Public Key Podcast

Future of Digital Assets, Self-Custody: Simon McLoughlin – Ep 87

December 19, 2023 | by Chainalysis Team

Episode 87 of the Public Key podcast is here and we are happy that you love the refreshed look. You wouldn’t expect a centralized crypto exchange to be launching a self-custody digital asset product, but Simon McLoughlin (CEO, Uphold), is on the podcast to talk about VAULT, a self-custody wallet that aims to make holding digital assets easy and convenient for users.

You can listen or subscribe now on Spotify, Apple, or Audible. Keep reading for a full preview of episode 87.

Public Key Episode 87: Self-custody and the future of crypto assets for exchange users

You wouldn’t expect a centralized crypto exchange to be launching a self-custody digital asset product, but  Simon McLoughlin (CEO, Uphold) speaks with Ian Andrews (CMO, Chainalysis) on the podcast to talk about VAULT, a self-custody wallet that aims to make holding digital assets easy and convenient for users.

Simon shares the growth and challenges Uphold faced during the 2017 bull market and emphasizes Uphold’s unique trading infrastructure, which allows for seamless trading between different assets.

He explains the rigorous token listing process and the partnership with Ripple to facilitate cross-border payments and their efforts to attract large banks as partners.

Simon also covers the various regulatory landscapes in jurisdictions they operate in like the USA, Europe and the UK, as well as global expansion plans to Canada, Brazil, Vietnam, and Australia. 

Quote of the episode

“One of the challenges over the past year has been maintaining banking relationships in the wake of FTX. We’re really really proud that we managed to retain our banking partnerships in  the United States, Europe and the UK and added new banking partnerships” – Simon McLoughlin (CEO, Uphold)

Minute-by-minute episode breakdown

  • (2:07) – Simon’s first encounter with cryptocurrency and joining Uphold during the 2017 crypto boom
  • (6:58) – The challenging process of listing new tokens
  • (9:23) – Uphold’s unique “anything to anything” trading experience
  • (12:17) – Partnership with Ripple for cross-border payments
  • (16:27) – Encouraging signs with banks approaching crypto partnerships after industry shows resilience
  • (19:50) – Different crypto regulatory approaches by the US, Europe and UK
  • (21:45) – Introduction of Uphold VAULT for easy self-custody
  • (25:13) – Future prospects for the industry and Uphold’s global expansion plans

Related resources

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Speakers on today’s episode

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Transcript

Ian:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Public Key. This is your host, Ian Andrews. Today I’m joined by Simon McLoughlin, who is Chief Executive Officer at Uphold. Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon:

Ian, thank you very much for having us.

Ian:

Super excited to learn more about Uphold’s business today, but I’m actually curious to start with your personal background. You’ve been with the firm for a long time. And prior to that, from what I can gather from LinkedIn, spent a lot of time in the world of private equity and investments. Where did you first encounter cryptocurrency, and what led you to make the leap from TradFi into the exciting world of crypto?

Simon:

Sure. Well, I traveled around a lot. I lived in the US for a while, I traveled and lived occasionally in Latin America. And that gave me a real sense for how difficult it is to move money cross-border. Not only is it expensive and slow, but it’s error-prone.

So when I was living in New York, I lived on Union Square, and there’s a bookshop there called Barnes and Noble. And I do remember the moment in 2017 when I picked up a book on a Saturday afternoon about Bitcoin, and it was just this notion that anybody with a mobile phone and an internet connection could move value all around the world without any intermediary. That just completely captured my imagination.

And I just very deliberately decided that I wanted to go and work in that industry. And so wrote on spec to a whole bunch of firms, one of them being Uphold.

Ian:

Amazing. So and what year did you find that book in Union Square?

Simon:

That was in, let me get it right, it must have been early 2017. And I joined Uphold in late 2017. But interestingly, I worked for 20 years in traditional finance and I never really came across crypto or digital assets. I think people in the industry tend to forget how little, at that point, the message had permeated the mainstream. So I didn’t come across it through my work in the institutional investment space.

Ian:

Yeah. It’s interesting that I think a lot of people’s exposure to crypto was, if you were trying to do certain forms of online commerce, right? Obviously if you were maybe into some of the more illicit trade, that was probably where you would’ve encountered it. Or if you were just aware of dark net markets and things like that in prior years.

