Digital assets and crypto: What’s on the horizon?

August 01, 2023

From blockchain to fintech collaborations, hear how innovation is changing the way we approach risk management and creating new opportunities for growth. Discover the challenges and benefits to integrating technology into traditional financial systems, and learn how partnerships can create a more resilient and secure financial landscape.

In this episode Scott Likens, PwC’s Trust Technology Leader, is joined by Caitlin Long, Founder and CEO at Custodia Bank, to explore the potential of technology and partnerships in stabilizing financial systems.

Learn more about cryptocurrency and digital assets.

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About the podcast participants

Scott Likens, Trust Technology Leader, PwC

Scott leads PwC’s Emerging Tech practice in the United States. With more than 25 years of emerging technology experience, he has helped clients transform their customer experience and enhance their digital operations. Scott has worked across industries with some of the biggest multinational companies to transform their business by applying a local lens to global digital and emerging tech trends. He has expertise using emerging technology and advanced analytics in many areas including e-commerce, digital architecture, mobile technologies and social customer engagement. 

Caitlin Long, Founder & CEO, Custodia Bank

Caitlin Long is Founder & CEO of Custodia Bank. A 22-year Wall Street veteran who has been active in bitcoin and blockchain since 2012. In 2018-20 she led the charge to make her native state of Wyoming an oasis for blockchain companies in the US, where she helped Wyoming enact 29 blockchain-enabling laws. From 2016-18 she jointly spearheaded a blockchain project for delivering market index data to Vanguard as chairman and president of Symbiont, an enterprise blockchain start-up. Caitlin ran Morgan Stanley’s pension solutions business (2007-2016), held senior roles at Credit Suisse (1997-2007) and began her career at Salomon Brothers (1994-1997). She is a graduate of Harvard Law School (JD, 1994), the Kennedy School of Government (MPP, 1994) and the University of Wyoming (BA, 1990).


Episode transcript

Find episode transcript below.

Announcer:

00:00:01:00 Welcome to PwC Pulse, a podcast to provide insights to help you solve today's business challenges.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:00:10:00 Hi there. I'm Scott Likens, Trust Technology Leader and Head of the Innovation Hub at PwC. I'm excited to be here at the PwC Emerging Technology Exchange with our guest today, Caitlin Long. She's the Founder and CEO of Custodia Bank. Caitlin has deep experience both in traditional financial services where she's held senior positions at top Wall Street banks and also in the world of decentralized finance.

00:00:30:13 For those of our listeners that may not be familiar with the term decentralized finance refers to a financial service involving either digital assets, maybe crypto currencies, possibly fungible tokens or NFTs and likely to take place on a blockchain. Caitlin, thank you for being here. How are you?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:00:46:13 Thanks, Scott. It's great to be here.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:00:48:13 Excellent. Well, it's amazing to meet you and I look at your background and I see Wall Street banks, I see law firms, I see amazing history, the very traditional industries.

00:00:59:03 Then I see this crazy pivot and I see you going into a world that is, it's upside down right now to some degree. But how did this happen? Like, what was the urge to do something so different than the traditional world of finances?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:01:11:03 Well, I came across Bitcoin in 2012 and like everyone thought, Oh, this I'll never amount to anything at the beginning.

00:01:18:17 And then once I dug deeply into it, like most people, you never come back out of the rabbit hole. And it was clear to me from having worked in traditional finance that there were major problems in the settlement system, and many of the PwC clients who are listening are going to be familiar with how hard it is to move money around the world and also in the securities markets.

00:01:40:29 And I knew that this technology, pretty early into my personal dive into it, was going to help solve a lot of the settlement problems.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:01:48:29 Transparency?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:01:49:29 This is a really simple concept. Exactly. And some of the most beautiful concepts in humanity are those that are the most simple and frankly, just having a ledger that is updated at pretty close to real time is a powerful concept.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:02:03:07 I remember 2012, I read the paper. I was in China 2013 to 2018, and I saw this just explode. But I came back to the U.S., and it was still something that no one wanted to talk about. And you're talking about 2012. We're in 2023. And I think a lot of executives may still not know a lot about this topic.

