we have within our various square for retail is not the same Square for Restaurants, which is not the same as the basic Square Point-of-Sale

Sophia Goldberg: Classic. Yeah.

Richard Moot: Yeah.

Sophia Goldberg: We always call it Square classic. I don’t know what the formal term is. We ran into it actually pretty early on because we had a customer that was running different apps in different locations and didn’t know and we also didn’t know until we hit a product gap.

So we learned actually a lot about the core of the Square platform as we were running around different product teams trying to figure out is there a reason why there’s this product gap? Is it coming soon? Do other people know and that side of things. And so what we were trying to do was call up the QR code and try and find an easy way about a year ago for in-store payments because what we built with Onset Anywhere took about a year and a half to build and get out. And so we wanted a quick win solution for a lot of end customers wanting to use their balance in store with some square merchants and we found that you could pay with QR code I think on Square classic, but not on Square Retail. I think it was this kind of interesting experience standing in the cafe with the head of operations from this brand us. We had our laptop opens I think with Square dev support and everyone, because I think so much of your tech does work so well and because so much of the dev experience works so well, we all just gaslit each other being like, there must be a reason, there must be a reason or we’re clicking the wrong button or we just can’t find it. And so that was kind in retrospect now that we kind of know a bit more about your systems a bit comical because

To your benefit so much does work so well that when there’s a gap, our first assumption was we are doing something wrong then rather than there’s a product gap here.

Richard Moot: I think that you said it so perfectly right there because come across this in the various sellers that I’ve talked to and I’ve helped try to solve something personally, I would be the first to say that I’m not well versed in all of the various point of sales and their interactions because I mostly think and deal with the API side of things, which is very agnostic of all of those interactions, but I’ve helped people who are like, Hey, I’m trying to do this barcode scanning in a particular thing and I’m following the instructions here in our support documents and I point out to ’em like that’s square for retail. You’re a restaurant, you’re in the wrong support docs. But the design is so similar and I think the thing I always like to say about this is it’s a great user experience, but it’s really great until it’s not and then all of a sudden you realize all of the magic is kind of fading away and you’re like, but I just really want to do this particular thing and I feel like maybe I have to be wrong, but sometimes it might actually be that there’s a miss on our side and I know that one of the big things that we’re working on here is actually trying to unify a lot of the various point of sales and trying to consolidate into one more consistent experience because I think at the end of the day you’re going to end up realizing a lot of businesses are kind of fluid in the way that they operate.

We’ve seen this in some of the health and beauty space where they’re both a service, but then they also have a big retail component, and so what kind of point of sale are they supposed to use? I mean, who knows? So I think a lot of the time, I mean even coffee shops, they’re going to have a retail component in addition to the food and beverage that they’re selling. So of course they want to be able to operate in both.

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, exactly. But it’s exciting to hear that there’s some more unification coming soon because I think that’ll benefit a lot of folks.

Richard Moot: Yeah, I’m very excited to get that out there to get a better streamlined experience. I mean, we’ve been doing a ton of work on just trying to optimize even just the onboarding process to get things initially configured in a way so that you’re like, Hey, I can at least figure out how my system works more easily. In terms of the SDKs and the developer experience that you’re offering to other folks, I’m curious in terms of what the desire is for a customer is to be able to more seamlessly fold ansa into their own custom applications so that it’s more fitting within their brand. What level of customization or are they really looking for with onset?

So we really have four integration paths and it’s kind of choose your own adventure and choose your own effort is maybe a way to put it. So on as custom as possible side, there’s our API integration where a brand owns all the front end experience, can build their own user flows, everything there. The next is the onset core SDK, and so that’s for mobile specifically, and so they don’t have to wrap our APIs into the mobile environment, but they still own the front end experience but can get live a bit quicker. Then there’s the easy button version, which we spent a lot of time on, so is actually a really powerful front end experience as well, but that includes the screens the customer sees and the brand can add their own logos and colors and some cosmetic effects to make it feel branded, but they don’t have to choose what the reload page looks like or choose what the auto reload toggle shape is. We’ve decided all of that for them. And so from what the mega enterprise might want to use down to the 40 location brand with a custom app, but no front end developers full time, that’s what that looks like. And then the fourth is we have some integrated partnerships, and so living within a lot of white label app platforms as the wallet of choice that they can turn on, the app provider builds that experience using our APIs, but from the brand perspective, they don’t have to invest any technical resources, which is really awesome.

