Bitt is a financial technology company that utilizes blockchain and distributed ledger technology to facilitate secure peer-to-peer transactions with seamless mobile money across a suite of Bitt’s Software and Mobile Applications.
Mediaplanet: Why is the Regulatory Sandbox Framework so important?
Bitt: The sandbox allows cutting edge companies like Bitt to deploy innovative products and services in circumstances where they benefit from, and are guided by, a close relationship with regulators, who monitor them in order to better under stand their operations and the nature of their offerings.
In our case, it has allowed the Central Bank of Barbados and the Financial Services Commission, in particular, to familiarize themselves with how the mMoney Wallet and mMoney Merchant applications work and perform in the market in order to determine if and how these products or services should be regulated. In fact, because regulation often lags behind innovation, the sandbox creates an enabling environment for the regulators to develop well-informed, right-sized regulation, as necessary, that facilitates innovation without introducing unacceptable risk.
How has DLT changed the game for Central Banks?
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a rapidly developing technology that powers trusted distributed databases, applicable to solve problems in various scenarios by eliminating the need of an intermediary third party. Private and public institutions around the world acknowledge its potential and consider it a revolutionary technology. A report by the World Economic Forum suggest that more than 40 central banks worldwide are experimenting with Distributed Ledger Technology. Some key use cases including Wholesale and Retail Central Bank Digital Currency, Interbank securities settlement, digital know your customer and anti-money-laundering processes, as well as trade finance and cross-border payments.
Distributed Ledger Technology creates a shared view of a large variety of information fed and replicated across institutions creating highly efficient and, in some cases, lower cost mechanisms for sharing information and transacting privately and more securely. Distributed Ledger Technology is changing the game for central banks by modernizing governance structures and operational frameworks. This technology can guarantee authenticity of information and the reliability of systemically important financial systems, while facilitating innovation with new financial services providers towards greater financial access and ease of doing business.
DLT is changing the game for central banks by modernizing governance structures and operational frameworks.
What makes your mMoney App unique?
At mMoney our mission is to build a product that supports full financial inclusion for ACP countries. In many ACP countries there is a significant proportion of the population that does not have access to banking for daily transactions. Many of these customers may have a bank account, but frictions remain to the extent that many would only use cash for day to day transactions.
This is where mMoney comes in. We are building a product that allows anyone with a smart phone to download an e-wallet and load with cash at a nearby teller. Once cash is on the phone customers would be able to pay at merchants, send to others, top up moblie phones, pay bills and send money to persons in other counties in a different currency, as well as to receive remittance from family and friends working in developed countries. On the retail side the merchant has access to a cost-effective POS system at a fraction of the cost of card-based transactions as well as a loyalty and payroll product all in one. mMoney is unique in that we are working towards all of these products in one.
What are the benefits of a white label solution for financial institutions?
By whitelabeling the mMoney stack, commercial banks can offer a progressive mobile-based digital payments platform to their retail and merchant clients alike. Bitt has extensive user experience (UX) research and development, having tested and rolled out multiple wallets and payment applications – commercial banks can take advantage of this experience, and on and ongoing basis can rely on Bitt for continuous upgrades to the UX and feature set.
Since clients are able to download the wallet from the app store, and verify their identity via biometric algorithms, the account creation process is simplified and can reduce in-branch operational burdens. Since the algorithms verifying the government issued ID and facial matches statistically have better ability of detecting fraud than humans, criminals can more easily be detected and rejected.
