the higlobe playbook
cross-border money is the biggest unsolved problem in fintech.... here is the move unocoin just made.
remittances are a five hundred billion dollar a year market.
people pay seven percent in fees on average to move their own money home. that is forty billion dollars a year extracted from the pockets of the poorest workers on earth. it is a slow violence. it is a hidden tax. and no one in the rich world thinks about it.
unocoin sat down with higlobe this week. they are doing the work. proper work.
the model is simple. you have a worker in the us sending money to a family in india. the old way takes three days, costs seven percent, and routes through six middlemen who each take a slice. the new way takes thirty seconds, costs less than one percent, and routes through bitcoin in the middle.
bitcoin is not the destination. bitcoin is the rail.
most fintech people do not understand this. they think bitcoin is an asset. it is also an asset. but the more interesting story is bitcoin as a settlement rail that no government can shut off.
higlobe and unocoin are doing this for the india corridor. there are sixty other corridors that need the same treatment. mexico to california. nigeria to london. the philippines to dubai. each one of those is a billion dollar opportunity sitting on the ground waiting for someone to pick it up.
and yet.... most of the smart capital in fintech is still chasing yet another neobank for college students who already have three.
this is what happens when you build for the people you already see at brunch. you miss the people who are not at brunch.
unocoin has been doing this for a decade. they started in 2013 when bitcoin was a meme. they survived three regulatory winters. they sued the central bank of india to the supreme court and won. they are not new to this fight.
the partnership with higlobe is not just a press release. it is the next chapter of a longer story. india is going to be the world's third largest economy by 2027. its diaspora sends home more money than any other country on earth. and the rail underneath that flow is being rebuilt as we speak.
if you are building in fintech and you are not paying attention to the corridors.... you are building for last decade.
what corridor are you missing?