Start thinking about Bitcoin at your company sooner rather than later
Cryptocurrencies can enable businesses to reinvent their relationships with finance, financial services
Businesses are faced with unique challenges stemming from the COVID crisis. As states struggle to balance public health with economies, there’s been an upswing in talks of how companies cannot go back to business as normal. Then just last week, major tech companies like Twitter, Coinbase, and Facebook announced plans to shift to remote-first working arrangements.
It doesn’t take much to envision more knowledge-based companies following suit, taking the de facto first steps towards the “future of work” — setting up Slacks, Zooms, Dropboxes, etc. But why should disruption stop at digitizing basic office infrastructure? Shouldn’t we as businesses and workers reexamine financial services, something most of us are either regularly dissatisfied by or wholly unfamiliar with, to build fintech that actually meets our needs, the needs of our stakeholders, rather than simply benefiting the intermediaries?
Disrupting embedded institutions such as banks and banking is not without significant challenges. But with the increasing momentum remote work is seeing, it only makes sense that our financial tools be more innovative and flexible to address the service complexities that are also sure to come.
What does Bitcoin, crypto bring to the table?
Most well-known financial services today are offered by traditional banks and institutions. So no matter how slick customer interfaces get, whether by person, phone, or app, the services are stacked on top of legacy systems from the 20th century. This causes friction for us in the 21st century who move money faster, transact globally, and demand tailored financial products. And such limitations will intensify as more organizations experiment with and or embrace remote work only to find their finances aren’t as accessible as needed. Fintech does drive improvements to UI/UX , but “delightful” layers of tech alone can’t innovate out legacies that make today’s experiences seem less user-owned and prohibitively expensive for most customers.
Enter cryptocurrencies. Built by and for Internet natives, crypto networks offer environments where users gain more control and ownership over their digital assets through programmability. Major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether (Ethereum) are open-source by design to enable participation by anyone and to ensure levels of transparency traditional financial institutions are not wired to offer. And in times when the speed of services like transfers, currency exchanges, accessibility to/approvals on loans, etc. can severely impact businesses and workers, fintech built on trustless digital foundations, without the limitations of back office working hours and the intermediaries needlessly embedded into our financial systems, is what we urgently need.
Fintech built on crypto/blockchain foundations is a gateway to reinventing finance as more customer-centric, less administratively defensive. As a result, a wider demographic of users can gain access to products and services that are priced high or are reserved for high net-worth, key account clients — wire transfers in a matter of clicks with no third parties; forex at a fraction of the costs imposed by banks; instant processing and payouts via markets that are 24/7. In remote work and distributed team setups, such transactions are regularly incurred and the fees quickly add up. But with Bitcoin, value is digitally stored and can be transferred peer-to-peer, from one jurisdiction to another, for little to no fees because that’s how it’s programmed to work.
Where to start incorporating crypto fintech at work
In spite of this push for change, traditional banks and institutions won’t be phased out any time soon — they provide critical infrastructure and services that many of us need in our daily lives. But COVID has made painfully clear this infrastructure has many centralized and offline components that grind to stops in crisis times due to reduced personnel, suddenly high service volumes, etc. For businesses that aren’t major corporations but still shift to remote, whatever their reasons, outages in their financial services can lead to serious losses. Managing even a proportion of company funds in crypto (payments, transfers, financing, etc.), however, can help retain some level of control.
Companies, in particular those now taking a seriously look at how they can accelerate digital transformations to accommodate remote work arrangements, may consider dipping their toes into the crypto fintech waters. Resources and tooling for a variety of financial services powered by crypto such as treasury, payroll, compensation, benefits, wire transfers, currency exchanges, borrowings, etc. have never been more accessible. And with speculation that central banks are rapidly considering moves to digital currencies due to future viral concerns, it may further advantage businesses and workers to get headstarts on becoming familiar with the underlying technology and principles, as was the case with personal computers.
Regardless of what direction the world moves in post-COVID, many workers have now experienced decentralization in some form, whether by choice or by force. And the availability of tools like Slack and Zoom revealed and demonstrated the strategic advantages that such arrangements bring. But companies will also need access to just as reliable financial products and services in order to keep operating financially regardless of where their contributors are or what happens in the environments around them. So there’s value in starting to explore how you can incorporate crypto into your company’s business stack sooner rather than later.
Consider testing the waters with crypto perks
The crypto revolution won’t occur overnight — after all, the PC and Internet revolutions took decades before even resembling the mainstay forms they now occupy in our daily lives. There’s a growing movement, however, towards decentralization (i.e. remote work arrangements) and establishing more open financial systems that go beyond simply being digital rocket ships of market speculation. And so this is an immense opportunity to reinvent financial products and services to be less predatory and inflexible; and to be more people-minded, broadly inclusive, and resistant to tampering and fraud (as we’ve seen repeatedly during times of global crises).
And so that’s why we at Quidli have started by offering a lightweight tool for businesses to manage employee incentivization and rewards based on Bitcoin. We’ve kept the use case simple yet programmable by design so that companies, teams, communities, groups, etc. can easily navigate their initial crypto experiences without getting lost or overwhelmed. If you’re interested in using crypto perks for your organization, remote or not, you can check out our quick tutorial video on how the platform works or start your own admin account via our website.
Want to start offering team members crypto as a work perk? Simply create an account for your company on Quidli to get started.
Are you an employee that wants to receive crypto as a work perk at your company? Fill out this request form and we’ll be sure to reach out on your behalf.
You can visit our site, follow us on Twitter, and or contact us directly with any questions or comments you may have at hey@quid.li.
