Digital checkout company Bolt, like other fintechs, is riding a wave of economic and regulatory change roiling the industry, thanks partly to the ascent of the Trump administration and the changes unfolding in Washington.

Bolt President Justin Grooms attended the industry Fintech Meetup conference in Las Vegas earlier this month and heard a lot of talk about how those changes may affect the industry. 

In an interview with Payments Dive shortly after the event on March 18, he touched on the impact of leadership changes happening in Washington, including at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Reserve, and how they will dovetail with industry changes already underway. For one thing, the Trump-propelled shift toward digital assets will have an impact on fintechs like his.

Grooms also noted how U.S. payments evolution has been driven by fintechs, such as buy now, pay later firms, as well as novel ideas, like the emergence of stablecoins, all of which are causing upheaval and competition for legacy payments players, including banks.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PAYMENTS DIVE: Did you hear anything interesting with respect to the idea of states becoming more active in regulation in the payments and fintech sphere?

JUSTIN GROOMS: I didn’t hear a broad discussion around that, but what I did hear some discussion about that was interesting is a pick-up in applications for money transfer licenses more broadly. We think about these walls kind of falling down around banking, or at least being challenged…even very powerful fintechs that have a lot of cash don't generally sit on ten billion (dollars) of assets under management, so they don’t always hit that classical Fed threshold of what it takes to be a bank type financial institution… So, with Michelle Bowman's nomination to be the vice chair of the Fed, she’s historically said, ‘Hey, that number might be too high,’ which all of a sudden makes banking more manageable for fintechs to look at.

And the second thing is that some people that we spoke to that are in the business of helping companies get and manage (money transmitter licenses) were saying business has picked up a lot for us recently, which is interesting to me, because I don’t think the biggest fintechs are out there looking to spool up MTLs. This means to me, there might be a lot of innovation happening in the smaller fintechs.

Anything else striking to come out of the conference presentations?

I think the biggest thing is just this concept around banks trying to get more creative in how they market their existing products. So, regarding buy now, pay later, there is this amazing situation where these banks offer built-in BNPL capabilities themselves as part of their financial banking products, but consumers are still adopting the branded BNPLs, like the Klarnas and Afterpays and such, at much higher rates than what the banks can get folks to use on their existing cards. There was a lot of discussion that was interesting to me about the need for the banks to partner with companies like Klarna to access that visibility. There was some discussion that was very self-aware coming out of the banks like we need to find better ways to to market our products in a language that speaks to consumers. 

Speaking of Klarna, what do you think Walmart’s strategy might be in changing up its BNPL partners, moving from Affirm to Klarna?

My knee-jerk reaction would be that Klarna did give them a better deal. I think that Klarna seems to be clearly driving their business towards growth, as opposed to building profits at this time. I take them at their word when they say that they want to be everywhere.

Turning to current politics, what’s your take on legislative proposals, like the one in Congress to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, actually becoming law?

The vibe that seems to be emerging right now is the willingness to challenge norms and status quo in how people access finance, financial tools in their life.

What may all this change mean for Bolt?

What’s exciting to me is that some of these concepts that are going to shake up the industry, from a deregulation perspective, and challenging, essentially is that we’re going to see, from my perspective, more of these niche products emerge, different ways of paying. Stablecoin is starting to get some real traction – this concept of being able to work with different types of digital currencies. I think pay-by-bank payments are slowly getting more and more accepted, especially for people that want to move money quickly. What’s exciting to us is that this really puts in a strong need for an identity layer to give consumers agency over all of this.