Ask YC: startups around remittances

5 pointspetervandijck2 comments

Sending money home is a 60 billion/year, inefficient market. I live in Colombia so I've been thinking about this for a while. Wondering if there are startups out there that are taking interesting approaches to this, or thoughts on how to take on this market. Combining with mobile could be interesting as well.

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Probably requires quite a bit more financial/legal hacking than technical. That said - I agree that it seems like a real opportunity.

The entire "payments industry" boggles the techie mind - Visa, MasterCard, and Western Union (to name a publicly-recognizable few) enjoy very high ROI having a nearly trivial (for a serious organization) technical problem to solve.

It's trivial if and only if you ignore fraud, which contributes a huge amount of technical and legal complexity.

Read the Paypal interview in Founders at Work. It wasn't market or technical reasons which killed their competitors, it was their inability to deal with fraud.

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