Jawudi

• We're solving for the cost of money movement into, out of and within.

 • Remittances are a significant component to the GDP of most developing nations and specially so in Africa; the 50M+ members of the global African diaspora send upwards of $100B in formal and informal channels. Where some nations rely on them for as much as 10% of their GDP, according to the world bank. Given this fact and the reality that remittance fees to Africa are the highest compared to any other part of the world, there's a big opportunity to reduce this burden for the global African diaspora... The cost of moving money from within Africa itself is even more expensive, costing as much as 20% in some corridors, for example it cost more to send money to Kenya from South Africa than from the United States. 

• The experience is also very disjointed. You have cross border players like money gram and Western Union that handle the remittance component. Local players handling peer to peer within a given country; the in-country peer to peer transfers are dominated by legacy telcos. So there's no end-to-end solution that unifies the cross-border with the local peer to peer. Peer to peer transfers can also be very expensive across Africa, as high as 5%+, whereas in the United States and Europe we've had free peer to peer for a while. 

•Our solution is a mobile application that serves as a cross border wallet that allows users in the US/Europe to send money to Africa; which in turn serves as a wallet for local peer to peer money movement and to make commercial transactions with merchants. 

• We used the best in class service-based cloud architecture (hosted on AWS) and a blockchain ledger as the rails for stable-coins backed 1:1 by fiat. 

Our purpose with Jawudi is to build an elegant solution that unifies cross-border to peer to peer and thereby make the movement of money across Africa a breeze. We charge a transparent flat 5% for our remittance service (vs. ~9% charged by the legacy players), while making our peer to peer service will be free!

But this is just the foundation. We'll use the profits from our remittance business to make investments in entrepreneurs on the continent and use our platform to build financial tools for the individual users and merchants on our platform, so as to help them access the full suite of financial needs to earn, spend and save.

Our ultimate long term vision is to unifies the resources of the African diaspora in the form of investment funds to drastically improve access to capital for founders building across Africa. We're super bullish on Africa!

sidenote: This solution of using remittance fee profits to fund growth in emerging markets is scalable globally. The overall remittance market volume is ~ 1 Trillion, with ~ $150B in fees. A portion of those fees being invested would be a massive game changer. 

Our solution serves the global African diaspora and individuals interested in the development of the African continent. 

Our customers are underserved in two ways:

1. Remittance/Money movement: The existing solution have a poor user experience and are too expensive. 

2. Investments: There are no retail investment vehicles into Africa today! We'll fix that. 

We address (1) by building an elegant and fairly priced cross-border wallet.

We solve (2) by leveraging the fees in one to start investing in Africa, and eventually raise funds from the diaspora to invest in Africa.

We're solving a personal problem. 3/4 founders have been sending/receiving money from/to Africa for over 15 years; so we are the users we're building for. We've dealt with every tool and problem that is out there; had there been a good enough solution we wouldn't have started Jawudi. We're also fortunate to have the education and experience to build a solution in a highly regulated space. 

Our CEO is a 2x founder so we have an idea of what we're getting ourselves into. 

We've spent the last two years talking to users, getting licenses, courting partners (payments, banking, kyc, etc.), designing and building our solution. We'll have a complete v.1 in June and plan on going to market this Summer. 

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The community first and foremost, because we'll face problems that we cannot even imagine today. However, our current needs will be mainly regulatory due to the nature of financial services and access to networks of capital.