00:02:21:26 The passion was there for you, but that's a big leap. Can you tell us about the next five years or eight years of how that happened?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:02:28:26 I'd been on Wall Street a total of 22 years before I left to go full-time into this in 2016. And from that 2012 to 2016 period, it was an interesting journey.

00:02:40:08 I kept my head down. I was going to Bitcoin meetups and started to discover there were others like me who didn't want to tell their first.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:02:46:08 You were under the radar. You had to do this on the side.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:02:47:08 Exactly. We have to stay under the radar.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:02:49:08 That’s amazing.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:02:49:08 But then an internal blockchain working group got formed. The CTO called me out of the blue. I was the only managing director.

00:02:57:07 Most of the people who were participating in the internal Bitcoin forum were relatively junior in their careers, and I stuck out like a sore thumb as managing director, running a business, and he called and said, Get up here please. The board has asked me to tell them, what is this Bitcoin thing and I would like to hear it from you.

00:03:12:01 He ended up pulling me into a group of five people himself and myself included, to start vetting, because by then the startups were calling. And we met a lot of the early startups. I'm, you know, having flashbacks, recalls of meetings with people.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:03:26:01 Some engineer with an idea.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:03:28:01 Well, exactly. And powerful ideas and all aimed at fixing the settlement problem.

00:03:33:17 And this is so interesting because it was not at the time what it has turned into for so many people today, which is a speculative instrument. That was never what I was interested in. I was always interested in fixing the settlement problem on Wall Street.

00:03:45:17 And as someone who's just deeply committed to basic property rights and right and wrong, while I was working in 2016 with the Delaware Blockchain Initiative, at the first startup that I was working at, after I left Wall Street full-time, I was actually in a meeting at the SEC with the deputy secretary of State of Delaware, and he talked about the number of instances where the number of shares issued in a 10-K issued and outstanding did not match with the number of shares registered in Delaware.

00:04:11:18 And I absolutely can see how that can happen. Those two ledger systems are never reconciled.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:04:15:18 The disconnection. Yeah.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:04:16:18 Absolutely. And so, what he explained is that it typically comes up in proxy battles where someone is challenging. Why are there more shares issued and outstanding than we're legally registered with the State of Delaware?

00:04:29:12 And you can start to see how that becomes a mess. But actually, proxy voting is one of the places in the securities settlement system where there is a massive amount of disconnect. And in fact, there was a terrific speech by one of the Delaware Chancery Court judges back in 2016 where he talked about the power of blockchain technology to fix proxy voting.

00:04:48:14 And he cited a I believe it was a University of Delaware professor who did a study that if there is a proxy vote that is within a ten-percentage point difference, that no one really knows who won due to the incredible inaccuracies in proxy voting. And this happens in payments as well.

00:05:07:14 And many of your listeners are going to find it interesting because, of course, many are publicly traded companies, but all of your listeners are going to be interested in the payments piece, which is everybody has pain points and I've in my Wall Street career dealt with that as well.

00:05:20:24 Big companies have thousands of bank accounts, and they all have to reconcile. And I was working at the time with the then treasurer of a global company with a global supply chain as well, and their big manufacturing facility, at least at the time, I think it still is. It was in Thailand, and it took them six days to move their own corporate funds from their Thai subsidiary back to the U.S. parent.

00:05:42:25 We did a project looking at their foreign exchange execution to try to figure out how effective was it. They had taken out so much of the inefficiencies in their operations that they recognized that the next thing they needed to attack was their corporate treasury, because there's so much inefficiency in corporate treasury moving money around. This is all public.

00:06:01:12 In an interview that I published on my own blog back in 2014, it's dated, but it's still very relevant because nobody has solved these problems, yet.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:06:08:12 Still not solved. Yeah.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:06:10:12 So what's interesting also then is if that's the case, they were trying to figure out we did a project for them to move money same day, just same day, their own corporate funds.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:06:20:12 Their own money.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:06:21:08 If they could have done that same day as opposed to T plus six at the outside, it would have saved them 200 million dollars. So, what is the 200 million dollars? It's the so-called comfort deposits in air quotes that your cash management banks require you to hold because it takes so long to settle payments, especially foreign exchange. You have to effectively prefund those payments.

