SureRemit’s 2nd AMA (Ask Me Anything) Highlights — August 30, 2018
On Thursday, 30th of August 2018, we held our 2nd AMA, an open Q&A session with the SureRemit team. Various subjects were discussed; the recent app launch, upcoming exchange listings, marketing, the roadmap ahead and much more! The AMA took place at our SubReddit, here are the highlights!
- Please follow this link for the full thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sureremit/comments/9bhyt9/sureremit_community_ama_with_sureremit_team_30th/
SureRemit Q&A Highlights
Q: Congratulations on releasing an app! Hard work paid out.
Questions that most community is interested in are:
- We all know if we don’t market the app, there is very slow progress in building user base. We can’t really see SureRemit anywhere outside of medium, twitter at the moment, meaning they are not exposed outside those two platforms. What media are you planning to market SureRemit on? TV advertisement, Internet — crypto or non crypto websites? How heavy are you going to invest in marketing campaigns?
- Volume is currently very low, what is your plan to achieve volume and liquidity of RMT token?
- There are more and more remittance apps that are being released on the market and have bigger exposure than SureRemit at the moment, how are you going to compete with those?
- Is system fully automated?
- Do you have a plan to update roadmap?
Best regards
A: Thank you! Long answer below:
This is a valid concern, and it is not lost on the team. We’ve made significant progress on the platform, and the natural next step is marketing. However, now that we’re live and seeing transactions, a few things need to take slight precedence over large-scale marketing. Liquidity is the obvious first. We need to be able to settle merchants in local currency. Unless our model for recycling the RMT is air-tight, we’ll run into sustainability issues at scale. I’m sure there will be other questions about this where I can go into more details. Secondly, we’re already learning a whole lot in the live environment, especially about fraud.
Fraud plagues the money/value transfer industry, and we might have sacrificed some security (on the company’s side) on the altar of simplicity, specifically with the card acceptance feature. In the coming days, we’ll be deploying features that might make it a little less straightforward to pay with cards, encouraging users to acquire and hold the RMT for their transactions. It will be costly (marketing and recovery) to discover nefarious customer behavior in a large-scale live environment. Finally, some things like third-party relationships and terms tend to change post-launch. For example, it became more difficult to offer Amazon US vouchers after a few transactions went through. We rely on a few third-party relationships that we’ll like to stress-test to avoid customer service issues in the future.
Nonetheless, when we do become aggressive with consumer-focused marketing, the approach will be very local, starting with regions where we have a high concentration of redemption points/merchants (Nigeria, Kenya, Middle-East etc.). The approach will vary for each market. Social media really works for Nigeria, for example, so that’ll be an immediate channel. Offline advertisement also provides a lot of credibility. Standard digital marketing and high-level PR strategies will also be deployed across-board. Already, we’re subtly placing our message in local media. Like (25:20–29:40) in this Voice of America radio programme. https://www.voanews.com/a/4524679.html. We’ll get there, but if we’re going to be around for a long time (especially if we’re going to ride through this bear market), we have to really pace ourselves.
Liquidity is not only important for RMT holders; without it, the entire SureRemit model will break down. Our community might expect a few quick solutions that’s popular with (good or bad) crypto projects, but a lot of those solutions don’t satisfy the requirements of both the token-holders and the company, while aligning our incentives. High volume exchanges are expensive. It’s a really unfortunate cloud in the crypto space, and the dynamics and politics under the hood are not as utopian as one would expect of the industry. Costs range from $100,000 to $2m, and at that cost, we need to make sure the immediate benefits are real.
To get a bit more detailed, for our use-case, we need to have a real, integration-level relationship. The RMT transaction flow requires communication with an exchange that will provide the RMT supply needed by card-paying customers in the app (this is what the initial token-holders really want). We also need to be able to conveniently push the RMT received from non-card-paying customers back to the exchange (this is what the company needs). We also need to trust that the volumes on both sides are real, otherwise volatility risk will be amplified, which is bad for the model too. We’re working tightly with an upcoming exchange called Busha, and the image below demonstrates the RMT transaction flow we’re working with. We’ll still continue our (very intense) efforts to list on existing high-volume exchanges, but we need such listing to go side by side with something like Busha.
Re-competition. We’ll try to stay on our own lane, because we believe that, as non-cash/money value transmitters, we’re running a slightly different race than most remittance services for now. Personally, I think remittance senders will always need money transfer operators (MTOs), but SureRemit will make them need MTOs less. While the competition’s message is “send money faster/cheaper/easier”, our message is more closely related to: “don’t send money if you don’t have to”.
