Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt shares stories and insights from his journey of over 30 years, from his first job at the Mongolian Stock Exchange at age 18 to becoming a pivotal figure in the country’s financial and technological evolution. As a founder of key institutions like XacBank and Ard Financial Group, he has been a relentless champion for financial inclusion and innovation. In this episode, he discusses his vision for transforming Mongolia into a leading “investor nation,” the challenges and opportunities presented by Mongolia’s history and geography, and his ambitious plans to leverage tokenization, AI, and renewable energy to secure Mongolia’s place on the global stage.

About our Guest

Mr. Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt is a highly successful and innovative banking executive, entrepreneur, and a champion for financial inclusion. As the CEO and founder of Ard Financial Group, Mr. Hutagt serves as chairman of Ard Holdings’ various subsidiaries, including Ard Credit, Ard Insurance, and Ard Securities. Under his leadership, Ard Holdings became the second-largest company on the Mongolian Stock Exchange.

With 30 years in the banking and microfinance industry, Mr. Hutagt has an extensive and distinguished career. He is the founder of XacBank, which was named one of the top 100 global microfinance institutions by Forbes Magazine. He has served as an advisor to the President and Prime Minister of Mongolia and is a founding member of the Mongolia Economic Forum. He also served as the country’s Vice-Minister of Finance.

Mr. Hutagt has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Alumni of his alma mater, Corvinus University of Budapest. His work has been featured in The Economist, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and the New York Times. He was also selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2009.

He lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia with his wife and children.

Directed by Paulo Joquiño

Produced by Paulo Joquiño

Follow us on LinkedIn for more updates

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

Transcript

Introduction

Paulo: Thank you for joining us on another episode of On Call with Insignia, where we go on call with leaders innovating the future of emerging markets globally. We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing many people outside of Southeast Asia. Normally we have guests from the region, but we’ve had folks come in and dial in from Latin America, from the US, and from India as well. And now we have somebody who is, I would say, the go-to person on anything related to finance institutions and financial services in Mongolia. He’s the guy. I have none other than Mr. Ganhuyag with me. I don’t want to butcher his full name, so I’ll let him share his full name. But I call him Mr. Gan, and I had the pleasure of being introduced to him by Yinglan. I would love to know how you guys met, actually. And maybe we can go from there.

Gan: My name, as you correctly noted, is not to be pronounced publicly very often. It’s pronounced Ganhuyag. And people know me as Gan. It’s easier. I went to a Russian school when I was a kid, and the Russian teachers would always blush when they tried to call my name at the beginning of the class.

I met Yinglan as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum. I’m a Young Global Leader since 2009, and I believe Yinglan joined not too long thereafter. We met at one of the World Economic Forum events, and I’ve run into him on many occasions. He’s a very sharp, smart, and hyperactive type of person, a very successful businessman, and I’m honored to be on the call with Insignia, a venture he has founded and is running very successfully.

Paulo: No, thanks for the kind words for Insignia Ventures Partners. But really, you’re the star of this episode. I wanted to start off with the fact that anybody can look you up on Wikipedia, and you have a full career there, but I would love to really hear some of your stories on being on the ground. I think this is the first time our audience really gets to learn about Mongolia as a market. And I think there’s a lot that, even if they’re not in the market or they’re not in the ecosystem, they can probably learn from how you’ve built a lot of the FinTech and blockchain industry in the country. It would be interesting for more people to learn about Mongolia other than the usual things that they see in mainstream media. So, I’m quite excited to have this conversation.

Early Career and the Mongolian Stock Exchange

Paulo: Maybe we can start with your first job. It was 1991, as you mentioned off the record. You were 18 and you were working at the Mongolian Stock Exchange. What got you into that particular role, and how did you make your way from that to eventually getting into microfinance? It seems like quite the leap, right? To the first company you started and became CEO of.

Gan: Mongolia was one of the more backward nations in the former Soviet bloc, the former communist states. If one wants to imagine what life was like before 1990 in Mongolia, I think you should look at North Korea. That’s how it was for us. There were 2 million Mongols in a country of 1.5 million square kilometers, which is the 19th largest landmass in the world and the most sparsely populated country in the world. In fact, it’s less than two people per square kilometer. Today, we have 3.5 million people, just for background.

