RocketFuel Blockchain Inc (OTCQB:RKFL) is applying blockchain technology to payments to make transferring money easier and faster for individuals and businesses, including for people without access to traditional financial services like bank accounts.
In a recent interview with Proactive, RocketFuel CEO Peter Jensen likened the company’s vision to what ride-sharing company Uber Technologies Inc (NYSE:UBER, ETR:UT8) has achieved.
Uber used technology to optimize how people move from A to B the same way RocketFuel is deploying blockchain to streamline the process of transferring money from A to B, he explained.
Jensen also spoke about the opportunities presented by tapping into the world’s unbanked population of about 2 billion people.
Proactive: You are thought of as a crypto payment company, but what does that exactly mean?
Peter Jensen: What we’re focused on is moving money from A to B, either between people or between businesses. There are two main markets we’re addressing. The obvious one is the one that we are a part of. We have our credit cards, we have online banking, but it’s just super inefficient with fraud and the problems with doing cross-border payments. We’re talking about making that process much more efficient with modern technology, just like we’ve seen with many other technologies that have optimized existing processes.
But then there’s a brand new market and that is for all the people who cannot do digital payments, the group of unbanked people. There’s about 2 billion people in the world who cannot make electronic payments. If you want to make a payment with an app like Venmo or PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PYPL, ETR:2PP), it needs to be connected to a bank account. If you can’t get a bank account, you can’t send money. So the opportunity is two-fold. It is making the existing market much more efficient using blockchain technology and it is enabling 2 billion people to participate in the digital age with money.
The banking industry is not really set up for the unbanked part of the world.
The problem for the banks is there are 2 billion people who realize they can go down to the market and pay with Blockchain to send money to friends in different countries or just the village next door. A lot of people in Africa and other places are asking if that works well, why would I ever need a bank? Then you have a lot of people in the Western world who say they don’t need banks for basic services anymore, and payments will be one of them. I don’t think banks are going to go away but we will use the banks differently.
What about efficiency and productivity? The way you’re describing it, it’s very simple and easy with immeasurable cost savings.
Think about all the payments that are made today between businesses to their subsidiaries, for example, The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO) needing to pay an invoice to a vendor in Korea. And where the big money is is consumers. You take all those payments with the complexity of the IT systems and processes that have been built and you try to optimize that with new technology. Just like Uber did. They move people from A to B and they made that whole process more efficient to the benefit of consumers and everyone, except the taxi companies of course.
So if you think about it, if we can reduce the cost of moving money from A to B by 75%, we can reduce fraud and improve productivity for our society. If we get this productivity improvement, what can we spend the money on? We spend on better schools and better hospitals and give back to citizens.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style