PEP Episode 089 — Contracts That Make You Bankable: Portability, Tokens, Termination | Adam T. Hark WHF

Banking Meets Payments: Capital, AI Reality Checks, and the Tokenized-Deposit Shakeup

Hosted by Leo Arzumanyan and Jeremy Stock. Special guest: Adam T. Hark, Managing Member, Wellesley Hills Financial (https://www.wellesleyhillsfinancial.c….

Payments isn’t just rails and rates anymore; it’s capital, contracts, and data that decide who scales and who stalls. In this candid, operator-level conversation, Adam Hark maps the real terrain for ISOs, PayFacs, acquirers, and ISVs: how residual streams get valued, why lenders still struggle to underwrite payments businesses, where AI helps (and where it absolutely doesn’t), and why tokenized deposits from major banks could upend stablecoin economics and B2B money movement.

What we dig into

From portfolio trades to full-stack banking: How residual purchases, portability, and ISO/agent structures shaped a niche investment-banking playbook for payments—and what buyers actually pay for when they value a book.

Capital that understands payments: Why traditional lenders misread variable merchant cash flows, the collateral that really counts, and the deal structures that align risk with revenue.

AI without the fairy dust: The practical use case is heavy-lift data processing (merchant-level files that set portfolio value), not judgment or strategy. Generative tools draft; experts decide. Hallucinations are a legal and financial risk without human oversight.

Operating in the tokenized era: How bank-issued tokenized deposits (with yield) could challenge private stablecoins, change treasury workflows, and accelerate corporate adoption of blockchain rails—while cores, processors, and gateways scramble to keep up.

Founder focus: Don’t bolt AI or crypto onto the roadmap just to keep up with the buzz. Start from the problem: auth rates, cost to collect, dispute cycle time, portfolio attrition. Solve that, then layer tech.

Field notes for teams

Valuation is in the data exhaust: Clean merchant-level reporting and cohort analysis beat pitch decks. If you want a premium, instrument your book.

Contracts drive financeability: Data portability, token migration, termination assistance, and audit rights are the difference between “bankable” and “hard pass.”

AI guardrails: Use models to wrangle processor files and KPIs; never ship output without expert review. Treat models as interns—fast, not authoritative.

Tokenized deposits over press releases: Expect treasury to demand speed and yield. If you touch payouts or cross-border, start planning wallet addresses, policy, and controls now.

Talent and trust: Niche expertise compounds. Clients will pay for people who actually understand payments math, not just “fintech.”

Why this episode matters

If you raise capital, buy portfolios, or operate on the sharp end of merchant acquiring, this is your playbook for 2025: get your data house in order, negotiate bankable contracts, deploy AI where it’s measurable, and prepare for tokenized deposits to change how funds move and settle.

*Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice.  All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.*

Transcript

Adam Hark (00:00):

We are all incentivized to say that, aren’t we? Right? I don’t think, again, in professional services in particular where creativity is important, strategy is important. I mean, we’re way out over our skis in terms of what AI can actually do. And

Leo Arzumanyan (00:19):

When you’re in a niche industry, we are ultimately, a lot of these models or all of these models are trained on the data that’s out there. Right. Our industry’s pretty niche. I don’t think there’s a lot of training material for to train on at least.

Adam Hark (00:32):

And I shut that stuff off even with the programs we use like Google Suite, make sure that Gemini’s off. I don’t want to teach ’em either.

Leo Arzumanyan (00:40):

Right, exactly.

Adam Hark (00:42):

I don’t want to feed these guys all out. These are proprietary processes and we’ve all, you’re in legal industry, we’re in the banking industry. We spent years investing ourselves and learning our trade. Continue to learn our trade. I mean, why would we just toss that and give that to somebody?