I had just graduated from my secondary school, which was a special school with Russian teachers and Mongolian kids, and one of the very few here in Mongolia. I said to my mom that I didn’t want to go to university like everybody else in my class. I said, ‘I don’t want to. I’ve had my tuition done, and I’m ready for life.’ She set me up in the Mongolian Stock Exchange, which was just created to privatize state-owned enterprises that were left from the socialist times.

And there I was, 18 years old at the stock exchange. People really didn’t know what to do with me, so they very soon made me an assistant and interpreter for the Canadian advisor to the stock exchange. So imagine, from one day being in a centrally planned communist country as a secondary school student, you wake up as an employee of the chemical of capitalism, which was a stock market, right?

I spent one year there and then got pretty bored pretty fast. After one year, I told my mother and my dad that I wanted to do whatever they were doing, and they were trading goods between China and Russia. So I did that and went to a university in Hungary in 1993. That’s how I started my career and that’s how I got set into this life.

Paulo: It’s quite interesting. I love that comparison of almost night and day from what you were doing in secondary school all the way to your first job in the stock exchange.

Gan: They paid me twice the salary of my parents. So, both the salaries of my dad and my mom. I started earning that from day one.

Paulo: So there must be a really huge generational difference with your generation and your parents’ generation in terms of economic prosperity and also the aspirations that you guys have. And I guess those aspirations included maybe starting your own company, right?

Pioneering Microfinance in Mongolia

Gan: After I finished my school in Hungary, I came back to Mongolia. I paid for my tuition. My father died in 1993, so we went through hardships. My mother had to cover my tuition fee. I was probably one of the first Mongols to actually pay and graduate on my own without government subsidies and stipends. I came back and tried to do some business, but it didn’t work.

Then I got invited to work for the Central Bank of Mongolia in 1997. In 1997, when I was at the Central Bank, I started pitching people, as you correctly guessed, to help me set up my own business. And I pitched nonstop. In 1997, I started with my cousins the country’s first savings and loan cooperative while working inside the Central Bank. I worked with my Central Bank colleagues to create a regulatory pilot basis type of regime and got licensed. And that cooperative credit union is still up and running and doing pretty well up to this moment.

While at the Central Bank, I ran into an ad which said that they were looking for a CEO of a microfinance project led by the UN and funded by the UNDP. So I applied, I got picked, and they said, ‘You are too young to lead anything in this life. Why don’t you become a finance manager?’ Which I agreed to, but after one year, they made me a CEO, and I founded the country’s first non-bank finance company, which was called Golden Fund for Development.

Expansion and International Recognition

Gan: I transformed that into a commercial bank through a series of mergers and acquisitions in 2001. So I was 28 when I got my bank license. And today, that bank has 10% of the market share and is a systemic bank. It’s the fourth largest bank in Mongolia, called XacBank.

Paulo: What kept you going through all of that? It seemed like a very short period of time to go from 1997, joining the Central Bank, and then in 1999, starting this microfinance company, and then eventually doing all these mergers and acquisitions. What was driving you and what kept you going through all of that?

Gan: I don’t know an exact answer to that question, but as you were asking, I thought maybe the level of curiosity that I possess inside me is higher than average. Maybe I try out new things and I get bored with routine tasks very easily. And so I’d like to always create new adventures for myself. And sometimes I get hurt, but that doesn’t stop me from trying again.

And that’s what I did. By 2004, I was lecturing around the world on transformations and change management. The Frankfurt School of Banking and Finance invited me. I was doing consulting jobs. In 2005, they named me as the UN Ambassador for the Year of Microcredit for Mongolia. Presidents visited my offices, Prime Ministers, the World Bank chiefs, and IMF chiefs.

The EBRD was the first equity investor in Mongolia in XacBank. The IFC’s first equity investment in the country was also us. And I brought in tons of international funds, thanks to XacBank. In 2007, I went beyond Mongolian borders and invested in Kyrgyzstan. So that was a historic moment.

Paulo: Was that the first kind of cross-border investment in the Central Asian region?

Gan: Nobody knew Mongolia at that time. And all of a sudden, we showed up on the horizon and invested into the Kyrgyzstan banking sector. Then in 2010, I was able to secure an investment into China. So we were the first international bank holding company to invest in China, and we had 51% of a joint venture there in Xinjiang. So these were the historic milestones in my career.