00:06:44:16 Now, a lot of your listeners are probably thinking, what's the big deal with that? Here's the big deal. At the time, the non-investment grade company had a very high cost of capital. I remember probably 20 years ago now when Moody's came out and effectively gave all the banks the sovereign credit rating and there was a big brouhaha. No, the banks are not part of the sovereign.

00:07:03:09 And then the 2008 financial crisis hit. And guess what? Moody's was right. They all got bailed out. But you see where I'm going, that the cost of capital differential is quite large between a non-investment grade, equity funded, capital structure company at the time and then a bank that has effectively a sovereign plus a little bit weighted average cost of capital.

00:07:21:12 And so it's a dead weight loss on the economy to make these non-investment grade companies trap all this cash. The better way to do it is just let settlement happen effectively as close to real time as possible, as opposed to forcing a company with a high cost of capital to trap all that extra cash in. There are a couple of thousand bank accounts around the world.

00:07:39:10 It's a reconciliation nightmare. And then on top of that, this is public information. A former treasurer of a global automotive company who's now retired, who's one of my business heroes, by the way, for this, kept them funded during the 2008 financial crisis. And this has been publicly disclosed in books since then, had sent a swap termination payment to Japan and it was due on a Monday, and they sent it on Friday afternoon from Detroit and it had to go through Lehman Brothers on the weekend of the Lehman Brothers failure.

00:08:10:21 And it took them a couple of days due to the swift black hole that every corporate treasurer is familiar with. It took them a couple of days to find where that money was, and they weren't sure that they would survive it. So, I'm talking about examples now that are ten, 15 years old. But guess what? Nothing's improved.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:08:27:10 Right. And back to your point around this technology gives us transparency that it doesn't exist in that current system. So, as we know, last year has been a little bit crazy. The year before we had all this hope, there was amazing energy speculation in last year, it kind of all fell apart.

00:08:41:10 Can you give us your perspectives like what, what actually happened? Was it a technology or was it something else? And then we'll talk about later. How, how do we get out of this?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:08:49:13 Last year was a year that I say good riddance because so many speculators and criminals and grifters and leveraged business models were flushed by the market. The market was vicious. Yeah. Markets work and great.

00:09:01:16 Good riddance to all of them. I hope they learn their lessons and never come back. The technology, of course, has continued to advance. Two years ago, the payment failure rate on the Lightning Network was unacceptably high. The payment failure rate right now is about one and a half percent where you propose payment and it doesn't go through within a reasonable period of time.

00:09:19:06 So we've made massive engineering improvements on the real application of the technology, which is, in my opinion, to payments while the speculators were all off speculating and I'm not interested in the speculation, one of the unfortunate realities is that in order to create an internet native money, it had to be a scarce token. And if something is scarce, it's a collectible. And if it's collectible, it may have value, if there's demand for it.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:09:45:16 Someone's going to try and get it.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:09:46:16 And so it's hard because the reality is you cannot separate the technology from the fact that the tokens are scarce and therefore may have value. And as a result, scammers will come in. But, you know, we've seen this before in the history of the internet itself, in the history of, for example, mutual funds.

00:10:03:10 There was a lot of corruption in the early years of the mutual fund industry. And then the Investment Company Act of 1940 cracked down upon it. And the rest is history. And we're going to, I think, have something like that happen in the United States. Unfortunately, not this year, but it's coming.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:10:18:10 I couldn't agree more. And back to your point around this, technology gives us transparency that it doesn't exist in that current system.

00:10:24:03 There is this pivot and I want to talk about last year specifically, but two years ago there was a pivot where defi as a broad term became common. Everyone was talking about it and there was a lot of things that happened, a lot of inflation in the market. You said speculative, right? So that happened. And then last year was a tough year.