Jeremy Stock (00:57):

Yeah. Welcome to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. And our special guest, we got Adam Hark with Wellesley Hills Financial. Adam, it’s a pleasure having you in the studio. We’re a big fan of what you guys do over there. Welcome. Thank you very much

Leo Arzumanyan (01:23):

Welcome, Adam. Usually I like to start these podcasts out by getting an understanding of who we’re with. So can you just let us know how you got into this space? Everyone has a really unique story from what I’ve learned. I’ve done a couple of these as Jeremy said now, and I’m realizing everybody has very unique stories of how they got into payments. So I’m just kind of curious how you got into this industry and from there, if you could tell us what your role is at the company and what the company does as a whole.

Adam Hark (01:48):

Sure. So if I’m going to be very frank about it, I kind of felt assed backwards into payments and investment banking at the same time.

Adam Hark (02:00):

I originally teamed up with a relative of mine who was working for a merchant acquirer. This is Cerca 2006, I think I’m based out of Boston. This relative was, and the acquirer was small publicly traded OTC company, and their business model was inorganic growth. So they would bird dog portfolio deals and residual deals, and that’s how they grew their company. And after that, it ultimately became my partner in my first business. He had observed internally working as a salaried person that he was doing a lot of the M and A work. He was identifying the targets and all this, and then at the consummation of a transaction and walks the investment banker and walks out with multiple six figure payday. And he is like, okay, something’s not right here. He had the idea at the time I was looking for a career change and we just kind of, it was such a really, it’s so niche that merchant acquiring payment processing space, you couldn’t help but think there was some opportunities there, especially given that what was super interesting, most of the transactions were not enterprise, they were asset transactions. So people are trading, they’re buying residual streams, they’re buying portfolios, they’re portable, they’re not portable, and this happening all the time. And there wasn’t at the time really a well-established intermediary

Adam Hark (03:34):

Who was brokering those transactions, representing whether it’s the buyer or the seller. And so we saw Elaine and we ran in it. So I cut my teeth in banking and in payments in the merchant acquiring space with the processors, working with ISOs sponsored banks. And over the years, I don’t know how much you want, I can run you up all the way to what you want. Yeah, absolutely

Jeremy Stock  (03:59):

Out, but interesting to know. Yeah, it is. The more detail, the better. Usually

Leo Arzumanyan (04:04):

One thing we’ve noticed is in similar, it’s funny how your story is starting out the same way is people just keep finding themselves in this industry. It’s not that they saw it out.

Jeremy Stock  (04:11):

People fall in all the time.

Leo Arzumanyan (04:12):

Every time I interview someone here, they always fall into it. It’s never like, and same for me. I didn’t become an attorney in payments knowing what I was going into.

Adam Hark (04:19):

It’s a really, I mean not purposefully, but it’s an opaque industry. I mean, we as consumers, okay, all we know about payments is that it either works or it doesn’t.

Jeremy Stock (04:31):

Exactly.

Adam Hark (04:31):

That’s all we know.

Leo Arzumanyan (04:32):

I never thought about surcharging or this

 

Adam Hark (04:34):

Pull back the curtain, man, there’s so much going on. There are so many different participants in the ecosystem. I mean it’s wild. And so that’s how I fell into investment banking. That’s how I got into the payment space. Over the years, we flattened out the practice to appeal more broadly to financial technology, all the species they’re under and fast forward to 2020 and comes a pandemic, blows out whatever our pipeline was at the time. There’s nothing. And the reason why that’s relevant, because there were no deals in the offering to keep myself and two of my younger teammates, I think Anthony’s been here on a podcast before Siobhan’s back in the headquarters in Boston. There was nothing pinning us in anymore. And what we kept bumping up against as advisors, m and a consultants doing investment banking work was the fact that we weren’t actually an investment bank.