And then in 2008, I think the World Bank gave us a $1 million award for coming up with a way to do smartphone, or not even smartphone, SMS message banking. So you would basically have a number and then text an amount, and that amount would be paid to the account that you noted there. So these were the types of things that we did, that I did with my team in the past, before they dragged me into politics. And I became a Vice Minister of Finance in Mongolia in 2010.

Paulo: You just brought up your government stint. But I wanted to ask, because you were building a lot of this infrastructure and making all these milestones in terms of investment, cross-border investment, and obviously, with Mongolia coming out of that period in the nineties, how did you navigate the regulations, or lack thereof? Did it make the job easier for you to experiment and do new things? Or were there any particular challenges?

Gan: I was young, and people probably didn’t take me too seriously, and that’s why they allowed me to create the first savings and loan cooperative, the first non-bank finance company, and then gave me a bank license and let me have a bank holding company, the first leasing company, the first mortgage securitization company, et cetera.

I was lucky in a sense, but at the same time, I would bounce back. I would never give up. So people would push me away, and I would bounce back and come back stronger. So I would never give up.

The Birth of Ard Financial Group

Gan: In 2012, I lost in the elections, and that’s when I went back home. I reflected on my life and what I wanted to do in the future. I was only 37. And I said, ‘Okay, maybe I should just finish what I started in the private sector.’ And that’s why I started this group, which I’m currently involved in. And that’s called Ard. Ard stands for people.

And I said, ‘I want to work for my people. I do not want to work anymore for institutions, any type of institutions. Not political parties, not international financial institutions, not private equities, no institutions, no banks.’ So I said, ‘I’ll work only for the people, including myself, including my family. I’ll only work for the people who are like-minded. And I’ll not waste any more time on faceless institutions.’

And that’s why I created Ard. Ard today is one of the larger conglomerates in Mongolia. We own Ard Financial Group, which is a holding company for our financial intermediaries. And then we have AI Group, which has just been split from Ard Financial Group. And that includes a media group, a software development group, and a crypto and blockchain group. And then we have now projects in mining and energy. And I just came from a meeting with the city municipal government leaders, and we will be entering into smart cities development in Mongolia.

Our financial group comprises banking, insurance, and investment banking divisions, which in themselves have different retail institutions in them. And then we own a big chunk of Mongolian Post. And we own a payments platform, which is called MonPay. That, together, comprises about 50 different companies, 12 of which are public.

And the mission of our group is to create the destination. So we want Mongolia to become the first investor nation, and we want to earn that. Currently, we have 110,000 shareholders. We want to bring in people now to help us expand in the region and then globally through our mining, energy, and smart city ambitions.

The Investor Nation Thesis

Paulo: I love that concept of the investor nation. I think it’s quite interesting. And I guess with any investment, even in Insignia Ventures Partners, any investment firm, we have an investment thesis, right? And a way in which we view the world that guides our investment direction. What is the investment thesis for Ard Financial Group? What principle or what future guides the direction in which you guys are investing?

Gan: I built this unique infrastructure which I would say cannot be replicated elsewhere. 46 different licenses, 12 public companies, which includes a payments platform and a postal platform. We own a stock exchange group, which has a stock exchange and a crypto exchange under one roof, which is called the Mongolian Stock Exchange. All these little pieces we put together over the years, and I don’t think it can be repeated anywhere. Even if you have an unlimited amount of financial resources, you cannot build that type of structure.

And we want to now grow meat on this architecture, on this platform in Mongolia. But at the same time, some of the stuff, like the super app that we have, which is called Ard App, which incorporates all the services of these companies and offers them to our clients in one app, which integrates all financial services into one, plus it seamlessly integrates crypto into the traditional financial services ecosystem. And I think it’s not done yet anywhere else.

And we want to now take some of our solutions into the region to some banks. I just came back from Europe where I was showing our solution to banks. So 2025 was the year when we start showing off the stuff that we did here in Mongolia, and everybody wants to get a piece of us at this time. And this is something that we want to offer in the region and globally.

And at the same time, we are expanding into other industries such as energy. So Mongolia needs to become energy independent. We want to use the Trump era to get financing to build more coal power plants. We want to tap into renewable energy sources so that we become energy independent, and then we want to export that energy at the same time.

