

Ask YC: startups around remittances - petervandijck

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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simon_
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.

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ig1
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.