00:10:38:13 And I want to get your perspective on what actually happened last year and where are we at and go into this year. What do we need to do different? Because we all know that the core technology still makes all the sense in the world what you just explained. But everyone thinks about all of the bad news we heard last year. Can you unravel some of that for us?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:10:55:13 Markets work and now those of us who've been around this is my third bear market and those of us who've been around have seen this before. And the sun will rise. It's going to.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:10:55:13 Technology is sound. Let's get back to the basics.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:11:07:13 Absolutely. We haven’t really talked about why the technology is so sound.

00:11:11:21 There's something really important that has taken place in the Bitcoin space. I'm mostly a Bitcoiner, although I'm curious about some of the smart contract platforms, many of which probably are securities. But Bitcoin is not and there isn't anybody to sue. There is no central authority. I mean, it truly is a decentralized piece of software, and it is a marvel from a software engineering perspective.

00:11:31:03 By the way, it's almost at Six Sigma network uptime. How many other pieces of software that are even close to Six Sigma network uptime.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:11:31:03 Without armies of people that are dedicated to doing that, that’s all.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:11:41:03 And all of the upgrades happen, and they don't take the system down, right? There is no network administrator. It lives in the wilds of the Internet, attacked every day from a cybersecurity perspective, and every day it gets stronger.

00:11:51:03 But let's get back to what's the practical use of the technology. We can here's the punch line. We can now move currency, internet native using the Lightning Network, which is a scaling layer of the Bitcoin network. Okay, so this is how this is for your corporate and business customers. This is what is relevant. You will now be able to move dollars at essentially the speed of light at essentially zero cost.

00:12:16:27 That is how you have to start thinking about this technology now, right now.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:12:20:27 With full transparency.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:12:21:27 With full transparency and auditability so if you think about PwC of course. Absolutely, because you can look at the blockchain and verify that those payments are there, and you don't have that swift black hole problem that I alluded to in those corporate treasury examples where the corporate treasurers had some sleepless nights in those examples because you can trace it immediately.

00:12:41:02 But what is fun is that this technology is at the very, very early stages of scaling. Okay. So, this is why most of you've probably never heard of it, something called the Lightning Network. It is mostly for small dollar value payments. I think the average payment going over the Lightning Network is something like $42. Okay. So, you might look at that and say, well, that's not relevant to me, but here's where we're going.

00:13:00:04 That is just code. Anyone can run the code. There are 8 billion people in the world, most of whom now have access to the Internet. And every one of those 8 billion people can run the code and create dollars, yen, euros, you name it, and transact in those with each other. Using the Lightning Network as the intermediary currency.

00:13:23:09 You can go dollar to dollar. You can go dollar to yen, you can go dollar to euro. This is inevitable. It is coming. The only question is how fast. This is why you're talking to your customers about the tech that's coming that they will within the next – call it five years be implementing.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:13:40:09 How did they prepare for that?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:13:42:09 Well, you've got to have somebody looking at this and what's fun is during my Morgan Stanley days, now we're going back seven years plus, there were a number of corporate treasurers.

00:13:51:11 I got to speak to the Mega-cap corporate treasurers. So basically, these are the Fortune 20 treasurers, but these corporate treasurers are of course all dealing with the same basic problems, even though they're in very different businesses. And so, it was the first time Morgan Stanley ever talked about Bitcoin. One of the companies had won the bidding war to sponsor one of the college football bulls and they wanted to pay in Bitcoin, right?

00:14:15:25 So these corporate treasurers were all looking for a mainstream place to understand what is Bitcoin. And here's the punchline, from those conversations multiple corporate treasurers followed up. We know of many large companies that have been using Bitcoin since then. They just won’t talk about it.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:14:31:25 So they're investigating, they're educating and they're experimenting. So, now's the time to do that because in your view, it's inevitable when, not if.

00:14:40:19 So get ahead of that. So, I think one of the things on everyone's mind is regulation. You mentioned there's been some from the government in the U.S. Again, I spent five years in China. I saw regulation move fast and came back to the U.S. I'm like, where is the regulation? Let's get some guidance. Right? I feel like we need more from the regulators, from the politicians, to say, how do we protect the people behind this. To your point, it’s happening.