Adam Hark (05:25):

And that created a constraint for us because we had developed this expertise in this really niche area of financial services and the biggest groups out there from publicly traded companies to financial sponsors, private equity groups, they would come to us so we could analyze what they were doing if they were looking to these types of assets and wanting to acquire them or build one, et cetera. But we would respond to requests for proposals and bid on engagement. It’s going to be investment bank, investment bank, investment bank consultant. You got DQ right away. So it was really frustrating for us. And then when the pandemic came in, blew up the pipeline, it interestingly created an opportunity for us because there was nothing pinning us in. We’re saying, you know what? We’re going to do it. So at the same time, we stood up Wellesley yields Financial, which is the operating company, the one that the market knows. I stood up Wellesley Hills Securities, which is our broker dealer. So now we registered with Finra and that really opened the doors for us because now 70 plus percent of investment banking is raising capital on behalf of the company.

Jeremy Stock (06:29):

Sure.

Adam Hark (06:30):

It’s not M and A. And it just opened the doors and we’ve been running. We ran through them and we’ve been running ever since. So that’s kind of the background today is we’re currently constituted that payments practice is still probably 30 to 40% of our business. Then there’s FinTech across the board, and then we have a burgeoning B2B software practice internally as well.

Leo Arzumanyan (06:52):

That’s really cool. One thing I wanted to ask you, and it is something I like to ask a lot of our guests, kind of like a, I don’t know what you want to call it, like an AI nerd. I’m really interested in how AI is impacting society and all sorts of industries. So we’d love to get your take on, are you seeing AI impact what you guys do? If so, how? And are there any challenges front and center for your guys’ clients that are maybe being resolved by AI? Just walk us through that and what you’re seeing because that’s a big component of everything now.

Adam Hark (07:20):

It’s a big topic, it’s expansive. I can approach the answer in two ways. I mean, one is what are we seeing as it relates to our clients in the payment space? I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward at the moment. I think it has value, immediate value to companies as it relates to repetitive tasks and automating them.

Leo Arzumanyan (07:47):

Yeah, agentic AI, right? I believe is that

Adam Hark (07:50):

Even generative?

Leo Arzumanyan (07:52):

Generative, okay

Adam Hark (07:52):

I think agentic is still, I mean everybody’s talking about us all over the place. I think you said society, I think everybody’s a little bit out over their skis on this. There’s a big difference. Whereas generative, you’re prompting it and it’s based on Bayesian reasoning, which it’s statistical. So the past predicts the future. That is what I think people are using now.

Adam Hark (08:19):

They’re prompting these massive LLMs and they’re getting outputs and they can do stuff that they would’ve normally had higher person, real humans, and bang, it pops out and there’s efficiencies there clearly as it relates to our practice. That’s really interesting because getting back to the expertise that we’ve kind of honed over the years and payments, there are certain analysis, especially KPI analysis, valuation work that you can’t get at other places. You’re not going to get it really at a lot of consulting shops that aren’t banks at the true middle market banks, they have FinTech divisions or payments divisions. But really what they did, they parachuted in bankers and they said, okay, you’re in the FinTech spot, but they don’t have that background or that expertise. So there’s some really niche things. One of the places that we’re looking at AI implementation specifically is in or with the processing of the massive amounts of data that the processors kick out, which basically define what a portfolio is worth and feeds or informs the financial model that tells you what the business is worth.

Leo Arzumanyan (09:34):

Just to jump in real quick on that point, I’m curious, how are you guys handling AI hallucinations? Because just for an example, we’ve had clients come to us and be like, Hey guys, we use, let’s say it’s Chat GPT or Google Gemini to draft this contract. Can you take a second look? And when we look, we have to completely redo everything. They don’t actually know what they’re looking for. So what they see to them sounds like a good contract. I take their one page contract, turn it into an 11 page contract that has all the bells and whistles that has everything that they didn’t know needs to be in there. And when I looked at their contract, it’s provisions that are not the laws that don’t actually exist, for example. And they’re like, they don’t look, I’m just wondering how you guys handle your hallucination with the AI.