But 2017 was really where there was a huge boom. We had seen the launch of Ethereum a little prior. There were ICOs happening, kind of left and right by 2017. Take us back to that point in time for Uphold. What was the firm like when you joined? What was the focus, what were you working on?

Simon:

Well, I’ve loved Uphold from the moment I joined it. It’s got a fantastic and unique engineering architecture and trading architecture, which makes it really special.

When I joined in 2017, I think we were at 47 employees. Today we’re at around about 400, and it’s gone from a tiny business into quite a significant business. And I remember when I joined, what I couldn’t get used to, because most businesses distribute regionally or nationally or internationally. But of course, crypto is inherently global.

And so I remember joining in September, October time in 2017. And then we went into that enormous bull market, and it was just extraordinary to see the growth in user numbers. I think we had a 230% increase in monthly transacting customers between September and December, 2017. And in 2021 it was even more spectacular. We went from … In September, 2020, we had monthly volumes of 140 million, to May 21, so six months later, just over six months, $2.5 billion a month.

And for any business to scale that quickly is extraordinarily difficult. You have to scale customer service, you have to scale compliance and control frameworks, which often involve a lot of manual processes. So I do remember being simultaneously exhilarated by the potential of being involved in a business that was truly global in distribution, but also very aware of the challenges in terms of having to scale a business very, very quickly in response to very unpredictable demand patterns as well.

Ian:

Yeah, Simon, it’s amazing how much that is consistent with my experience joining Chainalysis. I recall coming on board, and in the first few days I was reviewing kind of information about where our customers were around the world, and how they were using our technology. And I was blown away at the global distribution.

Customers in places as far out as Mongolia, where I can safely say I’ve never had the opportunity to work with anyone in that country prior to joining Chainalysis. It’s such a unique property of cryptocurrency. Unlike most technology that tends to kind of originate in California, Silicon Valley, and then migrate eastward around the world, crypto doesn’t have that attribute at all.

Simon:

It doesn’t, no. It has sort of violent and unpredictable patterns. When I first joined Uphold, I think our second-largest customer base was in Venezuela. And it was basically classic example of people in a country with non-stable fiat currency looking for the safe harbor of digital assets. And that was a huge business, and we’ve still got a significant following in Latin America for that reason.

Ian:

Today I gather the company is operating in 184 countries, and you support over 200 different currencies between the kind of crypto and fiat sides of the business. The complexity of that just must be absolutely massive.

Simon:

Yeah, I mean the trading stack is complex. We support 280 assets altogether, largely digital assets: coins, tokens. We also do precious metals, we also do carbon credits. But I mean, the majority of our business obviously is in digital assets and tokens. Most people know because of our retail app, we’ve kind of made a name for ourselves because we support important new tokens early.

We source liquidity from 30 underlying venues, including some decentralized exchanges, which is where some significant new tokens appear first. So we’ve been the C-five venue over the past, I don’t know, 12 months, which has really been the place you’ve gone to discover things like Casper, XTC, Hedera Hashgraph, there’s a bunch of stuff that we were first to cover.

Ian:

Talk about how you approach that a little bit. Because I get the sense reviewing your public website, there’s a huge emphasis on trust and security. We’re going to talk about some of your innovations I think on the security side here in a little bit.

I see many exchanges take a very conservative approach to listing new tokens, so being first to market as a differentiator must present some challenges. How do you think about overcoming those and being first, but also being safe?

Simon:

Yeah, well, I think it’s a question for us of being safe, and it’s lovely if you can be first too. I mean, it’s fascinating in the sense that there are now tens of thousands of projects being built on blockchains. And you want to give people the opportunity of accessing all of that innovation at the same time as protecting them from scams and frauds.

We are not in the business of picking the winners or the losers, we’re not an investment advisor. But when we look to launch a new token, there’s a very formal process that we take the project through. So we have a listing committee, every token has to go through it. It consists of InfoSec, compliance, fraud, legal.

And we reject between 50 and 70%, actually it’s more like 70% these days. We reject around 70% of tokens that are brought to the table. We make sure there’s a real community behind each project. We make sure the code is open-source and auditable by a reputable third-party. We conduct searches on the founders, we look at token economics to make sure that the team isn’t holding a disproportionate amount of the token.

