Author: janina

Kumar started the session by thanking everyone who joined the AMA, and those who submitted their questions in the form. We believe the AMA was very useful to all and we wanted to also give the latest updates to the rest of the Cashaa community who couldn’t make it. 

 

Carl Jolley: How long does Cashaa intend to run the staking reward program?

Kumar: The staking reward program started in June 2019, and there is no end date of the program. It is different to other reward programs done in the crypto industry; here staking is done so that users can take advantage of the Cashaa banking services and use the tokens. Those users who are staking to get the banking services also get the rewards in tokens which again can be used in the platform itself. This is the reason to do the quarterly bonus, it can not be mistaken as a dividend. CAS as a utility token can not give any kind of dividend, you need to use the product and so it can not be run in a way that you only hold tokens and get rewards.

 

Feri Nur: What are some milestones to look forward to, what may be the challenges in the future and how do you plan to answer them?

Kumar: We are proud to be one of the projects that started during the peak of 2017 ICO boom, and we took one of the most difficult tasks, to convince regulators that we can do banking which is highly regulated, in a clean and safe way, and can bank businesses that are struggling. 

Today, for Cashaa the biggest challenge is operation management, for which we are taking a number of steps.

Other than that, we are working to enable US businesses and provide USD accounts, where we have a good chance to be able to do so from the end of October or November. The partner would be Metropolitan Bank in New York which is licensed all over the US and is banking major crypto businesses already. We are now working to build a unique solution for our business customers from the US.

The second milestone we are working on is EUR accounts, which we are targeting in the next 3-4 months.

 

Verose: Why is the name of our project Cashaa?

Kumar: Cashaa was started in 2016 and originally wanted to compete with Western Union for cash transfer to Asia and Africa. Our name consists of cash and a double-A, which stands for Asia + Africa. However, at the end of 2016, with the demonetization in India and a further decline of cash use, while digital payments and use of blockchain technology are increasing, we worked on transforming Cashaa from a cash transfer company to a full-fledged banking solution provider, until we finally enabled our first business customers in May 2019.

 

Bhim: What are your goals?

Kumar: We see ourselves as a next-generation banking platform open for everyone who wants to join the crypto revolution. We want to build one infrastructure to solve the banking challenges for eventually all underbanked industries. 

 

Bhim / Heomapu Phuong: How did your team deal with the technical challenges of the initial launch of this product?

Kumar: We learned from our mistakes, found the right partners, found the right supporters, and made sure to never compromise on compliance. There were not many technical challenges, all were more operational challenges. 

 

Cezo/ Drake Mazeola: What factors may drive the price of CAS?

Kumar: Only the demand for our solution can drive up the price of CAS token. As a company, we are not interested in any other move that may impact the price or volume. A price peak time of BTC, ETH and other tokens can also impact the price of CAS, but as a company, the only thing we can do is to ensure to have a smooth product that solves existing problems and enables CAS holders to access these products.

People can buy tokens based on their own agenda, but CAS is nothing else than a utility token, which is also very clearly stated in our terms and conditions.

 

Vocongnga: What about new exchange listings?

Kumar: We do not plan new exchanges in the coming quarter as our focus will be to make operations smooth, but after that, we are open to new listings.

 

Sean Chin: Why can’t you make staking versatile and simple, like other tokens? 

Kumar: Staking is primarily product-driven and can not be mistaken for anything else. Staking amounts are always linked with the product, the plan you have chosen. You can’t stake tokens just to get the reward. Second, Cashaa does not control the staked tokens, we do not have centralized staking unlike other programs, but staking directly on the Binance chain. This makes the entire process more transparent, everyone can see how many CAS tokens are staked until when.

 

Paul Roth: Can you tell us which customers are onboarded so far?

Kumar: We have non-disclosure agreements with clients, we are giving bank accounts, we can not disclose any details. If a business wants to give this information itself, fine, but we need to follow privacy requirements. We have so far 29 rejections, an increase of 2 since the last AMA (while we still have onboarded 23 businesses so far). 

