Partnerships update: progress on integration and state of current partnershipsProgress on integrationPast few days have been spent finalizing compliance and approvals for card process and IBAN integration (Integrator #1), meaning that as of this week if all goes according to plan most of the admin and compliance checks should have been completed. We will still need to work together with the integrator on coordinating how processor fees will be structured — however this should be a more dynamic process.
We started off working with 4 options — one (integrator #4) which fell of at the start due to lower appetite in terms of risk exposure and another one (integrator#3) was somewhat left in limbo while their compliance was designing new guidelines for working with companies in our sector. This later option has finalized its process and it looks like it will be hard to move ahead with them — however it was the case that a majority of players in the market was working with them so we’re glad that we had contingencies and started with 4 options.
With options #3 and #4 out of the picture and #1 moving along nicely you are probably wondering what’s happening with #2 — on this side as you might remember last week we submitted some new and innovative schematics to credit card company which are still currently being reviewed — however early feedback is positive — last thing that needs to be done here is monetary related negotiations.
In the mean time, we have also spoken and assessed 3 other potential integrators, one of which we might bring in as a further contingency.
We also had the chance to attend a hackathon at one of the major banks in Estonia and got some very interesting contacts.
State of Current PartnershipsWe have seen a couple of questions in the chat regarding to what is the current status of announced partnerships so we’re happy to address that. We have decided to move in the direction of partnering with companies such as Mothership, Kyber, ETHLend, Zilla as well as Smartly, Bitof Property and Indorse — because we saw synergies between our products, however, we are all at the start of the journey as as you have seen everyone is focusing on building their core products at their own pace. Right now the partnerships are at a starting stage where we focus information and knowledge sharing to better understand how everyone is navigating the space and building relationships.
The next step will take place once partner’s respective product has reached a degree of maturity so we can actually integrate and as you might have noticed there has been impressive progress so far — everyone is excelling in their particular expertise. You will notice that we have not been pushing too aggressively on adding new partners despite receiving constant contacts from other parties, this has been so we can keep focusing on our current commitments — deliver on these and then expand.
E-Residency GoalsE-Residency can be considered one of the most impressive achievements in the context of digital identity and it is surely paving the way for other countries to take a global approach on the topic of doing business and enabling a generation of digital nomads. Since the inception of Change we have had close contact and have worked to support each others vision. We do plan on executing more aggressively with E-Residency in the future and this will be done in a much more formal and direct manner than it has been done up to now.
With Change scaling we do envision E-Residency allowing global residents to access a series of Change services that for whatever reason might be restricted to Europe, an example you might have seen and real problem can be the fact that some cards companies only allow card issuance to the residents of a particular country and you are restricted from ordering such country if you are let’s say from outside the EU.
https://medium.com/changefinance/partnerships-update-progress-on-integration-and-state-of-current-partnerships-494ee0afc6e9