Richard Moot: I mean, I love to hear it because I’ve always seen in a different case of there’s, I don’t say it’s necessarily the 80/20, but there’s always that balance between those that obviously in the enterprise size want the heavy customizable, fully brandable, they want every feature that they could imagine type thing. And then there’s the other people who are like, I could not be bothered to build 90% of this. Please just give me the fully baked solution where I can just add in a couple things here and there. I’m curious on that, how do you balance prioritization between the two? I mean, I always find that’s the most difficult thing to really strike the right balance on.

Sophia Goldberg: It’s difficult. I think focus is everything at a startup. And so we started with a very enterprise heavy approach. I think we were SOIA compliant as five people. We’ve been basically PCI compliant actually we’ve been PCI compliant since our first transaction. So we knew that we were building for enterprise scale longer term and enterprise software. And for us the decision of where to balance is really from a go-to-market perspective of how can we help drive urgency and help reduce objections. And so

Sophia Goldberg: For SMB and mid-market and mid-sized brands, a lot of that is around technical resources and prioritization. And so we realized that actually spending additional time on not just building a core SDK but building UI components was we worked with one brand it and realized we spent even, our team spent so many hours in a room helping them with design decisions that our head of solutions, myself, one of our lead engineers and my co-founder of the CTO probably spent a dozen hours walking them through and seeing all the decisions they were making in real time of, okay, what screen should go next? Should this be a toggle or a tick box? All of those things. And we realized every customer we’re going to work with is going to have these exact same conversations and probably land at things that look pretty similar because there’s a lot of new and delightful experiences to build in the world of mobile. The checkout page is not one of them anymore. And so there was a lot more of an aha moment. And then for us, we really prioritized it from the perspective of timing of we knew we were going to invest a lot more heavily in this vertical and helping them launch quickly, and so we were able to go out and find a really great iOS and Android developers to work with and bring it to market and design.

Richard Moot: I think that’s so great because it kind of goes back on that idea of we’ll worry about payments so you don’t have to, and we’ll worry about customer retention, so you don’t have to, it really tries to really strike that part of we care relentlessly about this for you, and so you don’t have to be sitting here making all of these decisions. And it ultimately saves time because they can have a better product, they can have a better experience, and they’re not having to sit there and go through this whole, I mean, to have that many people for a dozen hours or more. It’s expensive. Yeah, it’s very expensive. So it’s great to be able to codify that in a way that you can actually give to people and be like, Hey, here’s your 80% solution, and you just have to make smaller branding decisions.

Sophia Goldberg: Exactly, and I think one thing we talk about a lot at any size of company, but especially true on the enterprise is with the right investment, a company the size of, say, Chipotle could build anything,

Anyone can go hire great engineers and build anything if you have enough capital, but is that really where you want to invest it? Do you want to invest it in a feature like expiring balances, which we actually have a developer blog post on, which is really complicated, how you have different treat balances, different ways can expire, certain funds have different funds in the same wallet treated differently, and then also have to bear in mind accounting and financial regulations on top of it. We like building that stuff. We’re good at building that stuff. There’s not many restaurant brands that need the knowledge to know how to build that on top of a ledger. And so that’s also part of our perspective as well is we’re able to free up a lot of time around the edges as well where they can invest those time and resources on core differentiating product or expansion.

Richard Moot: Great. This is probably a good place for us to wrap things up. Big thanks to Sophia Goldberg for joining us. I truly appreciate you being here and teaching us more about Ansa and where can somebody go to learn a little bit more about Ansa if it’s something that they want to, they’re interested in a closed wallet, maybe they’re running a business or maybe they just want to look at you guys’ SDKs and figure out, hey, maybe this is something that’s for me. Where can they go to go learn more about that?

Sophia Goldberg: Yeah, you can go to ansa.dev to check out more, or you can just email hello@ansa.dev and it’s probably me who’ll get back to you.

Richard Moot: Awesome. And for anything else, if you’re interested in learning more about Square, be sure to reach out to us at developer.squareup.com. You can find links for our discord. You can follow us on X and be sure to subscribe here to learn more and hear more about stories from people like Sophia. Thank you so much. 

Sophia Goldberg: Thanks for having me.