Among the 600 business registrations, there are around 183 businesses outside Europe, roughly 70-80 wallets, 12-14 exchanges, and we are working on more details on which kind of businesses registered so far.

 

Paul Roth: What is the status of hiring and how much will relationship managers be able to handle?

Kumar: We initially planned to hire 3 relationship managers, we onboarded one person so far from another bank who will join from 1st October.

On 31 August we have also formed a pre-compliance team. Both initiatives should speed up our onboarding, we are targeting 45-60 businesses a month once we have all 3 relationship managers hired.

During hiring, we realized that no matter from which side we are trying to hire – banking or crypto, we have to teach them the other part. Once relationship managers will get more mature, we will see an increase in the number of processed applications.

So far we have rejected 29 businesses, but since we built the pre-compliance team, we are checking their applications again, see which mistakes have been made, we are forming a template which new joinees can follow, and will give the chance to re-apply. Most businesses are related to crypto, such as brokers, exchanges and wallet providers. We also want to develop a process including a test through which we identify the level of risk understanding of our applicants. 

We expect at least 15-20 new businesses to get onboarded with our new process until October.

 

Dipankar Roy: What about future business customers from the Binance ecosystem?

Kumar: As we moved to the Binance ecosystem, we gave benefits such as cheaper services to other Binance companies compared to businesses that are not part of the network. However, they have to go through the same onboarding process.

 

Paul Roth: Where are we with our roadmap?

Kumar: We are pretty much on the roadmap and are trying to see how we can prepone the items. Most challenges are non-technical, and the roadmap was built from a technical perspective. The only challenge was that once we went live, operations became a bottleneck, which we are working on. 

 

Random Member: When you start banking US customers, will it be businesses and individuals, and also high-risk industries?

Kumar: We again will be focused on businesses, which brings more revenue for less cost compared to individual customers. We will target crypto businesses first, and once we have strong operational processes, we will go after other industries. On 27-28 November, we will have a booth at the Sigma iGaming Conference in Malta to start having a presence in that space.

 

Random Member: What about cannabis, which is legal in some US states but still illegal on a federal level, so a lot of cannabis companies are having trouble to get banked. Will you target these companies to bank them?

Kumar: Yes, although we have not closed a banking partnership for the USA yet, we have several options for partnerships in the US. Most likely we are considering going with Metropolitan Commercial Bank in New York, we’ll be able to bank businesses from the whole US.

 

Mukesh Bhati: In the last 8 days, an online quiz is running on your Twitter. What are the benefits?

Kumar: The benefit of the quiz is to educate users about the products and services which are live today, what the value is which you get if you have signed up and if you are a token holder.

After the quiz, we will evaluate and see how we can run the next such initiative.

 

Mukesh Bhati: What are the key features of the token on which base you attract new users to the project?

Kumar: Day 8 and 9 are totally focused on the token and its benefits. We encourage everyone to read the questions and answers to get the updates.

 

Divyanshu Dubey: Any update on Indian regulatory news and how it can impact Cashaa short or long term?

Kumar: Going through the new paper written by the same committee which last time was negative, it has now changed its tone from negative to neutral to positive. We have seen the change very fast, although it is not possible to comment on the time, all the questions may be answered in less than a year.

Until then, the more difficult the situation, the more it will be an opportunity for Cashaa. If you are in India, you can get incorporated in the UK or Europe and get our banking and other services. 

We also started this for our other non-European customers such as businesses from New Zealand or Hong Kong who wanted to apply for card processing. 

 

Ramesh: Are we really offering an account limit of 1 billion GBP, as its limit given by big banks?

Kumar: It is possible, you can apply for a 1 Billion GBP limit. If you go through our tier-based pricing in our fees and limits section, you will see that we enable limits of up to 1 Billion, as well as the fees required.

 

Random Member: When will be the next Coinmarketcap banner ad?

