Wazzup Pilipinas!
TraXion, a fully-featured financial services platform for the unbanked and underbanked, is enabling full financial inclusion for everybody in the Philippines. To create a ready-to-go solution, it blends a very new technology—blockchain—with decades-old technologies like text messages and leverages a broad network of existing brick-and-mortar shops.
Eight out of 10 families in the Philippines are unbanked or underbanked. This means they have never had access to financial services that the middle class takes for granted. Being stuck in a cash-only economy limits people's financial options, putting their financial security at risk, and stifling their economic potential.
TraXion is offering full-featured savings accounts that enable payments, low-cost remittances, peer-to-peer loans, savings accounts, a full range of insurance options, investment consultancy and a philanthropic crowdsourcing platform.
A Pragmatic Approach
To accomplish this feat, TraXion is using existing infrastructure: mobile phones and convenience stores. TraXion has developed a mobile e-wallet that works on even the most affordable feature phone through the proven power of SMS. They're also rolling out e-wallets to the estimated 600,000 merchants operating ubiquitous privately-owned "sari-sari" convenience stores all across the Philippines.
The whole system is powered by blockchain technology and automated by smart contracts. Blockchain tech keeps funds safe and secure, while TraXion's TXN token helps to ensure speedy, low-cost remittances, taking mere seconds for an international money transfer instead of the average processing time of one-to-five business days. A much larger-than-average percentage of the Philippine population works abroad, remitting money back home every month to support their families—who often withdraw this money in one envelope of cash. This represents an extended market base that TraXion is eager to reach.
"After establishing our customer base in the Philippines, we will expand first to Indonesia and other countries where there are a lot of overseas migrant workers to better facilitate their remittances. Our first client contract with a seafarer's cooperative is a move in that direction, onboarding up to 1 million maritime entrepreneurs," said TraXion Founder and CEO Ann Cuisia.
Being on blockchain means TraXion is platform agnostic, allowing it to be easily adapted for different technologies and approaches in different countries. While they are focusing on sari-sari store integration in the Philippines, for example, the higher smartphone penetration in Indonesia will make it easier for TraXion to access the market directly.
Cuisia is also the Founder of GavaGives, the most popular online charity crowdsourcing platform in the Philippines, which will be connected to the overall TraXion platform. The TraXion team is dedicated to combating poverty, having promised to allocate 2% of their tokens as rewards for top philanthropists on GavaGives. The charity platform was a testing ground for TraXion's e-wallet and the underlying blockchain technology. GavaGives uses Hyperledger Fabric to track contributions through the value chain, greatly increasing accountability.
GavaGives has recently partnered with Coins.ph, Southeast Asia's leading e-wallet. The partnership will draw more attention to TraXion's blockchain method of verifying trustworthy NGOs, by bringing up a list of top-performing philanthropy organizations operating on the GavaGives site whenever someone uses Coins.ph to make a donation. This will greatly reduce charity fraud across the region.
There are a number of other companies also currently working on financial inclusion solutions. Among them, She Counts is giving unbanked women in Tanzania and Indonesia access to mobile banking services, Paysafe enables cash payments online in many countries around the world, and IDBox combines a solar-powered Raspberry Pi with a fingerprint scanner to offer power–main free access to financial services in Papua New Guinea. While none of these companies offer the full scale of services that TraXion is ready to launch, Cuisia-Lindayag remains hopeful for their success.
"We aim to work together with other companies that make e-wallets, not compete with them," said Cuisia. "At the end of the day, we're all working together for the common good. We must not lose sight of this."
TraXion's TXN token pre-sale has already begun, and their crowd sale begins on August 1st. More than $4 million has already been raised in their private sale. For more information and to learn more about the KYC process, visit https://www.traxion.tech.
Additional Facts and Figures:
According to the World Bank's most recent Global Findex, 22% of all humans on Earth remain unbanked.
In the Philippines, 89 million people are unbanked or underbanked, and credit card penetration is only 3%.
2.2 million migrant Filipinos work overseas at any time, making the Philippines the third-largest remittance-receiving nation in the world, according to a recent World Bank report.
The Philippines has a very high rate of mobile phone penetration, at 75% according to a 2017 joint report by We Are Social and Hootsuite.
"Sari-sari" convenience stores account for 40-45% of company sales in the country according to a recent estimate by Procter & Gamble Philippines.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