Adam Hark (10:16):

So what we’re doing, excuse me. We’re currently working on a project with the University of Toronto. We’re working with an AI team at the school. It’s a joint venture doing it through one of our executive advisors, Michelle Bao, who based out of Canada. It is a collaborative effort. We’re feeding them the data and they’re supposed to be basically simulating the analysis that we would do internally. And again, it goes back to fundamentally processing these massive data files, the raw data reports that the processors kick out on the merchant level activity, whether it’s for the ISO or for a bank, et cetera. And it’s not so much a halluc, I wouldn’t say it’s hallucination issue. There’s a trust factor here. So where we are in the project is we’re really trying to determine to what degree of accuracy the outputs that the model that these kids are working on with an AI program are to what we would come up with. To answer your question, perhaps more bluntly, as much as I find generative AI an extremely useful tool, to me it’s still stupid.

Leo Arzumanyan (11:34):

Agreed.

Adam Hark (11:35):

This is not smart AI. Smart AI is deep learning. That’s when you get into the agentic stuff where it’s actually, you’re not prompting it, it’s looking at data, it’s finding patterns, it’s processing that information, it’s drawing conclusions, and then it’s acting on it. That’s different. I mean right now we’re still in the generative universe. And so I think it’s really important that you have that human oversight. You cannot send something out the door.

Leo Arzumanyan (12:00):

Hundred percent.

Adam Hark (12:00):

That’s something that kicks out of a model.

Leo Arzumanyan (12:02):

I always tell our clients.

Adam Hark (12:03):

You’d be negligent

Leo Arzumanyan (12:04):

If you’re going to use it without us even looking.

Adam Hark (12:06):

You can use pieces of it.

Leo Arzumanyan (12:07):

But you have to verify. And one thing I try to explain to people when I’m trying to kind of explain what AI is in a simple way, is the way I view it. Lemme know if you think differently, but for generative AI specifically, I kind of just say, Hey, it’s like a word predictor. It predicts the next words.

 

 

Adam Hark (12:21):

Yeah. I mean that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re prompting it saying, Hey, listen, find an answer that would mapped to this input, which is the prompt or the question, and it kicks it out based on, again, it’s basically the statistical. So it’s just saying there’s a 90% chance that the answer should be this, but it’s not a hundred percent

Leo Arzumanyan (12:41):

And it’s not verifying it.

Adam Hark (12:43):

And I think if you’re especially feeding the professional services industry like you are and we are, you can’t just kick that out the door and say, yeah, this is, here we go. And I think clients too want to know or make sure that there’s some on eyeballing these outputs before it gets kicked back. Because I mean, if you told me, I’m sure maybe there are AI lawyers out there now. I don’t know. I’m sure. I mean, they’re doing document processing and all that kind of stuff. I’m sure. Now that doesn’t give me the warm and fuzzies, right? Not at all. I feel like I’ll be back in court for something.

Leo Arzumanyan (13:18):

Yeah, I don’t think it’s at that stage where I would be comfortable doing that at all. There was one I didn’t really look into, but I remember a headline like a PI AI attorney. I dunno, I don’t even know how that passes any sort of ethics standards. How do you go to court with that? I don’t really get how that works.

Adam Hark (13:35):

I know, I dunno. I don’t want to know. But I mean I think it is effective in doing it can take 70% of that heavy lift, do that piece, and then you can fine tune it with oversight and just kind of back testing to make sure that the outputs are, they’re coming out where they should come out. If we did a real human did it.

Leo Arzumanyan (13:58):

That’s really interesting.

Jeremy Stock (14:00):

It really is. But what I’m hearing you say, Adam is in essence we’re not at risk of our jaws being taken over just yet. Not yet yet.

Adam Hark (14:08):

Well, I mean, listen, we all are all incentivized to say that, aren’t we? Right? I don’t think, again, in professional services in particular where there’s creativity is important, strategy is important. I mean, we’re way out over our skis in terms of what AI can actually do.

Leo Arzumanyan (14:28):

And when you’re in a niche industry, we are ultimately, a lot of these models or all of these models are trained on the data that’s out there. Our industry’s pretty niche. I don’t think there’s a lot of training material to train on at least.

Adam Hark (14:41):

And I shut that stuff off even with the programs we use like Google Suite, make sure that Gemini’s off. I don’t want to teach ’em either.