Kumar: We are not planning new banner ads until the end of October as we have a lot of onboarding work to do, so currently we do not see a reason to run another ad. Every banner ad gets us 60-80 new businesses, so it is not beneficial to run another ad as long as we haven’t worked through the existing applications yet.

 

Random Member: How likely is the partnership with the new banking partners?

Kumar: Compared to when we got our first banking partner 10 months ago, we now are not a newcomer, but as we have hundreds of valuable business users, partnering with us is now an attractive business opportunity for both sides, so we are confident on the new partnership. Now over the next 3-4 weeks, we will have the technical discussion.

 

Random Member: What about businesses that are not onboarded yet?

Kumar: We are aware that businesses are looking to get banked every day, they will not wait for months. However, we do not see it as a lost opportunity as there is at the same time a big influx of new signups. 

 

Random Member: Is it possible for us to get delisted from Binance DEX?

Kumar: It is very unlikely, one of the advantages of Binance DEX is that the listing went through the validators, and a token can not get delisted only if 2-3 people want that. It’s only possible if the entire community wants us to be delisted in case we would have done something seriously wrong.

 

Sia Chik Foo: I have staked 50,000 CAS till September 2020, can I change the date?

Kumar: We do not have centralized staking, it is not controlled by Cashaa or Binance, so the date can not be changed.

 

Agus Satria Hartadi: What about crypto price fluctuations?

Kumar: We use the Kraken API, so if someone tried to convert between BTC and fiat, the risk is not on Cashaa’s side, but Kraken’s.

 

Random Member: What’s the financial status of Cashaa?

Kumar: Based on our burn rate, we have enough capital without raise for the next 18-24 months starting from today, although we are also considering a raise in Q4. 

 

Ramesh (Live Member): Why did we move our HQ from Estonia to the UK?

Kumar: As a banking application based in the UK, we benefit from the UK’s high reputation which is more attractive and trustworthy for businesses to bank in, compared to Estonia.

 

Random Member: What is the impact of Brexit on us?

Kumar: We are providing UK current accounts to businesses, which in the case of Brexit will not change. After Brexit, whether you are based in Hong Kong, or Estonia, it does not matter, in both cases you will still get a bank account.

If Brexit turns out not in favor of the UK, regulations in the UK may get more lenient and easy to work with.

 

Oidiotso: Does a Cashaa UK current account support multiple payments incoming from customers on LBC or Paxful or similar platforms. Also, can I make payments to buy crypto from traders and sellers on LBC using my account?

Kumar: Yes, you can.

 

*Random Members are community members whose real name was not asked/known during the AMA.

 

Make sure you also join our next AMA with Kumar, which will take place in the Binance DEX Telegram group, 12 September, 3pm UTC! Join here: https://t.me/BinanceDEXchange 

 

The Cashaa Team

Cashaa is a UK-based banking platform dedicated to banking crypto businesses, of which 99% are underbanked. Although our products are suitable for other industries as well, we needed to first focus on an industry in which we have easy access to clients.

Banking with Cashaa is completely safe – when you look at how Cashaa or any Fintech or challenger bank works, you will see similar arrangements with a partner in the background which holds the same license as any proper high street bank. Additionally, Cashaa also provides hybrid banking as we also support crypto, unlike other challenger banks. 

All the cryptos are controlled by users, we can not make any transactions on your behalf or in your absence. Your keys, your coins.

 

What are our existing products which users can use today?

• A multisig crypto wallet with a UK current account

The account can be used as full, GBP denominated UK account in the same way as those given by any normal bank. Behind the scenes, the accounts are generated by Clearbank, the UK’s first clearing bank after 250 years. This account can hold up to 1 Billion GBP. 

• Linked MasterCard for ATM withdrawal and online and PoS payments
• SWIFT for international transfers, FPS, BACS and CHAPS for local payments
• Storing supported cryptocurrencies without giving control to any centralized entity
• Exchange these cryptos into GBP and vice versa
• Crypto Payment Gateway

Our Crypto Payment Gateway will enable businesses to accept crypto and directly convert them into local fiat currency. Currently we are live with BTC only and are testing it with some of the bigger merchants that want to accept crypto payments.

