With a blockchain-based lending platform, millions of underbanked people in Asia will be able to access basic financial services and build their financial reputation.
MicroMoney, a global lending services provider, has recently announced it is planning to raise $30 million in an upcoming ICO. The company’s goal is to transform the current economy situation in emerging markets.
According to the World Bank, almost a third of Earth’s population, or more than 2 billion adults, doesn’t have access to banking services. Among the most affected regions are Asia, Africa, and Latin America where about 65-80% of the population is unbanked. People can’t get basic services like personal loans or SME loans because they are unable to build their credit history. This is a major problem for emerging countries, such as Philippines, Thailand or Myanmar.
Established in 2015, MicroMoney provides short-term loans as a solution for financial needs of its clients who are getting none or next to none service from traditional banks. With 200 employees and over 100,000 customers, MicroMoney is currently available in five countries, including Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri-Lanka, and Thailand. In the long run, the project plans to bring the new global decentralized crypto economy to over 2 million unbanked people in Asian countries.
“We are proud of the fact that we can help people who have no access to the classical, but outdated centralized economy of bank,” Anton Dzyatkovsky, CEO and founder of MicroMoney, said in a press-release.
“In our markets, banks focus on lending to medium and large enterprises,” Dzyatkovsky said. “Our other competitors, microfinance companies, do reach out to individual borrowers but loan approvals can take weeks or even months,” said Sai Hnin Aug, co-founder and operations director at MicroMoney.
As CrowdfundInsider reports, easy approval procedures allow MicroMoney to simplify and speed up the process of loan application. Using new technologies like blockchain and big data, MicroMoney will be able to determine a person’s creditworthiness in just 15 minutes. The first loan is usually small but after repaying several loans customers can borrow up to $300, what is a large sum in unbanked regions.
The company has also revealed that it wants to focus on mobile approach due to a high level of smartphone penetration, even in MicroMoney’s regions.
“For example, in Africa, 80% of the population does not have a bank account but 63 of 100 people use mobile phones. Secondly, this is a higher popularity of smartphones above laptops and computers. Finally, it’s practically equal capabilities of smartphones’ and PCs processors and features along with significant progress in financial services mobilization, cloud services, and Big Data systems to analyze all these data,” the company said.
The ICO is set to begin on October 18th, while the pre-sale was already launched on September 15th. The fund raised during its $30 million token generation campaign will be used to develop new products and expand into new markets, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and China. These branches are planned to go live in Q3 2017 – Q1 2018.
“The demand for our services is such that we envision expanding to five more markets by the end of 2017,” said Hnin Aug.
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