We don’t support tokens with privacy features. We obviously may look at the marketing language that the project is using. If they’re suggesting that the price is going to go up, or if it goes into the realms of being security, we reject it.

So we do really a vast amount of work before we bring a token onto the platform. And the vast, vast majority are rejected. Because we really don’t want to expose retail customers especially to the risk of detriment. And sifting the wheat from chaff in this space, it’s difficult. People have to educate themselves above all before they invest. It is obviously a high-risk space.

Ian:

Yeah, it’s high risk, high return. But I love the approach. I am curious, you mentioned earlier that one of the things that was attractive about Uphold at the outset was the sophistication of the trading platform and infrastructure that you built. And I noticed it kind of gets encapsulated in this marketing phrase, “Anything to anything trading experience.”

Share what you can about, what does that training infrastructure actually look like, and maybe how does it differ from the average exchange out there? What’s really making Uphold unique?

Simon:

Sure. So if you look first of all at the interface level, on Uphold you can go from, in one move, physical gold into Bitcoin. Or you can go from Hedera Hashgraph into Casper in one trade. You don’t have to sell the token, buy fiat, sell fiat, buy a different token.

If you go onto a lot of other platforms, you still have to do a trade in several legs, which is expensive and clumsy. So at an interface level, you can go from any supported asset into any other supported asset in one move. And that’s because people are trading on our ledger.

So behind the scenes, we’re structured a little bit like a prime broker. We have our own inventory. That inventory is operated within risk bands, so we don’t go more than 2000 long or 2000 short on any particular asset, long or short based on our liabilities to customers. As soon as we do in either direction, we go out to market and we rebalance our inventory.

And the thing that makes Uphold really special is we are connected to 30 underlying venues, including centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, OTC brokers, and we have a pricing engine that’s listening to all of the pricing and all of the quantities in real-time on all of those venues.

And that system is actually pretty sophisticated. We rely on physical servers co-located next to our trading partners. We have servers in Japan, Singapore, Europe, US, on a co-located basis. The trading language is C++ and Go. We don’t operate in the cloud, this is physical servers. So you’ve got ultra low latency.

And in plain English, what all that means is we’re able to continually poll the market for the best pricing. And for retail, that means you can rely on competitive pricing compared with comparable platforms. And for our institutional business, very deep liquidity. Because you’ve got access to the whole market, and we can help you move large quantities in or out with minimal price impact.

So it’s a very powerful model. Because you haven’t got one order book, you’ve effectively got 30 order books. And you’re continually listening to them all, and identifying the best way to do a trade.

And unlike a lot of similar trading venues, we don’t just do USD pairs, we do USD GBP pairs, euro pairs, E-pairs, BTC pairs. So there are literally hundreds of paths to doing a transaction, and that basically helps us obtain optimal execution for clients. And it makes the infrastructure very adaptable to different user groups.

Ian:

That liquidity that you’re talking about, I would imagine that was a big draw for the recent partnership announcement with Ripple. Talk a little bit about what you’re working on with them.

Simon:

Sure. Well, it’s a very exciting deal for us. Ripple have a service called Ripple Payments, which allows multinational companies to move money cross-border in a very seamless and quick way. It’s largely to do with treasury movements from one subsidiary to another. So you could have a very large company moving funds from the US to Europe, or Asia to the UK.

And the way they do it is they allow the company … Basically they’ll open an account with Uphold, the account will be pre-funded with XRP up to a certain dollar amount required for the transaction. And then our job is to convert the crypto into fiat and handle bank payouts.

We are one of several liquidity providers to the service. The corridors we are operating in are UK, US Europe. And we’re very excited about it, because it’s a service that’s up and running with a large installed user base, and Ripple are already moving hundreds of millions of dollars a year through the service.

So for us, it’s a very high-value use of our infrastructure. And by infrastructure I basically mean the trading architecture I spoke about before, which allows you to move large quantities without moving the price of an asset. The licensing that we’ve got, we have, I think it’s 51 licenses now on three continents. And also, all of the compliance and fraud framework that you need to move, you need to move crypto into fiat and vice versa. That’s a highly regulated activity, and you need specific licenses for us.

It’s a part of the business I’m most excited about. Because if you really believe in blockchain technology, that’s a true example of it being used to cut out middlemen, inefficiencies, and serve a useful purpose. It’s got nothing to do with speculation. It’s got everything to do with performing financial transactions more efficiently.

