[init]

Congratulations from a fellow African! Looking forward to your success!

Moving to the US and Europe was a shock for me. It is hard to send money to my home country. If a relative back home needs money within two weeks I usually have to ask other people to send money on my behalf or I have to ask other relatives back home to help them until I can pay them back. This is constant source of stress when you have a poor family.

I ended up quitting my job in another domain to go work in Fintech with the ultimate goal of solving this problem.

Some issue that make it hard for me to send money:

* Transfer fees are very high for both bank transfer and remittance services.

* The large remittance services like Western Union and MoneyGram have draconian processes to the point that they can just block your transfer with no clear explanation and on multiple occasions they even blocked all customers from sending money to my country.

* Only one bank back home has online banking services and they have lamentable security practices.

* Many banks in the west don't let me send money back home. If they do then they require you to physically go to a branch and prove your identity. This was/is a problem during the pandemic.

* You can only send up to a certain amount. Too little, it gets eaten away by the transfer fees, too high, they don't let you send it unless you give them a sob story and they feel sorry for you and approve it just this one time.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Curious why a solution such as Wise (formerly TransferWise) doesn't solve the transfer fee problem. Are certain countries in Africa not supported?

Not affiliated with Wise, by the way, simply a satisfied user (but I've only used it for USA <-> European transfers).

[init]

I've never used Wise because it doesn't serve my country. In fact there's no shortage of remittance services besides Wise.

The main problem is that the KYC and risk checks run by european and american companies don't take into account how people relate to each other in Africa and how money flows in the continent. It's possible that one person regularly sends money to several relatives with different names and in different cities in the span of a few weeks. Fraud detectors at the european/american remittance companies don't like that.

Many of us are also living abroad temporarily and want to retire in our home countries. We want to repatriate most the money we earn abroad but banks in the west don't make it easy.

[riancochran]

We offer more than just sending. Wise actually charges fees too, that make lower transfer values more expensive. But beyond transfers, Wise doesn't allow it's users to hold NGN, KES, GHS, for example, nor do they allow users to send from Africa into NA/EUROPE.

[riancochran]

We can relate. All of this is solvable.

[herval]

Why is it that way today?

I can imagine Western Union and the like would certainly love to move more money, as they're paid per transaction - what makes it so that they don't make it easier?

[beebeepka]

Do you feel comfortable sharing as to why these problems exist in the first place?

[riancochran]

what are some of your other pain points?

[init]

These are my biggest pain points and your solution is similar to what I had in mind but more geared towards the lesser served markets: Portuguese and French speaking countries.