Transcript
Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large. Every other Thursday, we bring on a guest who is shaking up financial services in some way, and we get into the why, how, and possibilities.
My guest this week is Lamine Zarrad, who’s the co-founder and CEO of StellarFi, a bill payment product that reports payment data to credit bureaus. He sees the startup as much more than that kind of product, though.
We get into his consumer finance vision, which, among other things, has included buying consumer debt and forgiving it as part of a customer acquisition idea.
It’s not Lamine’s first fintech rodeo either. He’s founded a few firms, including one he started building while working at the OCC.
Did I mention it was solving for a pot payment problem?
We get into that. Here’s our conversation.
Lamine, thanks so much for being on Money Isn’t Everything. It’s great to see your face. I think the last time I saw you in person was going down the mountain slide at MX’s event or conference.
That’s right. Almost a year ago. Thanks so much for having me. I’m super excited about this.
Yeah. There’s so much I want to mine your mind with, but I think I just want to sort of set the stage.
You’re someone with so many vibrant experiences. That’s my interpretation of you. There are so many places to begin, but you’re not a first-time founder.
I want to start at what feels like it might have been a really wild moment for you, when you were working as a federal regulator and you had a side thing going on, building a startup that was focused on pot payments.
After that tension, you were in DealBook, and I believe the story was by Nathaniel Popper, who’s such a killer.
Let’s start there. Walk me to that moment in time when you were, I don’t know, masquerading as a startup person, but also working at a federal bank regulator, nonetheless.
That’s right. Living that double-agent life. You’re going to get me in trouble all these years later.
Well, let’s talk about it.
It was a fascinating time, and honestly, at the time I was scared. I was so afraid because I kind of came up in a conventional, traditional world of finance.
Part of that was military, grad school, and all those things. I just did things, like many immigrants, that I thought were the right things to do to advance my career.
But I was always very entrepreneurial. I was never happy anywhere, in any organization, unless I was free. I always had these ideas.
When I was at Treasury, we were supervising 36 nationally chartered banks, and a lot of them were banks in states like Colorado, California, and Oregon.
They were all asking at the time for permission to serve their communities, specifically cannabis businesses, because they knew this was not going away. States passed all of these laws.
It’s a cash-heavy economy, and there was a business opportunity for them. They also wanted to serve the community by cleaning it up.
You take cash out of the equation, you have accountability, you have transparency, you reduce crime, and you reduce targets of opportunity.
In California, we were talking to the Division of Banking. They were freaking out because dispensaries kept getting robbed. Growers, every time they’d move money from the Emerald Triangle somewhere down to Sacramento, they’d get robbed.
There were so many different aspects.
We felt responsible because we were the last decision-maker in a long line of decisions that were made.
My bosses at the time were working pretty closely with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, trying to figure out what to do.
Then they developed this guidance, referred to as FinCEN guidance. I think it was 24 bullet points of things that the banks should do in order to serve the cannabis industry.
It was really mostly surveillance. You have to surveil every transaction. You have to know exactly where the money comes from.
It was kind of a distillation of some of the more gruesome BSA requirements put into this supercharged version where you now have to become the CIA or NSA.
I was there thinking, I know these banks. They don’t have the resources.
I chatted with their heads of technology. Some of these folks had been tellers once, and no disrespect, very smart people, but this is not the stuff that they necessarily know how to do or even want to do.
It just felt unfair, and it felt unattainable. Those banks wanted to do it, so they naturally were looking for solutions.
I thought, “I can do this. I can go build this thing.”
I had always wanted to do something like this, create a product for the consumer, but this time going through banks.
I had no idea where to start.
How do you start as an entrepreneur? There are so many different stories.
A lot of entrepreneurship stories are folks who created some software and then it took off. I was not one of those people.
I didn’t have a computer science background. Although I studied advanced quantitative methods, I knew statistical modeling, but I had no idea how to code something.
I didn’t know how to raise money. I watched Silicon Valley a couple of times.
Did that train you enough?
That’s right. Yeah. I thought I was prepared.
I didn’t have a network. I don’t come from money. I didn’t have friends with money.
I was fortunate enough to go to good schools, and I built some connections. In fact, the reason I think I ended up in The New York Times was because of one of those connections.
