HiveOnline

Helping microbusinesses thrive, with paperless administration, easy access to finance and payments, and fact-based reputation over their mobile phones.

Small businesses form the backbone of economies everywhere, yet they're at the back of the queue for access to services and finance, and their biggest problem is trust. In developed economies they're outcompeted by big companies who have high volumes of customer reviews, while in developing economies most lack access to basic banking services or even formal identity.

hiveonline brings small businesses seamless financial administration, paperless agreements and value transfer, with a reputation system that scores them on their behaviours and facts about what they deliver. For unbanked businesses in developing economies, we use non-financial data for customer validation, taking away the risk and expense of borrowing for the world's most disadvantaged entrepreneurs. The reputation shows they can be trusted, even if they have low volumes of work, levelling the field for smaller businesses

Our tools support community collaboration and disintermediated financial ecosystems, so micro and small businesses are no longer dependent on banks, credit agencies or governments to demonstrate they're trustworthy. This helps them work together more, expanding commerce and competing with larger competitors, while removing the need for exploitative middle men and lenders.

SMEs employ more than half of the world's workforce, despite their current disadvantages. With the opportunity hiveonline gives them to reduce the challenges of running a small business, removing the barriers they traditionally face, we help them grow and prosper, supporting ground up community wealth and job creation.

Hundreds of thousands of MFIs support 700,000,000 loans to the estimated 450-700 million nano- and micro-businesses globally in the economy. Typically they charge upwards of 40% interest, due to their high customer due diligence costs and default rates. Mobile money schemes like M-Pesa charge upwards of 50% for microfinance.
Mobile money schemes run by telcos also lack interoperability, requiring third party partnerships to exchange money outside of the system. hiveonline's blockchain backend and interoperable platform enable us to transfer money at cost with local and international payments schemes, banks and other cryptocurrency networks, without incurring cross-border or network transaction fees.

We deliver our app to be culturally sensitive, promoting technical and financial education through relevant interface design. Customers use microservices on their local device, so it can always be used. Value is also stored at a community level, in field agent and retailer wallets, so communities can exchange value offline, while our asynchronous reconciliation manages decentralised ledgers and liquidity management.
Our technology is a layer cake of microservices architecture, distributed data, processing and liquidity and universal interoperability. Our blockchain operates on nodes which can include personal devices, solar panels or local nodes such as microfinance institutions, schools or retailers.

We plan to increase access to financial services for unbanked NMSEs (Nano- Micro- and Small Enterprises) in the emerging markets we serve. Absolute numbers of members brought onto the platform, with reduction in default rate for lending, will be a key metric.

we'll measure how many customers build positive interactions as the result of using our system, including:
- customers getting access to wider markets or larger end customers
- customers collaborating with other customers
- customers transacting peer to peer rather than through intermediaries

Hiveonline gives small businesses access to familiar services in a cheaper, more seamless way; our mobile-delivered app gives developing economy businesses access to affordable finance and the ability to build reputation, giving them access to land rights.

As the reputation community grows, customers can use our tools to find other trustworthy businesses for collaboration and commerce, while our disintermediated (blockchain based) finance system creates distributed pools of value, managed by and within communities. As more countries adopt central bank cryptocurrencies, we grow the wealth of developing economy communities by tokenising their natural assets, with economic tools designed to capture wealth within communities.

hiveonline's key customers are the unbanked micro-entrepreneurs in communities in ASEAN and sub-Saharan Africa, where money means cash or expensive mobile money solutions; many are farmers, selling surplus at low prices. Others are engineers, small retailers, and labourers. They're exploited by middlemen because they have no economic power and can't access loans except through microfinance institutions at astronomical rates.

hiveonline gives these businesses the opportunity to join the formal economy, with benefits of land rights and ID, while benefiting economies as they start to participate as taxpayers, removing both the opportunity and need for corruption as the solution expands.

Behavioural profiling has been proven to be a better indicator of future behaviour than credit scoring and is now being used to evaluate customers by several banks. With this technology we can help genuine microbusinesses access affordable finance, while building reputation they can use within their community and beyond for commercial and financial activity.

Mobile money solutions like M-Pesa demonstrate how populations will rapidly adopt alternative solutions to fill a void, and our solution leapfrogs mobile money with a low cost alternative which isn't constrained by centralised processing. This critical access to finance, helps those communities to grow their businesses.

Sofie Blakstad (CEO) is one of the world's leading banking transformation experts, and together with Rob Allen, CTO and Blockchain, decided the future of finance for underserved and disadvantaged customers lies outside of the banking industry; hence hiveonline was born. We bring a wealth of experience both in leading and delivering global transformation and business build, and in research and technology disciplines across the NGO and corporate world.

The leadership team all have experience building SMEs so understand the challenges, and bring a wealth of knowledge to tackling the problem from a customer perspective.

Our leadership team has delivered major transformation in over 60 countries. We have built a global network of partners and customers with existing distribution networks of over 1 billion customers, to support rapid expansion, and we're creating collaboration organisations with them to deliver the solution in our target regions, starting with target countries before expanding regionally.

We've built credibility as trusted advisors to the UN and G7, with established presence as experts in fintech applications for financial inclusion. The Danish FSA has selected us for their inaugural regulatory sandbox, giving us a globally recognised EU validation. Our blockchain organisation is partnering with global NGOs with a technology focus such as the Gates Foundation's Mojaloop and NEM Foundation, to support distribution.

The platform comprises a bank-grade blockchain interface layer, self-executing contracts, chat, marketplace, portfolio management tools, our proprietary reputation system and user-friendly customer interfaces, delivered over mobile or web (for institutions). The blockchain layer provides interoperability with multiple blockchains, allowing continuous adoption of evolving protocols. It will adopt the Swirlds Hashgraph network, providing transaction throughput of 250,000/second, supporting micropayments. It integrates with traditional payments, banks, card networks and cryptocurrency blockchains so we can use existing and evolving networks.

Solve's support will go towards funding our Data Science team and building out the reputation system that's so critical to scaling our offering in unbanked communities. If we're lucky enough to progress to the global prize this will go into expanding and accelerating our build in sub-Saharan Africa, through establishment of a regional development team of 3 developers, 2 community managers/community anthropologists and a DevOps lead, in either Ghana or Rwanda. We have a well functioning social media communications campaign which will fully publicise the win across our wide network.

Regulatory acceptance of the solution: we are in the Danish FSA Regulatory Sandbox, fast-tracking EU regulation for our e-Money licence. This assures other regulators that we're a legitimate business. We are pegging our cryptocurrency to local fiat currencies, so from a customer's perspective they look like normal money.

Delivery capacity and distribution of business: we are focusing on two core business models (developing and developed economies) and within each area using a cookie-cutter approach, to reduce the need for customisation in new markets, enabling us to scale rapidly.