August 2019 Community AMA Wrap-Up

Cashaa is a UK-based banking platform dedicated to banking crypto businesses, of which 99% are underbanked. Although our products are suitable for other industries as well, we needed to first focus on an industry in which we have easy access to clients.

Banking with Cashaa is completely safe — when you look at how Cashaa or any Fintech or challenger bank works, you will see similar arrangements with a partner in the background which holds the same license as any proper high street bank. Additionally, Cashaa also provides hybrid banking as we also support crypto, unlike other challenger banks.

All the cryptos are controlled by users, we can not make any transactions on your behalf or in your absence. Your keys, your coins.

What are our existing products which users can use today?

• A multisig crypto wallet with a UK current account
  The account can be used as full, GBP denominated UK account in the same way as those given by any normal bank. Behind the scenes, the accounts are generated by Clearbank, the UK’s first clearing bank after 250 years. This account can hold up to 1 Billion GBP.
• Linked MasterCard for ATM withdrawal and online and PoS payments
• SWIFT for international transfers, FPS, BACS and CHAPS for local payments
• Storing supported cryptocurrencies without giving control to any centralized entity
• Exchange these cryptos into GBP and vice versa
• Crypto Payment Gateway
  Our Crypto Payment Gateway will enable businesses to accept crypto and directly convert them into local fiat currency. Currently, we are live with BTC only and are testing it with some of the bigger merchants that want to accept crypto payments.
• Debit and credit card processing
  Our target is to give bank accounts to underbanked businesses, not only crypto businesses. Almost all customers will be online entities and they will want to receive card payments from their users. It is an essential part of the banking services Cashaa is providing to allow our customers to accept credit and debit card payments.

When we look at existing exchanges, wallets, ICOs and STOs, how many are enabling card payments? It is not an easy task to accept card payments in this space but we took the time to understand the difficulties and were able to come up with a solution.

Any company which is processing credit and debit card payments today, such as Coinbase, Simplex or Binance, offers this service at a fee above 3%. Binance is the cheapest at 3.50% and Coinbase at 3.99%. Cashaa is making sure that businesses get the same capabilities but at 3%. We launched this product with another banking partner less than 3 weeks ago and we are in the process of onboarding 11 companies for that. Once they go live, it will be up to them how many fees they want to charge their customers, but from us, they will only be charged 3%.

Is Cashaa a bank?

It is very important to make sure we are using the right words. Fintech companies, such as Transferwise, Revolut, or Cashaa, are not calling themselves a bank, but use slogans such as “better than a bank”, or “banks are old, let’s move”. Specifically, the word “bank” can not be used together with Cashaa, although we are providing similar services as a bank. We rather say that Cashaa is providing banking services instead of Cashaa being a bank.

Who are our competitors?

While we are early in the market with openly banking crypto businesses and having crypto and fiat smoothly in one place, we do have some challenges and competitors.

One example is Wirex with their business product based in the EUR market, partnered with a Lithuanian institution and trying to do the same things as we do out of the UK. Other examples include Mistertango and LHV in the EUR market, and Silvergate in the US, which is not a direct competitor.

Some of these institutions require their clients and the related individuals to have their account with the same bank, which makes it difficult to scale the business. While there are some competitors in the EUR and USD market, the GBP market is completely open.

Can users buy CAS with credit and debit card?

Previously we used to allow CAS tokens to be bought directly from the Cashaa wallet (OTC) through credit/debit card. However, we’ve paused this feature specifically as we wanted users to buy from the open market until we link the Cashaa OTC with Binance DEX order books. Once the service to buy CAS tokens is resumed in the Cashaa wallet, we will extend the buy feature to include more tokens.

How are our products linked to the token?

• To be onboarded, you get a 50% discount if you pay the onboarding fee in CAS tokens compared to GBP. This has been proven to be the strongest utility of CAS. BNB and others are working with the same mechanism, providing a useful service for which you get a discount when using the native token.
• As a business grows and requires increased account limits, you have to have more and more CAS tokens. For every limit, you need a certain amount, which you can see on our fees and limits page.
• We offer a 75% discount when using our crypto gateway services, e.g. when converting between crypto and fiat back and forth.
• If businesses have 100,000 CAS as a monthly average balance, they can get free card processing services, API banking, etc.
• Personal users are rewarded by getting CAS collected as a fee from businesses. The more businesses Cashaa is onboarding, the more it will positively affect our users.
• A business could have a bank account already but needs credit and debit card services. If they do not need credit and debit card services, they might want to add crypto payments to their business. All these services will require CAS tokens.

Businesses will need to feel comfortable using our services and then will do whatever is required to get the tokens and buy them to continue receiving our services. As soon as they start the service and they start scaling, our CAS token will become increasingly important.