One of my colleagues from school was a producer at the time, making videos at The New York Times. When I pitched him on what we were doing, he was like, “You’ve got to talk to Nathaniel about this.”
Certainly, there was some privilege there for me that gave me access, but not in a traditional sense. I had no clue what to do with this.
I thought, “Well, let me go figure this out.”
I talk to banks all the time. I know exactly what banks want to do. Let me see what dispensaries want. What do suppliers want?
On nights and weekends, time off, I took a lot of my leave that was sort of pent up and started just going and knocking on doors.
I’d drive up to a dispensary in Denver and talk to folks across the counter and ask to talk to their manager, which would freak them out.
I was going to say, they must be like, “Who is this guy?”
“Who is this dude?”
Exactly.
I was still very sort of, not clean-cut, but kind of square at the time. I was nicely dressed. I had a badge.
Right. You had this badge.
And here I am asking them, “What do you do with your cash?”
For the most part, I got a bunch of, “Get out of here. We don’t know who you are. This all seems shady. We don’t want to talk to you.”
I realized that the only way I could get them to talk was if I started to buy stuff.
So, I started to buy stuff. I ended up with a lot of product that I purchased over a year of interviewing people.
I’d buy things and be like, “Hey, listen, I bought this in cash, and it’s just weird. You guys could potentially get access to banking. There are laws out there that are helping banks deal with dispensaries. How are you guys thinking about this? Are you thinking about implementing certain technologies to help you get this?”
Their ears would perk up, and they’d be like, “What are you doing?”
I’m like, “Well, I’m actually building one.”
Then I’d start talking to these folks.
So, you were basically mystery shopping pot shops?
Yeah.
While working for the government.
Yeah. While working for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Did that make you nervous?
Oh, I was terrified. Yeah. I was terrified.
But the thing is, I couldn’t shake this off. There was no other thing I could do.
If I wasn’t pursuing this, I wouldn’t have been able to continue on with my job. I was possessed with this idea.
I wasn’t just interested or curious. I was absolutely, in a way that I’ve never been possessed by any idea before, moved by it.
I knew this was the right time. I knew I had the right skill set to do this. I had probably the best circumstances around me.
I was like, “I’ll figure out everything else.”
I just had this idea that had to work. It absolutely had to work.
Massive, massive problem. The industry was blowing up and growing, and I was like, “I can do this.”
Anyway, that’s how I got over my terror.
You just did it.
When that story hit, and I’m assuming this, but let me make sure, I imagine that got you a lot of attention. Was it boom, growth immediately? Were you ready for that moment?
Yeah. So, here’s the story.
I’m still an examiner. I pitch to Axel, my buddy from grad school, who just produced a very short film at The New York Times about the banking problem in the marijuana industry.
I’m like, “Right, Axel, I know him. Let me reach out to him.”
I’m like, “Dude, we’re solving this. We have this new technology. It’s a prototype.”
He directs me to Nathaniel.
I spent three or four days chatting with Nathaniel. He was so interested. I didn’t expect that level of interest.
I thought he was just going to be like, “Okay, cool. Good story, bro,” and move on.
Not at all.
He gets back to me the following week and is like, “I want to run this story.”
This is a November timeframe. He says, “I want to run it. We talked to the editors. It’s going to go live in February. I don’t have the specific date. We’ll just let you know.”
I’m like, “You cannot run the story. I’m a federal bank examiner. I’m going to get fired.”
He’s like, “We’re going to run the story.”
So, I go to my boss, and I’m like, “Look, I’ve been doing this thing on the side. There’s absolutely no conflict of interest. I did not do anything to jeopardize my status, and certainly nothing to do with the OCC. I’ve been interviewing folks, and I think I have this product that I want to run.”
He’s like, “Oh, this is very interesting.”
He was very skeptical.
I’m like, “Well, the reason I’m talking to you is because The New York Times is going to run the story in February, and I think I’m going to resign before it runs.”
He’s like, “Why would The New York Times run a story about you?”
He was so puzzled.
“You don’t even have the company.”
I’m like, “No, but we have a prototype.”
“You have a prototype, and you are...”
Well, you’re Hannah Montana.
That’s right.
The story lands. In fact, you see the New York Times clippings behind me. I’m still extremely proud of that story.