00:15:00:17 Let's do it the right way. What's your perspective this year in the sense of regulation? Where should we educating our executives, our representatives, etc., to get some of this moving?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:15:11:17 Well, again, many of your customers are multinational companies. And so, you can do all of this from outside of the United States. And I expect most of your customers will, because the United States is behind.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:15:23:17 Can we accelerate it. I mean do you think.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:15:25:07 Well, unfortunately, we've taken a big step backwards in Washington because of the blow ups of last year. It's a terrible result for the United States. And those of us, including my own company, who we aren't even operating, don't have any missteps because we've never operated, and we were targeted by the regulators.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:15:40:17 You were still feeling the pressures.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:15:41:17 Absolute. Because they really don't.

00:15:44:29 There is a faction within Washington, DC that absolutely wants all of this squashed.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:15:47:29 But there's a faction that doesn't. Right. There's been.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:15:49:29 There's a big fashion that does.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:15:49:29 Right.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:15:51:29 And this is apolitical in many ways. You see strange bedfellows where you see progressives and conservatives working together and where else.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:15:58:29 How beautiful. Right. And where else is that happening?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:15:59:29 Where else does that happen? It just doesn't. But it just goes to show you. It really doesn't.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:16:03:29 But if we want innovation, we need that, right?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:16:04:29 Well, we do. Does the innovation really need permission? No, of course not. This is code. Okay? And most of the service providers, the intermediaries that provide services like exchanges, custodians, private key hardware management devices, those kinds of things, they will just stay away from the United States.

00:16:24:21 And it's too bad because.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:16:25:29 Which isn’t the right answer for us.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:16:26:29 Oh, it’s definitely not the right answer. And the funny thing is organizations that make decisions out of fear tend to get what they fear. And we're seeing that happen here. This will be popping up and causing problems for all of them where we've seen, for example, that there were some poor decisions made by a number of the banks that were involved in that situation.

00:16:48:25 There were in fact, the FDIC’s inspector general just came out and said there were 11 banks that possibly were involved in wire fraud involving the big fraud in the industry. 11 different banks got caught up in possible wire fraud. That's a big deal. And so how is it that 11 banks ended up making the same mistake? Those of us who've been around a long time, we understood something was really off with not just the big fraud that imploded.

00:17:13:13 We knew there was no way that they could have made as much money as they made that fast. Again, there's a lot of transparency.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:17:19:29 Right? We have transparency in all.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:17:21:29 Absolutely. And we knew how much was going through their balance sheet. And it just didn't make sense that they were throwing money around like they did. Right. So those of us who've been around knew what questions to ask.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:17:31:29 But you have to know, you have to understand a bit about the technology. You have to understand the evolution that's happening. You can't just apply the same standards because the system is different, distributed, it's transparent. It's a very different mindset.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:17:44:29 Absolutely. And this is why it's such an interesting dichotomy, because law enforcement long ago came to that realization.

00:17:50:29 They would much rather, in fact, than we've seen Former Justice Department officials say, I would much rather have the financial crimes committed using a computer than paper $100 bills. Because it's traceable. Ultimately, you can always trace it to an IP address. And if you can trace it to an IP address, as law enforcement has proven, they will be able eventually to figure out the person behind it.

00:18:11:03 That's how the takedown occurred. They were watching. It took them quite a while, but they did ultimately figure out who the person behind it was. But to your point, the financial regulators haven't figured that out yet. And in fact, actually they're moving in the exact opposite direction.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:18:26:29 So we need to focus on education. We need to focus on engagement and thinking about how to regulate the right way because the technology is sound. This is what I keep coming back to.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:18:34:29 Oh, absolutely.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:18:36:29 To your earlier point, from the early days, it had this promise You must focus on the right things.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:18:40:29 Right. Well, and again, your multinational companies can just go around the United States and use it out of Europe. Right. Everyone knows that non-U.S. banks can provide U.S. dollar bank accounts. Okay. So non-U.S. companies can provide U.S. dollar stablecoins. They'll get them offshore.

