7. What is community banking and insurance? Give me some context.
Community banking and insurance can mean many things. In the ROSCA context, it is This grassroots organization leverages personal reputation and social ties -- and draws upon 2,000 years of resilience and effectiveness in offering credit and insurance to communities around the world.
Specifically, a ROSCA is a group of individuals who agree to meet for a defined period in order to save and borrow together, a form of combined peer-to-peer banking and peer-to-peer lending. ROSCAs are commonly built along clan, geographical, social, or professional networks. In countries around the world, ROSCAs have a variety of different names such as: susus (Ghana/ Caribbean Islands), tandas (Latin America), hui (China), chits (India), cundinas (Mexico), etc.. For more, find the whitepaper at WeTrust.io for more details!
8. How will YOUR solution benefit the world?
WeTrust’s vision is to leverage social capital, trust networks, and blockchain technology to create a financial system that has aligned interests with all of it’s participants. 2 Billion people in this world do not have a bank account and the existing financial system has many contradictions. One cannot get an affordable loan without having well-paying job and good credit, while legitimate insurance claims directly reduce an insurance firm’s profits. The un-banked and un-insured are most hurt from this lack of access and misalignment of interests, and are always in search of alternative financial solutions.
We believe that today’s banks and insurance companies play an important role in society. However, in contrast to other industries where undifferentiated products result in low margins, they thrive because of their important role as a “trusted third party”. Yet, our research shows that there is an alternative to this dependency on a “trusted third party”, one which can help reduce the friction necessitated by centralized intermediaries and result in a world where everyone has access to fair, market-priced credit and insurance.
9. Why use the Blockchain?
With blockchain, the communal savings and lending circles (also known as ROSCAs in the US) can now be used anywhere. It doesn’t matter whether you don’t like how expensive existing financial service are or if you have no access to them at all. Communal savings and lending circles could be a great opportunity for blockchain to re-think the way we think about savings, credit and insurance.
10. How will you onboard non-tech savvy users onto your platform?
Because of the very nature of our product, our initial users will have to be somewhat tech savvy and either have to own a computer or mobile device. We believe this isn’t an issue as mobile device penetration is exponentially increasing year over year with a 72% penetration rate by 2020 (or, 5.6B people worldwide) according to GSMA. Our initially markets will be focused on individuals with strong social capital and trust networks (e.g. current students & alumni, fraternities & sororities, etc.), but due to differences in each other's financial situation, there exists a opportunity for one more fortunate to help another less fortunate.
WeTrust interview