Doubling down on the push for inclusion in the global financial landscape, Finance Blocks, a blockchain powered fintech platform aimed to promote financial inclusion for the unbanked, receives a 25 million dollar capital commitment from Bahamas based GEM Digital Limited to continue efforts to digitize rural financial institutions in emerging markets and promote accessibility, transparent banking services, and financial inclusion world-wide.
Co-founded in 2019 by Jake Seltzer, Finance Blocks was created to address the 25% of the world’s total population that does not have access to basic financial services. The unbanked face exploitative repayment terms from informal moneylenders and lack identity documents, credit scores, and awareness about financial products. Finance tech sophistication, such as blockchain-powered digital products, historically has not reached rural financial institutions (RFIs) and the unbanked.
Now, the capital investment will propel Finance Blocks into even the most rural corners of the globe, such as India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, and Ghana.
“These funds will allow us to continue developing our technology, expand our development team, onboard over three million users, create an intensive global marketing campaign, and allow charitable contributions of water and power to the areas in which we operate,” said Seltzer.
Seltzer believes this technology will directly impact the global economy by way of the youth. Referring to them as “innovators of tomorrow,” Seltzer believes financial and investing literacy will encourage higher education and break generational debt while creating new generations of middle class.
In its simplest form, Finance Blocks is a platform that will help RFIs switch from paper-based legacy systems to a secure, easy-to-use, and efficient digital system for all their processes. That allows RFIs to create unique digital identities for all their customers, compute their credit scores, manage their financial data, loans, fixed deposits (FDs), savings accounts, and more on a single platform. Users have an app that helps them stay instantaneously updated about their financial activity, such as withdrawals, deposits, transactions, loan equated monthly installments (EMIs), and interest on FDs. Based on the age of their account and financial activity, users are given Smart Credit Scores computed by blockchain-powered smart contracts.
Blockchain technology is an integral component of the solution Finance Blocks presents.
“Blockchain technology plays a crucial role in lifting people out of poverty and providing better services to the populations of low and middle-income countries. It is a system of recording information that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. Think of blockchain as an incorruptible digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. This process can be transformative for low and middle-income countries as corruption is the single largest issue affecting the unbanked,” says Seltzer.
Global digitization will help the unbanked achieve upward economic mobility by providing the right financial tools in their hands. RFIs are then empowered with the resources and infrastructure to achieve their aims. To learn more about Finance Blocks, visit https://financeblocks.io or email info@financeblocks.io or to learn about GEM Digital Limited, the digital asset investment firm that actively sources, structures and invests in utility tokens globally, visit https://www.gemdigital.com.
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