As a huge number of businesses are pending to be onboarded, in the future more CAS are needed to be used for products and services, not just for staking, and therefore we reduced the staking time for personal users from 12 to 3 months.

Why are we only focusing on businesses?

As a company, we had to evaluate where our strengths are, how we can make revenue, and where our customers are. Businesses have the highest need and are the most profitable segment. Personal users can more easily open accounts compared to businesses. Coinbase, Wirex, Xapo, and others are coming with a card for personal users. Why invest too much money in marketing personal cards when our pricing would not be significantly cheaper than the aforementioned companies?

There are around 20+ different ICOs/companies planning to give people crypto cards, although there are already established players in this area. Margins are very low, and operations costs are very high. If Coinbase comes with a card, they don’t have to acquire new customers, but can issue it to their existing customers. In such instances, it makes sense to provide a card to make customers stay with them.

Although we keep being focused on businesses we have also started to give personal accounts to users with zero fees and with access to banking and Mastercard with crypto banking, but only within our Cashaa community. To become part of Cashaa community acquire CAS at Binance DEX.

Where are we at with our business onboarding?

So far more than 500 businesses have registered with us in the past 100 days, which means we are getting 5 business signups a day, which is huge. Onboarding one business is beneficial for maybe 100 individual users.

Out of 568 overall so far, only 23 businesses have been able to get onboarded and require CAS tokens for onboarding and other things, 9 are being processed, and 24 have been rejected.

Marketing

One day of Coinmarketcap gives us roughly 60–80 new business signups. However, if we are not able to onboard them in time yet it also does not make sense to keep advertising. The good thing, however, it shows there’s high demand for Cashaa’s products. Priority is to ensure we can onboard businesses faster by smoothing the process and hiring more relationship managers.

Why are these registrations not impacting CAS tokens yet?

We need to engage these businesses to get onboarded and as long as the businesses are registered and not onboarded, there is no impact on the value of our CAS tokens yet. We’re doing whatever is possible to onboard businesses faster but even if we try to onboard them faster it is not necessarily always in our hands.

Our average onboarding time is 4–8 weeks, and more than 30% of the cases have required up to 12 weeks, mostly due to complex structures and the speed in which user documentation is provided. For example, when we are asking for business projections, to know which kind of requirements the businesses might have in the future, it often takes more time for them to provide it to us.

To put things into perspective, high street banks are strictly denying crypto businesses and challenger banks are also completely denying them.

When you onboard crypto businesses, you have to go through enhanced due diligence processes. Some part of the process can be done automatically, such as ID checks, but some parts need to be done manually, such as checking the UBOs (Ultimate Beneficial Owners), and their other businesses and relationships. Our learning curve is extremely high, having jumped into the banking space, with a focus on high-risk businesses.

As much as we would like to onboard them fast, our compliance department must have a completely different mindset. They handle each file with extreme cautiousness which is taking a lot of time. We can not ignore that this space attracts many bad actors, and cannot rush to onboard businesses. We had cases where founders gave fake passports.

Still, to get more businesses onboarded we are hiring and training more relationship managers to filter and follow up with our clients. So far more than 200 businesses have not heard back from us yet. Therefore we are also training more accountants, lawyers and businesses to do the documentation and accounting, and so far we have 6 partners to outsource some of our work. For example, law firms in Malta, who can do the first level of onboarding, acting as our extended relationship managers and providing a personal touch locally which Cashaa as a purely digital organization is not able to give otherwise.

How about Binance program, AMA and CZ tweets?

Unfortunately, our point of contact at Binance during our listing had left, and the replacement contact was on holiday until August. However, CZ personally retweeted Cashaa’s tweet about our Binance program. Retweeting was his personal choice. We are planning our next AMA in September directly on the Binance channel.

Will Cashaa accept privacy-based cryptos such as Monero?

Our banking partner has strict guidelines for which cryptos are accepted, only businesses dealing with those will be accepted. 6 cryptos so far are accepted in addition to our CAS token. BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB and more, we will publish the full list on the website. Monero definitely is not part of it, we will not accept any business dealing with any privacy coin.

If the Indian Government bans crypto, how can Cashaa help the Indian community?

The Indian Government is not the first. In 2016 Russia declared that people will go to jail, and then went back to encourage businesses to come to Russia. We have seen this in different places, and for Cashaa it means an opportunity. We will run more ads in India in this case and encourage businesses to set themselves up abroad with us in the UK or Europe. We can register them and offer them an account, a package which we will make public on the website from the next quarter onwards.

What’s next?

In the next month, we encourage our community to learn about the latest of Cashaa by reading the website and learning directly from the source, e.g. visit the CAS token page and our knowledge base for details on staking. Feel free to compare what you have learned in this AMA with what you read on the website and if there is something missing you may let us know so we can add it to our knowledge base.

To access the presentation, visit here.

The Cashaa Team

The Next Generation Banking Platform

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