With 35 billion remittance transfers every year, the 30 million African migrants worldwide lose a total of $2 billion just to support their families back home. A solution to this is Peers Exchange, founded by Yannick KG the company is an international peer-to-peer currency exchange and payment platform. Their users, called PEEXers, are paired up strategically to help them avoid expensive fees from banks and other institutions like Western Union or Money Gram.
They primarily work in Africa, so for example, they will match someone sending USD to Cameroon with someone sending Central African CFA francs to America. They offer their services so cheaply by matching up payments with those going the opposite direction using mobile application currently and mobile money technology very soon. So “your” money never actually leaves the country, it’s rerouted to someone who’s being sent a similar amount by someone overseas. Your foreign recipient, meanwhile, receives their funds from someone trying to send money out of their own country.
PEEX is the first P2P exchange service in Africa. They allow our users to send money abroad and exchange at the mid-market rate. In many cases, Peers Exchange can bring down these rates by 11 percentage points, meaning PEEXers only lose 1% of their payments instead of the typical 12% across Africa. A trial run was conducted through social networks in which the equivalent of $800,000 USD was exchanged in less than 1 year
PEEX innovation is that its customers deal with their peers in a trusted social network. These verification measures work the same way Airbnb and Uber verify users, hosts, and guests.
