BMJ Score: 3.8
Market
Transparency
Team
Token
Adoption
Quick Summary
118 crypto investors read thisCommentary
In the world of money transfer platforms, the remittance process is still largely dependent on agents who provide a public face to senders and recipients of money. Remco wants to reinvent this process by leveraging digital funds and creating a token that will act as a stored value for money transfer. Putting these tokens on the blockchain will increase efficiency, lower the cost of transactions, and increase the speed with which money is transferred. While this is an extremely saturated space with many competitors, Remco has an advantage because its parent company, VTNGlobal, has been around for 15 years and has over 3.6 million subscribers. The team is large and experienced, and the project is also partnered with Visa and Mastercard. Remco is still working on its platform development, but it has licensing for money transmission and mobile payments. While we were disappointed that there is not a working MVP, the platform will be built on the ETH network and is scheduled to be released during or before April 2019. Normally, we would be concerned about a project without a working MVP in such a saturated space, but Remco has an outstanding team with a significant customer base and a large partner network. This, along with its detailed whitepaper, gives us confidence that once the MVP is working, the project will be able to differentiate from its competitors. We look forward to see what the team produces over the next few months!
Investment Information:
- How to invest: To participate in the presale, you must first register on the main site.
- Discount: 35% bonus throughout presale
- Eligibility: Details regarding the eligibility of investors can be found on pages 5 and 6 of the whitepaper.
- Token Price: 1 REMCO = $0.06 (discount included in price)
- Jurisdiction: US
- Accepted Currencies: BTC, BCH, ETH
Market: 3.5
- Problem addressed/solved: The cross-border international money transfer business is broken. A few lingering challenges include lack of consistent standards and regulations, significant variability regarding costs, and poorly kept transaction records.
- Target customers/customer/ segments/verticals: Remittance companies, agents, and end consumers make up the target market for Remco. More specifically, banks and companies that send funds (especially cross-border) can find utility from the Remco platform.
- Value creation: REMCO Tokens allow any licensed money transmitter to mint programmable tokens. These tokens move value and leverage distributed ledger advantages at speed and scale, while also offering innovative compensation to all transaction stakeholders. Remco's parent will immediately be the first user, therefore Remco has a substantial, built-in customer.
- Competition: Remittance-related blockchain projects face significant barriers to entry due to multi-jurisdictional regulations. Therefore, more established entities such as banks and mobile payment operators pose a significant threat as they already exist in the market and don’t have to jump through the legal hoops like Remco must. Furthermore, platforms like Stellar Lumens already have a recognizable name in this space as well.
- Market size/potential: The official statistics indicate that the cross border money transfer industry (i.e. the remittance industry) processed $466 billion in 2017. Experts believe informal money transfers may equal this amount. Remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached $466 billion in 2017.
- Regulatory risks: There are substantial risks in this space. This year, Western Union was fined $60 million for violating anti-money laundering laws. In addition, Remco will have to abide by the different money transfer licensing regulations of each state. While the project has two licenses currently, it will continue to be a challenge to obtain licensing for other states with complex compliance mandates.
Transparency: 4
- Investor value: Early investors of the Remco project will see the value increase if companies utilize the coin in sending funds to other entities. Even though the project’s value is based on its token, REMCO is still just a utility token that will require high demand in order to increase in value. Remco actually provides projections for the token’s value based on different models including DCF, Monetary Model, and CCM-NVT.
- Disclosures: Remco failed to produce an MVP during the ICO because it wants to use the token generation funds to develop the project. The project clearly goes above and beyond when disclosing information to potential investors. There is a whitepaper, pitch deck, one-pager, valuation model, and roadmap, all of which include great detail on the different facets of the project.
- Token distribution: Total tokens for sale 65%, Founders Team & Advisors 15%, Marketing 5%, Business Partners 5%, and Reserve 10%.
- Use of proceeds: Operational Expenses 15%, Marketing/Sales 25%, Research and Development 40%, Legal and compliance 10%, and Reserves 10%.
- Caps: Soft cap: $6 million USD; Hard cap: $60 million USD
Team: 5
- Track record: Remco has a core team consisting of six members and an additional seven advisors. The core team has significant experience (particularly the CEO) in business automation and payment/remittance operations. Plus, each member has a solid reputation on LinkedIn with plenty of connections. The CEO, Peter Ojo, has helped Remco’s parent company process over $700 million worth of transfers in the past 24 months alone. He has also developed software for Lockheed-Martin, RES, Hitachi, AT&T, and British Telecom, IRS, and TSA. The financial expert, George Oluwaboro, will primarily focus on the finance and compliance issues that Remco will encounter. He has spent over 25 years providing business consulting and advisory services to the financial services industry with emphasis on KYC, AML and BSA compliance.
- Integrity: Stemming from an established parent company gives the project major credibility in this space. It essentially allows investors to look at the team’s past performance as an indicator of their trustworthiness for this ICO. In fact, the USA business has been running as a precursor to the proposed REMCO Remittance Token, live and under regulatory supervision in two US states since 2017. REMCO leaves little doubt that their team is built well for this project and future success.
- Peter Ojo, CEO/CTO (LinkedIn)
- Joel Patenaude, COO (LinkedIn)
- Catherine Berruer, Vice President (LinkedIn)
- George Oluwaboro, CAP, VP Finance (LinkedIn)
Team Members
Token Mechanics: 3
- MVP: Remco does not have an MVP. According to the roadmap, the blockchain infrastructure will go live in April of 2019.
- Token use case: The token address will store the value and thus replace the traditional card pins or numbers. REMCO Tokens (REMCO Remittance tokens) connect senders and recipients without any intermediary, the way mobile phones connect two people. REMCO Remittance tokens use a programmable money transmission token and APIs to allow remittance companies globally to mint and customize their own tokens.
- Value-added: It’s evident that the REMCO token is absolutely vital to the success of this project. It’s the sole reason why the project can execute near-instant transactions on the blockchain. It allows companies to transfer funds to other entities (especially cross-border) in a timely and efficient manner with a programmable token of their own.
- Decentralization: REMCO runs on a distributed ledger technology known as a multichain blockchain.
- Token Supply: Max supply of 2 billion REMCO.
User Adoption: 3
- Technical difficulty/investment expertise needed: The Remco website fails to really explain the gist of the project to the common consumer. The best explanation of the Remco initiative can be found within the pitch deck. The team breaks down the problem, market opportunity, and solution that Remco plans to provide, which is a way for companies to transfer money with programmable tokens.
- Halo effect: Remco has a “partners” section on the site, but it is labeled in an odd way. It reads “Partners Of Other Platform Businesses Currently Operated By The REMCO Founder” which include the likes of MasterCard, VISA, Western Union, and Transfast. It appears that the Remco founder has relationships with these companies but the project has yet to secure active partnerships that will add to its value as a company. The project also lists CitiBank, UBA, Fidelity, and other major financial institutions as partners.
- Buzz: Remco boasts impressive numbers on its Facebook and Twitter accounts with over 13,000 followers on each platform. Furthermore, it actually registers solid engagement with nearly 300 likes/shares per post. There are a variety of ways to follow the project that include Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Medium.
