Humaniq sets out plans to open up opportunity to all
London’s Fintech community hears how Humaniq will fuel a new wave of entrepreneurship in the Global South
London’s flourishing Fintech and Blockchain community has heard how the Humaniq app and HMQ coin will empower people currently without tools they need to improve their lives.
Dinis Guarda, CEO of Humaniq, opened the first of the startup’s monthly meetup events at the Rise London Fintech accelerator on 26th July by setting out how the app and cryptocurrency provides a solution to the problem of 60% of the world’s population lacking full access to financial services. Dickson Nsofor, Humaniq’s Chief Business Development Officer, said operational costs were still hampering efforts of banks to improve financial inclusion.
Dickson said that by harnessing the power of the Ethereum Blockchain, operational costs in countries including Nigeria, where he is from, can be brought down. One of the first tangible fruits of this will be a slashing of the 12% fee for remittances to two or three per cent. But this is just the start. Plans for a marketplace in the app would allow those with businesses or ideas to connect with others to collaborate and borrow the necessary capital to invest.
People currently without tools to increase their income, “can let the world know they have talent,” Dickson added, solving a major problem that the world suffers today, according to entrepreneur Thomas Power, a leading Blockchain influencer. “Technology has failed to match talent to demand for that talent,” he said. An Internet based on companies with large, centralised servers “has not spread capital everywhere, it’s put it back to the top,” he said.
But, with the Blockchain, “we are looking at the beginning of the democratisation of capital,” he said. Fellow panel member Tim Campbell, and advisor to Humaniq, said: “There’s massive, untapped potential among all those unbanked people. We want to provide people with the power to improve their lives.” Tim cited the example of an entrepreneur in Ghana he had met who had made a new type of charcoal with a 36% markup.
“That’s massive, but without financial services, he could not invest, he could not expand.” This lack of access to lending particularly affects women, as Katia Elizarova, fashion model and Kiva ambassador, following Nana Ocran, writer on contemporary African culture, added. “If women can access loans, they can make something, they can improve their lives,” Katia said. “The Humaniq app allows the inclusion of people who have been excluded.”
The app will be piloted in Ghana from next month with a marketing strategy designed to achieve 50,000 app downloads by the end of the year. The attendees of the event also heard news of the first startup that will use the Humaniq platform to offer financial services. Protectiq will offer affordable health insurance to the unbanked, once they have verified their identities using the bio-metric identification that the Humaniq app offers. Humaniq will select the startup from its accelerator for testing on its platform and aims to have launched ten such projects to empower the global unbanked before 2018, and 100 in the first year. They will all use the open APIs provided by the app to allow their fast, cost-effective deployment to users around the world.
Tim said that while Humaniq was just one of dozens of providers of new cryptocurrencies, he advised the assembled Fintech community: “Look at the white papers and ask yourself: ‘How will they make a difference to people?’ Humaniq makes sense because we make a difference to people’s lives, we facilitate entrepreneurship.”
