Cash (is) was king

“I can pay your invoice direct to your bank account…” I said….
“No thanks.”
What do you mean, no thanks?
“I want a bloody check — I can cash that f****r in tomorrow.”
So cash really is king. But at a cost.
This labourer was willing to reduce his wages by 12% to get his “cash” from one of many high street vendors, what, three days sooner than waiting for the check to clear.
But his main reason to do this is he did not want that check to hit his bank account at any cost. That would have just reduced his unauthorised overdraft, to a lesser unauthorised amount.
Can’t buy beers with that!
And this is how the “pay day loan” and “check cashing” industry was born. People need the money now, and not at the end of the week/month.
Last week we had our first technical Etch meeting with a Master Card provider to bring our goal of “real time ERC-20 payroll card” a reality.
They thought our idea of tokenising the “cash” to enable the free flow of money through the system — payroll, NI, etc. to a prepaid card that the worker owned, per second, was indeed a very novel idea. To say they were intrigued is an understatement. In fact, they offered to subsidise some of the cost and even had a few clients in mind who they thought would benefit from such a system.
But the primary “knock on the head, why didn’t we think of this before” moment was when Tomasz was describing in detail how Etch would integrate with the technical standards for EVM (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) and that the “fiat” money would only be transferred at point of use. Rest of the time the “wages” would stay as ERC-20 tokens, backed 1–1 by the employer/insurance.
It was quite a moment when we both looked at each other and released that we are now in the remittance market, too!
According to The Migration Observatory, the UK is one of the top-10 remittances sending countries in the world, a sum that varies widely from £1.5 billion to £16.5 billion a year. (There is no official mechanism for recording.) Most of this comes from low-income migrant workers, that work extremely hard to support their family back home. But again, sending this lifeline back home comes at a cost - typically from 7 to 11% of the total amount remitted.
But no more.
Our plan is for the worker to receive a number of Etch.pay cards all linked to the main account. The cards can be given to relatives in receiving countries, with a % of the worker’s income to flow in, in real time. Now, not only can thy start with ZERO balance on the card in the morning and pay for lunch with money earned that day, but his mother the other side of the world can buy lunch for the family too*.
That is what I call a game changer.
Our goal for Etch was always to de-risk the worker from not getting paid and to guarantee food on the table, but this can save lives, too. Now the stakes are that much higher for Etch to be a success.
Therefore, an additional goal for Etch is to be the most efficient way of sending money that is earned back to developing countries. That, in turn, will reduce poverty.
Phew!
This week we have a meeting with a London based building maintenance and cleaning company that has thousands of employees — 95% are migrant workers, and according to statistics, 30%+ will be sending money back home.
Not only do we need to show them the benefit for their employees, but for them as the employer too. Yes, our model will be “music to the ears” of the corporate social responsibility officer, but we need to show them the savings.
After all, token is king.
You can follow our journey at https://etch.work
* The recipient withdraws money from ATMs / cash brokers or as a debit card in store.
