Don’t follow the hype: Why Azimo isn’t building a blockchain
“Building blockchain into our tech stack would be like building a railroad with no stations”
Our mission at Azimo is to democratise financial services. To achieve that, we’ve harnessed the power of technology to bring our service to more than 190 countries. You could be forgiven for thinking, then, that we’re madly excited about cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
Since the price of Bitcoin started surging last year, Twitter and the news media have been awash with hype over the currency and the blockchain technology it’s built on. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey even declared that Bitcoin will become the single global currency within 10 years.
Hundreds of startups have jumped on the bandwagon, bandying around their own cryptocurrencies and “blockchain-based solutions”, mostly in the hope of attracting venture capital cash. A few of these companies have a valid product that solves a valid problem and will succeed. 99% don’t, and they won’t.
Why aren’t we building a blockchain?
Azimo is a remittances company. A customer in any European nation can use our service to send money to a loved one in any of 190 countries around the world. A substantial portion of the remittances we process are collected in cash, often by people who don’t have access to a bank account. People use Azimo to support their families, to send gifts, to pay wages or to foot urgent medical bills.
We started thinking about blockchains long before the press became obsessed with them. We asked ourselves the same question we always ask when considering what to build: “How will this improve the lives of our customers?” The answer then was the same as it is now: blockchain wouldn’t bring us anything we don’t already have in terms of security, speed or cost.
Financial technology is there to make things more accessible, not less
Above all, we’re not building a blockchain because it’s not where our customers are. Today, the vast majority of people who need our product do not have access to networks or financial services that use blockchain. If that situation changes, we have the right talent to move quickly. Until then, we’re building services for the 99%, not the privileged few.
But what about cryptocurrencies?
A small percentage of our customers use cryptocurrencies and have expressed interest in using Azimo to complete remittances with them. Because we listen to our customers, we’ve had exploratory discussions about how and why we might enable cryptocurrency remittances in future. We’re also blessed with plenty of engineers who have the required technical expertise to do so quickly.
For now, though, we’re focused on solving the real problems that the overwhelming majority of our users face every day. We worked hard to build a service that allows a Filipino in London to get Pesos into the hands of a family member in Manila in less than 60 seconds. Right now, blockchain doesn’t help us do that any better, faster or cheaper.
New technology is exciting, but we’ve never been a business that follows the hype. It’s Azimo’s users, not the latest trend, who decide what we do and why.
