Telcoin, a cryptocurrency company launched in Japan with headquarters in the U.S. and Singapore, has operated mostly beneath the radar of fintech media since setting up shop in 2017. But that is changing today as a result of Telcoin’s attention-grabbing start to 2021.
In February, the blockchain-powered financial technology platform officially launched fiat transfers between Canada and the Philippines through its official iOS and Android applications.
The remittance service is made possible by Telcoin’s collaboration with GCash, a mobile wallet operator in the Philippines with a reported customer base of 33 million users.
The significance of Telcoin’s arrival in the remittance marketplace is rooted in the company’s cost-savings advantage to consumers who can use the service without leaving their homes.
The global average cost of sending a remittance is 7 percent. Telcoin is targeting 2.5 percent or less to send a remittance using an iOS or Android smartphone.
Interest in Telcoin has also been fueled by the growing need for financial services among un-banked individuals in search of mobile solutions preferable to physical remittance shops during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Putting the market opportunity into perspective for mobile-first remittance services, Filipinos alone receive an estimated $2.8 billion in remittances annually from Canada. For Telcoin, having the edge of affordability over competitors in one of the world’s largest remittance corridors is not a trivial achievement.
Apart from Canada, additional remittance sending markets in the coming weeks are expected to include Singapore, Australia, and the United States, with partnerships announced to add Mexico, Nepal and Tanzania remittance corridors thereafter.
For Telcoin, the launch of remittance services appears an entree to bigger moves in the fintech space. These aspirations became clearer in the wake of the company’s most recent community update affirming the next iteration of Telcoin’s mobile wallet.
“Telcoin V3 is the culmination of three years of research and development, organization building, and business development,” the company shared in its weekend update. “The next generation of the Telcoin Platform stack is architected to fully harness the power of DeFi and the reach of telecoms to bring fast and affordable, user-owned financial products to every mobile network subscriber in the world.”
Telcoin says V3 will introduce two “formative, compliant, user-owned” financial products designed to “operate at a fraction of the cost of traditional services, which execute automatically via smart contracts rather than intermediaries — and where active Telcoin users capture fees typically awarded exclusively to financial institutions.”
Telcoin credits its compliance-first approach with opening doors to secure an expansive list of mobile money platform platforms across multiple continents, most of which have not yet been disclosed publicly.
“We are incredibly excited to be at this exact place and time in history, at the forefront of what we believe is a movement that will revolutionize financial services and empower billions of people,” Telcoin says.
