Cross-border stablecoin remittance

We want to create a future of economic inclusion so that underrepresented communities are financially included in the global financial ecosystem. We will enable people to send more money for less by giving them a cross-border money transfer platform that is affordable, fast and secure. 

We will evolve our existing fiat-based remittance platform to adopt stablecoin remittance. 2.6 billion people in emerging economies have a smartphone. They could well be part of the 1.7 Billion people who are unbanked globally. Mobile phones are truly an equalizer when it comes to removing inequality as they disrupt everything from gender norms to transport networks. Our platform is going to put the latest in blockchain driven fintech advances into the hands of those who need it the most. We are confident that we will meet or surpass the UN SDG goal 10.c, reducing remittance transaction costs to less than 3%.  

Remittance inequality slows economic growth. Globally, 1billion individuals utilise remittance annually. 6 billion live in emerging economies globally and 220million send an average of £1650/year to their home country. On average, an economically active individual in sub-saharan Africa is charged 8.5% of the total remittance when sending money into LMIC’s and developed countries.

Nigeria is an emerging economy, facing high fees, unreliable security and slow international transaction times with diaspora living in developed economies. Nigeria’s measurable outflowing remittance market was worth £90Million in 2019. By 2025, Nigeria is forecasted to have 475million mobile internet users and the whole industry is expected to contribute £132Billion to Nigeria's GDP by 2024. Here is a rapidly growing population lacking the financial tools they need to succeed.     

Instability within Africa’s currencies due to corruption, political upheaval and war have long plagued her economic performance. The potential for innovation within mobile money utilising crypto-currency can mitigate the volatility of local currencies.

Studies show that when female-headed households in Kenya adopted mobile money accounts, poverty dropped, savings increased, and 185,000 women left agricultural jobs for better positions in business or retail.

Sendit.money is building an affordable, accessible, cross-border payment platform for economic individuals to send money between the UK and Africa with ease, eliminating the need for third party Money Transfer Operators. It will create a step change in the remittance behaviour of individuals in emerging markets, providing a service which not only beats the competition on rate, speed and security but also meets the SDG goal 10.c to reduce remittances to <3% of total transaction cost. 

Sendit.money builds upon existing mobile handset technology & supporting data networks to provide a service that will work seamlessly on both smart and feature phones.

Our novelty arises directly out of the service speed, security and affordability and our innovative approach to customer acquisition. Stablecoins are pegged 1:1 to a Fiat currency, mitigating value fluctuations normally associated with other crypto-currencies, i.e, Bitcoin.

Blockchain offers security & transparency to streamline the UK/Nigeria remittance corridor enabling instantaneous payments while still facilitating KYC and AML regulations. 

Our stablecoin and challenger bank partnership approach allows us to negate costs normally associated with non-compatible currencies (i.e GBP to Nigerian Naira) such as double service fees and high FX rates used by MTO’s. 

In 2020, 540 billion was remitted worldwide. About one billion individuals are involved in remittance annually. Around half of remittances are sent to rural areas, where three quarters of the world’s poor and food insecure live. Money sent as remittances can make an enormous difference for those receiving it as well as the communities that they live in. Consider the emerging economies of Africa. Nigeria is a great example of an emerging economy with a youthful and growing population that has to deal with high fees, unreliable security and slow transaction times when they transact nationally & internationally with diaspora living in developed economies. An estimated three-quarters of remittances are used to cover expenses such as food, medical expenses, school or housing. Sub-saharan Africa continues to have the highest average remittance cost (about 8.2%). Sendit.money expects to be able to meet the SDG 10.c (reduce to < 3% of the transaction costs by 2030) thereby enabling people to send more money for less. This means more money in the hands of people who need it most. Our launch countries are Nigeria and the UK, however, we plan to rapidly expand operations across Africa, Europe and the US to help millions of people in emerging economies find more financial freedom. 

There are 2.6 billion people in emerging economies who have a smartphone and could well be part of the 1.7 Billion people who are unbanked globally. Mobile phones are truly an equalizer when it comes to removing inequality as they disrupt everything from gender norms to transport networks. Our platform is going to put the latest in blockchain-driven fintech advances into the hands of those who need it the most.