I didn’t realize that was that. That’s amazing.
Well, I know it’s a hard transition, but I think of you, I think of trying out really unusual ideas, going for it.
I know there have been other acts since then, but the one you’re at now, StellarFi, and how you’re going about customer growth.
Let’s set the stage a little bit more with context of what you’re doing, and then I want to get right into how you bought some debt to acquire some potential customers.
Yeah, let’s do it.
So, your mission statement, Lamine, is now?
We are making money simple. That is effectively our mission statement.
Overall, as a company, we’re battling the vicious cycle of poverty.
It’s a much more abstract battle because, what is poverty?
We identify that as downward pressures on everyday Americans to live paycheck to paycheck because of many different systemic barriers and constraints.
The way credit is structured is, in fact, stacking all the cards against your everyday American.
This is kind of what we’re solving here at StellarFi.
Frankly, what we do today is very much tied to my first experience with Tokken, then my second company, Joust. All of those experiences really built up until now.
I realized we’re going after these businesses to help them access banking. We’re helping freelancers access merchant processing tools, invoice factoring tools, getting into credit.
Really, the little guy, the everyday person in this country living paycheck to paycheck, let’s not go after businesses. Let’s go after them and help them out.
There are a lot more of these individuals than there are freelancers or small businesses.
Frankly, they are the economic engine of this country.
If a consumer cannot borrow money and then repay that money, this whole thing comes to a screeching halt.
We live in a very young republic, and our economy is very fragile, despite the fact that we think it’s resilient to a lot of market fluctuations and geopolitics in this world.
Frankly, it’s still very, very fragile because it is a credit-based economy.
The Fed is really the only thing that we have going for us that’s helping us control the volatility.
I thought, you have this Federal Reserve that’s devising this constant strategy to control how much people are borrowing, but then you have consumers who cannot borrow.
For the most part, two-thirds of the population is impaired.
We thought, this is a problem we’re going to solve. This is a problem we certainly think technology has a big role in solving.
So, we said, “All right, well, let’s look at consumers. Why can’t they pay?”
I think the trope is that they’re underbanked or they don’t have the resources. A lot of Americans are living in poverty.
But it’s not true. Most of those consumers actually are very well off.
I think a lot of the recent statistics that are being released are very much supporting some of our early findings.
People are living paycheck to paycheck not because they don’t have money. They’re living paycheck to paycheck because they’re mismanaging bills.
There’s an element of personal responsibility and certainly this kind of irrational exuberance. It’s the other side of the coin, or whatever is a double-edged sword.
The system trains you to be optimistic about life because of the American dream and all that good stuff.
You also tend to be a little less realistic about your ability to manage obligations.
That’s what it is. High-income individuals in this country live paycheck to paycheck.
We said, “Let’s build bill pay. Let’s build a bill pay solution to help them pay their bills.”
I find this so intriguing in general.
Before I want to get into the pricing model, because I think that’s a really important component here too, about a year ago, you started buying debt to then forgive, to then say, “Hey, I’m StellarFi, and we forgave your debt. I don’t know, maybe you’ll want to be our customer.”
We’ve talked about this before, but that’s a wild move too.
What’s the status there? Are you still doing it? How did it go? How’s it going?
Yeah, it’s still running.
It is admittedly a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be in terms of creating a very clear message and value proposition to your user.
Let me give you a little bit of background, in case listeners are not aware of this strategy.
We’re not the first ones to do it.
There are a couple nonprofits that ventured out into the space, namely working with medical debt to help folks with medical bills that are unpaid, help them get rid of those things and get them off their profile.
We thought, “This is brilliant,” because it aligns nicely with our mission as a company to help consumers end that vicious cycle.
The way the system is structured is that this debt gets passed down from debt collector to debt collector, and it becomes cheaper and cheaper to buy because it’s much more difficult to collect from users.
It is no better for the consumer that it’s passed down three or four times because it’s still on their credit report.
It’s still affecting them in a very, very negative way, preventing them from getting the job that they want to get and making it tougher to climb out of their situation.
But it’s cheaper because debt collectors know that the chances of collecting this debt are now significantly diminished after a year or two years or whatever.
We thought, well, maybe we can buy it very, very cheaply and just, poof, make it go away.