Energy currently is the most essential ingredient for data centers. We want to use our abundant energy sources to power AI data centers, and these are the projects that are highly lucrative. And we want to work with partners to explore the opportunities that Mongolia is currently offering to investors.

Then, there are immense mining resources. So everybody talks about critical minerals and nuclear fuel. We have all of them. Everybody talks about gas. Everybody talks about solar and wind. And when you look at the Mongolian plateau, with 300 sunny days in a year and always windy, it’s the home of wind. With the current storage technologies, we can now become the energy storage for the planet and then tap into nuclear energy.

Last year, we signed a deal with the French company Orano to produce uranium here in Mongolia. So these are the opportunities that are present here currently. And Mongolia is 1,200 meters above sea level. That’s where I’m sitting right now, facing the window. I’ll show you afterwards how Ulaanbaatar looks. We are bordering Russia and China, both of which are the second and third largest military powers. So you can say Mongolia is well-guarded by these two for free, right? We have the most secure place on this planet. In order to hit us, you have to go through Russia or China. You pick.

This is a new way of thinking that I’m advertising. And if we manage to attract foreign investment and become a financial center…

Mongolia’s Economic Landscape and Challenges

Gan: I talked about our advantages, and that was being secure with our two big neighbors. But it also presents a unique set of challenges, being squeezed between two large neighbors such as China and Russia. 

So that is a unique set of challenges that it also brings in terms of logistics, bringing in goods, and politics, to be friendly with both of them and also to be friends with Europe, to be friends with Singapore, to be friends with America. It’s hard.

Having said that, we have a free and democratic country. You can go on freedomhouse.org and look at the map. You will find that there is a big green chunk of land between our two neighbors. And this is not my book, but this is one by a Swedish guy named Johan Nylander, but he gives me credit. It doesn’t talk about my wolf vision, but he gives me credit here, and I’m eternally grateful to him for that.

And I think because we’re free and democratic, we can have access to our policymakers and influence policymaking and say we want to develop in this particular way. Today, there is this newspaper that is part of our media group. It’s called ‘The Mongolian Observer.’ It’s in English. And there we talked about tokenization.

Tokenization and the Future of Finance

Gan: It is called ‘The Ard’s Treasury Chest.’ We call it the ‘Digital Chest.’ And it’s on the front page, and you see the wolf there in the middle. And we talked about tokenization. So we tokenized our shares five years ago. The digital wolf, the investor nation, the central wolf. And we’re saying it’s time to tokenize everything that we see. Anything can be tokenized.

And we’re saying, ‘Okay, please read this article and let us tokenize our shares so that we can take our coal-producing companies and list them on Binance to raise money, to provide liquidity, to become borderless, to become a financial center, the wolf economy.’

And then we published this book last week. It’s ‘Digital Gold 3.0.’ This is the ‘Digital Gold Original’ from 2017. This is the ‘Digital Gold’ which was published in 2021. So we go out of our way to influence people’s mindsets, to influence a lot of thought leadership. We do lots of stuff.

In 2017, we organized this Crypto Nation forum, invited all the policymakers, and it was hype to talk about Bitcoin because Bitcoin was going up. Then 2021 came, and it became not very nice to talk about crypto. But we stay our course because we have a belief system. We truly see the future, and the future says that financial intermediation, the way it was done up to now, is done.

We believe in tokenization. We believe in less financial intermediation. We believe in Bitcoin. We believe in digital currencies. We believe in borderless money. We don’t believe in centralized monetary systems, et cetera. And of course, with our central banks and minister of finance, we talk our way through, and over time, we know we will prevail.

And Mongolia can become the number one nation to say, ‘We have digital IDs for all our citizens. We tokenized and sold our shares on Binance.’ We were the first country to privatize our assets on Binance. That’s what we’re doing.

Paulo: It’s quite interesting, the vigor with which you speak of the direction in which Mongolia is heading.

The Mongolian People and Technology Adoption

Paulo: I wanted to go back to talking about the people in Mongolia, and you did mention earlier that Ard stands for people as well. How would you describe the Mongolian demographic and how they use these technologies, how they view these technologies with respect to what you’re building?

