Telecom & DeFi; Interoperable Liquidity — Enreach
Enreach is founded by Abdelkader Allam and Kashaf Bashir who are co-founders of Opt1mize Technologies, an Irish FCA regulated “Open Banking and Realtime Global Settlement” FinTech.
Abdelkader (Kader) is both a software and telecoms engineer who has spent much of his career working with technologies used by telecom companies as well as mobile money applications centred around local/cross-border payments. Kader who networks in the French-Speaking African telecom and software communities, has resided most of his adult-life in such regions. Kader has consulted with telecom regulators and operators delivering security and revenue audits and was part of the team that uncovered billions in fraudulent telecom activity in Niger.
Kashaf (Kash) in his corporate career was training to be an Actuary in London, first in Pensions and Investment then followed by General Insurance, Reserving and Pricing on the Lloyds of London Reinsurance market. Kash left his career to start a B2B energy company which pivoted into telecommunications activities surrounding Voice over IP protocols. Kash invented the CommSettle concept, Kader joined the vision after the pair came together in 2012 at a telecoms conference in Amsterdam.
In 2013 Opt1mize was born, and both founders have been building, iterating, and repeating the process up until this day. Eventually, the founders in 2016 raised seed money on a prototype of their invention, CommSettle (Communication Settlement but more aptly described as Commodity Settlement in its current state) and have spent the last few years bootstrapping CommSettle into the platform it is today.
CommSettle is a centralised platform used by telecom operators to dynamically trade their network assets with other Wholesale Telecom Carriers. The industry represents a global participation of Wholesale Telecom Carriers who are trading the telephone calls, SMS, roaming traffic or even data consumption of subscribers using their telecom networks. The Voice and SMS portions of this industry represent global annual revenues of $650B and $50B for voice and SMS verticals respectively.
CommSettles USP is its peer to peer real time gross settlement payment rail on bank accounts belonging to the carriers, integrated with their trading activity. Telecom transactions are intangible but rateable, and have huge transactional throughput. The nature of the transactions have proven a barrier of entry to other technology companies that have attempted to develop and execute settlement. Each of those technology companies delivered limited non real time and non peer to peer settlement. Many of these platforms have since gone bankrupt and their services no longer exist (including Arbinet the company founded by Alex Mashinsky of Celsius Network).
Opt1mize, recently valued at €86m by Deloitte, has performed settlement in excess of €250m in telecom transactions since the beta platform went live in June 2019. The CommSettle eco-system as of today includes both Tier1 and Tier2 telecom operators as part of the current 65 membership, with a long list of carriers waiting to join.
Enreach founded by Kash and Kader, are currently building an integration layer between the Cryptocurrency Industry, CommSettle and Opt1mize’ regulated banking infrastructure. Enreach will be enabled to perform liquidity integrations with CommSettle introducing tokenisation to telecom operators trading voice and SMS. Telecom Operators and users of Opt1mize Banking infrastructure will be enabled to interact with Decentralised Finance. Enreach will bridge liquidity between the telecom, cryptocurrency and FIAT ecosystems, opening up new liquidity markets, business models and revenue opportunities.
Enreach will act as the FIAT gateway bringing institutional Telecom Operators to the Crypto industry, whilst Crypto can take the benefits of delivering relevant DeFi solutions to Telecom.