Instead of coming after them as a debt collector, we buy it like a debt collector, but then we say, “We’re not going to collect.”
We categorically forgive every single penny of this debt.
We thought maybe they’ll be grateful enough to use our product because the product is designed to help them pay their bills and never get into this situation again.
The reality of the matter is that most consumers are incredibly skeptical of this because it sounds too good to be true.
That is our single biggest challenge in this endeavor, to prove to those consumers whose debt we bought that we actually forgave their debt and that we’re legitimately just doing this because we’d love for them to use our product.
But we’re not forcing them to do anything. There are no strings attached.
Honestly, it’s absolutely fascinating how much rejection we get because they’re conditioned to think there are still conditions, that people just want money from them.
I understand this probably all too well because, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before, but I used to run a social media network site for debt collectors and the tech they use.
I’m familiar with some of the tactics, at least what they did 15 years ago, which would be like, around Halloween they’d send people pumpkins with, “You owe us this money.”
So, it’s pretty aggressive.
To have the opposite thing happen, I can see why there would be a sizable amount of skepticism.
Are you finding any kind of medium working better than others, like email? Do people say, “Is this real?” Do they reach out to you? Are they ignoring you?
Yeah. We predominantly use electronic means of communication.
What we know for a fact is that print will be the best in terms of reaching out to people. People still trust print.
But we haven’t gone there because it is expensive. We already buy the debt, and then we have to spend some additional capital.
Certainly, it’s on the roadmap. Eventually, we’ll get to it.
What we do is rely on email predominantly. Then folks who do reach out and respond, we engage them and try to bring them on board if they want to.
Otherwise, we have a page where anyone can, if they heard about us, for example, through PR, go and see if they can find their own debt and if it was forgiven.
That’s been pretty effective as well, and it’s a cool tool because it creates engagement on our page.
You can see if your debt is forgiven.
Then text communications and voicemail, we’ve tested those. We haven’t really run with those aggressively.
Text is very intimate. It works well, but it’s also very intrusive, so we want to be very, very careful there.
Of course, voicemail is interesting too because it is inefficient, difficult to scale.
But with AI these days, we’re thinking of ways to create very human messages but leverage AI to be able to scale this and just go out to a bunch of numbers and let them know, “Hey, we forgave your debt. No strings attached.”
The only thing you have to do is say, “Hey, I’m real. I’m here. I acknowledge it.” That’s it.
I think it’s such a fun thing to try out.
It cues up my only segment here, “That’s What You Said.”
You actually said this to me, because I put it in my newsletter, but it ties to this.
“The worst thing you can do as a credit builder is start breaking the system and then creating a lot of moral hazard. You don’t want to incentivize people to do bad things and get away with those bad things.”
Let’s unpack that here too. How do you get in front of that risk?
Yeah. That’s a thing we grapple with daily.
We want to be on the side of the consumer, but we also want to represent the system to its fullest extent.
It’s a tough thing to do when you’re a disruptor and an innovator as a company because, on one hand, we do want to help folks.
We know that most people are well-intentioned. Most of them, the reason they have bad marks on their credit reports is because life happened, and they just need to climb out of it.
Just give them a fresh start.
There are undoubtedly bad actors out there, and we’re trying to weed those out.
We’re getting better and better at preempting and sidestepping those folks and really focusing on the ones that need help.
But at the same time, we don’t want to break the rules, and we certainly don’t want to distort the nature of credit.
We don’t want to create a population of users on our platform who look better than they truly are.
In other words, we boost their score, but they’re still pretty risky to other lenders, and they leveraged us to distort the fact that they’re not going to be a good borrower. Now someone else lost money.
We don’t want to be agents of doom here.
What we focus on is not necessarily credit score boosting.
Credit building is our consumer message because it resonates. Consumers get that.
We don’t see ourselves as a credit builder. We see ourselves as a bill pay product.
We’re a bill pay card. We are building a consumer card to help them pay their bills. That’s how we see it.
Our card is becoming more and more conventional-looking. It started out almost like a debit card.
It now has a credit component where you can keep a balance, manage the balance with help, and pay it off.
We’re getting deeper and deeper into balance management to actually become a credit card for folks who we can underwrite better.
Give them a card, help them with all the tools and education they need to then manage that card responsibly.
