Driving Financial Inclusion Through Digital Access

Transcript

good afternoon bonjour uh tough act to follow uh but very important and um you know i like to think some of the things that i've learned we've learned with phone bank in my current company [Music] will can be impactful across emerging market in all types of use cases whether it's providing basic sort of telecommunications infrastructure as well as addressing humanitarian crises but today you know we talk about sort of a few frameworks that we've developed to help drive adoption of web 3 across

emerging economies again i'm chris davis i'm the founder of phone bank i'm a experienced financial technology and wireless entrepreneur and so i've been at this a long time and sort of been thinking about the application of new technologies as used by people and one of the big issues we see today across um many countries is sort of lack of public institutions in the trust and what i mean by that is um you know it's not that there aren't sort of banks or governments you know uh or services uh it's just that you know

that they're not widely accessible or available or people don't trust them you know as as as as evidenced by the last speaker if you are the minority in this country you're not getting serviced in a particular way right um and you know and another great example of that is like money remittance these are the types of things we take for for granted in the in the west like sending money to you know to europe or to the us well if you were to send it to many emerging markets it might get there in a couple days uh and you know but and then you even getting it might depend on when the bank's open or uh if the banker likes you or not and so hence not leading to to any trust

and sort of availability of these institutions and while there are these next generation of players like again using sort of the the remittance example like um uh you know there's transferwise but it's predicated on the old existing sort of banking infrastructure you realize today even today the fastest way to send a dollar to the other side of the world is an airplane right and it's because when you send a like a dollar there's these like intermediary banks that it has to go through and you know to finally arrive at sort of the the bank in country um but and because that these sort of web two entities are baked on top of these old

uh institutions um you know you don't know what you're gonna get and uh you know and you don't even know what they're going to do with the the information that you that they have about you well what you've seen in in many emerging economies where they leap frog in terms of telecommunications going from no phone uh leapfrogging wired directly into mobile um the same is true and what we're seeing around banking in that if you don't have a bank account uh and which is you know in many respects the vast majority of people on this planet um it's actually better to have a stable coin as long as

you can have liquidity on the back end of it in a uh a software wallet distributed on your mobile phone right that's the bank of the 22nd century um and you're gonna see a similar type of leap from no financial services directly into to defy like if i wanted to to set up some type of financial account for a refugee you know that's how i'm going to do it and while uh you know we have this great conference going on and you know there's there's all these sort of d d phi uh uh applications um

you know that the ux is still very very broken i mean imagine giving uh i mean heck my mother let alone uh you know someone who may not be formally educated in any way at crypto key and tell them to do something with it doesn't matter if it's a a satoshi or a billion dollars worth of bitcoin you know it might be um not relevant to this so but the groundwork is laid that's a good news and so what we're talking about today is uh you know we've in our sort of experience we've put together sort of a simple set of frameworks that you know some of things we consider are like ease of use accessibility how do we reduce

friction cost um and many many more apply um and so as we lay this out you know this is just a high level some examples of the the type of institutions you know and sort of where they might fall out in a simple two by two around ease of use and accessibility where you look at and i'll share a little bit more about what we do at phonebank um but uh companies and products like uh p2p exchanges from like paxful or or binance or local bitcoins they're actually uh easy to use and very accessible right and they circumvent like you may

or may not be aware like in places like nigeria uh banks are actually precluded from funding crypto exchanges which is one of the reasons why uh the pdp exchanges of uh uh has grown so fast or adoption has grown so fast there um and or even in markets where crypto is not available at all you know through traditional financial or funding crypto is not traditionally available in um with financial institutions and then you know you look at new applications like the axe infiniti and what they enabled in rural philippines in terms of driving

economic inclusion to people that may never have been connected to the internet before and definitely not web 3 before but now it's driving a big part of their uh um their livelihood so going back to like you know crypto adoption in in sub-saharan africa it's uh and i could say this is sort of on the border of ease of use and and um accessibility but as compared to traditional sort of money remittance um you know this is the fastest growing crypto markets in the world and uh and a lot of it's driven by the fact that the whole money remittance type institution is is broken and if you want

to participate in global trade you have to use cryptocurrency and so it's it's accessible and then once you sort of develop the behaviors around how to use it it's relatively easy to use and you can do it 24 7 365 uh and you don't need to ask your banker and again you know i i mentioned sort of uh actually infinity in the context of money remittance and and even sort of uh you know uh this sort of alternative financing mechanism that they call scholarships you know because some of these the land cost got so expensive that the average player couldn't afford to buy into the game so they got a scholarship

which is um a type of uh uh leasing or learned earn type program or for for skilled players but you know it was a a clever mechanism to make it more accessible uh and you know and the type of thing that you can code into the blockchain um you know via mobile and you know one of the one of the applications that we even tested out last year was um a a type of uh micro tasking where we could pay out people in our native token that they could then redeem for prepaid airtime and these are tasks

in terms of like data cleaning labeling that uh you know most of us wouldn't you know do the uh the 10 cents per action type work but in places like kenya or nigeria or mozambique on and on you know that could top up your mobile uganda that could top up your mobile bill for the day and again you know this goes to the this accessibility with the the p2p exchanges um you know uh it's a great way to onboard in markets where uh you know you might have restrictions or their

direct integration with there's no direct integration with the financial institutions and now phone bank you know we are a uh a type of on-ramp targeting mobile first cash-based economies where we use prepaid airtime as a medium of exchange uh into into crypto and the significance of that is literally there's eight billion prepaid mobile phones globally and uh our prepaid sim cards globally and they all act as a type of simple um uh uh like store value account and as such you know that value can be transacted

and traded and we facilitate that in our marketplace but you know where we um are unique and differentiated in terms of our onboarding and in terms of reducing friction and accessibility is like we have a very simple kyc process we actually piggyback off the process from the carriers and provide a ton of filters in the front of our wallet um so that people don't have to register a ton of information to access it um and you know and and this works anywhere on the planet where you have a uh a gsm prepaid phone and then finally you know as we as we think about sort of this uh sort of continuum from web one to web

three the significance now being sort of ownership and you know and so why i sort of left our company to last is what we really do is we create and the opportunity for us here is to create this bridge from you know this less than one percent of the world that has crypto to the nearly 100 of the world you know in our case that has access to mobile telephony but we need to build more bridges to these real world applications and you know i think that's sort of the opportunity we have now in this new cycle and how we get ethereum and and web3 adopted in real lives to help people thank you [Applause]