What is BitMari

What is BitMari:

BitMari is a Pan-African remittance service that shall leverage on bitcoin technology to tap into new markets of the diaspora remittance.

1. What does your company do?
   
   We are a remittance platform that allows people to send money to Zimbabwe from anywhere in the world leveraging Bitcoin technology. We are the only Bitcoin based company in the world to receive a money transfer license from the central bank of Zimbabwe and have a strategic partnership with Agribank to perform remittances for their customers using Bitcoin.
2. What problem does your company solve?

The remittance problem is global yet it hits the hardest in developing regions including Africa.

In 2017, the international average cost of remittance is approximately 7% yet, the cost of sending money to and from Africa can be as high as 20%. 20% is $2 out of every $10. These $2 may mean very little to you and I but in some areas of Africa, it could be the cost of a daily grocery trip.

Exceptionally high costs of remittances to Africa partnered with an almost complete lack of transparency in the movement of funds to Africa. These costs reduce the value of remittances that can be sent to Africa, thereby stifling the true economic growth of Africa. When the Zimbabwean economy collapsed in 2009, a lot of people left the country to work in the diaspora and support their families back home. They face high fees to send money back home through traditional remittance platforms. We will use bitcoin to reduce the cost of remittances and reduce the friction of financial transactions.

1. Walk me through how your product solves this problem?

Mobile money transactions accounted for 81.2% of all electronic payment transactions in Zimbabwe in 2016.

The prolific adoption of mobile money services places BitMari in the optimal position to leverage Blockchain technology and Bitcoin to disrupt the local remittance industry in Zimbabwe.

Our Bitcoin wallet is available for free download on both Android and IOS operating systems. People simply download and register it and it’s ready to use.

Our customers will not need to pay high fees to send money back home. Through our partnership with a local bank, even people in remote areas of Zimbabwe can easily collect their money.

Customers download the BitMari wallet to their phone and use it to purchase Bitcoin which they send to us.

Our customer gets notification via email with a reference number which they send to the recipient in Zimbabwe.

The recipient simply visits a bank branch nearest to them and collects their cash in USD. By documenting every transaction on the Blockchain, it also becomes possible for BitMari to offer both sender and recipient control and oversight of their transfer journey and costs — a feature currently almost unavailable anywhere else.

1. What is your company mission?

Technology changes the world in ways that politics, militarism, and economics cannot. We believe that Bitcoin will be the technology that unifies a “United States of Africa.” BitMari will leverage Bitcoin technology to reduce the friction of sending money to Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa. BitMari will do all it can to help eliminate the border impediments to trading within the African continent and this will eventually assist to overcome the the neocolonial banking infrastructure that currently undermines Africa’s development.

By removing obstacles, such as high costs, BitMari also aims to encourage greater adoption of regulated money transfer services and re-building trusts between civil society and institutions, as well as genuine social and economic development.