And a big part of Uphold’s story now is, we are positioning ourselves as a piece of infrastructure that such projects can plug into. For example, slightly different example, but there are thousands of super interesting projects being built on blockchains now. We are integrated into 26 blockchains.

Earlier this year we launched a service called Topper, and Topper allows a user to, with their debit or credit card, buy crypto on the spot, on the website of one of these projects and move fiat into crypto to participate in the project. So it’s a non-custodial solution.

Again, it’s really facilitating payments into decentralized projects. And it’s a very scalable business. You are fundamentally acting as a bridge, a regulated bridge between fiat and crypto. That’s the kind of thing that gets us really excited, because it’s recurrent payment flows, it’s utility use case of crypto, and it’s got nothing to do with people just gambling on crypto.

Ian:

As you think about your business into the future, what’s the relative split between this B2B infrastructure that you just described versus the maybe more well-known today retail trading venue?

Simon:

Yeah, I mean, my goal is to get the company to a point where, by the end of 2026, the majority of our revenues come from B2B payments. Now, that depends on a lot of things. It depends on clear regs crystallizing in many parts of the world, it depends on a certain rate of enterprise adoption of the technology.

But I’m really, really encouraged over the last eight months. Now that we are getting clearer regs in many parts of the world, we are seeing companies adopting the technology to do really interesting, useful things. Over the past few months, we’ve even been approached by a number of quite large banks.

And the banks are basically saying, look, now we can see the regs are coming. Okay, they may not be here today, but we can see they’re coming. We want to be able to distribute digital assets to our customers. We don’t need your wallet, but we don’t want to have to build everything you’ve got. We don’t want to have to go and get 51 licenses. We don’t want to have to build all of that trading architecture. So we would love to plug your infrastructure into our wallet on a white label service.

That’s a part of the business, again, we’re super interested in. Because you are plugging into very large installed user bases. You’re not connecting with startups and inheriting execution risk. So that’s a very encouraging sign for us.

Ian:

I mean, that outlook is kind of amazing, coming off the year that we had in 2022 where it felt like the entire industry was kind of on the brink of collapse. To know that banks are now coming back to the table and actually exploring projects with the level of sophistication you just described.

Simon:

I think that’s right. I mean, I think they’re seeing a resilience in the industry after these brush fires, where a lot of weaker players get taken out. And the players that have robust control infrastructure and proper control frameworks, I think the firms that are left standing are the kind of firms that banks want to work with.

I mean, like a lot of crypto firms, one of the challenges over the past year has been maintaining banking relationships in the wake of FTX. We are really, really proud that we managed to retain our banking partnerships in United States, Europe, and the UK, and added new banking partnerships I might add. At a time when there wasn’t a very high degree of appetite among many banks to support crypto firms.

And the reason we were able to retain them was, fundamentally, you as a crypto firm have to sell your own compliance function and control framework to the bank’s compliance department. And the banks will only work with firms who represent a low risk to them. Which means you’ve got really solid anti-money laundering controls, fraud controls, InfoSec controls.

I mean, these are very complex businesses. And you have to get your partners comfortable that you don’t represent an unacceptable level of risk.

Ian:

Given the markets you’re operating in, even just the three you mentioned US, UK, Europe, it strikes me that the regulatory and policy view towards crypto is pretty radically different across those three markets. I mean, as an American, I would say we’re kind of mired in gridlock and uncertainty here in the US at the moment.

Europe seems to be leading the way with what, at least from my view, is a pretty compelling and reasonable framework under Mika. And the UK is somewhere in the middle, where it seemed like they were being very restrictive on actually licensing exchanges. I think you’re uniquely one of the few that actually has an FCA license.

But now publicly, they’ve sort of said they’re hoping to attract more legitimate crypto businesses into the market. So maybe that’s opening up a little bit. What’s your perspective?

Simon:

I think the MICA regime across Europe is the most progressive and far-reaching. Dubai is doing some really interesting things. The UK is, it’s really promising actually. They’re taking crypto really seriously, and the government has a high appetite for attracting the industry and providing a home to the industry. And a lot of big crypto firms have moved to the UK, because the UK is providing clear rules of the road.

