Rebittance Startups Agree: Bitcoin Does Not Make Remittance Cheaper (But Does Allow for Innovation)
Rebit.ph co-founder Luis Buenaventure recently published a blog post on Medium claiming that Bitcoin does little to help cheapen remittances. While the math-based currency does lower the bar of entry for startups, and local technological innovation could further improve the competitive advantage of so-called "rebittance" companies, Buenaventure argued....
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Luis Buenaventure, co-founder of one of the best known bitcoin remittance companies in the space, Rebit.ph, has published a blog post on Medium claiming that the cryptographic currency does little to help cheapen remittances. Bitcoin remittances, better known as "rebittances" (a term Buenaventure claims to have popularized), allow customers to send cash to friends or family abroad. Effectively, this means that only the rebittance service itself uses bitcoin, both the sending and receiving end of the transaction merely touch cash. Since it is cheaper to send bitcoin around the globe....
Multinational insurance and asset management company AXA is eyeing bitcoin to help streamline the remittance market, the general partner of its VC fund has told CoinDesk. Minh Q Tran said AXA Strategic Ventures, the firm's $223m fund, and its accelerator, AXA Factory, are treating digital currency as an "investment thesis". He said: "We think that many use cases related to bitcoin have not already been explored. In particular we are very interested in how bitcoin, and more generally cryptocurrencies, might be used in the remittance market." Though no bitcoin or blockchain startups have....
FastCompany’s report revealed that overseas remittance totaled $429 billion in 2016. Some of the largest Remittance markets include China and the Philippines. Already, bitcoin startups have begun to dominate the remittance markets in the two countries, with the Philippines leading bitcoin remittance innovation. Both domestic and international remittance is a massive market within the Philippines. Companies such as Lhuillier and Palawan operate thousands of branches throughout the country, with deeper market penetration in comparison to international remittance companies such as Western....
The Philippines has the world's third largest remittance market just behind India and China, with overseas remittances reaching more than $25.1 billion in 2013. But due to the country's poor banking systems and expensive remittance services, overseas Filipino workers and the local workers working far from their provinces have always searched for alternative systems for transferring cash. For generations, remittance services including Lhuiller and Palawan Pawnshop dominated the market in the Philippines, despite its high transaction fees. On average, the fees are close to 10 percent for....
Bitcoin is growing in popularity in Africa particularly in regions such as Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana. This week the Hong Kong-based Bitspark has launched a remittance service to Nigeria at rates 14.4 percent better than competitors, by leveraging the speed and efficiency of the Bitcoin network. Bitspark Offers Cheaper Remittances by Leveraging the....