• Debit and credit card processing

Our target is to give bank accounts to underbanked businesses, not only crypto businesses. Almost all customers will be online entities and they will want to receive card payments from their users. It is an essential part of the banking services Cashaa is providing to allow our customers to accept credit and debit card payments.

When we look at existing exchanges, wallets, ICOs and STOs, how many are enabling card payments? It is not an easy task to accept card payments in this space but we took the time to understand the difficulties and were able to come up with a solution. 

Any company which is processing credit and debit card payments today, such as Coinbase, Simplex or Binance, offers this service at a fee above 3%. Binance is the cheapest at 3.50% and Coinbase at 3.99%. Cashaa is making sure that businesses get the same capabilities but at 3%. We launched this product with another banking partner less than 3 weeks ago and we are in the process of onboarding 11 companies for that. Once they go live, it will be up to them how many fees they want to charge their customers, but from us, they will only be charged 3%.

 

Is Cashaa a bank?

It is very important to make sure we are using the right words. Fintech companies, such as Transferwise, Revolut, or Cashaa, are not calling themselves a bank, but use slogans such as “better than a bank”, or “banks are old, let’s move”. Specifically, the word “bank” can not be used together with Cashaa, although we are providing similar services as a bank. We rather say that Cashaa is providing banking services instead of Cashaa being a bank.

 

Who are our competitors?

While we are early in the market with openly banking crypto businesses and having crypto and fiat smoothly in one place, we do have some challenges and competitors. 

One example is Wirex with their business product based in the EUR market, partnered with a Lithuanian institution and trying to do the same things as we do out of the UK. Other examples include Mistertango and LHV in the EUR market, and Silvergate in the US, which is not a direct competitor. 

Some of these institutions require their clients and the related individuals to have their account with the same bank, which makes it difficult to scale the business. While there are some competitors in the EUR and USD market, the GBP market is completely open. 

 

Can users buy CAS with credit and debit card?

Previously we used to allow CAS tokens to be bought directly from the Cashaa wallet (OTC) through credit/debit card. However, we’ve paused this feature specifically as we wanted users to buy from the open market until we link the Cashaa OTC with Binance DEX order books. Once the service to buy CAS tokens is resumed in the Cashaa wallet, we will extend the buy feature to include more tokens.

 

How are our products linked to the token?

• To be onboarded, you get a 50% discount if you pay the onboarding fee in CAS tokens compared to GBP. This has been proven to be the strongest utility of CAS. BNB and others are working with the same mechanism, providing a useful service for which you get a discount when using the native token.
• As a business grows and requires increased account limits, you have to have more and more CAS tokens. For every limit, you need a certain amount, which you can see on our fee and limit page.
• We offer a 75% discount when using our crypto gateway services, e.g. when converting between crypto and fiat back and forth.
• If businesses have 100,000 CAS as a monthly average balance, they can get free card processing services, API banking, etc
• Personal users are rewarded by getting CAS collected as a fee from businesses. The more businesses Cashaa is onboarding, the more it will positively affect our users.
• A business could have a bank account already but needs credit and debit card services. If they do not need credit and debit card services, they might want to add crypto payments to their business. All these services will require CAS tokens.

Businesses will need to feel comfortable using our services and then will do whatever is required to get the tokens and buy them to continue receiving our services. As soon as they start the service and they start scaling, our CAS token will become increasingly important. 

As a huge number of businesses are pending to be onboarded, in the future more CAS are needed to be used for products and services, not just for staking, and therefore we reduced the staking time for personal users from 12 to 3 months. 

 

Why are we only focusing on businesses?

As a company, we had to evaluate where our strengths are, how we can make revenue, and where our customers are. Businesses have the highest need and are the most profitable segment. Personal users can more easily open accounts compared to businesses. Coinbase, Wirex, Xapo, and others are coming with a card for personal users. Why invest too much money in marketing personal cards when our pricing would not be significantly cheaper than the aforementioned companies?

