Who are we
Ryver Protocol is the fruit of our hard-earned experience in OOjiBO.
In Southeast Asia, there are 640 million people, 460 million of them do not have bank accounts or enjoy the full benefits of the financial system. Not the benefits of derivatives, futures or CFDs but simple yet vital instruments such as insurance. In Myanmar, 1.7 million of its 2 million small-scale farmers are in debt, and even a simple car accident could tip them over the edge into bankruptcy. Yet they don’t have access to that insurance.
We started in 2014 to deliver the fundamental building blocks needed to bridge their access into the system — mobile and agent banking. While using mobile phones to check their balances and make transfers is de rigeur anywhere in the world, agent banking is a phenomenon that is only observed in developing regions like Southeast Asia and Africa. Because the existing retail banking model is optimised for developed nations where it is cheap to build and maintain a network of ATMs and bank branches for counter service. But in developing countries, such a network is too expensive (relative to income) to maintain, hence agents are often used for cash-in/out and counter service.
Over time, we learnt 2 crucial lessons.
- The unbanked and underbanked need an entire suite of services. If the various financial inclusion players do not work together, this demographic will remain chronically underserved.
- Relying on existing infrastructure will only shackle us to the mistakes made by the existing infrastructure that led to this problem in the first place
There was a third, deeper lesson for us. There is often an overlap between the unbanked population and stateless/refugee populations. In a vicious cycle, due to incomplete records or political factors, they are not granted the IDs required to join the financial system and thus will never build the track record to enjoy its benefits.
Ryver Protocol was designed to help the unbanked and underbanked, and to enable others to help them too.
Hence, Ryver Protocol provides two solutions.
- A second layer protocol for finance, built on Avalanche Consensus (think of it as an alternate SWIFT) that provides the end-users of service providers with the means to store and transmit money regardless of distance, with an immutable record and instant settlements.
- A suite of ready-built banking services that allows any organisation to come onboard, choose the services that they need and immediately set themselves up as a bank.
This machine builds banks.
And by making it radically easier for anyone to be a bank with access to an international network for money transfers without worries about fraud or chargebacks, it makes banking scalable across the world.
We hope that by driving down the barriers to entry, those who couldn’t scale the walls to the financial system in the past would find it easier to do so in the future.