At a government level, the appetite is high because they can see the technology’s not going away. I think there’s a little bit of a lag, the FCA is still making up its mind basically, and it’s got extremely high standards for crypto firms. The process they put us through to get our license is something like I’ve never experienced before. And I have to say, it was brilliantly run by the FCA. Incredibly demanding. And we were very delighted to get the license, because they really made every large firm that applied for that license work for it.

But I think at a government level, there’s an appetite to attract the industry here. Where we are based, we’re just off Carnaby Street on Oxford Circus. And within a stone’s throw there’s a whole bunch of big crypto firms, Genesis, Copper to name just a handful, within a couple of hundred yards of us.

So London is becoming a crypto-friendly destination, and the government’s introduced some pretty helpful legislation and draft bills. The US, I think we’re coming up for a regime change. I’m hopeful that there’ll be clear regs in the next two or three years.

My belief, I mean it’s been good to see some of the SEC overreach be put in check by the courts over the past nine months. And I think what’s particularly encouraging in the US is, if you look at the draft bills that have been introduced, so the McHenry bill, the Lummis, Gillibrand bill, there’s real detail in those bills that has definitions that even MICA doesn’t have in.

So my own personal belief is, the US is going to be late to the party, but they will come to the party, and they’ll probably end up coming with the best set of rules and the most detailed set of rules for all. But it’s going to be two to three years of continuing to navigate a degree of uncertainty.

Ian:

Well, I enjoy the optimistic outlook on the situation in the UK. And what you described with the FCA and the difficulty through the licensure and examination process, I think is what we actually want everywhere. Like you said, weeding out the firms that aren’t taking security and fraud seriously. I mean, those are the companies that we don’t want to see continue.

I’m interested, to shift gears though, you just had a huge announcement on the technology front launching something called Vault. Talk to us about what Vault is and why you decided to build it.

Simon:

Sure. Well, basically Vault makes self-custody easy and convenient for the average user. It’s a multi-sig wallet where the user controls the majority of the keys. So the user has two keys. We, Uphold, have one key. If you put assets in your Uphold vault, the assets are on chain. They’re in a location that’s fully bankruptcy-remote. And the wallet is resilient to key loss. So in other words, if you lose one of your private keys, you can put your remaining private key together with our private key to create a replacement key.

And the last benefit is that the trouble with traditional self-custody is it’s complex, it’s clumsy, and also you are remote from trading locations. You have to go rummaging through your desk drawer to try and find your hardware wallet when you want trade.

With Uphold Vault, you have all the security of a self-custody wallet. But when you want to trade, the trading venue is literally one click away. So you can move your funds back to Uphold. And this is an automated process, so one of your keys is put together with our one key, and the funds are automatically pulled back.

We really think it’s something special. It’s incredibly easy to use. It’s multi-chain. So we’re starting with XRP, we’ll add Bitcoin in Q1, followed by some of the more exotic networks actually, such as XTC and Casper in Q2. So you won’t need multiple wallets for multiple chains, covers multiple chains.

And I think the thing I love about it the most is, we chose native multi-sig technology that’s embedded in the infrastructure of blockchains. And that technology, in the case of Bitcoin, it’s what, 10, 12 years old? The Bitcoin network’s never been hacked. That technology is battle-tested, it’s protected tens of billions of dollars of assets. And we put a window onto it that makes it much easier to use. And if you lose one of your keys, we can help you create a replacement key.

And I know when I came to crypto for the first time, my impression was, wow, what a fantastic technology innovation. But the reality is, for the average person, holding digital assets natively is difficult. It’s complex, it’s impractical. And so I believe that Vault potentially solves one of the biggest problems in crypto, which is it makes it easy to hold digital assets on a self-custody basis.

Ian:

I would add an adjective to your description of self-custody, which is terrifying, right? This idea that you have something of significant value that is backed by a string of letters and numbers is … You’re never quite sure when you go to send something out of one of these wallets, am I sending it to the right location or am I sending it to a burn address where I’ll never see it again? So I always sweat a little bit before I hit transfer. So I love this model.

A couple technical questions. The idea that it’s one click to transfer from my wallet back into my account at Uphold, is there a transaction fee associated with that? Or are you somehow covering the transaction fees? And I realize that may vary depending on the network that you’re operating on.