Leo Arzumanyan (14:49):

Right? Exactly.

Adam Hark (14:51):

I want to feed these guys all out. These are proprietary processes and we’ve all, you’re in legal industry, we’re in the banking industry. We spent years investing ourselves in learning our trade, continue to learn our trade. I mean, why would we just toss that and give that to somebody?

Leo Arzumanyan (15:07):

Just to one of your point, Jeremy, yesterday I was reading an article, so Google just released their latest Gemini 3.0 model, which is crushing all the Benchmarks

Jeremy Stock (15:14):

Right.

Leo Arzumanyan (15:15):

In terms of job losses, right? Radiologists, there’s this exam for radiologists where they take a look at the scan and whatnot. The average radiologist that was part of this study scored, I want to say 81% Gemini 3.0 now scores somewhere around high fifties, low sixties. So they’re bridging the gap. The last model was in the 20% range. So we’re really bridging the gap on a lot of these things.

Adam Hark (15:41):

And that’s probably one of the best use cases there for generative. Because I mean, you think about a doctor, what they’re doing is they’re processing information from what they see, from what they hear from tests, and they’re making a prediction based on it. And it’s probabilistic.

Leo Arzumanyan (15:56):

Yeah. You feed it, the scan you run that scan against thousand

Adam Hark (15:59):

So you can score it. They’re not a hundred percent. They’re never a hundred percent. Well, hopefully they’re, but I mean we would wish. Yeah, we would wish. I mean I would expect that AI at some point to exceed the human capabilities and prognosis and whatnot.

Leo Arzumanyan (16:13):

I could go on this topic forever, but just sticking with payments and what you guys do.

Adam Hark (16:18):

Yeah, we just wanted to help you.

Leo Arzumanyan (16:21):

What kind of challenges are you seeing, let’s say in the immediate to short-term future for your clients, the industry as a whole? Anything that’s coming up across your radar that you’re thinking and worth talking about?

Adam Hark (16:31):

I think there are two things. I think making sure that good companies are well capitalized is a constant challenge. And I think payments, again, may be a victim of its own specialization because a lot of lenders out there, whether they’re bank or their private credit funds, still have a lot of difficulty getting their heads collectively around the business model. If they’re lending, what is it secured against, how much risk there is there? You know about this because a lot of that risk is baked into the contracts, which doesn’t map to, they understand SaaS model recurring revenue because here we got software company sells to a business, there’s a contract in place, the business pace, X amount a month, okay, payments processing is different. It’s variable.

Leo Arzumanyan (17:21):

And so many different industries are implicated. That they don’t think about.

Adam Hark (17:25):

So I think that’s a challenge that persists. And then I think on the technology side of things, and I think this is AI, this is now crypto, I think people are struggling to understand where they’re going to be, what their business is going to look like, what the world is going to look like three years, five years from now. And I think

Leo Arzumanyan (17:48):

What you mean by that, are you saying digital is going to replace fiat or are we talking

Adam Hark (17:54):

Well, I think there’s a place for all forms of money. I’ll say that, but I mean think this, it’s infecting the psychology of founders right now that they feel pressure. How are we going to use AI? And I think a lot of them panic and they look for an AI solution without actually understanding the problem that they needed to solve. So I think that’s distracting and disruptive to the core business crypto, I think completely different technology, but I think that’s also has creeped into the mindset of the founder in the payments space. How is this going to affect us? What do we need we prepared to provide our merchants with everything they’re going to need in the next three to five years as it relates to payments acceptance.

Leo Arzumanyan (18:54):

So I was actually, that’s perfectly ties into what I was going to ask you before this podcast. You brought up JP and M and then base network, we’re talking stable coins, all these things. I’m going to need your expertise on this. I just had a little bit of time to look into that, but correct me if I’m wrong. What I understood was JP and M released this base network for tokenized deposits. And just from my kind of brief look into this, it almost seems like is this going to undercut the genius act and the utility of stable coins? Because with stable coins, you can’t get interest off of them, but with these tokenized deposits you can. So why even use stable coins? That’s kind of how I saw it.

