The FinTech space is a busy, complicated space. It is a sector that encompasses many types of companies everything from payments; lending; investment and trading and consumer banking. As you can imagine the crossover is incredible. Solving problems and having systems that are efficient, effective and meaningful for a user on an enormous scale is extremely difficult…to say the least. The intricacy and sophistication of the problems arising and being solved by the minds in this space is incredible. There is no better place to look then Asia with WeChat and Alipay which gives us the scope of the projects, but also the understanding as to why implementation in the free, Western world is much more difficult.
Before we consider a couple main drivers in the space let’s look at the basic framework for the FinTech space. KPMG breaks down the sector into three spaces:
B2C (business-to-consumer) which directly target general public such as banks without physical agencies (Fortuneo), digital money pots (Leetchi), apps for managing personal finances (Bankin), etc.;
B2B (business-to-business) which offer financial services to companies, such as alternative payment methods or payment service providers like HiPay;
B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer), generally crowd funding platforms that gather project leaders and investors.
Adding a level of complexity to the equation is the cross border payments, and in particular remittances or people sending money home to family from another country. The main focus of this article is going to be on the remittance part of the equation. The incredible number of hardworking family members who leave their home to work in foreign lands, often for little pay all so that they can send money home to feed, clothe and shelter their families. It is the business side of the story, the data, the situation so many face and a giant step forward by a company called PaySocial. This is not charity. This is a business and it works by activating people socially promoting products, spending and lifting up those that want to work.
Paymentweek.com wrote that Daniel Schulman, CEO of PayPal saw the digital wallet, mobile payments market to be as much as $100 trillion. That is a staggering number, a number hard to even conceive. By way of comparison, the United States’ GDP for 2018 was a projected $20.4 trillion.
The Economist published an article on April 19th entitled Making Remittance Cheaper that revealed the antiquated and inefficient system employed at transferring money around the world particularly at places like Western Union. Remittances are foreign workers sending funds back to their home country, generally to impoverished families. Currently, digital payments has cut the cost of moving funds around dramatically, and in the case of PaySocial to zero for customers willing to watch a tailored advertisement.. And a new generation of FinTech firms has broken the stranglehold that big banks used. The cost of a transfer between consumers or small firms who are both in G7 countries can now cost 2% or less. This year some $10trn will pass across borders. The sums involved are vast—$550bn of remittances will go to developing countries this year, more than all the capital they receive as investment from multinational companies, says the World Bank.
There were two conclusions reached by the author, two things that needed to change. The first, which is occurring today regardless of bank intervention, is competition. The space is heating up, but the other aspect is the strangle hold on money tracking through money laundering laws. These choke holds stop innovation, insure bank wealth and all under the guise of stopping the flow of ‘illegal funds’ or terrorist funds. Banks fought against the tide until recently where they have been flocking to FinTech partners, subsidiaries and solutions. They will not want to give up the free cash flow from fees.
Enter PaySocial. The solution to an antiquated system trapped by golden handcuffs. The business model is simple, tested and works. The solution is a fun, interactive, texting and payments system that removes all fees for your attention to watch a short advertisement, an ad that is tailored to your shopping patterns! Gone are the BMW ads to the migrant worker who may enjoy the aesthetics of the car but will never engage in buying from the advertisement.
Before we look at the incredible opportunity with PaySocial let me convince you with some data from some of the biggest firms. PWC recently published a report describing effects of FinTech on the financial landscape and noted ‘FinTechs represent both challenges and opportunity to incumbent financial institutions’. That is a polite and conservative understatement.
The conclusions that KPMG are that companies consider innovation with fear mainly associated and attributed to losing ‘all or part of their businesses’ and 25% of said companies stating that ‘revenue could be lost by 2020’. The payments sector is very aware of the disruption caused by FinTech – only 4% of incumbents do not deal with FinTech with most clamoring to find a business model to keep them afloat. The majority look for partners, and subsidiary agreements to defend their core business. They have seen what has happened in Asia; particularly China with WeChat and Alipay. That type of saturation cannot happen in the West for a number of reasons which will be considered in another article but suffice to say there are golden handcuffs associated with the West.
So get involved. Sign up for the app. Try it out or better yet contact to see if you are a partner, accredited investor or visionary that wants to provide profitable solutions to world wide problem.
Securities Disclosure: I, Andrew O’Donnell, have received remuneration in the form of cash and stock.
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