Remittance startup on seeing the faces of their unbanked users

Disclosure: The author is the COO of Seedstars World. My Cash Online is one of the winners of their startup competition in Kuala Lumpur. 

Nurol scrolled through his gallery and pulled up a picture of a run-down row of cardboard houses perched on the bank of a still, muddy canal.

“This is where they wash their clothes and themselves. And here, you can see the shop,” said Nurol Shamrat, CFO of My Cash Online, an e-marketplace for migrant workers.

Another picture followed, this time of a slightly bigger hut: a fan nailed to the thin wall, a TV set plastered on the counter, and one poster hanging lopsidedly in the corner. What exactly constituted it as a shop escaped my understanding, but I let him talk.

“This is where the factory workers gather once the day is over to buy some drinks and chat with the shop owner. We trained him to become our mobile sales person, and he helps us run things in this settlement. With his help, the workers can deposit their wages in a bank account and send the money to their families back home.”

Stunned, I stared at the screen.

So this is what the mythical world of  “remittances” actually looks like?

At Seedstars World, we stumble across remittance solutions almost every week. In Africa alone, three of our previous local winners are trying to tackle this ubiquitous issue in various ways, from value-based remittances (Mergims) to mobile money transfers (remit.ug), all the way to bitcoin (Beam Remit).

However, since we always run our pitching events in the capital cities, we rarely get to experience what exactly the typical unbanked user looks like.

With Nurol’s photos, everything became more real.

The face of the end customer

“We are focusing on the blue-collar workers hired for construction, manufacturing, and plantation work, as drivers or domestic help,” explains Mehedi Hasan, My Cash Online CEO.

With Malaysians reluctant to take up menial jobs, Malaysia is one of Asia’s largest importers of foreign labor. As a relatively wealthy nation, the country attracts people from neighboring countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar, whose citizens seek stability and better economic opportunities to provide for their families back home.

Foreign workers form Malaysia’s third largest community, around 19 percent of the total population. And more than half of these foreign workers are undocumented.

Managing financial transactions

So, what about remittances?

Where does this leave us?