Simon:

Yeah, so we’re starting off with XRP, where the fees are tiny. But no, to your point, when you move funds between the vault and Uphold, yeah, there is an on-chain transaction fee which you, the user, pay for. But in practical terms on XRP, it’s negligible. I think there’s a minimum balance. I think initially you need 12 XRP to open a Vault account, but that’s not a King’s ransom.

Ian:

Yeah. Why the decision to start with XRP versus any other currency out there? What led you to that path?

Simon:

Just the majority of our users hold XRP. As you know, we continued listing XRLP for two years when most other exchanges de-listed it, and we attracted a very large user base of XRP holders. So beginning of the year we surveyed our customers and said, “What do you most want to see on Uphold?” And the resounding answer we got back was, greater variety of custody options.

So this year we’ve introduced UpHuddle, which is a true self custody wallet. By true I mean you just get one key. Vault is our assisted self-custody option where you get two keys, we keep one key. So to your point, it’s sort of self-custody without the terror of, I’ve lost my key. But it’s very much user-driven. And I mean, a lot of this was driven post-FTX. People lost confidence in centralized exchanges given what went on at FTX. Which, as you know, was nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with conventional fraud.

But when we asked our customers, custody came up as the big issue. Having said that, Uphold’s, the traditional Uphold app, the custodial model, every month for the last 18 months, with two months of exception, we’ve seen very strong positive inflows. We were definitely a net beneficiary from that crisis in the industry. Because Uphold uniquely publishes its assets and liabilities every 30 seconds on a public website. And we’ve done that since 2014 every 30 seconds. And that means that you know your assets are here, you know they’re available to withdraw.

And we are audited by a firm called RSM Robson Rhodes, which is a big audit firm with an international reputation. And also, we’ve done stuff like take governance really seriously. Our chairman of Uphold Europe is a guy called Kevin Ludwick, who’s a former FCA seven-year regulator. In the US, the chairman of Uphold Limited is a guy called Jim Hilton, who’s the former head of Promontory Financial Group, the big compliance advisory firm. So we’ve got governance built into our DNA.

So at Uphold we never loan out customer money, we never rehypothecate customer money. And you can go to our transparency page at any time, and you can see that your assets are there a hundred percent-plus reserved. So that’s really [inaudible 00:32:26].

Ian:

I was on that page on the website earlier today, actually. I saw the page, and I actually sat there long enough to see it refresh. So we’ll link to it, the show notes.

Simon:

Oh, good. Yeah, please do.

Ian:

Everybody else will go watch the numbers move around. I think the big deal though, is the point you made about having an actual auditor verifying those sums, right? You follow the FTX debacle, and they had some of those numbers on their website too. But they were just random number generated numbers, they weren’t actually tied to anything that mattered. And so having that seal of approval from an auditor on the process behind it, I think is really powerful.

Simon:

Yeah.

Ian:

Hey, last question for you. What’s on the horizon beyond Vault for the business? New markets, new technology, new tokens? Where do we see things going over the next year?

Simon:

Well, I think, I don’t know the future, right? But it feels pretty promising at the moment. You’ve got sort of, we’re coming up to the Bitcoin halving, there’s greater regulatory clarity emerging. Companies and some banks are adopting the technology in a way that we didn’t really foresee, certainly 12 months ago. So it does feel as though the industry’s in a much better place than it was a year ago.

In terms of where Uphold’s going, geographically we’re going to Canada, Brazil, Australia, and we’re also looking at countries like Turkey and Vietnam, which have strong crypto communities.

To my earlier point, we’re putting a vast amount of effort into, we already have a comprehensive set of APIs, but we’re doing a lot of work on building out our API set so that a third party firm that has its own wallet can plug in and access some of our core services without having to take the Uphold wallet.

So we can, again, act as a piece of white label infrastructure for retail aggregation platforms and regulated financial institutions. That’s very exciting for us. And we’re obviously busy scaling products like Topper, which is the fiat crypto on-ramp. That’s extraordinarily in a really difficult market that’s been doubling its revenues every month since launch.

So yeah, we feel it’s a pretty interesting time to build the B2B part of our business, is where our principle focus is at the moment.

Ian:

Exciting times, Simon. Thanks so much for the conversation today, and best of luck with all that you’ve got ahead of you.

Simon:

Yeah, well thanks so much for having me on, Ian. And I’m sorry we had a few technical problems. I hope it emerges clearly in the end.

Ian:

Absolutely.

Simon:

Great.

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