00:18:56:23 The bank regulators really cannot control this. They don't understand the technology. And I'll give you an example. That is a piece of evidence that they don't. They've been three pieces of guidance that came out from the banking agencies in the U.S., the FDIC, the OCC and the Fed.

00:19:11:23 And then in another case, it was a FED itself. And the first piece of guidance, they discouraged banks from using open, public and or decentralized networks.

00:19:21:01 HTTP is an open, public and or decentralized network. So, did the bank regulators just ban the banks from using the Internet? This gives you an example of how these hasty regulations get written, but they had to rush things out. And so, in the span of rushing things out, you see that folks who really understood the technology were not at the table.

00:19:40:24 That's pretty clear. They were intending to say the banks shouldn't use things like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:19:46:29 Yeah, this has been awesome. You mentioned five years from now, if you think about five years from now, do you think we get to a point where this technology is actually infused into our financial system? Is it infused into our enterprises or are we still fighting the machine of how to get it done?

00:20:00:06 Of course, predictions are tough, but if you think five years is enough time?

CAITLIN LONG:

00:20:03:29 Well, it depends on how you define the financial system. It is already being widely used, especially in emerging markets, and especially for U.S. dollar stablecoins right now, including by smaller businesses, probably more the target customer base would be more medium and large businesses. There's also a discussion of what's happening with retail, central bank, digital currencies.

00:20:24:27 The UK is of course moving down the path of issuing a digital pound through the central bank. We've seen how Nigeria, for example, just implemented a central bank digital currency, and it caused Bitcoin use to spike. Why? Because people don't trust their governments and they don't want the financial surveillance. So, there are fights coming all around the world.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:20:44:29 There is a lot, lot to do.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:20:46:29 Absolutely. And so, if Washington does make a move, if that's what this is all about, that they don't want private actors doing this and they just want the government to do it itself. Well, first of all, it took the Fed seven years to get fed now out. So, I'm not optimistic that anything will happen quickly.

00:21:00:23 But second of all, I think the private versions that will just exist offshore will be regulated. In Switzerland, for example, Swiss banks have had the ability to issue Swiss franc denominated stablecoins for three or four years now, and they're FINMA regulated Swiss banks. So, you don't have to use the US dollar.

00:21:21:23 And maybe I'll close by saying I've thought for a long time that corporate treasurers should be optimizing the payment cycles of invoices and most companies will just because it's simple as say, well, I'll pay my invoices, you know, T plus 60 days.

00:21:34:02 But that's not the optimal way to think about paying an invoice. What's the optimal way is to think about what your cost of capital is relative to your customer’s cost of capital. And if your customer has a high cost of capital, you should actually pay the invoice right away and get a discount from them.

00:21:50:02 That is an economically optimal way for both sides to win because they don't have to finance their working capital with a very high cost working capital and they get money from you today at a rate that is cheaper than the implicit cost of financing that working capital.

00:22:06:18 Now, why is it no one does this? Because it never made sense to do it because payments.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:22:11:29 Wasn't fast enough.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:20:12:29 Payment technology wasn't fast enough. We're moving to that. And so again, coming back to the example I gave of the treasurer of a large multinational manufacturer, they taken all the inefficiencies out of the business and what they really want was to take inefficiencies out of corporate treasury. This is coming and you will be doing that within the next five years.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:22:29:29 So we can embrace it and do it the right way to benefit businesses. And with all things technology, I think we have to educate and use that to enhance and augment what we're doing, and that's the right way forward. Caitlin, thank you so much.

00:22:41:21 I appreciate your time, your insights. It's an amazing time to be involved in this area and we appreciate your passion for making change because it is not easy to do so. Thank you for this. Stay at it.

CAITLIN LONG:

00:22:52:29 Much appreciated.

SCOTT LIKENS:

00:22:53:29 And to our listeners, thank you for joining us on this episode of PwC Pulse. We'd love to hear your thoughts about today's conversation. Please leave us a review on any of your favorite podcast platforms.

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Chief Strategy and Communications Officer, PwC US

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