Adam Hark (19:34):

So a couple of things. So stable coin to me, it’s not going away. It is going to be part of the future. It already is. It’s part of the now. That’s just the way it is. What I think is amazing, just from a high level is just the speed at which the technology’s evolving along with the regulatory regime, along with the use cases, along with demand, all different segments. I was doing, I was a moderator at a panel in New York City about a month ago, and that was on stablecoin. And I was making a case, not just for everybody, talks about the B2B cross border, which is so objectively as a release of stablecoin is an objectively better solution. With one caveat. It doesn’t have the throughput yet that the SWIFT system has.

Adam Hark (20:33):

I don’t think it can handle the amount of transactions, but I mean the technology itself, I mean there are still intermediaries there, but a lot less of them, which is what reduces the time. And when you reduce the amount of intermediaries, you’re also reducing theoretically the cost. Great. But I mean, there is a case to be made for the B2C at some point, especially as it relates to big retail like the Walmarts and the Targets and the Home Depots of the world who make up maybe 60, 70% of all card transactions that are running on Visa and MasterCard, a big retail. But just between that point in time, which was roughly a month ago, and now, I mean the JP PM Morgan press release that came out two weeks ago with their not a stable coin. So it falls outside the purview of the Genius Act, which is fascinating in and of itself because now you’re talking about it is a tokenized deposit. So if I’m a corporation and I have money in my bank account essentially, now, I still haven’t figured out the mechanics of this with granularity.

Adam Hark (21:41):

But as I understand it, it’s interchangeable. The big, I read this press release three or four or five times because I’m saying to myself, I think this is a really big deal and nobody’s talking about it.

Leo Arzumanyan (21:54):

You were the first, I haven’t heard of it until you raised this. And I was like, wow, this is huge and

Adam Hark (21:58):

Release nobody talking about, because it turns to me, it turns the whole stablecoin business model potentially on its head. Because here you have these non-bank issuers who generate revenue primarily from yield, I mean from the securities that are backing the coins. Now, if I think about, if I was a corporation and have my accounts at JP Morgan, and I have at least two accounts, I have an operating account and I have a money market account, and even for a small company, you can do basic treasury management where if you’ve got a balance in your checking account, you’re switching it into your money market, you’re getting yield back and forth into checking when you need it. Okay. Why would I ever take money out of my bank account and convert it to, let’s say, USDC?

Leo Arzumanyan (22:42):

Right, which you can’t get

Adam Hark (22:44):

I don’t get yield on

Leo Arzumanyan (22:44):

On no yield. Yeah.

Adam Hark (22:46):

Why would I do that now in JP Morgan, they have two networks that they’re operating. So the base one, I think is some sort of joint venture with Coinbase. That’s Ethereum level two solution. What’s relevant about that is it gives JPMD their deposit tokens, access to public blockchain, and then internally they have a Connexus network, which is their own proprietary permission network. So you have to be in the JPM network to have access to that, have a wallet and whatnot. But you get all the benefits of stablecoin without having to give up yield, which to me is a game changer. And again, I’m very surprised that the financial media, the pundits that we typically listen to on LinkedIn and everybody, it’s almost like the whistling past the graveyard on this one. And as a scratch in my head, I was like, I’m not sure if they understand what I mean. This is the biggest institution in the world,

Leo Arzumanyan (23:46):

Right? Yeah. When he brought that up, I started looking into it, and like I said, just briefly, but just from that brief review, I was like, wow, this is huge. Wow.

Adam Hark (23:54):

I think it’s a big deal. I think it’s a big deal.

Leo Arzumanyan (23:55):

I’m curious how you think, because you just said it’s a game changer. If you just had a really short, condensed version, game changer, what do you think is the biggest change that’s going to come as a result of this?