Gan: We have about a dozen banks for 3.5 million people. We have about 500 non-bank finance companies and, I think, 200 savings and loan cooperatives. I’m very proud of all these numbers. All Mongolian citizens have not one, not two, not three, but five different bank accounts. We’re overbanked.

I think when we were starting, there were like 10,000 borrowers from banks, and now everybody is inducted to a bank, which is not good. So that means that we overdid our job, and now it’s high time to disrupt banks, disrupt in a positive way. They need to change, they need to bring down their costs.

AI brings us now the potential to bring down the credit risks tremendously. We’ll be the first ones now to announce AI-based lending, AI credit scores. We have 8 million phone numbers, mobile phones, smartphones, and 300,000 Ard Coin holders. About 1 million people have brokerage accounts. MonPay, which is our payments platform, has 1.9 million users. So imagine, with 3.5 million people, half of which are kids, we have 1.9 million accounts.

Paulo: Imagine, half of which are kids. So it’s still a very young population. And a lot of room. I think one thing we see, especially with financial services products, is there’s a lot of longevity in these platforms that invest in the youth’s ability to save and invest. And I think Mongolia definitely has that potential as well.

Risk Management and Future Outlook

Paulo: I wanted to also talk to you about risk. I’m not sure how much you can share in that regard. But I think with any financial service company or FinTech, how they manage risk is at the heart of what they do. And what for you is the biggest risk with this wave of tokenization that you’re trying to lead in Mongolia and redefining what it means to be an investor nation?

Gan: In 2021, at the beginning of the year, we were the only project that was involved with crypto. By the end of 2021, there were 60 different projects, and they raised money unscrupulously. And so that was a big risk for the country as a whole. It was a market risk, and regulators didn’t respond well, and we let our people lose money to scams. Basically, it was a massive, publicly advertised scam to which regulators and policymakers just closed their eyes and closed their ears. I think we should not let this repeat itself.

The over-indebtedness of the population is definitely a concern. Macroeconomic stability is definitely a concern. We need to make sure that the macro policies stay sound. We need to make sure that the Mongolian tögrög stays stable and appreciates, I hope.

Definitely, with the current administration, if they go ahead with some of the initiatives that we are discussing, the Mongolian tögrög will be, again, like in 2011, the strongest currency. And that will also result in an influx of foreign direct investment, making Mongolia the hottest capital market again, like in 2011 and 2021.

In 2011, I was in the Ministry of Finance. In 2021, Ard Financial Group and our subsidiaries comprised 80% of the total trading on the Mongolian Stock Exchange. So I hope to bring back those times, but now on a more sustainable basis. In 2011, the Mongolian tögrög was the strongest currency globally, and we produced 17.4% economic growth. I hope we will be able to return to double-digit economic growth, but on a more sustainable basis.

The Startup Ecosystem in Mongolia

Paulo: We’ve talked a lot about how Mongolia has to be the investor nation. I would love to hear your view on what Mongolia’s startup ecosystem is like. How would you describe the startups that are in the market and how entrepreneurship, in particular, for the future generations of Gan, are looking to build their own companies. What does it look like in Mongolia?

Gan: Very sporadic. There is not a big policy push by the government to support startup entrepreneurs in Mongolia. But given that, I think it’s in our DNA. I receive these young entrepreneurs who have genius ideas, and they need a systematic approach and support.

We work with some venture capital funds that support startups. Last year, as I hosted the Mongolia Economic Forum, we supported the startup challenges as part of the forum. Last week, we held our UB Blockchain Week, and we organized a hackathon with some cash prizes for students.

There is a UB Innovation Hub that was supported by the municipal government, which was shut down. There are private initiatives, the business incubators that are run by large companies. We, ourselves, I say, we are an idea that we just put together. We are big, but we are still a startup. So our mentality inside this company, our culture inside this company is one of a large startup because we put together some pretty impossible ideas into one house.

Paulo: It is really inspiring to see that, as you mentioned, it’s in your DNA. So I’m sure even if it’s still a little bit sporadic, as you mentioned, not as much of a huge push, but it’s part of the people’s identity. And I guess there’s a lot of ice-breaking effort that is happening.

Gan: We are breaking the ice. We are breaking the ice for others to follow in different directions. And because Ard is in so many different industries, we are breaking the ice in lots of directions in many industries. 

