Unlocking Financial Solutions For Immigrants

The 47 million immigrants in the US have unique financial needs that are not being met by the current financial products and services.

For example, immigrants are unable to apply for a loan from a bank in the United States to buy real estate property in their home country. This is a unique financial need for immigrants. We want to be able to own a vacation home in our home countries, so we won't have to be staying at hotels or with relatives when we visit.

Immigrants transfer over $700 billion annually but still experience high fees and slow delivery of the funds to recipients. When we send across borders, we lose up to 30% of our hard-earned money to fees alone due to high transfer fees and low FX rates on current platforms. According to the United Nations, immigrants lose more than $25 billion annually in remittance fees.

We are developing new financial products and services to meet the unique needs of the 47 million immigrants in the U.S. Think of how the USAA is serving the military community.

How? Firstly, we are starting the most basic need of immigrants, which is providing a low to no-cost remittance service to them so they can continue supporting their loved ones abroad without losing so much hard-earned money. 

The CrossKudi app is a revolutionary mobile remittance platform that uses blockchain technology to make international payments cheaper, faster, and more secure. With CrossKudi, users can send money to friends and family around the world with just a few taps on their phones. Customers can also directly pay for essential expenses for recipients and be able to allocate funds based on needs.

Once we have these users, we plan to offer them value-added services as we grow.

There are approximately 47 million immigrants in the United States, comprising about 13.7% of the total population. Many come from Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, El Salvador, and developing countries. We often have limited access to traditional banking services or face significant fees when sending money across borders through the current remittance platforms. We are currently underserved because traditional banking solutions are not meeting our unique financial needs. In some cases, we also face regulatory barriers that make it difficult to send money across borders. 

That is why we are building CrossKudi and developing new financial products and services that will meet the unique needs of immigrants in the US. 

We are addressing these challenges by providing a low to no-cost and convenient alternative for immigrants to send money to their families and loved ones by leveraging technology, such as blockchain and its DeFi protocols. Our solution reduces the costs associated with traditional remittance services and increases access to affordable financial services for immigrants.

Our solutions will have a significant impact on the lives of immigrants in the US because by reducing the financial burden associated with sending money across borders and increasing access to affordable financial services, we are improving financial inclusion for underserved (immigrant) communities.

The problem is personal to us. As immigrants in the United States. We continue to walk in the shoes of our target audience and have experienced the pain points of sending money across borders to support families. We want to stay connected to our loved ones abroad and continue to support them financially without paying so much in fees and that is why we are building the solution through CrossKudi.

With our basic MVP, we have conducted private beta testing and validated the need for our solution. We served about 200 users monthly and have served more than 450 since the discovery of our solution. These are Immigrants across 19 U.S. states. This was achieved all through word of mouth and $0 in marketing.

We are interested in participating in Solve to gain connections to business partners, mentors, and potential investors.

We know we can't do this alone, so we need help building the right partnerships to test our solutions and validate our impact and business model to scale.

Connecting with the right social impact investors to back us has been a challenge.

The current remittance solutions are centralized on legacy financial systems and lose funds at several steps throughout the transfer process. At CrossKudi, we’ve found a way to utilize blockchain technology to revolutionize the remittance market and avoid some of these legacy steps and associated costs to offer a cheaper, faster, and more secure cross-border payment service for immigrants and their families abroad. By reducing the cost and complexity of sending and receiving remittances, individuals and businesses can more easily participate in the global economy, increasing economic growth and reducing poverty.

We are committed to helping over 10,000 and 250,000 immigrants to stay connected to their families in other countries and help prevent them from poverty in the next one and five years, respectively. We will achieve this by helping make affordable the international money transfer services that are currently expensive and bridging inequalities by putting more money into the hands of people that need it the most.

To better measure our commitment, CrossKudi will be measuring our revenue per transaction to the World Bank’s global goal of reducing the cost of remittances to below 3%, including working with partners with aligned missions.

CrossKudi is a blockchain-based remittance solution that operates on a decentralized network that allows for secure and transparent transactions without the need for intermediaries such as payment processors. We can avoid some of the legacy steps and reduce transaction costs and processing times, making it more affordable and convenient for users to send and receive money across borders.

Our expected immediate outputs are reduced transaction costs and processing times, increased transparency, and greater security. So people can continue to send financial support to their friends and families across borders without losing too much of their hard-earned money. And for the recipients, this means more money to cover essential needs.

The longer-term outcomes of our solution would be increased financial inclusion because more people would have access to our affordable and reliable remittance services. This, in turn, will lead to increased economic growth and poverty reduction in countries where remittances are a significant source of income.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/blockchain-disrupting-banking/#:~:text=Payments%3A%20By%20establishing%20a%20decentralized,time%20transactions%20between%20financial%20institutions.

We are utilizing blockchain technology and its DeFi protocols. Users will be able to use our services through the CrossKudi web or mobile apps.

We have conducted a proof of concept by testing our solution and processes with some early adopters in private beta. 

With our private beta testing, we can offer no-fee cross-border payment service and faster payments to recipients.

Here are some links to publicly available evidence of use cases of blockchain technology.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

https://www.pri.gov.pk/pakista...

https://cointelegraph.com/news...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...

CrossKudi is a black and an immigrant-led company. We take equality and inclusion seriously. Our goal is to create inclusive financial products and services to meet the unique financial needs of the 47M million immigrants in the US, who are largely part of the underrepresented groups.

Short-term: Our current business model is generating revenue from the spread in the exchange rates by taking an average of 4% per transaction.

Long-term: Interests from offering loans as an add-on service
                  Third-party referral fees
                  Subscriptions from businesses using CrossKudi for cross-border payments

Our revenue streams would come from charging transaction fees on cross-border money transfers, generating revenue through partnerships with financial institutions. We also seek investment capital from venture capitalists or secure grants from organizations 

We have raised a total of $125k
$100k - Investment on SAFE from Northwestern Mutal Black Founder accelerator powered by Gener8tor
10K - Grant from Solana blockchain
$15k - Grants from various incubator programs