Denelle Dixon recently expressed, “Not enough of us are rolling up our sleeves and getting involved with building this new global and inclusive open financial system.”
In an interview published at Business Reporter when asked: Why is global access to payment systems so beneficial? First of all it should be a right, it should not be a privilege. Today, it is a privilege. That is the unfortunate thing that we see. There is so much fracture within the system on a global basis. So that it is not only difficult for one country as global payments to talk to another country, it is also very difficult within the country to be able to do payments. It is a very fractured system.
And, so therefore the fact that it is a privilege means that there are select few within that country that are actually able to get access to the tools that are necessary to be able to effectuate those payments. And, there are people all over the world who are trying to send payments and remittances back to their families, because they are living outside of their country that they are in, and it is complicated. And it is challenging and it costs them a lot of money. And it takes a lot of time.
How does Stellar come to know of the scope of the problem in the first place? One of the things that Jed McCaleb who is our founder, one of the things that he has focused on was the ease of use of e-mail. The e-mail became so simple for us to be able to send content and to send notes back and forth and you could do it from one provider to another provider. You didn’t all have to be on the same e-mail provider to be able to have access to the content that is distributed amongst one another, that was an important innovation and it is an innovation that could be leveraged so much more capably when you are thinking about money. And you are thinking about financial infrastructure.
The fact that today we have these fractures and this system that does not actually all speak the same language creates a lot of challenge and creates a lot of opportunity for innovation and change. And, that is where Jed saw that opportunity.
Over 200 million SMEs in the emerging markets are actually excluded from the tools that they need to be able to conduct their business. They don’t have access to credit. They don’t have access to lending. They don’t have access to the financial resources to be able to make their businesses successful. So, it is not just at an individual level. These SMEs are so important because these are the businesses that are focused on the challenges and the problems in those regions. And, they are going to solve those problems and those challenges.
So, in as much the same way that I mentioned that women are actually systematically excluded from different financial access. These businesses are too. Blockchain actually and Stellar in particular and the tools that are being built by these companies on top of Stellar allows them to be able to create some form of a quality with their businesses out there. Because, they can’t get access to credit. They can’t get access to capital. They can’t get access to these resources, when they leveraged these tools that are available to them.
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