There are around 20+ different ICOs/companies planning to give people crypto cards, although there are already established players in this area. Margins are very low, and operations costs are very high. If Coinbase comes with a card, they don’t have to acquire new customers, but can issue it to their existing customers. In such instances, it makes sense to provide a card to make customers stay with them. 

Although we keep being focused on businesses we have also started to give personal accounts to users with zero fees and with access to banking and Mastercard with crypto banking, but only within our Cashaa community. To become part of Cashaa community acquire CAS at Binance DEX.

 

Where are we at with our business onboarding?

So far more than 500 businesses have registered with us in the past 100 days, which means we are getting 5 business signups a day, which is huge. Onboarding one business is beneficial for maybe 100 individual users. 

Out of 568 overall so far, only 23 businesses have been able to get onboarded and require CAS tokens for onboarding and other things, 9 are being processed, and 24 have been rejected.

 

Marketing

One day of Coinmarketcap gives us roughly 60-80 new business signups. However, if we are not able to onboard them in time yet it also does not make sense to keep advertising. The good thing, however, it shows there’s high demand for Cashaa’s products. Priority is to ensure we can onboard businesses faster by smoothing the process and hiring more relationship managers.

 

Why are these registrations not impacting CAS tokens yet? 

We need to engage these businesses to get onboarded and as long as the businesses are registered and not onboarded, there is no impact on the value of our CAS tokens yet. We’re doing whatever is possible to onboard businesses faster but even if we try to onboard them faster it is not necessarily always in our hands. 

Our average onboarding time is 4-8 weeks, and more than 30% of the cases have required up to 12 weeks, mostly due to complex structures and the speed in which user documentation is provided. For example, when we are asking for business projections, to know which kind of requirements the businesses might have in the future, it often takes more time for them to provide it to us.

To put things into perspective, high street banks are strictly denying crypto businesses and challenger banks are also completely denying them. 

When you onboard crypto businesses, you have to go through enhanced due diligence processes. Some part of the process can be done automatically, such as ID checks, but some parts need to be done manually, such as checking the UBOs (Ultimate Beneficial Owners), and their other businesses and relationships. Our learning curve is extremely high, having jumped into the banking space, with a focus on high-risk businesses. 

As much as we would like to onboard them fast, our compliance department must have a completely different mindset. They handle each file with extreme cautiousness which is taking a lot of time. We can not ignore that this space attracts many bad actors, and cannot rush to onboard businesses. We had cases where founders gave fake passports.

Still, to get more businesses onboarded we are hiring and training more relationship managers to filter and follow up with our clients. So far more than 200 businesses have not heard back from us yet. Therefore we are also training more accountants, lawyers and businesses to do the documentation and accounting, and so far we have 6 partners to outsource some of our work. For example, law firms in Malta, who can do the first level of onboarding, acting as our extended relationship managers and providing a personal touch locally which Cashaa as a purely digital organization is not able to give otherwise.

 

How about Binance program, AMA and CZ tweets?

Unfortunately, our point of contact at Binance during our listing had left, and the replacement contact was on holiday until August. However, CZ personally retweeted Cashaa’s tweet about our Binance program. Retweeting was his personal choice. We are planning our next AMA in September directly on the Binance channel. 

 

Will Cashaa accept privacy-based cryptos such as Monero?
Our banking partner has strict guidelines for which cryptos are accepted, only businesses dealing with those will be accepted. 6 cryptos so far are accepted in addition to our CAS token. BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB and more, we will publish the full list on the website. Monero definitely is not part of it, we will not accept any business dealing with any privacy coin.

 

If the Indian Government bans crypto, how can Cashaa help the Indian community?

The Indian Government is not the first. In 2016 Russia declared that people will go to jail, and then went back to encourage businesses to come to Russia. We have seen this in different places, and for Cashaa it means an opportunity. We will run more ads in India in this case and encourage businesses to set themselves up abroad with us in the UK or Europe. We can register them and offer them an account, a package which we will make public on the website from the next quarter onwards.

