SureRemit: A Real Business; A Real Global Opportunity
By: Samuel-Biyi 'Laolu
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, ICO, Cryptocurrency, Fintech

There are 1,000s of new cryptocurrencies in the market. Many have been developed to power great concepts and have huge prospects, but a popular theme is that, for many, there is no underlying business supporting the project and most implementations are futuristic.

SureRemit is being developed on the back of a real, active business with real traction and latent demand. In 2014, my team came together with the vision to pioneer the development of a large-scale prepaid retail voucher infrastructure in Africa. Previously, we’d led Business Intelligence teams as founding members of Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce venture and first tech ‘unicorn’, where we observed that there is value in aggregating a local merchant network and enabling acceptance for closed-loop digital prepaid payment instruments.

We tried to solve a local problem by providing a system that allows individuals or companies to send non-cash value to recipients locally, without having to rely on the broken logistics infrastructure for delivery. We developed a platform that allows an individual in Nairobi, Kenya who intends to send a refrigerator to a recipient in Mombasa to send a voucher that can be used to pick up the product at a local electronics store. We called this SureGifts, and today, thousands of individuals and businesses are purchasing and redeeming vouchers across Africa for different use-cases.

Individuals send vouchers as gifts or simply as a form of value transfer, and businesses use digital vouchers to reward their employees, customers and clients wherever they are. This includes banks, telcos, FMCGs and airlines that integrate e-vouchers into their loyalty programs. An example is an integration into our network by Diamond Bank for their Gemzone Rewards Program.

You can view real-time data on voucher generation and redemption HERE.

Live SureGifts voucher creation and redemption

Although the platform was initially built to serve local non-cash value transfers, a majority of demand for vouchers came from people abroad. We have received repeated voucher requests from 23 countries across all continents. Most of these were from migrants choosing to send vouchers instead of cash as a form or remittance because of the control it gave them over the use of funds, in spite of the cost of making international payments and wire transfers for the vouchers. International demand for vouchers continue to rise, but the existing payment systems do not support cross-border exchanges, settlement and fraud control, particularly for prepaid, instant digital goods like e-vouchers, and this makes the process of acquiring vouchers costly and inconvenient.

This is why we’re building SureRemit to leverage the blockchain technology of the Stellar platform for cross-border remittances with cryptocurrency. The vision is to create an ecosystem specifically for global non-cash value transfers, where individuals or businesses locally or internationally can send instant non-cash value at no cost wherever they are, using Remit tokens. Liquidity for Remit tokens will be supported not only with existing local demand for vouchers, but also with the demand that will come from 250 million immigrants who want to send nearly $300bn in non-cash value home, but are burdened by the cost, procedures and speed of cash transfers, and the lack of visibility into the use of funds.

SureRemit Introductory Video

In developing markets without sophisticated financial systems, cash is king, but this presents an incredible opportunity for a technology player that is able to engineer widespread acceptance for an alternative, closed instrument as described in this article. Concepts like SureRemit can thrive by leveraging on existing merchant networks across the world, especially in major remittance corridors like India, South East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. SureRemit has already secured relationships that will expose its users to thousands of merchants globally and hundreds of utility bill services.

The SureRemit opportunity is real and clear, and this is why we have been backed by reputable global investors like 500 Startups, CRE.VC, and Greenhouse Capital.

Learn more about SureRemit at token.sureremit.co, read the Whitepaper here and join the conversation on telegram at t.me/sureremit.