Banco Mare

The vison of Banco Maré is to be the reference digital Bank for low income populations in Latin America in the next 5 years. The key points of Banco Maré are:

i) Penetration: we will reach where traditional Banks cannot - remote areas and low income neighborhoods.
ii) Customer Service: we provide high level customer support and want to strengthen the connection between the client and Banco Maré. The transformation is to promote a service that is truly concerned customer satisfaction
iii) Product: We will have an app that includes such features as bills payment, credit cards, recharges (public transport, mobile phone, services as Netflix, Uber etc.), Peer to Peer transactions (via QR Code), Bus Tickets, etc.
iv) Technology: We provide an app that brings a positive interaction for our client. We use blockchain technology (r3, Corda) to guarantee security, scalability and low cost for our expansion plan.

Banco Maré is focused on financial inclusion of the unbanked population in Brazil. Our target public are part of the 1,7 billion people unbanked worldwide and 55 million unbanked people in Brazil. 

These people are currently overlooked or under-served by traditional financial service providers--many of them don't have access to basic financial services, such as bill payment service, debt payment assistance, bank cards, and so on. Our customers are low and moderate income consumers living in "favelas" and low income neighborhoods. Banco Maré's objective is to include this population on the financial/banking system, providing them simple services that can help their daily lives and improve their income. The solution is a platform of financial services, based on a mobile app and supported with local presence - Kioscos are local shops that offer Banco Mare's services and provide customer support.

Banco Maré is focused on underserved populations, more specifically the unbanked population of Brazil, around 50 million people. The large majority of the population has a smartphone (138 million), and at the same time is not included in the financial system. Either there is an extensive list of requirements to open an account, or there are no physical banks around their neighborhoods. Banco Maré wants to transform this unfortunate reality and offer financial services for this population that was historically underserved. 

What makes Banco Maré more innovative than anyone else is the fact that we are inside communities in three states of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Alagoas) accurately listening to our clients and provisioning services and solutions that the traditional banking system is not able to do.
The objective is to provide financial services that really empower our customers and solve their daily problems - as having to move over 5km, paying two times public transport and spending hours in a line to pay a simple bill; or enabling them to buy on-line and acquire services such as Uber or Netflix with the pre-paid credit card. In short: we want to make financial inclusion possible!

The business strategy is based on the assumption that the first step is to increase the customer base. The idea is to provide, first of all, services that are highly demanded and not restrictive for our public (in terms of cost). Having this in mind, we are offering bills payment, recharges, pre-paid credit cards and distributing POS machines to business that do not have the access. Besides that, we believe that Banco Maré has to be close to our customers and understand deeply the necessities and demands of this population, and therefore we started working with on-the-ground presence (since the very beginning of the operations).

Our next step, in 2019, is to expand through the app (mobile), so that we can reach more people all over the country - over 100.000 users until December and more than 1M by July/2021.
Until today we have spent a lot of effort on developing the technology and the correct features for the app and build up a operations team that works directly in our Kioscos (local agencies) - both receiving cash in, providing services and customer support.
From July on (3rdQ) we will invest on the expansion plan through mobile, based on on-line Marketing and physical presence only on specific and strategic locations.
We will prepare a team of people (2,000 active clients/customer care) to be fully dedicated to customer support - specially through WhatsApp, which is the best channel to be in touch with our public, and keep on developing the app and including new features.

The most important competitive advantage over our competitors is that Banco Maré can reach where no one can approach. Today, Banco Maré is able to lead customers that traditional banks and other financial institutions do not contact. We developed a penetration that is highly distinctive and unique.

Besides that, the fact that we are focused and committed with Social Impact is also highly distinctive.
We want to build partnerships with local stores in order to be located all over Brazil. The model is simple: any store/retail can be a local representative and receive cash in, do cash out and offer Banco Maré services and receives a small fee per trnasaction. The model is based on cases such as M-Pesa in Africa, B-Kash in Bangladesh and PayNearby in India.

We developed a mobile app in order to include people not only in the financial system, but also in the rising digital economy. Today in Brasil there are more than 230 million active smartphones (more than one per people), which means that the technology we require is not a restriction for our potential customers. We offer a high level technology, which is similar to what the traditional banks offer, in terms of security and traceability of each transaction. The r3 company is our partner, and we use blockchain technology, Corda system, to track all Banco Maré's transactions. Technology is one of the main cores of Banco Maré. We believe that technology can truly transform people's life, help on a daily basis and improve their income. 

We want to implement the highest technology level focused on a population that is traditionally excluded. Today, for example, the customer is able to login with its digital. The idea is that in the 1st quarter of 2020 we will have the technology for facial recognition, include NFC technology into our operations and bring top applied science to our app and customers.