 

What’s next?

In the next month, we encourage our community to learn about the latest of Cashaa by reading the website and learning directly from the source, e.g. visit the CAS token page and our knowledge base for details on staking. Feel free to compare what you have learned in this AMA with what you read on the website and if there is something missing you may let us know so we can add it to our knowledge base.

To access the presentation, visit here.

 

The Cashaa Team

The Next Generation Banking Platform

This month was marked by the start of CAS trading on Binance DEX, the long-awaited exchange which forms part of a great ecosystem and which brought a lot of excitement in our team and community. However, a lot more was going on in Cashaa in the past month, let’s have a look!

Token Updates

Binance DEX Listing

The month started with the long-awaited announcement of our CAS token listing on Binance DEX, the leading decentralized exchange by volume. CAS/BNB trading started successfully on 18 July, see here.

Moving all CAS Trade to DEX

On 23rd July, we announced moving all our CAS trade from the Cashaa wallet to DEX. Personal and business users can sign up here and buy CAS directly.

Furthermore, we also announced that we are working on enabling to link the Cashaa wallet directly to Binance DEX, giving you the comfort of trading at DEX from our wallet.

CAS Trading Competition Launch

On 29th, we started our Binance DEX CAS trading competition, which will last 3 weeks and where participants can win a total of 2,000,000 CAS! Requirements include a daily volume greater than 35,000 CAS on a minimum of 5 days a week, a weekly volume of minimum 210,000 CAS, and a minimum holding of 5,000 CAS. See here for all the information.

CAS Swap and Release Schedule

We have also published the full release schedule of BEP2 CAS tokens until the end of the year, as we release them in batches, and have started the distribution on 3rd July.

For all information about CAS, see here.

Product & Partnership Updates

Business Signups

We have come a long way since the launch of our crypto-friendly business accounts in April, and have this month reached a number of 586 businesses sign up to date.

Merchant Accounts

We were also happy to start enabling crypto companies to accept Mastercard and Visa payments under a 2.75% processing fee, compared to giants like Coinbase or Binance charging 3.5–4%, and Changelly or Bitcoin.com even 6–12%.

Free Business accounts for Binance-based companies

We have started our initiative enabling fellow Binance-based companies to get an account with us including free onboarding for banking services, and 50 % discount on further products and services.

Personal Accounts

We have also enabled the early activation of personal accounts for everyone who refers a business user to us, compared to personal accounts for the public only being activated in 2020. To join our referral program, see here for more information.

Team Updates

We are growing! In the past days, we have published 3 exciting opportunities to join our team in Mumbai, including as Frontend Developer, Relationship Manager, and SEO Expert! We are looking forward to receiving your application at hr@cashaa.com and welcoming the future superstars of Cashaa!

Events

1. Amsterdam Community Meetup

While the team was in Amsterdam from 4–10 July, we had a community meetup at the Bitcoin Embassy Amsterdam on 7th, where Kumar presented on what sets Cashaa apart from any challenger banks, as well as participated in a roundtable discussion on various related topics.

2. London Fintech Week

We have attended London Fintech Week, which every July gathers the world’s whos-who in Fintech, and also at this edition brought new users and partnership opportunities such as here with Frontier Networks, led by former Head of Level39, Eric van der Kleij.

3. Summer HI Tech Festival London

Janina was invited to speak at the Summer HI Tech Festival — Tech for allon 16th July in Cocoon London, sharing Cashaa’s way to success in a panel on “Effective Marketing of Tech Companies” as well as presenting on the potential and current real-life applications of blockchain technology in a panel on “Blockchain in Business”.

To watch bull.io’s interview with Janina, and the now published previous month’s panel discussion in Cocoon on mass adoption of Fintech, see here and here.

Cashaa Meme and GIF competition

We have finished our meme and gif competition and rewarded the top 3 of each category respectively — you can find the winning entries here and here. Thanks to everyone who participated!

The Cashaa Team

The Next Generation Banking Platform