We are currently in the development phase of building our fiat based remittance platform which will launch between Nigeria and the UK towards the beginning of Q3 2021. We have raised $321,000 in pre-seed funding which has enabled the build of the platform as well as finalized partnerships with both UK and African financial partners to take our product to market. Further funding will allow us to develop the digital crypto wallet to enable the implementation of stablecoin remittance into our platform. 

The novelty in our cross border payment platform arises directly out of the speed, security and affordability of our mobile experience and our innovative approach to customer acquisition. Our mobile money transfer service will be both disruptive and trend setting through its use of the blockchain & stablecoins to communicate value, across borders instantly and securely. Simply put, a “stablecoin” is a crypto currency whose value has been pegged to fiat currency in a 1:1 fashion. By bonding the value of the stable (crypto) coin to the Fiat currency it is possible to remove the value fluctuations normally associated with other crypto currencies. With the innate security & transparency offered by the blockchain we can streamline remittance, enabling nearly instantaneous payments while still facilitating KYC and AML regulations. 

We are creating a step change in the remittance behaviour of people who live and work in emerging markets. We are going to build upon the existing mobile handset technology & the data networks that support it to provide a crossborder payment service which will work seamlessly on both smart and feature phones. 

Eliminating the need for third party Money Transfer Operators (MTO’s) by implementing stable coins and partnering with challenger banks in both target launch countries (UK & Nigeria) we will negate the costs normally associated with non-compatible currencies (i.e GBP to Nigerian Naira) double service fees and high FX rates used by MTO’s. 

Sendit.money(2019) is new to the market, currently offering a novel UK/Nigeria beta-platform, utlising standard on ramp/off ramp and strategic partnerships with financial service providers both in Africa and UK (Lerex Technology) who take on the licensing and regulatory responsibilities. Implementation of stablecoins will establish and future-proof our market position as an extremely competitive UK-based money transfer service provider, establishing our foundations on technology that we believe will replace the current remittance methods (CHAPS,SWIFT,BACs).

The common customer value proposition is an affordable, accessible service to regularly send money, securely through the UK-Nigeria corridor. The average cost of remittance to Africa is 8.5%1.4 but can be higher than 17%5.1. We aim to meet the UN-SDG goal 10.c of 3% or less2.1, meaning we would be approx.5.5% (but could be up to 14%) cheaper than competitors. Our enablement of purely digital transactions is unique to the Nigeria/UK corridor.

5-year growth plan:

Y1(2021-2022) develop,prototype, test and launch beta stablecoin remittance offering in the UK and Nigeria

Y2(2022-2023) 128,581users generating £281,000, continue platform optimisation, scale into secondary African markets

Y3(2023-2024) Scale into EEA region, 824,793users generating £1.7 million

Y4(2024-2025) Launch additional financial tools, scale across Africa, £3.3 million revenue

Y5(2025-2026) Expand operations into USA, £7.9 revenue, 8.1 million users

• Active users

This will enable us to measure how many people we are actively helping to receive more money thereby allowing those individuals to have more money in their pockets to spend in their communities helping them with essential things like food, healthcare and education. 

• Typical money saved per transaction

This ties into the above metric but by tracking these cost savings compared to our competitors we will be able to determine how much money is being saved on a monthly and annual basis by users of sendit.money. 

• How funds are being used

As users on our platform will have access to a debit or prepaid debit card we will be able to track where money is being spent. This will allow us to measure the indirect impact we are having on SDGs 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 & 8. 

• Demographics of users (women, ages, region rural etc)

By utilizing the data gained from the demographics of our users we will be able to measure the progress that we are making to SDG 5. This will also help us to understand what demographics are less well-served so we can make changes to our offering to try and include any demographics that don’t use our platform as consistently. 

• Types of causes and size of the community involved

All of the information above will help us as we launch our community fund and social impact product.

3 FTE

1 PTE

3 Contractors

Michael Lawal (Nigerian) 6-years’ experience in the decentralized finance industry and over 13-years’ experience in startups. An experienced founder with 1 successful exit he leads business development, stakeholder engagement and continues to engage with investors.

Julie Hendy (American)-Worked with early to mid-stage startups in various sectors. As Project Director, she will use her previous experience managing a multi-site co-working business to make key decisions for the project, ensure resources needed are available and communicate project goals effectively throughout the company.