We have over 11,000 clients (accounts), that mostly represents a whole family with only one account. We believe that we were able to impact over 25,000 people in the last two and a half years (since we started to operate), supporting vulnerable and low income people in Brazil. 

Undoubtedly we improved substantially the quality of life of our customers, saving money, time and bringing more security for them (a cashless economy is more secure, specially in favelas/low income communities). We transact around R$ 1,000,000 ($270,000) per month, number that tries to quantify the improvement that we have been delivering to our customers, specially in terms of time saving, security and technology empowerment.

Besides that, we hire employees from the local communities (75% of our team), which means by one side that we bring direct income to the locality, as well as the local empowerment that Banco Maré creates. We capacitate these individuals and include them into university (we are proud to say that 14/16 of our "local" team is studying at the university - we provide scholarships), and also provide spanish classes (english classes will be provided soon).

We measure our success by a set of metrics and KPI's, such as: clients, activation rate, churn, retention rate, return rate, total amount deposited, number of bills paid, total amount transacted and so on.

The three main goals over the next year are: reach more than 100,000 clients until December of 2019, revenue of over $95,000 by May/2020 and realize a round of fundraising of $2M until December 2019.

The main risks that we face are basically related to our operations. We deal with cash and, even though we have never had any problem in terms of security, we consider it a risk. Nowadays we are well known in the communities we are located and therefore completely respected having in mind that we provide a service that is helpful and highly committed with social impact.

Another risk that we believe is an issue to take care of is talent retention. Companies normally compete for talents and as Banco Maré has in its culture a salary cap and the belief that the company should be less vertical and mantain a tendency for horizontality, top employees must be stimulated constantly and feel that they are a fundamental part of the organization. In order to manage this risk, we offer partnership in the cap table (vesting contract) for high level employees that remain in the company for a few years. Besides that, the fact that we are a quite renewed enterprise attached to social impact definetly attracts talents and inspire them to be part of Maré's team.

In order to deal with the risk of dealing in cash, the idea is to scale all over Brazil in 2019 through partnerships with local stores, and that is our plan in order to consolidate as a platform and make sure that the operation works only with our support, but does not demands Banco Maré physical presence.

In order to manage the risk of employee turnover, we offer partnership in the cap table (vesting contract) for high level employees that remain in the company for a few years. Besides that, the fact that we are a quite renewed enterprise attached to social impact definetly attracts talents and inspire them to be part of Maré's team.

10

The organization was founded by Alexander Albuquerque, Maer Melo, Vitor Kneipp, Benjamin Drouin and Ronaldo de Albuquerque. The innovative mindset and extensive knowledge about technology brought the founders together, with the dream of creating a startup Fintech that includes the traditionally underserved segments of the society into the financial system. All the founder have a top educational background: Alexander Albuquerque is a systems analysts and has more than eight years experience at multiple companies in the technology sector. Has founded his own enterprise in 2010 and has administrated it until the beginning of 2016, when started to dream about the Banco Maré project. Today he is full time working as the CEO.

Benjamin is originally from France, living in Rio de Janeiro, has more than five years experience working for a strategic consultancy branch of Mckinsey & Company, and today works as an advisor for Banco Maré. Ronaldo Albuquerque is a systems analysts, with MBA in marketing and founder of Global IP - a company that provides technological solutions for security and was the first angel investor to believe on the dream. Vitor spent three years working on M&A and went for the Oxford Said MBA in the 1Q/2018 and is currently working remotely as an advisor to management. Maer Melo is graduated in Network Engineering in Brazil and after that has moved to the US to work for Novell, Rackspace and then to the Silicon Valley to be the Sr. Site Reliability Engineer of Twitter.

Our business model works as the following:

We earn a small amount of money per bill paid; we receive R$ 5,00 per pre-paid active card (the customer pays R$ 10,00 per month and convert it to mobile phone credit).
In the 3Q/2019, Microcredit and a model of Direct Payment (for big companies to substitute what is now called "boleto", basically an invoice) will be included in our business model.
For Microcredit we will charge an interest rate of 2,3% - which will provide a revenue of $23,900 per month by December 2020.
Banco Maré will earn $0.25 per transaction for the Direct Payment model, which will be $7,200 in revenues by Dec./19 and $32,5k by Dec./2020.
The forecast for the pre-paid credit cards are around 10,000 cards sold until Dec./19, which will be $11,9k in terms of revenue(R$ 5,00 per card, around $1.3), and 47,000 cards by Dec./2020 and $58k of pre-paid cards.

If we selected to Solve, Banco Maré would use the prize funding to invest in the sales team and on the Technology squad. We would hire 1 senior Dev, 1 senior Comercial manager and 5 "on-the-ground" comercial employees. The idea is that we can include more features in the app and provide a wider range of useful services for our clients as well as expand to more and more localities and overtake further. The prize money would be definitely important for us to develop our expansion plan and reach the 100,000 clients target by December.