Most of the system is automated. As we’re learning in the live environment, however, that might not entirely be a good thing.
Yes, the dog ate a few parts of the original roadmap (e.g, Latin America plans), but we’re still mostly right on track.
Thank you for your very good questions!
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Q: Considering we are nearing the end of the year, does the team have any concrete plans/objectives to establish starting in 2019, or is it still too early to say?
You guys are doing a wonderful job and I can’t wait to see RMT grow exponentially.
A: Europe is looking very active. Lots of interest coming out of there, so we’re likely going to establish a sales/research office there in Q1. That’s the only new thing that’s on the pipeline for early next year.
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Q: Cant wait for Amazon to be back online the app!!
A: Amazon was really popular. We’re working on it :)
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Q: Hey Sel, Sam, and the wider team. Congratulations again on the launch! I really hope that this AMA, and near-future marketing pushes serve to open eyes and hearts to this incredibly exciting and deserving project. I know a lot of the questions I have in mind are shared, and will be asked far more eloquently by my peers in the community, but here are a couple of merchant-related queries:
What is the time-frame for reintroduction of Amazon to the app, specifically in the UK?
Will you add UK/other countries in Europe sections for bill paying? Adding utility companies, such as British Gas,BT, O2, Orange, Virgin, E.ON etc. would be very useful for adoption over here. I know that the developing world is a necessary focus (and I’m very glad it finally is!), but there are plenty of people in the UK with struggling relatives/friends.
Ditto for UK merchants. As well as the return of Amazon, I would love to see the addition of big High Street names like Argos (tech/household goods), PC World, Staples, Nandos (restaurant), Subway, Asda (UK subsidiary of Walmart), Waterstones (books), W.H. Smith (more books), Boots/Superdrug (chain pharmacies), Thomas Cook (travel agent), T.K. Maxx (our version of T.J. Maxx), New Look/H&M (clothes), Early Learning Centre (educational childrens toys — a huge addition for people with single parent friends/relatives) and Mothercare (clothes/goods for newborn children/toddlers).
Exploring voucher sections for other countries, I see many familiar names already on the SureRemit books, for example Steam (US), The Body Shop/Toys R Us (Saudi Arabia), Spar (Nigeria). How easy would it be to bring these across to the sections of other countries that the companies also operate in (all of these are very familiar in the UK)?
In addition to physical stores, I would love to be able to personally use crypto to pay for or gift vouchers for things like travel (British Airways/RyanAir/Easy Jet), or accommodation (AirBnB). I know this is something that is already available through the app, for people on other continents, but please don’t forget Europe!
Is there anything you can tell us about the actual process of courting and adding new merchants? I have literally no idea how you approach clients; how much they are told about SureRemit and/or RMT, and what their ultimate involvement with RMT the currency is. I think the context would be interesting for a lot of us, and hopefully provide a better framework for community members to come up with ideas of potential businesses to include.
Following on from the points above, would you consider putting together a simple form, for those wishing to put forward potential merchants to the team? This could have key details, such as the company name (obviously), type (restaurant/clothes shop etc.) and location (whether by country or website), but needen’t be too lengthy. To mitigate multiple requests for the same merchant, you could have it pop up with something like “We are already processing a request for this company” if the same name is entered on a second form.
As I said at the beginning of this (rather long) post, I have many many more questions, but I’m sure these will be asked by others! Thank you for all of your hard work so far; I am very happy to be along for the ride!
A: Haha all about new merchants. I agree that, ultimately, this is what gives the app the most value. The more merchants, the more useful. We approach merchant acquisition in different ways. For markets where we’re physically present, we establish relationships with these merchants directly, at the most senior level. Deploy voucher redemption/POS systems to their stores if physical, or integrate into their online stores, negotiate settlement terms (in fiat), then autonomously generate and sell those vouchers to the public. For other markets, we have to rely on other people who have done that, and have third-party APIs we can plug into. Some major merchants (like Amazon Europe) have these APIs directly, others work with third-parties. Most maintain a wallet system, so we maintain balances that are depleted as vouchers are generated. It’s really different for each merchant and country.
At the end of the day, it’s all a function of the Business Development engine we have going on in a specific country to establish these relationships (e.g. a relationship with Booking.com for hotels in Europe if they have a voucher system), or where relationships are not required, how deep our pockets are to maintain wallet balances. For all, we hardly talk crypto, as the conversation is likely to break down then. We manage the risk and fears and FUD on our side, till we’re big enough.
Follow the full conversation on Reddit here.
Download the SureRemit App on the App stores:
- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.suregifts.sureremit
- iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sureremit/id1102261592?ls=1&mt=8
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