That’s kind of how we see it.
We work with the bureaus pretty closely in ensuring that what we do is above board.
We always look at other products out there and try to educate consumers on what’s good and what’s not good.
It’s unfortunate. The credit space is just riddled with all kinds of bad actors, everything from credit repair scams to credit builders that are just fake and take your money, to stuff that doesn’t work well and still charges you.
What we want to do is not make you into someone with a higher score. We want to make you, as a user, into a better borrower, a more responsible borrower.
We see ourselves as a fitness coach or a trainer, whatever you want to call it.
We don’t just tell you, “Hey, this is a hack to build your six-pack.”
We actually want to be there with you while you’re doing those sit-ups and crunches.
Yeah, so you can walk away with one.
How many bills are people attaching on average?
We’re between four and five bills on average, and that number is growing.
We actually started out at about one and a half bills.
Folks would attach something tiny because they wouldn’t trust us. They’d link something that was trivial, and if we didn’t pay it, for example, it wasn’t going to affect them, like Netflix.
Then we noticed that as the brand started to mature and as we developed a little more trust and partnerships as well, users would link bigger bills, more important bills, and more bills in general.
If we acquire users through a partner that promotes us, there’s usually a trust factor.
Usually folks start with one or two, and then by month two or three, they’ll add additional bills.
We see everything from subscriptions to cell phone bills, telco stuff, which is sizable, $200, $300 bills, to utilities and rent.
I’m kind of curious. The economic environment has been weird for a bit now, so it’s like, you can say one thing, but is it that thing?
One thing we can say for sure is credit card debt is rising.
Are your users feeling that? Are you seeing things start to form in different ways? Are you worried about that in any way?
Yeah, without a doubt. We’re concerned.
We see that as an opportunity, and maybe we’re just being overly optimistic, but we see this as an opportunity for us because the more debt you have as a user, obviously that compresses your score.
The more aware of that you are, the more you seek out solutions.
Certainly, there’s an opportunity for growth and discovery.
But in reality, someone who is so overleveraged that they can’t manage any of their bills, they can’t just avoid some bills and focus on others.
Although we want to help them prioritize things that are existential on our platform, it’s going to spill over.
We’re worried about that. We’re worried about our own collections rates.
Our collections rates have been stellar, pun intended here.
We learn a lot. We weren’t always stellar, I’ll be honest with you.
We went to market with not-great collections rates. We’re now head and shoulders above any lending product out there.
I looked at the data, and frankly, we want to keep it there.
We’re constantly looking for ways to create incentives and disincentives, and then mechanical constraints, for users to not be able to have runaway trains and abuse the system.
Take some other debt somewhere, pass responsibility to us, and walk away.
We’re always thinking about that and thinking about it holistically.
Tell me about your pricing plan.
Today we have two plans.
The way we make money is very simple. We charge users a subscription fee, which gives them access to a whole slew of different tools.
They pay for it. It’s a SaaS product. It’s not a credit product, per se, in that regard.
There’s no finance fee.
They pay us a membership fee, either $4.99 or $9.99, to access the bill pay solution, which has 10,000 billers that they can link.
We have a bunch of education tools, access to credit counseling through nonprofit partners, projections, their full credit report, and all the good stuff.
You can go buy your credit report from the bureaus directly for $24.99 a month, for example, but you’re not getting all the other features that you’re getting through us.
Then we make money on interchange.
In other words, when we make a payment on a bill, we make money through the network.
We use Visa cards, and we generate a certain amount of interchange. That’s also very attractive to us.
We like it because the more volume we have on the platform, the more interchange sort of takes over from subscriptions, and the less important subscriptions become.
At that point, we can start getting pretty aggressive, reducing fees, forgiving certain things, and making our product as close to free as possible.
That’s kind of our goal.
Once we get enough volume, subscriptions really become less important to us, and we eventually do away with them in certain plans or deeply discount them to attract more users and really accelerate growth.
Yeah. I think it’s interesting too because a lot of fintech has come to realize they do need to charge stuff, otherwise their model is not going to work that well.
You mentioned referrals. Are you working with neobanks? Are they passing on their users?
Yeah.
Traditional banks too, or is it mostly the neobanks?
