Meet the Access Family
We cannot properly introduce the Access Family without first sharing the Atlas story. Below is our story — who we are, and how we got here.
Quick TL;DR on Atlas
Atlas Money is a branchless banking platform that allows anyone to become their own community micro-bank. Atlas Money Agents go door-to-door daily to Atlas Money Clients collecting deposits, issuing withdrawals and offering microloans.
The Atlas Story
Atlas Money is currently in 3 regions in Ghana and 1 region in Senegal with over 300 Agents and 17,000 customers, who have deposited over $1.5M. Atlas Money has issued over 3,000 micro-loans so far, and because the model is savings and relationship led, Atlas Money has a nearly 0% default rate.
Atlas Money was in the Techstars Barclays fintech accelerator in London (Q2 2015). The Founders met many of their early stage employees through Techstars and began to conduct pilots in Senegal during the program.
In January 2016, the team moved to Ghana, and it was there that Atlas found their product market fit of branchless community bankers already existing in the marketplace.
The gaping problem was one of trust and uniformity — personal bankers and larger Micro Finance Institutions would often collapse, losing all user deposits, but users always returned to the same channel seeking to rebuild trust anew. Atlas immediately saw the power of this model at scale.
But before building their core product, the team first spent countless hours shadowing existing personal bankers, retaining the convenience and close personal relationships of the model, while providing much needed trust and greater financial access.
Atlas Money Agents use a smartphone app to transact with customers, while customers only need a feature phone to participate on the platform. Customers pay Atlas Money a small monthly fee for the agent services provided.
Being an Atlas Money agent is a full-time job and a well paying one at that, with most agents making over 2x the average monthly income.
Atlas Money sources their new agents from local communities, empowering people that are already pillars of the off-line communal networks that are ubiquitous throughout West Africa and beyond.
Atlas also host monthly meetups across their agent and client segments to ensure that they utilize their communal network to continue improving on the platform. Atlas require Agents to pre-purchase transaction credits to guarantee the safety of user deposits (a model used by telcos for both airtime and mobile money distribution). All an Agent needs to start is a smartphone and $100 in starting credit.
Atlas immediately exported this Ghanaian model to Senegal to test inter-country product market fit. Senegal did not have this model of access, nor the pain-points that accompanied it. It was a tremendous success, with users in Senegal being even more active than those in Ghana.
Meet the Team
The Founders: Mickey & James
Mickey and James are from the same small town in the suburbs north of New York City. It was late 2012, and Mickey had graduated from George Washington Law School and had just passed the New York State Bar Exam. He was intent on starting a company that could empower people. Meanwhile, James had just finished Y-Combinator with a company he co-founded, Eligible API. He was looking for a new challenge, and Mickey was looking for a technical cofounder.
In 2013 they built a political startup together to empower people to have greater access to the political process. Their first year together was a lot of hustling, commuting, sweat equity and building out of their parents’ basements — they made a ton of classic product mistakes, knew no investors whatsoever, applied to countless incubators, and were rejected time and time again. James then when on to receive the Thiel 20 under 20 Fellowship, and from there they met a Fellowship Mentor, Helmuth Chavez, who got them hooked up with a libertarian university in Guatemala called UFM.
In early 2014 they were invited to a thought leadership retreat in the wonderful mountain city of Antigua. While there they met Magatte Wade and Ruth Richardson (more on those two marvelous women later when we release posts introducing them as advisors).
James was already into bitcoin, having been mining since he was in Y-Combinator. Mickey was enamored with the technology and how it could empower others in the most fundamental of ways.
While in Antigua, they started a side project that would become their focus just a few months later. It was called Atlas Card, and it was the first US bitcoin debit card. From there they met Adam Draper and joined Boost VC.
Moving to Africa
Mickey and James realized in early conversations with José, Magatte and other colleagues that the true transformative power of blockchain and cryptocurrency, required mass adoption, and the needs for such an actual product market fit would be in the developing world and not in Silicon Valley.
So they set out to Africa to really validate their thesis.
Magatte Wade offered them introductions into her home country of Senegal to travel and talk to the people there about their problems.
They entered the Techstars Barclays fintech accelerator in 2015 and spent most of the program in Senegal.
James made a SMS to SMS blockchain wallet system and they began to talk to users, mostly women’s’ groups, about their problems in rural Senegal.
The women were so welcoming and honest, and the resounding request was for access to more capital.
Mickey and James then raised a seed round from some great investors that believed in their mission and trusted them to figure it out.
They started to talk more with Barclays Africa and decided to enter the Ghana market. The team of just six at the time, dropped everything, moved to Accra, and lived together in a hacker house for over a year.
Jose
Mickey and James first met Jose while networking in the social good space for their first startup. He was such a passionate person, obsessed with ways to empower others.
He had a diverse background of spearheading banking products for the underserved in Spain, and at the time they met him, was a Diplomat for Spain by day, and social good organizer by night, bringing together entrepreneurs with investors and advisors across New York City.
He is a certified economist with a deep background in all the things that ACX stands for and hopes to achieve — a true asset to the Access Family.
Oneki
One of Atlas’ earliest employees was Ondrej David whom Mickey and James met at Techstars. From the Czech Republic, he won an open design competition to join Techstars and help out startups in the batch. Having hustled to create an opportunity for himself purely based on merit, he immediately had the Founders’ deep respect.
