A Series of Conversations
Manila Day 2 & 3 : Visit to local Bitcoin startups
May 15 (Thursday) & May 16 (Friday)
37coins visited two Philippines’ bitcoin startups for possible partnerships in the region. On Thursday, we visited the Bitmarket.ph office in Makati and was greeted by 13 enthusiastic employees. They also have an employee in Cebu to work with markets there. Bitmarket.ph was founded by four Filipino entrepreneurs Nick Galan, Jardine Gerodias, Miguel Cuneta and John Bailon in 2014. Bitmarket.ph focuses on point of sales and tries to educate local merchants about bitcoin. Their ultimate goal is to become the “Bitpay of the Philippines.”
We talked with Bitmarket.ph about each others’ service and bitcoin use in Philippines. Also, Dondi from SMART (one of the top mobile carriers in the country) joined us for the conversation about the future of the digital currency and their product SMART Money.
- What’s the biggest challenge to introduce SMART Money to the people?
Dondi said making people understand the concept has been the most challenging. We have been marketing it for several years but haven’t seen the huge success in the market yet as people are still used to using tangible money. However, most of them use SMS frequently (Philippines is often called as “texting captial in the world”) so we see some hope there.
- What can be the advantage of using this form of digital money (SMART Money)?
Dondi said definitely lower fees as opposed to withdrawing money or using cash service out of the ATM. Also for remittance, it’s a lot cheaper than using the bank transfer or Western Union.
Kassy who is in the business development team at Bitmarket.ph gave us a presentation to provide insights about the consumer behavior and marketing in Philippines. It gave us confidence about implementing our service in Philippines market after hearing her explanation.
- What’s the effective marketing in Philippines?
Kathy said that Celebrity and Social Media marketing are the effective ways in Philippines. People love to watch soap operas and are passionate about celebrities, so it usually works to use celebrities in the promotion.
Kathy said that merchants use social media (especially Instagram) to drive traffic into their website or social media account to the shoppers. Filipinos are not passionate about online shopping as they still prefer to shop at the malls. But they notice when merchants comment on the post on celebrities’ social media account with short promotion words and their websites or social media accounts. A lot of shopping websites use social media to directly reach the customers.
Kathy also said that merchants and consumers communicate through Viber to negotiate and to arrange the way of money transfer. Often they meet face-to-face to exchange money and the product or use bank deposit. Social media serves as an online platform to connect merchants and consumers but there is no means of online transaction yet.
Kathy also said Consumer demographics are females in 20-30 age group. The most popular products on the net are insurance and fashion. Price of the clothing /accessories they purchase on social media are about 300-500 pesos. (9 dollars-15 dollars)
The next day, we visited Coins.ph, the biggest ‘bitcoin exchange’ in Philippines. Coins.ph was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Ron Jose (CEO, Co-founder) and Runar Petursson (CTO, Co-founder) in 2013. They hope to make bitcoin accessible to everyone in the Philippines, including those who don’t have access to the Internet or bank account. It offers various ways to buy and sell bitcoin through bank transfer, cash deposit/pickup and mobile money. We talked about each other’s services and discussed possible integration of 37coins and Coins.ph.
As told by Ron Hose, the goal of Coins.ph is to introduce more paying options to make it easy to buy bitcoins. 37coins’ SMSwallet solution might be an option for Filipinos to trade bitcoins easy and cheap.
Coins.ph recently became a service provider to 2 top daily deal websites in the Philippines — MetroDeal and CashCashPinoy — and hopes to expand its merchant network, which is currently 7 merchants in the country.
After meeting with coins.ph, we went out dinner with Ron, April of coins.ph and guest Jay, the top seller on localbitcoins.com in Philippines. Jay is a computer programmer based in Manila and is developing a mobile ecommerce app with bitcoin transaction feature.
Jay had 12 transactions on that day on Localbitcoins. He told us that about 2 out of 3 transactions are thought to be remittance, as speculated from their IDs and IP addresses. It is assumed that they are using bitcoins for International money transfer.
He also shared a fraud experience that he had. People usually deposit money into bank account to buy bitcoin. But there was a case when the buyer cancelled the deposit by disputing with the bank. It turns out that a scammer had convinced another person to deposit cash into Jays account. The victim though they were depositing cash to buy a camera. But the scammer never delivered the camera, so the victim disputed the charge and got a refund from the bank. Jay, having thought the scammer sent the funds, sent the bitcoins. After accepting the bitcoin, the scammer disappeared.
Jay suspects when he has to deal with users without history on the website, but he does not want to exclude newbies as he wants more people to use bitcoin in the country. Possibly tighter security system can solve this problem of sorting out newbies and frauds. But it is hard to plan against social engineering tactics.
These two day were valuable time for us to learn more about the local market and to connect with local bitcoin startups that strive to make bitcoin more accessible to people in the Philippines. Hopefully we can help them with our service to spread bitcoin use in this country of 100 million Filipinos.
