Centbee - Afrikan Heroes

Centi and Centbee Partner to Empower African Diaspora with Affordable Blockchain-Based Transfers

June 1, 2023

In a major stride towards empowering the African diaspora community, Swiss fintech pioneer, Centi, and leading global digital cash wallet, Centbee (www.Centbee.com), announced today at the London Blockchain Conference that they have joined forces to redefine remittance services from Switzerland to Africa. Deploying advanced blockchain technology, this partnership is poised to make cross-border money transfers more streamlined, cost-effective and inclusive.

Remittances are the financial backbone for many African households, with Switzerland’s sizable diaspora community playing a significant role. According to the World Bank, in 2020 remittances from Switzerland to foreign countries surpassed $8.2 billion, with a substantial portion dedicated to African countries.

Traditionally, remittances rely heavily on bank transfers and credit cards, creating challenges for the unbanked and underbanked communities in Europe. Addressing this critical issue, Centi has developed a unique cash on-ramp feature, whilst Centbee offers off-ramps in various African countries including Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. This synergy promises to enhance financial inclusion significantly.

Preliminary tests indicate that sending CHF 50 in cash to Ghana using Centi and Centbee’s combined service could be 85% cheaper than the market leader. This translates to recipients getting up to 30% more cash-in-hand based on the same CHF 50 sent from Switzerland. This revolutionary model could pose a formidable challenge to traditional high-fee remittance service providers.

The partnership is also eyeing greater savings potential by leveraging Centi’s ground-breaking blockchain technology combined with a unique, Swiss bank-guaranteed stablecoin, alongside Centbee’s user-friendly digital cash wallet and extensive knowledge of the African market. This union is expected to bring about a marked improvement in remittance services, providing much-needed financial relief to families and communities in Africa.

Bernhard Müller, CEO of Centi, underscores the vision driving this partnership: “Our collaboration with Centbee is rooted in a shared commitment to making financial services more accessible and affordable for underbanked communities. Together, we aim to challenge and transform the remittance landscape.”

Echoing this sentiment, Lorien Gamaroff, CEO of Centbee, adds: “Our partnership with Centi, a frontrunner in digital payments, aligns seamlessly with our mission to make digital cash accessible to everyone. We are confident this partnership will bring significant benefits to our users and the wider African community.”

This collaboration between Centi and Centbee showcases the transformative potential of blockchain technology to revolutionise global remittance services. By making these services more affordable and accessible, we move one step closer to financial inclusion for all in Africa.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

South African Crypto Startup Centbee Raises $1M To Facilitate More Cross Border Remittances

December 26, 2022

With funding from Calvin Ayre, founder of prominent bitcoin venture capital firm Ayre Ventures, Centbee, a London and South Africa-based facilitator of digital currency transfers on the Bitcoin blockchain BSV, has concluded its pre-series A round for $1 million.

Centbee, a company founded in 2017, has created a proprietary digital wallet that utilises the BSV blockchain and facilitates Bitcoin transfers. Lorien Gamaroff, a crypto expert with a primary base in Johannesburg, and Angus Brown, a 20-year banking veteran, founded the company.

Customers can use the cross-border remittances service Minit Money to send digital currency payments to friends and family members who live abroad thanks to Centbee’s crypto infrastructure. Recently, the features roadmap has been increased. Minit Money’s “in-wallet chat application” function is performed by Centbee’s ChatPay feature. Through a second decentralised finance app, the startup also provides a number of digital cash products and services.

“We rarely hear from remittance providers using crypto, but it’s an area with potential. Traditional remittance providers are hampered by the time delay caused by international finance protocols, mainly SWIFT. Given that crypto uses blockchain for its verification checks, the money arrives much faster and can be held by the recipient as savings or an investment, if they don’t want to acquire fiat for spending,” the company said in a statement.

The BSV ledger is used by Centbee to permanently record all remittance transactions. Due to a use case that is motivated by usefulness rather than currency speculation, it is marketed as a “real peer-to-peer” electronic cash system for sending Bitcoin.

As jointly appointed chief executives, Gamaroff and Brown are in charge of Centbee. Along with its London headquarters, the firm also has offices in South Africa that support its growth. According to Centbee, 35,000 remittance payments into Africa have so far been made possible.

Calvin Ayre’s contribution follows his firm’s earlier commitment in 2019. The latest investment will support Centbee’s expansion objectives by strengthening its technical and operational capacity.

Ayre said: “My faith in Centbee has been rewarded through Angus and Lorien’s ongoing commitment to making Bitcoin — the original protocol in the form of BSV — easily usable and accessible to everyone. “

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard