TagPesa, an exchange and remittance company based in Kenya wants to provide a crypto-currency exchange platform to revolutionize Africa’s remittance market by providing over the counter selling and buying of bitcoins.
TagPesa says it aims to provide a full scale trading platform in partnership with Australia’s igot inc which has raised money to expand globally.
Apart from making it easy and convenient for people to transact and remit money within Africa and internationally,TagPesa aims to provide a payment gateway for individuals and businesses in East Africa to help them in their push to cashless payments such as powering online payments for both local and international merchants serving the larger East Afrcan community.
Founded by Nhial Majok-based in Melbourne, Australia, James Mwangi and Eric Gichuri- based in Nairobi, Kenya, Anyang Majok-country manager S.Sudan and Ayuen Dengtiel based in Country Manager, Uganda.
Speaking to TechMoran, Mwangi said TagPesa is a fully regulated Kenyan company and is set to provide a reliable, cost effective and efficient service to provide the backbone for business engagement around the whole of East Africa which is currenly hampered by a large number of different currencies.TagPesa, running on the igot platform aims to help merchants generate sufficient profit to finance future growth and to provide the resources needed to achieve their other objectives plus the financial ability to bank where they choose, whether in the cloud, locally or via their mobile phones on the go.
The igot platform allows users to buy, sell, send, recieve and store Bitcoin. It also allows users to trade bitcoin for cash, vice versa and users can request money via email from anyone in their networks. Because 90% of Bitcoins on igot are stored offline, the firm says it makes it secure for its users.
According to Mwangi, TagPesa is looking into integrating PayPal in the region so users can chooce to either get their money in bitcoins or via PayPal. M-PESA is yet to be included in the process and might take a long time to be. After Kipochi’s dead, one of the challenges the bitcoin community has with M-PESA reliance is the fear that Safaricom, a Vodafone Group PLC firm might pull its strings anytime disabling them, so there’s no promise of M-PESA at the moment as M-PESA and bitcoin are competiting products both aiming to dominate emerging markets’ remittace sector.
Apart from TagPesa, BitPesa, is making it possible for anyone living abroad to send money back home in form of bitcoins to reciepent’smobile wallets.