Yeah. We have traditional bank partners. We have neobank partners. We have other fintech platforms that are not neobanks.
We have tech partners that are not fintech at all, just consumer platforms that provide access to, say, prescription medicine, things like that.
Our product is a mass-market product, or at least at the moment has a mass-market appeal. It may not be a true mass-market product quite yet.
We feel very fortunate building this solution where we can find customers through so many different channels.
But yes, we make money two ways.
We buy affiliate traffic, so we pay our partners when they send people our way.
Then vice versa, we have an offers marketplace and constantly are developing new incentives for both partners and consumers where they can get discounted access through us.
Then we generate referral income that way too.
That has honestly been such a low priority for us.
We’re building it. It’s moving in the right direction, but we’re putting most of our muscle behind the user experience when it comes to the core product, the bill pay experience.
This marketplace will eventually be there. We’re not pushing it too hard.
I have at least two questions left for you.
One of them is, what advice, or what’s one thing, you’d want a banker or a credit union exec to pay attention to?
It could be outside of bill pay, credit scoring, pot payments, anything you think where you’re like, “Hey, financial institution, zoom in here.”
Yeah. I think risk management in general.
Let me specify what I mean by that.
Bankers think of risk in a very conventional way. They think about risk in a regulatory framework, related to either their investment side of the business or the onboarding side of the business.
What do we do with KYC and AML?
To them, it’s regulatory-imposed requirements that they have to meet.
I think bankers need to be proactive, not aggressive or loose with those frameworks, but challenge regulators and say, “Hey, the regulatory approach should be risk-based.”
My institution does something very unique. We’re not like other banks because every bank is unique, and this is how we manage our risk.
Look at it holistically, kind of like what we do.
We said, yes, we work with someone with an average score of 580. They’re, by old conventional accounts, a risky individual.
But we don’t think they’re risky.
Not because we have a better underwriting model, but because we have enough insight into their bank account. We think we can collect our money from them.
We also know that there’s an interest for them to build credit, so that creates certain behavioral patterns.
We also know that these are recurring bills that they have to pay that they’re paying through us.
For example, they don’t always pay 100% of recurring bills, but most of the bills are paid.
We know that there are different behavioral patterns there.
Instead of blindly looking at our customer as a 580-score customer, we take the context and contextualize their risk profile.
I think that’s what banks need to do.
I know that this has been talked about in banking for a very long time, but no one knows how to do that because no one wants to challenge the approach to risk management, certainly not enough on the compliance side of things.
I think it needs to be aggressively challenged.
Well, you heard it from a former bank regulator here.
Opening it up to you, how should people reach out to you, or is there anything else you want people to know?
Yeah. I think folks should go to our website, StellarFi.com, and stay abreast of things.
We always try to keep it updated.
We’re also on social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. We have accounts everywhere.
If you want to follow any of our updates there, you can.
In terms of exciting updates, we are releasing new cards here in a very short period of time.
These are going to be consumer credit cards with a lot more functionality in terms of usage, more bills that they can pay with those cards, and many other perks.
We’ve been talking about rewards for about a year and a half now, and we’re finally releasing a comprehensive rewards product.
You can now get a lot more back for the bills you’re paying.
A lot of exciting things are coming down the pipeline here. Keep track on the website.
All right. Well, I’ll be following you, but you already knew that.
That sounded like I was going to stalk you, so maybe I am. Who knows what’s going to happen next?
But one thing that is for sure going to happen next, my final question to you: what is the photo or image on your phone’s lock screen?
Unfortunately, I’m kind of boring.
Is it all black?
No. It’s an Apple default, orange and blue lines, that I’ve never updated.
Well, at least it has some kind of color.
It does. It has just abstract geometric figures.
Well, Lamine, thanks so much for being on the show. It’s been a delight to speak with you.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
So, here’s what I learned.
If it feels like a passion project, you’ve just got to do it, regardless of where you work.
And in pursuit of customers, experiment.
If you liked today’s episode, subscribe because I don’t want you to miss the next episode, which is in two weeks.
We sit down with Tony Benado, the head of product at Charlie, which is a neobank for the over-62 crowd.
We talk about pausing payments to try to reduce fraud, the movie Thelma, and whether or not our parents go to the clubs.
See you then.
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