Rafal Skucha (Polish) has over 10 years of experience as a technology leader and will oversee the technical infrastructure and integration of the project. He will lead and project manage all technical aspects of the project to ensure that our IT infrastructure is resilient, fast, flexible and fully secure. 

Yasser El Janahi (Morrocan) has 9 years of experience as a full-stack front and back end developer. He will be a key resource in the day to day development of our platform.   

 Bowen Hendy (English) has 10 years of experience in UX/UI covering all aspects of the design lifecycle. He will be overseeing all design aspects of the project ensuring the platform has a simple, stylish and easy to use design. 

Sendit.money is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all sections of the community. We aim to create opportunities and reduce barriers for everyone, particularly under-represented groups. We are committed to making sure there is no unjustified discrimination in our processes for recruitment and selection, performance management and pay, and that promotion and retention is fairly granted across all our operations.

The leadership team at sendit.money is made up of Nigerian, American, Polish and British, including 1 female co-founder. We believe diversity in our leadership is key to success and will continue to strive to bring talented and diverse individuals onto our team as we grow. 

We are applying to Solve to gain access to additional capital during this early stage of our journey. Additionally and more importantly to have access to the Solve network which we understand could have the potential to open up conversations and partnership for catalytic growth within sendit.money. At sendit.money we are trying to create a community and to do this we have to be part of communities that have expertise that we can draw from in order to grow. We believe that by drawing on the advice from experts in the community, we will be able to overcome the barriers that we face now as well as those we might face over the course of the next year. 

We would be grateful to receive support in regulatory and legal matters as this will be a constant in our business given the highly regulated nature of the fintech and cross-border payment space. 

Additionally, we will be looking to implement more measures for monitoring and evaluating how we measure our impact and implementing more data-driven methods. Particularly we would like to ensure that we are measuring impact as a matter of priority and integrating these goals into our company OKR's would be beneficial for us. 

Finally, if we are successful, customer acquisition will be a key point for us to ensure that we achieve our path to financial sustainability as well as our impact goals. We would like to use the resources and expertise within the MIT network to help us make decisions that we believe will grow a community that loves our product and actively invites their friends and family to join the money revolution. 

At this stage, we are very open to all partnerships. We believe that openness and community is the way to success. Particularly we are interested in partnering with challenger banks in our target markets as well as telecoms companies that we might find mutually beneficial interests. We would also be happy to partner with real estate companies in our targets markets to help diaspora buy property in their home countries as well as pay their mortgage more easily. 

At sendit.money we want to create a future of economic inclusion so that underrepresented communities are financially included in the global financial ecosystem. We will enable people to send more money for less by giving them a cross-border money transfer platform that is affordable, fast and secure. 

 To achieve this we will evolve our existing fiat-based remittance platform to adopt stablecoin remittance. This integration will enable us to replace traditional methods of remittance which are slow and expensive with the latest financial technology where transactions take seconds and the fees traditionally levied by Money Transfer Operators are drastically reduced. 

Our innovation stems from the fact that there are 2.6 billion people in emerging economies who have a smartphone and could well be part of the 1.7 Billion people who are unbanked globally. Mobile phones are truly an equalizer when it comes to removing inequality as they disrupt everything from gender norms to transport networks. Our platform is going to put the latest in blockchain-driven fintech advances into the hands of those who need it the most. We are confident that we will meet or surpass the UN SDG goal 10.c, reducing remittance transaction costs to less than 3%.  

Sendit.money is a cross-border payment platform that utilises stablecoins, underpinned by blockchain to provide a money-transfer service that is affordable, fast and secure. 

Instability within Africa’s currencies due to corruption, political upheaval and war have long plagued her economic performance. The potential for innovation within mobile money utilising crypto-currency can mitigate the volatility of local currencies.

Studies show that when female-headed households in Kenya adopted mobile money accounts, poverty dropped, savings increased, and 185,000 women left agricultural jobs for better positions in business or retail.

funding will allow us to accelerate the implementation of stablecoins into our business model, enabling us to be the first UK-based remittance company servicing the Nigeria/UK corridor using stablecoins. This project will enable sendit.money to be the first company to offer stablecoins based remittances in the UK-Nigeria corridor, thereby empowering hundreds of thousands of Nigerians to send money in and out of the UK with ease, receiving the best rates and ensuring that their loved ones get the maximum amount of the money sent possible.