Adam Hark (24:04):

The biggest concern, the reason why when they did the Genius Act that they legislated it in that private third-party issuers couldn’t share the yield was to protect the banks. They didn’t want people, the banks wanted to make sure the deposits stayed placed. They didn’t want money flowing out of deposit accounts, which they need to do. Their primary business, which is lending that money has to stay there. So they didn’t want it flowing out into Stablecoin Private. That’s why they legislated it in that banks can’t share yield. So now you get this tokenized deposits, which falls outside the scope of the Genius Act. It’s not a stable claim.

Leo Arzumanyan (24:47):

I wonder if this is going to prompt other companies to start doing this and doing partnerships

Adam Hark (24:51):

With, well, dunno, exercise in reductio, add absurdum, but you’re thinking about the small, tiny financial institutions. The banks out there. It was a Bank of North Dakota put out a press release or something like that, maybe a month and a half ago that, what was it? The Buffalo coin or something? I have no idea.

Leo Arzumanyan (25:10):

Buffalo. Everyone has a coin, right?

Adam Hark (25:12):

That’s say, but I mean, if you think about smaller financial institutions, I mean the biggest threat to them with stablecoin again, is outflows. If they lose a deposit base, they lose their ability to lend. So imagine them being able to keep the, there’s no need to go outside to convert deposit funds into a private issuance like USDC or Tether or something like that. It’s a great solution. Now, that begs a whole bunch of other questions as to core banking core capabilities now, and I think that’s also why you saw Fiserv and FIS jump right in the ring at the same time as Genius or right before, right after it passed. Because people sometimes forget they’re not, A lot of people in our space think of ’em as acquirers, okay? They’re banking core technology providers. Thousands of banks run on Fiserv and FIS cores, so it’s natural for them to have to address this. I think they came right on and they said, we are going to address this, which they had to do. I’m not sure exactly how they’re doing to do it, but all banking cores in the future are going, I mean, listen, everybody, whether every merchant, every merchant on the planet’s going to have a routing number, still a checking account number. What’s different is now they’re going to have a wallet address. That’s the future.

Leo Arzumanyan (26:40):

I want to end it off with two things. One, I don’t think you told them where they can reach you, like the specific email or specific contact info. And two, something I want to start doing with our podcast, Jeremy, at the end of each podcast, I want to ask the guests one thing they’re looking forward to. So either if it’s a trip that’s coming up, I don’t know if a good movie, you’re going to go watch whatever the case may be, just let us know one thing you’re looking forward to in the near future.

Adam Hark (27:02):

Okay, as it relates to contacting myself. I think the simplest way to do it is just find me on LinkedIn, Adam T. Hark Wellesley Hills Financial, because we kind of have a long domain name

Leo Arzumanyan (27:18):

Link is probably easiest.

Adam Hark (27:19):

It’s too easy to misspell

Leo Arzumanyan (27:22):

And I’ll make everyone reach out to us and we’ll give you those contact, whatever the case may be.

Adam Hark (27:26):

And in terms of things I’m looking forward to, this is a very selfish thing. I love being right. All right. So I want to see in the next 12 months where we are at the end of 2026 with stable coins.

Leo Arzumanyan (27:40):

It can’t be work related. It’s got to be personal thing. You’re looking forward to, I got to cut you off there.

 

Adam Hark (27:45):

Oh, that’s personal. I want to, right. No, I think for me personally, I take a lot of, I’m a builder. When people, especially people applying for an internship or something like that, they say, why did you get in this business? What is it that brings you into the office every day? What is it about your personality? I said, I like building things, and I like doing it with teams and my teammates, and I love my teammates. I love what we’re building. And to be able to continue that trajectory is extremely fulfilling and rewarding, and I’m looking forward to that. Cool. That’s great.

Leo Arzumanyan (28:29):

You still tied it to work, but we’ll let it slide.

Jeremy Stock (28:30):

Yeah, absolutely. It is a worker. Yeah, no, it is. It’s a great answer. Adam, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at global legal law firm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions that do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.