Over the course of Atlas, he proved himself to be way more than a designer. As is true in most early stage startups, all of the team was doing everything, but he began to take a heavy hand in product. As the company matured, he grew with it and is now Head of Product.
He goes by Oneki, a name he made that is Honest meets Quirky… it is beyond fitting. He’s one of the smartest people and kindest people Mickey and James know and epitomizes the culture they try to foster of Great Minds and Big Hearts.
Team Senegal
Mickey and James met Malick through Magatte Wade during their first days in Senegal and hired him the second they got their first funding. Malick is a lawyer and jack of all trades. He used to work at OxFam and knew both Magatte and Ruth through a program called Women of the World, a program funded by women to provide growth capital exclusively for women in Senegal. He managed the fund, ran the program and was truly the perfect fit for Atlas.
After a few months Mickey and James met a different Magatte Wade. Magatte had just finished grad school in the UK. He had countless job offers but choose to work with Atlas to pursue his passion of transforming his own country.
Together with Malick they hired the rest of the Senegal team and were single-handedly responsible for the success of Atlas, moving from their families in Dakar to the rural area to oversee all operations, product iterations, and expansion.
Dayo
Atlas first met Dayo through Andela, a startup that trains up local talent and connects them with high paying tech jobs at startups and larger corporations. (Sidenote: they have an amazing mission and we love working with them). The Founders and Dayo became fast friends and were so impressed with his development and leadership skills. After almost a year together, and with Andela’s blessing, they asked him the join the team full time.
He has worked his way up from a junior engineer to the Head of Engineering, from building out the core product, to now building out whole product teams. From Nigeria, he lived with the team in Ghana, visited the Founders in NYC for Thanksgiving and is truly a dear friend and centerpiece to the team.
Team Ghana
Atlas has such an amazing and large team in Ghana, but to keep it brief we’ll just highlight a few bios here.
Reginald
The first hire was Reginald, who had a diverse background in all mobile money projects in Ghana. He helped Atlas to build out its initial team, with our offices held out of the hacker house at the time. He now heads up Business Development across Ghana, focusing mainly on Community leader outreach to scale up Atlas’ agent network.
Phyllis
Phyllis was employee number 2. Her background was in political canvassing which translated so well into operations at Atlas. For the first year she did everything all while earning her graduate degree and juggling family life.
She is beyond an inspiration for what intelligence, dedication and hard work can translate into. But what is one of the best things about Phyllis was how she has truly grown with Atlas into a true leader and cornerstone of our culture.
Kwesi
Kwesi joined Atlas after they had found their product market fit and were looking at scaling up operations. He hails from a background in launching mobile money systems in Ghana and is one of the core leaders in Ghana, inspiring the rest of the team to fulfill the mission across the country.
Ori
Ori joined the team more recently as we dedicated time to Access. He is a graduate of UVA where he taught classes on bitcoin to his fellow students. He was also tapped by law enforcement to help de-anonymize ransomware scammers.
He is an outstanding solidity developer and has helped to sculpt so much of what has become Access.
His background in undergraduate, before falling down the crypto rabbit hole, was in anthropology, which made him a perfect find for blending our existing mission and values with the creation of a full-on crypto ecosystem for the underserved.
Enter Access Network
When Atlas started they were bulking up the day’s transactions and injecting them into a hash to put on the testnet of bitcoin’s blockchain. Atlas wanted to push all transactions live onto the mainnet, but at the time it was prohibitively expensive to do so for $1 to $2 transactions (and this was before the price took off in 2017).
Our vision (and still is today) was to go from a basic P2P banking platform for current accounts to a whole suite of applications that provided better access — free P2P sending, e-commerce, group loans, micro-insurance, co-owned businesses and community centers, tech incubators etc. (it was a long list).
The team began looking into making a token economy early in 2017 to both solve the problem of transaction fees and more importantly to realize their original vision.
Along the way of crafting Access Network they realized that while Atlas built their products with communities — and knew from these communities a good roadmap for new products — that the best thing to do was to empower them to make all of those decisions themselves, and to be able to incentivize such developments from an open network of global developers.
Thus Access Network was born. Access puts power in the hands of the people so they can control the development of their own communities.
While Access Network has stand alone value without Atlas, Atlas will help to push it out to sea and bootstrap it in the early days, acting as the primary and immediate exchange partner for distributing Access in West Africa.
Most of all, we are so excited to see what people can co-create together — more things, at a faster rate, that are clearly desired.
During the course of its journey Atlas has tried to foster a true family culture, hosting team members at the Founders’ parents’ homes for Thanksgiving and spending a lot of time in-market together as Atlas continued to scale.
We will try to open that culture to the world, not because we grew together this way, but because in our short experiences thus far on this Earth, through our time with Atlas’ communities, we’ve come to see that is how the world is.
It is a world full of good and loving people, smart people, who are so similar in their values and hopes — across borders, genders, religions, ethnicity or age— who if given the chance, will create beautiful things for each other, with each other, to be used together.
Together,
The Access Family
Special Thanks to all who helped review this post, including Jose Fernandez and Shannon Wu.