And I forgot to mention, the government approved the regulation on virtual zones. And then the Financial Regulatory Committee has a sandbox regulation and the Council on Sandboxes, and the Central Bank has an innovation hub, which is also a sandbox for innovation in the financial industry. So there are a lot of these sandboxes.

Paulo: In any case, yeah.

Gan: These are happening, and my investor relations guy is a founder and managing director of a venture capital firm which invests in startups across the region, actually.

Personal Curiosity and Future Projects

Paulo: As we’re nearing the end of our hour here, I wanted to ask something a little bit more personal. You mentioned earlier on, at the start of the conversation, that it was really your curiosity, higher than the average, as you mentioned. What are you curious about today? What drives your curiosity these days?

Gan: Like everybody else now, I’m very curious about how AI data centers work and what they need. What kind of efforts can be made to make Mongolia house the most efficient AI data centers. And if we can use satellites to do that because we cannot do it through cables through Russia and China.

And that’s what is very high on my agenda, and that’s why I’m very much focused on learning more about these initiatives. I’m working with the World Economic Forum. Probably we can sign, as a government, as a state, agreements with the World Economic Forum to make Mongolia a huge sandbox for legislation and regulation of AI data centers and the export of AI data center capacity.

And also, it’ll be interesting to see how we can manage the building of the skills and knowledge and passion that is necessary to drive the industry. And I hope to place Mongolia at the forefront of these initiatives. And then you’ll see a lot of tokenization talk coming out of Mongolia and linkages to Singapore. Suffice to say, my company tokens are traded on IDEX, our crypto exchange. Those tokens will be traded very soon globally. So that’s here.

Mongolia’s Relationship with Southeast Asia

Paulo: Looking forward to the headlines and more and more news about those initiatives in the near future. And finally, just to bring things back to Southeast Asia, and you did mention a lot about ties to Singapore and building these kinds of relationships with other countries. I’m curious to know also what your view is on Southeast Asia and how the Mongolia-Southeast Asia pipeline of innovation and economic support can be built further.

Gan: We are fortunate in the sense that sometimes we affiliate with Southeast Asia. Sometimes we affiliate ourselves with Greater China, with Northeast Asia. And sometimes, most of the time, we are viewed as Central Asia, along with the five ‘stans.’ And then we are a member of the EBRD, and the European Commission has their offices here, et cetera. We are in a curious situation, and I want to really exploit this curious situation.

Southeast Asia, the future is Asian, that’s for sure. The 21st century is Asian. We are driving, under the leadership of China, of course, the growth of this planet. China is driving the innovation. China is driving AI development. I think we need to view it as a fuel for our own growth.

And of course, the differences in the political systems will play a huge role, and that’s why I think countries in Southeast Asia should be able to exploit the opportunities that Chinese leadership provides in terms of AI, EV development, and in terms of technology innovation. It gives us opportunities. And China itself is a huge market, a huge consumer market. And I think that will help its neighbors propel their own growth stories.

And that’s what we need to look out for. And of course, Russia is in our backyard. The war will stop one day, sanctions will be lifted, and I want to be ready for the day when Russia welcomes back foreign investors. And that will be like me going back to my youth, reliving my youth. That’s cool. And not missing out on the huge opportunities that I missed out on because I was too young in 1992, 1993, when I was going to Russia. And I didn’t really understand the big dynamics, the big opportunities that were opening up to investors and entrepreneurs back then. It’ll happen again.

Conclusion

Paulo: On that note, coming full circle. Thank you again for coming on call with us and sharing all of these stories and all of these insights. And I think, most importantly, the passion, I think, is my biggest takeaway. The way you talk about your country really inspires me to think about my own country, the Philippines. Thank you so much for sharing that with us and hopefully, for our audience tuning in out there, hopefully you’ve learned a little bit more about Mongolia. I know Mongolia these days is very popular because of the Netflix show ‘Physical 100: Asia.’ But now, you know a little bit more about the country and the opportunities it has, and maybe it inspires you guys to start these connections and think really globally in the same way that Gan has. So on that note, thank you so much again for joining me.

Gan: Cheers and good luck, Paulo. Very good to meet you, and thank you for having me.