![]() ![]() "Even with everything happening you did see this massive increase in digitization," he said of COVID-19 and its impact on business. The company is not yet disclosing many numbers on its size or customers served but Faye tells me business overall grew 5x in the last year and is posting a gross profit. Taptap Send says that it's the only company in the space that has publicly committed to that goal (it has yet to hit it, it seems). Mobile technology has played a big part in that, making it easier both to send and receive money, but it's also opened the door to a lot of potential exploitation by bad actors, preying on people who might use a service for convenience and not be fully clear on how the actual pricing breaks down.įor that reason, the UN has set a goal for remittance pricing and commissions to be no higher for any company than 3% of the total sent - one way to ensure that players focus more on volume and less on margins. They are also, in fact, more valuable even than foreign direct investment: The World Bank has tracked that remittances overtook the money donated by states in 2019. Taken together, cross-border remittances is a massive market, worth some $540 billion annually when you consider the established channels, with more "informal" methods (which can be as analogue as passing money via a person making a trip from one country to the other) estimated to be of nearly the same size. "Taptap Send is taking advantage of this structural change in mobile money and other distribution networks to offer what we hope is the fastest and best price service to customers," he told TechCrunch in an interview. Taptap Send can be thought of as Faye's hat trick in the space, taking the bigger concept of remittances used to help people, and building it as a C2C business: aimed at individuals who are sending people "back home" money to live on. Segovia (acquired by Crown Agents Bank) did this for B2B use cases - it built a mobile money transfer as a service, which other money transfer companies could use to power their businesses, by way of an API. GiveDirectly (still going strong) did this for philanthropic donations - it's an NGO that sets up donation campaigns where individuals and big businesses can contribute, and people in receiving countries can directly get the funding via mobile money transfers. In each business, he's tried to take the same approach: building financial technology to improve the lot of people living in emerging markets. Before Taptap Send, Fay founded GiveDirectly and Segovia. The startup is the third entrepreneurial outing for Michael Faye, a development economist who previously worked for the United Nations. On top of this, there is an economy of scale principle at play here: Having better rates will drive more users, which in turn might not mean better margins but a higher volume of transacting and more returns overall. It has built its whole tech stack from the ground up and says that this lets it pass on lower exchange rates to its customers, typically lower than others that might be serving the same markets. The company's business model works by way of charging no commission or any other fees for transfers, instead making a cut on foreign exchange. Taptap Send is among the startups that is trying to approach the promise of tech with this in mind, and with a view to bucking that trend. ![]() Of course, that doesn't mean that other, less wealthy demographics don't exist, or don't also need new technology but building for them is usually less lucrative and more risky. ![]() or regions like Western Europe: There is a lot of money there, and specifically consumers and businesses with the kind of income that allows them to invest in new technologies and simply to do more. There is a reason that a lot of companies launch and build services in countries like the U.S. The Series A was co-led by Canaan Partners and Reid Hoffman, with other unnamed investors also participating. The 15 receiver countries include some of the poorest countries in the world that are the hardest to service, plus emerging markets with some of the poorest populations - DR Congo, Mali and Madagascar among them - while the eight originator countries include some of the most common places to which people from these countries emigrate - United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, France and Italy among them. ![]()
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